Pirate Sun (18 page)

Luckily, after the Gretels had pulled the wooden lances out of their ships they had then shot everything in sight, so the air was clotted with debris. She had to weave a complicated line through the space around the town-wheels because a stray rock sucked into the intake could ruin the bike. She didn’t stop for leaves and twigs, though—a few of these belched flaming out the back of the bike as she flew.

In any case the Gretels were distracted by a small but consequential firefight taking place around Chaison’s command center. It looked like some fools were making a last stand there; her pulse skipped as she wondered if one of those distant figures was Chaison. But he couldn’t possibly be so stupid…She accelerated, squinting into the headwind—and almost immediately hit something.

The bike shook between her legs making a huge
braaaap!
noise as it began to yaw out of control. She caught a glimpse of sparks and smoke flailing behind her and then let go, consigning the damned machine to whatever fate awaited it—this putting her right where she’d been a few minutes ago, namely falling out of control.

She billowed her wings which yanked her feet-forward. Right ahead of her (below her, according to her inner ear) was a cloud of drifting rocks; she was going to pass right through it. Antaea kicked a fist-sized stone, then landed with her heel on one the size of her head, spinning it off to the left. For a few seconds it felt like she was hopping down a slope, from rock to rock to rock, then she was through. Behind her, gunfire.

The circus ball was just ahead. It had shrunk, and was furred with splintered planking. A cloud of Gretel troops surrounded it, some beleaguered defenders huddling behind shields near the main door. As Antaea feathered her wings for normal flight, she saw one of those men stand up out of his crouch. It was Corbus the strongman. He was screaming something, swinging his rifle over his head in a tremendously dramatic gesture.

Then he coughed and drifted back under the impact of dozens of bullets. Antaea turned sadly, and kicked into the stirrups of her wings. They gusted her around the curve of the ball, away from the sad carnage, and she alighted on the bullet-pocked decking. She gripped it with her toes and looked up.

Eight airmen on bikes were closing on her. Four had their rifles aimed at her head. Antaea put up her hands while, in foolish parody, her wings rose on their springs as well.

A big shape hurtled over the blockhouse’s horizon and scattered the tight knot of bikes. Two went twirling away. Antaea put her hands to her ears to block the deafening roar of a jet at full thrust, almost losing her grip as hot exhaust washed over her. Then the attacking catamaran spun in mid-arc and for a mere instant, stopped in the air.

It was a battered thing, two twenty-foot-long spindle-shaped nacelles riding on either side of a big industrial-strength fan-jet. That jet was now screaming as it aimed the boat at the bikes.

The Gretels were firing but it was close-quarters now and as the catamaran swept in the engine throttled back. A small figure carrying a big sword leaped from one of its nacelles; one of the airmen blocked a thrust clumsily with his rifle but was propelled off his bike by the force of the attack. The short swordsman put both feet against the smoking side of the bike and kicked off. His target was the next bike, but its pilot was too quick with his rifle.

Antaea threw her sword. It caught him under the shoulder, not digging in but throwing off his aim so that his shot missed, and the small man was on him in the next instant.

Antaea slipped off the wings and launched herself from the wreckage. She had no sword, but in such tight quarters what she had was better.

Two of the bikes were drifting about six feet away. Antaea fell between them and as their riders swung around to strike at her she lashed out. The long spike of her right heel caught the first rider under the jaw; she was already spinning and kicking out with her other leg, pinning the other man’s calf to his bike. As he hissed with pain and reached for her ankle she crouched and put both boots into his chest. Since she’d leaned to the left as she did this she began to spin and so was able to grab his shoulder on the way by. She planted her feet again, carefully this time, and jumped.

There were two of them left and both were good swordsmen. Her ally—whoever it was—was engaging the first recklessly. He had one leg jammed down the intake of the airman’s bike, preventing it from starting. The airman had equal leverage, with his feet in the stirrups of the bike.

Antaea’s own adversary met her with a wicked thrust of his rapier, but was astonished as she parried it with one heel-spike and slid the other boot down the blade, twisting. He was nearly disarmed and reared back with a curse. Antaea smirked at him past her poised feet.

He tried a cut. She blocked the blade with her ankle though it split the leather enough to reveal the steel greave beneath. He cut again and she caught the blade between left boot-sole and heel-spike. Again she twisted and again he nearly lost his sword. Now his blade was stuck.

She brought her knee to her chin, which drew her to him. Before he realized his mistake she lashed out with her other leg, punching a hole in his forehead with her right heel. He convulsed once and drifted away.

Antaea pirouetted, catching one handlebar of the bike with her toes. Blood dotted the air between her and the last jet, and perching on it was Darius Martor. He was gaping at her in frank astonishment.

