Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

  He described it all--the travels with Venera, the grand colloquy, and his deepening relationship with Leal Maspeth. And then he came to the garden, the tree, and the iron cheetah. And Gallard.

  "He would have buried his sword in my back if my dragonfly hadn't seen him," he said--and instantly, up and down Brink, in the Hall and the storerooms and laboratories, every member of the Renaissance stopped what they were doing.

  Maerta stood up, almost knocking over her chair. "Gallard attacked you? But that's--"

  "--What he would have done long before, had I not de-indexed myself," Keir said calmly. They were staring at him as if he were mad. He swiveled to look out the window pensively. The sky trembled with distant bursts of light. "It was when the oaks visited that time last year," he went on quietly. "They're very secretive, and their support of our research was secret. But they were worried. Somehow, the enemy had found out about us."

  He turned back to Maerta. "That was the real reason the oak came to see us. It knew A.N. had put a spy in our midst, but it didn't know who it was. All it knew was that it wasn't me. So it found an opportunity to speak to me alone, and it warned me that we'd been compromised."

  Maerta had laid both hands palm-down on the table, and was staring at him intently. "A week before you de-indexed, you told me you'd made a breakthrough. We thought--well, we didn't know what to think. You suddenly panicked, said you'd gone too far, learned something nobody was supposed to know. It was ridiculous, but all the more frightening because you seemed sincere."

  Keir nodded, half-smiling. "I was part of a preindustrial-style drama society, oh, many decades ago. I'm glad my acting is still believable."

  "But wiping your own mind ... neotenizing yourself. Neither of those were an act."

  He shook his head, saying, "They couldn't be. I didn't know who the traitor was, either. Whoever they were, the oak warned me they had tapped scry. I couldn't tell anyone what I'd found--not in the necessary detail--except through scry. He or she would learn it all; and if I kept it to myself, it was only a matter of time before the spy moved against me."

  Maerta took a deep breath and said to the others, "And that was when he came to me and told me he was going to de-index himself." Glyphs of surprise exploded through scry; she shrugged. "He said it would be temporary, but he wouldn't tell me why he was doing it."

  "But--" Thoun, one of the founders of the Renaissance, shook his head. "You could have come to us. To any of us--"

  "Come to you? Come to you?" His voice was rising. "You were completely ignorant of the situation, all of you!" He stood up. "You thought we were safe here, or, oh, even worse! You never really believed in the danger. You never thought they would come after us. You never looked over your shoulders. And I was too distracted, I was so close for so long I couldn't raise my head out of the problem ... It's just a good thing the oaks were watching out for us."

  "But Gallard..." Maerta glanced around the table. "What happened that night in Virga?"

  Keir closed his eyes, and heard the others gasp--for they were there now, seeing the tree and the shadowed pathways through the eyes of the dragonfly he'd carried with him into Virga. The perspective swooped and dove, and Keir smiled as he seemed to spiral with it, dizzyingly, above the treetops. The gardens of the palace at Aurora emerged, and again he felt the others react. Emoticons flooded scry as all of Renaissance saw the wonders of a Virgan city for the first time.

  But something had moved below. The dragonfly plummeted, returning to Keir, who stood with a hand held half-out at the base of a machine-augmented oak.

  Someone was running up behind him, revealed and hidden in flashes of shadow and city light. It was Gallard, and he had a sword in his hand.

  He raised it, his face twisted into a grimace, and Keir saw himself react. Every time he'd reviewed this recording, he'd felt a sympathetic prickle between his shoulder blades and half-consciously hunched, and he did so this time, too. The Keir in the dragonfly's video dove to one side, and Gallard's strike missed.

  He rolled to his feet and for a second Keir saw himself smile. The others wouldn't understand that, but he remembered: for just an instant, he'd reveled in having the reflexes and power of a young body. Despite his shock at the attack, he'd felt powerful.

  The dragonfly lowered to head-height. Gallard hadn't noticed it. He advanced on Keir with his blade raised.

  "You're not surprised," Gallard accused; his words appeared as subtitles in the recording, thanks to the dragonfly's lip-reading program.

