Pirate Sun (26 page)

Deep booms echoed between the palace and the city and some of the pool’s glass panes cracked. A full-fledged battle had erupted behind the
Severance
, between the police boats controlled by the pilot, and admiralty ships. Underneath it all was the faint sound of twenty thousand people screaming as they flew for cover.

As the sky seemed to come unraveled all around them, Chaison’s doubts and hesitations melted away. He was trained for this chaos. It was his job to create moments like this one and then steer the madness in the right direction. Finally, he was in his element.

He glanced back at the pilot then up at the oncoming ship, assessing what was happening and what to do.

As Kestrel’s damaged bike bumped gently against the pool’s flagpole and the palace guards dismounted to surround them, Chaison said, “The
Severance
will use the palace as a shield. You have to get to it. I’m going after the pilot.”

Kestrel blinked at him. “How?”

“With these fine men as my escort,” said Chaison ironically. “They want me, not you. Go!”

Without waiting for an answer Chaison dove for the pool building’s hatch. There were shouts and he was caught before he could maneuver through the opening. That didn’t matter, because Antonin Kestrel and Antaea Argyre had seized the moment and jumped the other way. The guardsmen had chosen to follow Chaison, as expected.

The guards took several half-hearted shots at the fleeing pair, but they’d already passed over the curve of the onion-shaped building and were just shadows in glass now.

Chaison smiled and turned to his captors. “Do your jobs, then,” he said. “Take me to the pilot.”

THE
SEVERANCE
WAS
holed in a dozen places and chunks of concrete and iron were falling off it as it spun, but its heavily armored engines still worked. It passed not two hundred feet beneath Antaea and Kestrel, but fine traceries of bullet fire still stitched the air near the ship and as it spun it was responding in kind to its attackers. There was no way to get near it, so the two held onto the gold-painted iron framing of the pilot’s pool and waited.

Antaea spared a glance behind her. Chaison was being hustled after the departing pilot, but he looked unhurt. It had seemed like folly to leave him but now she was realizing that he’d done the moral and tactical calculation and knew that the safest place for him right now was at Sempeterna’s side.

The pilot wouldn’t kill the one man who might be able to negotiate a way out of this mess.

The
Severance
was inside the turning ring of the palace now. Antaea had never seen madness like this, not even during the siege of Stonecloud: the admiralty vehicle, bearded with smoke, simply plowed into the suspension cables and elevator shafts that spoked the wheel’s interior, snapping and smashing its way through them like a maddened animal. Sections of shaft hit the roofs below and these simply disappeared in clouds of masonry dust and flying, twirling shingles. Accompanying it all was the terrifying noise of ship-to-ship battle taking place between the palace, the admiralty, and the city.

The
Severance
was not built for speed, but squat as it was the can-shaped vessel could turn by simply spinning around its own center of gravity. As it reached the midpoint of the palace wheel it did just this. Antaea saw an axis-to-surface ladder rotating majestically toward it and realized with a start that there were human shapes on that ladder. They began to dive off it seconds before the
Severance
clipped it and flung it away in pieces. Men tumbled through the air, their tangents taking them at high speed toward the rooftops. She looked away.

“Come on,” said Kestrel a moment later. “Now’s the time.”

Nobody was firing at the
Severance
anymore. It had carved out a space for itself inside the turning wheel of the palace and now simply hung there letting the ring-shaped building spin around it. Even though its hull was suspended scarcely a dozen feet above the highest rooftop,
Severance
was still weightless because it was not participating in the rotation of the larger structure. It thundered like a furious cloud past the windows of ladies-in-waiting, rattled the sills of butlers and maids and bureaucrats—but it was they that were moving, not it. Draped with cables and surmounted in smoke,
Severance
waited for the enemy’s next move.

That move was pedestrian enough that Antaea would have laughed, if not for Kestrel’s obvious distress at the damage being done to the palace. A packed elevator car sank slowly down from the pool on one of the few untouched cables; she could see Sempeterna, Chaison, and a squad of guards all crammed into it cheek-by-jowl.

