Pirate Sun (16 page)

Shuffling through the rest of the pictures, he found another showing a similar formation elsewhere in the city. All the images had been taken through telephoto lenses, and were blurred from atmosphere and engine smog. “Damn! It must be half the city…”

He whistled loudly, turning heads up and down the room. “I need somebody who knows Neverland. Who’s lived there.” After a minute of consultation a middle-aged woman edged out of the drift of people. Chaison gestured her closer, and showed her the pictures.

“They hold these all the time,” she said. “Indoctrination rallies, to make sure everybody understands whatever fairy tale they’re modeling current policy on. It would be good to know which tale they’re using today…” Then she shrugged, and handed the pictures back to Chaison. “Attendance is mandatory, but because of that the rallies have lost their punch. Nobody cares; you’d be hard pressed to find a more cynical bunch than Gretel townspeople. The government’s always crying wolf, so if they’re hoping to whip up mass enthusiasm from the people with this, it’s not likely to work.”

Chaison refrained from asking what a crying wolf was. He was not reassured by her words. “They expect their citizens to become conquerors,” he said. “They’ll have prepared for this over a long time.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged again. “But nobody believes the government.”

Preparations didn’t slow for nighttime, but Chaison had reached the end of his strength. As he let himself be flown to a new, larger apartment on one of the town-wheels, the image kept going through his mind of Neverland’s people pouring into Stonecloud bearing swords, knives, and homemade truncheons. What had they been told about the people they were supposed to subdue? Chaison had been taught to mistrust and fear the people of Falcon; he had only just come to see them as they were, as ordinary folk struggling to maintain sane lives under the heel of an oppressive system. The Gretels were past masters at distorting reality. Had they told their people that Stonecloud was full of trolls and wicked witches, all of whom deserved to die?

His handlers dropped him off at the axis of the two-hundred-foot apartment wheel. He found himself thinking of freedom in clear skies as he climbed into a railed slot at the top and bounced his way into vertigo and increasing weight. It would be good to be flying, a new man with a different name, in some far corner of the world…

He found the little apartment at the end of a quiet, carpet-lined hall, entered, and closed the door gratefully.

It was very dark in here. He strewed his clothes indiscriminately as he made his way to the half-seen bed. It was only as he climbed in that he realized Antaea was already in it.

She chuckled. “Hello.”

“Hello.” He smiled into the blackness, feeling her warmth next to him. It would be so easy to just turn over and enfold her in his arms; but somehow—when exactly he wasn’t sure—they had come to an unspoken agreement. Whatever attraction they felt for one another was off-limits to the game Antaea was playing on behalf of her guard masters. Knowing this made him feel hugely relieved, and relaxed to be around her. Somehow, chastity had become a little island of trust on which they both could shelter.

“When?” she murmured; he knew what she was asking.

“A few hours at most,” he said. “By dawn tomorrow, it’ll have begun.”

Then he turned over and, sensing her relax beside him, fell instantly asleep.

FOR THE GRETELS
, dawn came three hours early. As startled sentries in Stonecloud blinked at the sudden day, four fast cruisers leaped out of Neverland’s jostling towers, batting aside a few Falcon bikes that tried to intercept them. They roared to within hailing distance of Stonecloud’s outer neighborhoods, and broadsided them.

Work gangs had been at it all through the night, strewing rubble from the dismantling of the city into the surrounding air. The idea was to create a no-fly zone for bikes, ships, and missiles. The problem was that the rubble eventually drifted off-station, so in the end it was easy for the Gretels to find breaks through which to fire. Sixteen, twenty, forty rockets slewed through the inevitable gaps in Chaison’s defenses, impacting deep within the city.

Chaison was standing on a T-bar atop the circus ball. The rumble of the explosions momentarily drowned out the flutter of semaphore flags from behind him. Orange blossoms of flame peeked between the crowding neighborhoods.

“They mean to sow confusion in the heart of the city,” he commented to Corbus, who watched silently, gnawing his calloused knuckles. “They’ll also block our sight lines.”