“It’s a weightless fighting style for women,” she said, shrugging modestly. “Taught in my country. Our legs are better weapons because our center of gravity is lower—”

He snapped out of his trance. “Come on!” He reached out to take her hand.

“Chaison is inside,” she said, nodding at the circus ball.

He shook his head and for a second or two she was furious with him. Then he said, “We got him already. There’s no time for this! The Gretels will be all over us.”

Hand in hand, they timed a jump from the last bike and as it tumbled into smoke and fire, they sailed up to the waiting catamaran. She flipped herself through an open hatch and into Chaison’s waiting arms.

“
DON’T
ABUSE
ME
, I’ve never flown one of these things before.” Richard Reiss put the tip of his tongue between his teeth and squinted at the controls. While he did this, building blocks, tree limbs, and swirling leaves scudded past the plastic windscreen.

Chaison stared at the ambassador. “Richard, why are you dressed as a clown?” Ballooning pantaloons and a polka-dotted top spilled out around the edges of Reiss’s seat; he had red smudges on his cheeks that he’d obviously been trying to rub off.

The ambassador turned with great dignity, fixed Chaison with a steely eye and said, “It is a very long story, and one I find I would rather
not
relate.”

Darius grabbed his shoulder and shouted, “Zero by forty! Right now!” Richard turned back and spun the control ball to zero degrees latitude by forty longitude, and the vessel made a long, sickening arc that ended with them entering a debris-chocked artery leading away from the town-wheels, the blockhouse—and hopefully, the Gretels.

The hum of the engine was reassuring; even the sound of Darius and Richard bickering made Chaison smile. He could finally let himself relax a bit. “Think this will get us back home?” he asked no one in particular.

The Gretels had been literally pouring into the smashed circus ball when Darius and Richard appeared, swords bloodied, from the other direction. “Well met, friend!” Richard had boomed. Chaison was almost alone, having ordered the remaining citizens of Stonecloud into a set of fairly defensible rooms. He had hoped the Gretels weren’t in a mood to make examples of people, but it was better for the townsmen to take their chances on a negotiation, than to try to escape through open air. Chaison knew what the nervous tail-gunners on a military cruiser were like.

“Ship’s fully fueled, Admiral,” said Darius, not turning his head. “Even has sleeping bags in the other nacelle.”

This nacelle was about twenty feet by six, made of thin ribbed metal, and divided into two compartments. The nose was transparent plastic and there were several portholes behind it. The pilot’s cradle was in the nose; that was where Richard Reiss was currently sweating and swearing.

A square door separated the front compartment from the back. “What’s in there?” Chaison asked, jabbing a thumb at it.

Richard looked back and grinned. “A present for you, good sir,” he said. “And a bit of a surprise, I’m sure.”

Chaison narrowed his eyes but Richard was immune to the sort of haughty upper-class glare that worked so well on lower-level staffers. “I’m not sure how you could surprise me after that rescue,” he commented, easing his way to the hatch. He made sure he kept at least a hand and a foot pressed against the fuselage at all times; Richard was performing unrated maneuvers at unpredictable moments.

“Let’s see this ‘present,’” he said, and opened the hatch. He immediately swore and slammed it shut again.

Antaea was staring at him. “What?”

Chaison flipped the door open again. Crammed among fuel barrels and supply boxes was Antonin Kestrel. He was tied quite thoroughly, his eyes accusatory over the oily rag stuffed in his mouth.

“This is
not
funny,” said Chaison. Richard and Darius were giggling like schoolboys. He fitted himself into the awkward space and pulled the gag out of Kestrel’s mouth. “Hello, old friend.”

“Friend!” Kestrel glared at him. “You have no friends anymore, Fanning. Only dupes.”

“—Then give me the controls!” Darius was shouting. Chaison glanced back to see Richard and Darius trading places at the pilot’s chair. Beyond the windscreen scattered buildings and a small flaming forest punctuated a blue sky.

“Are we out?” Chaison called.

“Yes!” Darius waved a hand over his head as he took the yoke with his other one. Richard preened. “I took us out, Admiral,” he said.

Chaison pushed past Kestrel to press his nose against a porthole. The city of Stonecloud was a sky-spanning, slow-motion explosion of masonry and forest, its suburbs being pierced with visible speed by the long talons of Neverland. He spotted occasional flashes of gunfire, but whatever was really happening in there was obscured by distance and smoke. The sight wavered, blurred with white, and then disappeared as the catamaran entered a cloud bank.

Chaison felt a wrench of sorrow. He’d been right all along: there had been nothing he could do for the city. Corbus should have surrendered peacefully before anyone could be killed, and if Chaison had been a better diplomat he might have persuaded him to do that.