Kestrel turned away. “How good are you at long jumping?” he asked her. Antaea shot him a confident smile.

“It was the way we got around back home.” Much of her days as a child had been spent in freefall, so like most kids Antaea had become adept at accurately jumping between buildings that might be up to a quarter-mile away from one another. A mis-jump could strand you in the air or, worse, leave you open to humiliation by your friends. Tired, hungry, and sore as she was, she knew she could clear the space between this spot and the
Severance
with little trouble.

“As long as
they
don’t shoot us on the approach,” muttered Kestrel as he put his feet against the side of the pool building.

“Who?”
Oh.
Now that the smoke was clearing from around the
Severance
, she could see that its heavily reinforced hangar doors were slowly winching open. A mob of men with guns and swords crowded around the doors, awaiting the right moment to leap off the ship and onto the palace’s rooftops.

Antaea returned her gaze to the ship as a whole, concentrating. Then she and Kestrel kicked off, reaching for one another’s hands immediately afterward.

Surrounded by flying shrapnel, bullets, with the turning palace roofs ahead, they had consigned themselves to a trajectory they could no longer control. Hand in hand, they sailed slowly toward the smoking
Severance
.

“
YOU GOT TO
him! I should have known it—you two were always too close.” Sempeterna darted out of the elevator forcing his guards to run to catch up. “Kestrel! That he should have betrayed me…”

Chaison shook his head. “Maybe it was that time when you tried to kill us both in Hale.”

“Well, considering what you’ve just done, I was right to try, wasn’t I?” The pilot stopped and glared at Chaison. “Now what? Is your ship going to blow up my palace?”

Plaster suddenly dropped from the ceiling above Sempeterna’s head. Coriolis force pulled it to one side so that it landed in a puff of white three feet away from him. Chaison could hear groaning noises coming through the walls. “It may not have to,” he said. “If enough of those cables were snapped…”

The pilot scowled, then turned to one of his officers. “Evacuate everyone except the security staff to the safe rooms and seal them, just in case.”

“We have to negotiate an end to this,” continued Chaison. “Luckily, we
can.
”

“We have to do no such thing,” snapped the pilot. “You think this,” he waved at the building around them, “is a crisis? You and your little band of rebels can have this place. It’s just a building. But you’ll never get…” A captain of the palace guard was running up the corridor, his plumed hat askew.

“Coming down from the roof!” he shouted. “Thirty—forty of them, more behind.”

Sempeterna sneered. “And how many of
you
are there? Two hundred?
Get
them!”

The floor shook and more plaster fell. Chaison heard “—Cut the rest of us off!” from the newly arrived guardsman. He nodded to himself.

“The
Severance
is firing its heavy guns into the wings surrounding this hall,” he told the pilot. “They’ve isolated you here. I don’t think you have two hundred men to take on the
Severance
’s crew.”

For the first time Sempeterna looked truly rattled. He turned to his master-at-arms. “Your highness, the boat docks are below us,” said the guardsman. “We need to get you to a cutter and off the palace.”

“But…” The pilot turned, wild-eyed, to look at Chaison. For a moment it looked like he was about to say something; but then he turned away with a curse.

“Take me to the docks! I’ll see this place blown to pieces before I negotiate with these—these pirates.”

They hurried along, and Chaison followed. One of the guards glanced over at him and snapped, “What are you smiling at?”

Chaison hadn’t even realized he was doing it. Against all reason and expectation, he discovered he was having a very good time.

FALLING AT THE
Severance
gave Antaea plenty of time to watch the unfolding battle in the air around the admiralty. The pilot’s honor was being defended by two dozen police and army boats of varying sizes, mostly squat spindle-shapes painted camouflage-gray. Against them were two midsized naval cruisers bristling with guns, and six attack boats with long metal rams on their prows. Despite the noise and explosions, all the ships were refraining from using their heavy missiles for fear of hitting the city. Their short-range ordnance was certainly damaging enough.