  Keir had laughed, half from adrenaline, half from contempt. "I'm only surprised at how badly you handled all of this. How long have you been working for them?"

  "There's no 'them,'" said his former teacher. "There never was. This collective fantasy that somehow you could band together and defeat the final evolutionary stage of life is ridiculous. The Renaissance is pathetic."

  Keir was backing away. "Then why pay attention to us at all? If we weren't a threat--"

  Gallard lunged and Keir twisted away. "Because you're a rallying point for every lunatic species that wants to advance its own cause. Don't you know why the arena exists? It's here as a place where we can all learn to get along. Artificial Reality is the glue that keeps us together. The species that rise to the top should be at the top, and the ones at the bottom should be at the bottom. They shouldn't try to game the system to their own advantage. They shouldn't conspire ... They shouldn't cheat--" He lunged again and this time his blade ripped through Keir's sleeve.

  Keir jumped backward again, but this time he'd tripped. He fell. Before he could rise Gallard was kneeling on him, one knee across his chest. Gallard raised his sword.

  Keir had made a last desperate plea, but not to Gallard's humanity. Whenever he watched this he thought, Why didn't I appeal to our friendship? To all we'd been through together? But something in Gallard's eyes had warned him that they were beyond that. So, he'd flinched back, hitting his head on the ground, and said, "Is Candesce a cheat?"

  Gallard hesitated, and in that moment something black had snaked out of the air to wrap itself around his chest. Gallard tried to shout in surprise but it turned into a whuff! sound as all the air was driven out of his body. It wasn't visible from the dragonfly's perspective, but Keir saw the astonishment in his eyes as the silver-threaded tree branch plucked him into the air. It rose in a smooth motion and suddenly Gallard was flying, limbs flailing, into the city-starred sky.

  The dragonfly moved, swerving around to hover next to Keir's head as he sat up. Something crashed through branches elsewhere in the grove, but all Keir had noticed at the time were the two gigantic, glowing green eyes that had appeared, winking, in front of him.

  "Are you all right?" asked the emissary. Behind it, the oak writhed as lines of light began shooting along its trunk. The light became blinding and with it came an overwhelming roar of noise. Keir crouched, shielding his face with one hand, but the metal cheetah curled its own head around to put its nose an inch from his.

  "Where are we?" it said.

  Keir began to laugh hysterically. "I remember," he said. "They could never figure it out. They built scientists--made their own Renaissance to reinvent physics like we did. But they couldn't figure it out."

  The cheetah blinked. "And you did?"

  "Quantum gravity," he babbled. "The final theory. It's a formal system. Every time they tried to rediscover the science, they were led right back to it. Of course. It's what all obvious experiments lead to. But it's a formal system!" He'd begun to laugh uncontrollably. Then he stood and staggered away from the cheetah and the tree.

  "Where are you going?" asked the cat.

  Keir turned once and grinned. He was walking away from the dragonfly; he'd commanded it to stay where it was. "I can't do what I need to here," he said. "And there's no time. Talk to them." He waved at the other paths, where a babble of voices and running feet could now be heard. "Make a treaty. You've only got a few hours; waste no time." Then he'd turned and disappeared into t
he darkness.

  The dragonfly settled onto the loam and watched as Antaea Argyre peered fearfully out from behind the trunk of a tree.

  Keir ended the recording and, back now in the sunlit conference room, watched as Maerta and the others sat for a while in stunned silence.

  At last Maerta looked up. "What did you mean? That our physics is a formal system?"

  He shrugged. "Every formal language, like say, mathematics, has a fatal flaw: It's always possible to write self-contradictory statements in it. Like 'X equals not-X.' About a year ago I realized that if you could do that in math, you could do it in quantum gravity. But here's the thing: Every statement in QG corresponds to a real phenomenon. So what would happen if I found a self-contradictory formulation in QG, and then made it?"

  Maerta blinked at him. "Made it?"

  "Built a machine to create the phenomenon described in that statement. A particle that simultaneously existed and didn't exist, for instance. Negative and positive charge in one, gravity and nongravity."

  "You did it."