Behind the bombardment, Neverland was moving. The two cities had played out a ponderous dance throughout the night, with Neverland trying to line up its neighborhoods for strikes into the heart of Stonecloud, and the Falcon city eluding its grasp like some deep-winter jellyfish, drawing strings of buildings in and whipping them out again at a mile per hour or less. Stonecloud’s fuel reserves had run out late in the night, the thousands of trucks and private vehicles that were towing the buildings disengaging one by one. Houses had begun to collide. It was this deep grumble, the sound of a giant grinding its teeth together, that had finally awakened Chaison and Antaea.

More missiles arrowed into the city. Chaison had nothing comparable to fire back. He was gratified, though, to see that most of the explosions were taking place in dense clouds of forest; leaves and twigs flew, but so far nothing had come close to the town-wheels.

These were the strategic target. The Gretels’ plan was obvious: to absorb the zero-gravity sections of the city directly into Neverland, and to dominate the town-wheels by placing heavily armed cruisers inside their spokes. The plan would succeed as long as their navy led the attack; without those cruisers Neverland might end up being assimilated by Stonecloud instead. Much of Chaison’s time over the past twenty-four hours had been spent working on how to cause that hesitation.

A young page jumped up to the T-bar from a nearby semaphore station. “They’re firing into the debris cloud on the outskirts. Lots of rockets, lots of explosions!”

He nodded. “High-explosive charges, no doubt. The shock waves will clear the debris. They’re making a hole they can pass through. I need to know if the gauntlets are ready. Send reserve gangs there, there, and there,” he pointed. “And alert the winter wraith’s team to start lining up the sticks.”

Stonecloud didn’t have conventional rockets; but that didn’t mean the city didn’t have missiles. He shook his head at the folly of the plan. The Gretels would be laughing about it tomorrow.

The Gretels had split their naval force into two; one squadron of ships headed straight into the gap they’d blown in the city’s defenses while the other could be glimpsed as bright flickers of light passing behind building and cloud, far too fast for the gauntlet gangs to follow. They were circling around the city at high speed looking for a second way in.

The first squadron nosed through the last flinders of drifting debris. Bullets pinged off their metal hulls, but the five cruisers were battened down, their own machine-gun snouts poking out of steel domes. They peppered the buildings ahead of them with bullets, easily suppressing the defenders’ uncoordinated rifle fire. One launched a rocket into an apartment wheel, which convulsed and flew apart, filling the arteries behind it with flying masonry. The cruisers shoved past the smoke and into a wider artery, a kind of cave formed of massive, essentially immobile municipal buildings that opened out after a quarter mile into the central space of Stonecloud. The air here was clear, the buildings static; the cruisers sped up.

The other squadron had found an opening on the far side of the city. Rockets erupted from their sides in startled lines as they spiraled through the broad gap in the buildings. The town-wheels beckoned through divergent clouds of forest, lake, and housing.

Chaison yelled “Now!” and the semaphore men waved their flags in grand gestures against the backdrop of shattered city. Simultaneously, two very different attacks unfolded.

The first squadron suddenly found the artery closing in around them. The government buildings were too heavy to move; but they had been spaced in such a way that dozens of smaller houses could be fitted between them. All through the city the obvious avenues had been similarly lined. Now, gauntlet teams consisting of hundreds of bikes, trucks, and other vehicles were converging on the houses from behind and pushing them into the artery. Before they could react, the cruisers found themselves boxed in—with houses ahead, mansions behind, and more closing in fast from the sides. Two of the cruisers opened fire but at such close range their rockets just blew the houses into fragments that rebounded toward them.

A spindle-shaped metal monster bristling with rocket ports and machine guns tried to turn; its captain had spied a narrow alley between the heavier municipal blocks. It was too late. Two stone mansions hit it from opposite sides, folding around it in a puff of masonry dust. Behind and before it, two more ships were bumped by passing houses—and then the artery became one slow crash, with cubic, octahedral, and spherical buildings shearing and breaking and five Gretel ships being chewed in their midst.

Across town, the other squadron had better luck. They had circled around faster than the gauntlet teams could react and now found an avenue of empty air that led straight to the vulnerable wheels at the city’s heart.