Around the big ships roared swarms of bikes and catamarans—ornately plumed palace guards versus dark-uniformed admiralty airmen. They were also refraining from firing their machine-guns and rifles, so their battle had become a joust. Men shot past one another at combined speeds of hundreds of miles per hour, lashing out with their cutlasses in hopes of catching the other rider. Some riders paired up, stringing thin cables between their bikes and hurtling together at the enemy in an attempt to cut them in two.

The city was quickly being obscured both by smoke and a fine mist of blood; so, it took some seconds before Antaea saw what was happening there.

She pulled Kestrel around, pointing. “Look!”

The four quartets of spinning town-wheels were emptying themselves. Thousands of human figures swarmed the air, sprouting all manner of wings, fins, and spinning fans to propel themselves. Sunlight glinted off metal here and there: swords and rifles carried by the flocking citizens. There was no order to the exodus, but the clouds of people hedged their way around the outskirts of the battle. They had a different destination, it seemed.

Kestrel gaped at the sight. “They’re coming here!”

Antaea had no more time to think about what was happening in the city, as the
Severance
was approaching quickly. It seemed magically suspended in the air above the rapidly racing spires and roofs of the palace. Every time the rooftop where the precipice moth perched came around, two or three of the airmen clustered at the hatches of the battered ship would leap into the air, with far more energy than their legs could propel them—they must have rigged some crude catapults. Without that boost of speed, they would have hit the speeding rooftops at over a hundred miles per hour; as it was, they crashed indiscriminately through window or shingled plane, rapidly building their own set of holes next to the ones left by the moth. That creature was watching their performance with an air of easy distraction, apparently unfazed by the battle, the flash-pots, and the fire that continued to smolder right under its feet.

It was clear that she and Kestrel had been spotted because several of the stubby machine-guns poking out of the ship’s hull had swiveled to follow their progress across the sky. She also saw some of the airmen pointing at them, so, for all the good she thought it would do, Antaea waved at them.

“You’re sure they saw us try to rescue Chaison?” she said in a deliberately light tone. Kestrel shrugged.

“Chaison’s friend the butler was supposed to relay the plan to the admiralty. Of course, he’s not one of theirs—I don’t know who he works for—but whoever it is has contacts. The plan was I would fire the flash-pots, fly Chaison and maybe you if I could out to the
Severance
, and then we’d rally the admiralty and the people.”

Antaea glanced back. “Well, somebody got to the people.”

“Brace yourself,” said Kestrel. They were about to arrive at the
Severance
.

Nobody’d shot them yet, but if the captain wasn’t in the mood to entertain visitors then in about five seconds they were going to bounce off the black, scarred hull of the vessel and drift who knew where—maybe right into the heart of the battle.

Faces were watching her from the hatches; and then, without fanfare, a man stepped onto the hull holding a rope, and kicked off in their direction. He held out his hand and Kestrel gripped it, wrist to wrist. Antaea recognized him from the previous night.

“Travis!”

“Chaison’s first officer,” said Kestrel.

Travis nodded at her. “Captured with the admiral after the battle in Falcon, traded back to Slipstream with the rest of his crew.” He squinted at her shrewdly. “You freed him from prison, I hear.”

She bit her lip, but said nothing.

The rope tautened and they were hauled into the
Severance
. After all its adventures and the long siege, Antaea had expected the ship to reek of offal and unwashed men. There was a bit of a smell, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected. She supposed there was no way the pilot could have prevented the admiralty launching buckets-full of water at the
Severance
whenever they wanted.

It was dark, though; they’d probably rationed lamp oil. The ship had a strange shape on the inside, with all its bulkheads wrapped around the central core that held the engines. She could see a little curve of space to each side of the engine shaft, and a little ways fore and aft before her view was cut off by platforms and cargo nets—but that was it. There was probably no clear line of sight through the ship at any point.