Stonecloud was an unfinished sentence, an interrupted excuse. Chaison wanted to go back there and undo everything that had just happened.

Just visible through the hatch, Richard Reiss, former ambassador to Gehellen, was strapping himself contentedly into a seat. Chaison frowned and looked for somewhere else to rest his eyes. He turned his head and found Kestrel watching him.

“Tell me, Chaison,” said the seneschal smoothly, “was that a dry run? Practice for our next stop?”

He shook his head numbly. “Next stop? What are you talking about?”

Kestrel nodded to the cockpit. “This boat has enough fuel for several days. Can you doubt that the lad there is going to take us straight into winter?

“And, from there, it’s a straight run back to Slipstream.”

“HE’S RIGHT,” SAID
Richard Reiss. “We have no time to lose if we want to save the others.”

“Others?” Chaison turned back to Kestrel. “Back in Songly you said something about the
Severance
—”

“You’re not going to convince me you don’t already know everything,” said Kestrel. He turned his head away and closed his eyes.

Chaison climbed through the hatch, momentarily debating whether to slam it on Kestrel’s smug expression. “Yes, the
Severance
!” said Richard, reaching forward to pat Chaison’s knee as though he were some bright schoolboy. “That’s what this is all about.”

Puzzled, Chaison nodded past the hull. “You mean, the—”

“No no, not the Gretels’ invasion, though it may have been indirectly triggered by it. I mean Kestrel, our imprisonment—our abandonment by the pilot! We got the story out of Kestrel on our way to find you.”

Antaea came to perch with them. She was doing her best not to meet Chaison’s eye. “But how did you come to be with Kestrel in the first place?”

“Oh that.” Richard dismissed the whole subject with a wave of his hand. “That’s another story.”

“I’m sure it’s an interesting one—”

Chaison shook his head. “I want to hear about the
Severance
. And about whatever’s happening back home.”

Antaea discretely backed away into the cockpit.

“Well,” Richard said with some relish, “let me tell you—”

“Rehearsing your propaganda!” shouted Kestrel.

Richard shrugged, and began the tale.

SEVERANCE
WAS QUITE
possibly the ugliest ship in Slipstream’s navy. Chaison had wondered once or twice whether he chose her for his expedition simply out of embarrassment—to get her off the roster for more public battles. Plug-shaped, little more than sixty feet long but forty wide,
Severance
boasted an outer hull of steel and concrete, few portholes but a plethora of gun ports. Her engines lined the inside wall of a shaft that ran down the ship’s center, like parasites in a section of vein; thus protected, they were invulnerable to anything but a direct shot from fore or aft, and huge hatches could be rolled across the ends of the shaft if the moment was desperate.

The features that made her a good blockade vessel were keeping
Severance
alive now. She had sloughed back into port shortly after Chaison’s sneak attack, billowing smoke and covered in black scars. It being late afternoon, the citizens of Rush had seen her coming from miles away, and crowded the air waving banners and speculating. Some blasted horns in exuberant welcome. It was assumed by all that this was part of the main naval force that had left weeks earlier to engage Rush’s other neighbor, Mavery. That little nation wasn’t considered much of a threat and the deployment of the navy was locally seen as more a reply to an insult than a war, for Mavery had started things by firing several rockets into the heart of Rush. Almost no one in Slipstream knew that it was Falcon Formation that had put Mavery up to it.

“Ha!” interrupted Kestrel at this point in Richard’s narrative. “Your first lie!”

“I am merely laying out all the facts for the young lady, as I understand them,” said Richard with great dignity. “You, of course, have a different story.”

“Absolutely,” said Kestrel. He strained forward against the ropes. “The truth is, Falcon never intended to invade Slipstream. Their navy was on regularly scheduled maneuvers that day.”

“Of course,” commented Chaison wryly, “it being an exercise, they felt it essential to fill their troop carriers with men…as…ballast?”

Kestrel sneered. “There were no men in the troop carriers.”

Chaison closed his eyes. He remembered when one of Falcon’s carriers had burst from rocket fire scattering men to the six winds. There was a brief moment—it could only have lasted a few seconds—when the
Rook
, under his command, shot through a cloud of twisting human forms at two hundred miles per hour. He wished he could forget the sound of them impacting the
Rook
’s hull like so much heavy hail.

“Continue,” he said to Richard Reiss.

Severance
’s captain was Martin Airgrove, who had been assigned this ship, some said, because of his personal resemblance to it. Airgrove was short, squat, and foul-tempered. The grand irony of the present situation was that Chaison knew he was a loyalist. He would have proudly laid down his life for the pilot, and had assumed he would have to do just such a thing when he joined Chaison’s expeditionary force.