  He nodded. "In secret. I'd planned it out, as the sort of mad-scientist experiment from an ancient movie; but I was afraid to actually do it, until the oak came to me. The night it told me there was a spy among us, I packed up a fab unit and a small Edisonian and went into the city alone, and I did the experiment. And then I knew how Candesce's field works, and I built a tiny version of it."

  "And you put it inside one of your dragonflies."

  He nodded. "And then I planned my own de-indexing, because the oak had showed me that scry was compromised. Something was on to us, and whatever it was could move at any moment." He looked down at the table. "I was afraid we were all about to be netted like fish and our minds taken apart. I was afraid to run, or say anything, because we were being watched. So I had to make sure we weren't seen as a threat."

  No one said anything. After a while, Keir became aware of a distant rumbling. He knew the sound that avalanches made, had lived with them for many months. This was different.

  He stood up and went to the window. The sky was full of pops and brief sheets of light. The battle was getting closer.

  "What now?" asked Maerta.

  With his dragonflies and his own eyes, he could see them and himself looking at them, could see his cheekbones revealed and shaded by the patter of dozens of faraway nuclear blasts.

  "I need our biggest fab and our best Edisonian," he said. "And I need something else, too, that might be harder to retrieve."

  He put his forehead to the window so he could see down the dizzying slope of Aethyr's skin, to where coiling cloud and the mottled green of landforms lay half-veiled by distance. "I need to retrieve a machine," he said, "from the plain where Leal Maspeth and the Home Guard crashed."

  23

  EVERYBODY KNEW, IN an abstract sort of way, that if the legendary Virga Home Guard did exist, they must have ships. Yet even Antaea, who knew the Guard intimately, found herself silent in the face of the truth.

  Inshiri Ferance's alliance had its own armada, and it might have been the biggest of its kind ever assembled. Antaea had braced herself in a gunnery port and, with wind whipping past her and sky above, below and to both sides, watched the muster of a thousand battleships. They filled the sky like swarming insects, each surrounded by a buzzing retinue of smaller craft. Contrails confused the view. Yet behind them, something impossible was looming.

  The First Line fleet was in cube formation. From here, many miles away, it appeared as a solid thing, a blued-out silhouette moving behind a veil of pale sky. Clouds and cities drifted in front of it. There was no way to distinguish individual ships in that mass, but she knew some were the size of Rush's town wheels.

  This was not the flagship of Inshiri's fleet. Ferance would never have been so stupid as to ride in that big a target. Instead, she had commandeered the Thistle, the fastest courier-class sloop she could find, a powder-blue needle bristling with engines. Around the Thistle flew a swarm of armored bikes, an escort armed with ship-busting missiles and heavy machine guns. Antaea badly wanted to be riding one of those, but Inshiri had forbidden it. She had to keep reminding herself that, vile as Ferance was, her cause was the right one. If it hadn't been, Antaea would cheerfully have killed the woman by now.

  Trailing well behind the sloop was a fuel tanker disguised as a hospital ship. A little breaking of the rules of war ... Inshiri had shrugged: Well, these things happen.

  The armada and the First Line fleet were only here to open the door a tiny crack; then Inshiri's ship would slip in. The Last Line was in sphere formation around Candesce, their own forces supplemented by those principalities that had sided with them at the last minute. Somewhere far away, Chaison's relief force would be approaching.

  The thought of him made Antaea sad. His own glorious armada was an afterthought. It could do nothing. It was a joke. Everything would be over by the time it got here.

  Antaea had come out here to watch sunoff. Candesce's great beacons had been dimming for some minutes, and now they were flicking off one by one. From a distance, the sun of suns looked like a single incandescent point of light, but she knew it was really an entire region of air populated by dozens of suns. Suns--and other ancient mechanisms whose purpose and potential no one understood.

  While Candesce was alight, the Last Line fleet had an advantage. They had fire and blinding radiance at their backs. But as soon as that light faded ...

  A faint sound reached her over the tearing noise of the engines. Sirens--bells. Abruptly, the cruisers of the armada began to turn and flock, and the carriers coughed bikes and armored catamarans into the air. She took a deep breath, leaned out, and saw orange and white flashes dotting the sky where the last of Candesce's light was fading.