Unshaven grim men were lining up by the dozen to climb onto the absurd, home-built catapults that had been mounted next to the open hatches. With time on their hands, the crew of the ship had obviously planned this assault meticulously. They might have known better than anybody else in the kingdom how the siege was going to end. As Antaea watched, a stocky airman with a cutlass in his hand climbed into a legless chair that had been made into a giant slingshot. Four other men hauled back on the straps that bound it as he fidgeted, trying to find his center of gravity in the thing. He said “O—

“—Kay!” as he was shot out of the ship. She watched him put his hands over his head and curl into a ball just in time as a speeding dormer window caught up with him and swallowed him whole.

Travis saw her amazed expression and shrugged. “After a few months in here they’ll do anything to get out.”

Kestrel shook his head. “But how did
you
get in? I just saw you last night, in the city—and
Severance
has been ringed with sentries all along.”

“We boarded the same way you were supposed to,” said Travis. “We were on a bike, circling at speed. The instant the flash-pots went off we aimed for the
Severance
. Made it two seconds before the loyalist machine-gunners opened fire on us.”

“‘We’?” asked Antaea.

“That’s right, ya traitor,” said a familiar voice. She turned to see Darius Martor swinging his way, apelike, up the ship’s internal rope system. Behind him was Richard Reiss. Darius was grinning, Richard looked his most dignified.

“I…” She had no idea what to say to them.

“We were almost home!” barked Darius. “And you stole him from us to turn him over to the pilot—” Richard put a hand on his shoulder, and shook his head.

“Not the pilot, I gather,” said Reiss. “The message Chaison relayed through Kestrel said that you were forced to turn him in. Something about your sister’s life being threatened?” She nodded dumbly. “I see. Is your sister…?”

She blinked, looking away. “Dead,” she said. “After all that, she’s dead.”

“Oh.” Darius was clearly struggling over whether to feel outrage or sympathy. “Ah, that’s rough.”

Desperate to change the subject, she said, “What are you doing here? Chaison brought you back so you could be free from all this.” She gestured at the ship around them.

Now it was Darius’s turn to look uncomfortable. “We got unfinished business,” he said.

“He’s afraid of his freedom,” said Reiss, not unsympathetically. “We walked onto the streets of Rush and I said, ‘This is it, boy, you’re home!’ And he stared into the crowds, and then he shrank back against me.”

“’Cause you had a death-grip on my shoulder!” Darius glared at the diplomat. “Anyway,” he said in a more subdued tone, “what was I to do after all this time?”

Reiss nodded, looking haunted. “What
are
we to do now?”

An awkward silence followed. Finally Antaea shook her head ruefully and said, “If you’re going down there,” she pointed to the open hatchway, “I’d like to try to make up for what I did.”

Kestrel shook his head. “I’ll take no more part in this barbarism,” he said. “The pilot may have been wrong, but it’s not right to compound crime with crime.”

Darius grinned. “The admiral’s in there and alive?” Antaea nodded. Darius shouldered to the front of the line and climbed into the catapult’s saddle, ignoring the protests of the waiting airmen.

“Then let’s get him back!”

“
A LITTLE LESSON
in political expedience,” said the pilot as they trotted together down the steps to the dock. “Nothing good would come of the general population knowing that Falcon Formation tried to invade us. What would be served by inflaming hatred against Falcon’s people?”

“That assumes that our people are stupid, which they’re not,” retorted Chaison. “They’re fully capable of distinguishing between the government of Falcon and its people.”

Sempeterna laughed. “Are they? And what guarantee are you willing to give me that if I go to stand with you on the edge of the palace, and tell the city what really happened last year, that they’ll
take it well
?”

Chaison cupped a hand next to his ear in an exaggerated listening pose. “It’s a little late for you to worry about that, isn’t it? They don’t seem to be taking it well that you’re in charge at all.”