Chaison had told the captains of the seven ships that the pilot had sanctioned their secret expedition. The fact was, the pilot had vetoed it. He did not believe Falcon was about to attack.

Chaison did.

“You’ve got that part right at least,” said Kestrel. “You went against the pilot’s express wishes. Treason.”

“It would have been treason to stand by and do nothing while Falcon Formation conquered my country,” said Chaison. Despite himself, he felt hurt by Kestrel’s accusations.

Coughing to a stop in a cloud of smoke,
Severance
had disgorged Airgrove and his senior officers, who had gone straight to the admiralty. “This decision,” explained Richard, “was what saved their lives, for it was strictly according to protocol. The junior staffers were all for taking the news straight to the pilot; had they gone to the palace first, they would never have left.”

As it was, Airgrove entered the offices of the admiralty and was briefing the senior staff before the pilot even knew he was back. Meanwhile,
Severance
’s crew had spilled out into the airways and streets of Rush. They told a tale so strange and powerful that it had spread through the entire city by nightfall.

Richard began to talk about events in the admiralty, but Kestrel interrupted. “I was there,” he said. “The pilot sent me to find out what the commotion was. I entered the briefing room to find Airgrove half-collapsed over the podium, a hundred senior staffers and rear admirals poring over his every word. He was describing a battle and at first I was excited to hear of the gallantry and ingenuity of our men. We had prevailed! I was proud. Proud!” He shook his head mournfully. “Then gradually I realized something—that peppered throughout Airgrove’s description were the words
Falcon Formation.
Not Mavery, not…anybody else within reason. This battle he was talking about, it was against an
ally.
You can’t imagine the horror that crept over me as I stood there. I felt like gravity had failed, because it was
you
doing this.”

Kestrel had sent a page running for the docks, and meanwhile interrupted the briefing. “The pilot needs to hear this!” he’d shouted over the objections of the staffers.

Thus began the first standoff of what was to become an escalating crisis.

“It would probably have all ended right there, too,” said Richard, “if the pilot had chosen to come in person. He could have closeted himself with Airgrove and arrested him right there. But by then the men were disembarking from the
Severance
, telling their story to anyone who would listen. And the pilot chose to send the honor guard to the admiralty. When these armed men burst into the briefing room, the staffers rallied around Airgrove.”

“It was a fiasco,” admitted Kestrel. Sixteen men in plumed helmets had leveled their rifles at the most respected leaders of the Slipstream navy, and demanded they turn over Airgrove. “It wasn’t my order, but I was bound by honor and law to execute it.” Airgrove would have gone, too, had he not been dragged bodily out the other door by two captains and a commodore.

When Airgrove didn’t reappear, the word went out to arrest the
Severance
’s crew, most of whom were either with their families, drinking, or trying to hawk the most extraordinary treasures that the Rush pawnshops had ever seen. So scattered, they were hard to find. The standoff in the admiralty had gone on for more than twenty-six hours before Airgrove calmed down from his initial fury (expressed in equal parts against the pilot and Chaison Fanning) and ordered them recalled.

“That was the line,” said Kestrel. “When he did that Airgrove crossed from being a misguided dupe of yours, to an active traitor. His men trickled back to the docks under cover of night, with help from the dockhands themselves, and reboarded the
Severance
. We got wind of this just as
Severance
tried to cast off, and intercepted her with the city’s police ships.”

The citizens of Rush awoke to a new and very visible stalemate, one taking place in the very air of the city. It was impossible to ignore or cover up what was happening. When the story leaked out, the riots began.

“Half the people in Rush aren’t even Slipstream citizens,” Kestrel reminded them. “They’re from Aerie—they’re conquered people and they hate the pilot. So now, the
Severance
is under siege and propaganda’s floating about that tells how you and the admiralty resisted the invasion of Aerie and how the pilot vetoed your attack on Falcon. The admiralty sustains the ship by shooting supply rockets to it. We catch the ones we can, but some always get through. Airgrove is bottled up inside—has been for months now.”

“But why?” asked Chaison. “What is he waiting for? Surely the story is out now. He can have nothing further to gain by staying there, unless he’s just out to save his own skin, which doesn’t sound like him at all.”

“Oh, come now,” snorted Kestrel, shaking his head. “It was only a matter of days before the rumors began to circulate. And when they were confirmed…it just spiraled out of control after that.”

Chaison was puzzled. “What rumors?”

“Why,” said Richard, “that you were alive, of course.”

Kestrel nodded in disgust. “Airgrove is waiting for
you,
Chaison.

“The whole damned city is waiting for your return.”