Antaea had seen them coming. She waited, mouth dry and heart pounding, near the wheels with several dozen men on bikes and a small cloud of tree trunks. These had been chosen for their size and straightness, and had been pruned and sharpened into vicious spikes. As people shouted and pointed at the four cruisers, Antaea nodded at her wingman and they set to work.

The bikes were tied together with heavy cable—some in pairs, some by four in a cross formation. Antaea and her wingman had brought their bikes in close on either side of a pole, with the cable trailing out behind them to wrap around its flat base. For many long minutes they had sat in the air, each holding a metal hook that gripped the splintered trunk just behind the sharpened point. Now with the help of a third bike they nudged the pole into a turn, until it was lined up pointing straight down the artery the Gretels were coming up. Then they opened their throttles wide.

For long seconds, nothing happened. Then, impelled by two howling jet engines, the sharpened log began to move. On all sides, other poles were inching forward, their acceleration slow but inexorable.

Bullets drew a cage of tracer lines around Antaea. The incoming cruisers could obviously see that a small cloud of bikes was headed their way. Odds were, though, that they couldn’t see the poles, which were end-on to them. Antaea leaned into her saddle, willing more power into the bike.

When they had the poles up to thirty miles per hour, she signaled her wingman again. As one they turned their bikes out and away from the pole. Now the cable was acting like the string of a bow, and the pole was its arrow. The two diverging bikes shot their missile as the cable snapped and rebounded. Antaea had a moment of terror as she watched the steel whip lash straight at her; the bike lurched under her and then the world started spinning.

Twelve sharpened logs met four armored cruisers at the mouth of the artery. The first pole bounced off the curved prow of a ship and shot spinning through the air. It took out a two-hundred-year-old house, casting sculptures and broken frescoes into the sky.

The second pole rang another cruiser like a bell and left a deep dent in its side. Another log hit the scored plates and went straight through them. Bright metal flew as the thirty-foot needle disappeared entirely into the cruiser. Pithed, the ship began to drift.

Antaea saw some of this, but she was flipping head over heels through the air as her bike wove a drunken contrail in the opposite direction. It shuddered as machine-gun fire caught it, then blew up.

She spotted a cruiser with a huge shaft jutting out of it, gouting smoke and tumbling; then she flew through the clawing branches of a tree and out into open air again. Stunned by blows from the branches, she could only watch helplessly as the pipe-choked underside of a town-wheel got closer second by second.

SHARP BANGS ECHOED
through the city, punctuating the faint sound of cheering from Stonecloud’s residents. Chaison frowned, listening to the irregular popping. It came from the direction of the first Gretel squadron and made a pattern. The pattern repeated twice.

“They’re signaling somebody, probably the other ships,” he told Corbus. Lacking the wireless technology Aubri Mahallan had once shown him, the Gretels were using percussion-charge strings, a common enough way of messaging in cloud or darkness.

“It’s almost time,” Corbus said suddenly. Chaison turned to him, frowning; he wasn’t watching the Gretels’ ships at all, but had his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the edge of the city. “I’m going to leave you for a while,” said the Atlas. “You’re doing fine, Fanning. But it’s time for the real action to commence.”

“What real act—” But Corbus was already gone, bounding away to the row of parked bikes near the circus ball’s door. Several men were there waiting, and they shot away from the ball in formation.

Chaison felt betrayed; whatever Corbus had planned, he hadn’t seen fit to trust his prized admiral with the information. This couldn’t be good—but he had no time to think about it right now. Chaison needed to know what was happening in the dust-choked artery where the first Gretel squadron had disappeared, as well as in the vent far down the curve of forest and building where the second had run into Antaea’s logs. The first squadron still had not emerged; they seemed to be stuck, though he had no illusions they had been destroyed. Of the four ships in the other squadron, one was disabled, another had hove to in order to help it, and another was drifting as its crew labored to remove the beam in its side. The fourth cruiser was circling slowly, laying down covering fire for the others.

Suddenly it changed direction. He saw a purposeful flare of exhaust blur the air around it as it went from a distant, short line to a dot. It kept this shape as the seconds lengthened.