  It was time.

  * * *

  TWO WALLS OF ships met in the hot air just inside Candesce's exclusion zone. Fire erupted along the line of that meeting as cruisers and battleships unleashed broadside after broadside at one another. In seconds the battle scene became opaque with smoke. The smaller escorts began peeling off from the core of the battle because visibility was nil, the air was full of shrapnel and debris, and worst of all, all the oxygen was getting used up. Any jet that flew into the expanding spherical aftermath of a fire would choke and die from anoxia, and if its pilot didn't get out he would quickly follow. From outside, the grinding and convulsion of vast whale-like ships, the bikes and catamarans and trimarans, poured withering machine-gun fire at the larger craft, and each other.

  Venera Fanning, watching through a tiny porthole in Inshiri Ferance's ship, saw the traces of bullets flung in random directions--bullets that might travel a thousand miles before finding a destination--and fingered the scar on her chin.

  * * *

  SHEER MOMENTUM CARRIED the invaders through ten miles of Last Line defenses. The plan was to punch a hole in the shell and pour the rest of the fleet in behind it. The Last Line knew this, so as the blunt needle of battleships pushed forward, they gave way--then, at a signal, re-formed in torus formation, and squeezed.

  The principalities were sleepless--and the citizens of many nations muttered in wonder at what appeared to be Candesce waking only hours after it had gone to sleep. An ominous red smudge appeared in the purple air inward of the six-hundred-mile-diameter shell of city lights and new suns that surrounded Candesce; and gradually it grew. It became a roiling sphere of fire, dozens of miles across, flickering with internal explosions and clots of smoke. In the cities, among the farms, errant missiles suddenly appeared out of nowhere, shattering ancient buildings and scattering crops. A whisper filled the air--not some echo of the battle, but the sound of millions of wings as countless birds and schools of disoriented fish fled the battle.

  Leal had found an out-of-the-way corner in the bridge of Chaison Fanning's flagship, the Surgeon. This spot boasted a tiny quartz window, inches thick, and in an unwitting mirror image to Venera, she had watched the battle through this for hours. The alliance fle
et was moving to join the action as quickly as it could, but the air here was thick with hazards: trees, houses, town wheels, and a million untethered and lost objects. Chaison's ships had to nose their way through this dense cloud, while at any moment the battle ahead of them might end.

  The bridge was full of muted sounds, the hum of machinery, tactical discussions, the crackle of chart paper. Despite her best efforts, Leal nodded off, one hand against the window. She was still there when, hours later, light began to well up between her fingers. Candesce was lighting again.

  Startled voices roused her. Blinking, she saw the bridge crew surrounding a circle of light on the back wall of the cone-shaped chamber. There were no large windows in this room, which was set well behind the armored prow. Outside light was piped from telescopes in the nose and projected on the white rear wall. With the flip of a lever, close-in or distant images could be put there, an effect that had seemed magical to Leal when she first saw it; but the images were dim, and they wavered. What she saw now was clear enough.

  A long scar of smoke and wreckage led from the edge of the exclusion zone almost all the way to Candesce. Ferance's battleships had pushed the Last Line fleet back, and pouring in behind them came a gray cloud that must be the First Line armada.

  Leal pushed off from her corner. "We're too late?"

  Chaison was chatting with two officers and, perversely, smiling. He saw Leal and waved her over. "They took too long," he said. "Look at what's happening ahead of them."

  She could hardly miss it: Candesce's suns were coming on line, one by one. "They're caught!"

  Chaison nodded. The Last Line fleet had retreated, maybe deliberately, drawing Ferance's battleships and cruisers ever closer to the sun of suns. That was their destination--but they had to get there in time to deploy the key and enter Candesce's control rooms. The Last Line had given them hope, falling back quickly enough to draw them in, then putting up a fierce resistance right outside the machineries of the giant sun. The goal was tantalizingly close--too close to give up. When the attackers realized that the rest of the Last Line fleet had circled around behind to cut them off, it was too late.