There were shouts from below and Chaison bumped into the man ahead of him. It was very bright farther down the stairs, and a stiff wind was pushing at him from behind. He craned his neck to see what was happening.

“—Floor! It’s gone!”

Standing on tiptoe, Chaison finally made sense of what the guardsman was saying. They were just above the hangar, which was a long building slung under the bottom of the wheel, its floor containing hatches of varying sizes through which bikes or boats could be dropped. Chaison could see one or two bikes still dangling from their chains—but they were dangling above thin air. The floor of the hangar was missing, just a few twisted spars poking out from the walls. Cloud and blue air shot by below and the air funneling down the stairwell shot into it in a steady blast.

As everybody cursed and turned and he was pushed back up the stairs, Chaison smiled. That part of the plan, at least, had gone like clockwork.

For once, the pilot had nothing to say.

They’d come down quite a ways, so by the time they reached the top of the stairs both Sempeterna and Chaison were panting. They could hear the steady sound of gunfire coming from the floors above. The captain of the guard pointed. “The reception hall is a safe room. We’ll make a stand there.”

“A stand?” The pilot stared at him in shock. “Since when are we making
stands
?”

“Come, sir.” The captain hauled the pilot along like a disobedient child. They entered the cavernous waiting room that adjoined the hall. This was windowless, its walls draped with obscenely rich tapestries and its floor dotted with colorful rugs and little furniture clusters. It could hold a hundred people without straining. Just now there were about twenty palace guards there, milling around the tall doors to the hall. These were closed.

Now Sempeterna nodded. “Very good. Yes.” He turned to Chaison. “Those doors are bomb-proof if I remember rightly. There’s only this entrance and my personal one which is similarly secure. All right,” he shouted, clapping his hands to get the attention of all the guardsmen. “We’re going to use the reception hall as our base. Ten men stay out here to relay messages and guard the doors, the rest come with me. We’re going to demand a cessation to these hostilities, or we will summarily execute the admiral.” He scowled at Chaison. “Correction: I will execute him.”

“Sir!” One of the men by the inner doors ran over, saluting hastily. “We shut the doors to lessen the noise, sir.” When Sempeterna merely raised an eyebrow, the man went on, “the windows at the other end of the hall are broken. The spin wind’s howling something frightful in there.”

“A little privation we can stand for a few minutes while we sort all of this out.” The pilot gestured for them to open the doors. The heavy portals almost pulled the men holding them off their feet as they swung in, and Chaison felt a rush of air from behind him.
Howling
turned out to be the right word to describe the noise coming from the smashed-in stained-glass wall at the far end. As the party of guardsmen padded into the deeply carpeted assembly end of the hall, some clapped hands over their ears. The pilot sauntered through it all, making a moue of distaste at the tangle of leading and glass that had wreaked havoc with the carpets.

The stained-glass windows extended fully thirty feet from the floor to the hall’s ceiling, only the chamber’s wraparound gallery breaking their symmetry. The ones at this end looked out on a fan-shaped garden and open sky beyond that. The hall was built on the very edge of the palace wheel, so at the other end, almost two hundred feet away, open air and the city beyond glowed behind Sempeterna’s raised dais. Normally the light of Slipstream’s sun would shine from behind him, casting myriad colors across visitors and long shadows across the marble floor.

Now, shafts of white light extended the length of the place, making bright smears across the marble floor below the pilot’s dais. The stone was strewn with glass.

The guardsmen slammed the doors shut and lowered a bar across them. Sempeterna nodded and strode toward the noisy chaos at his end of the hall.

The hall seemed empty and Chaison cursed under his breath. He knew he needed to run,
right now,
but didn’t know which direction to go. He looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of what he knew must be here.

Shouts and shots—and somebody lunged past Chaison. He saw the look in Sempeterna’s eye—
oh no you don’t!
—as one of the guardsmen tried to tackle him again, then the sovereign of Slipstream dodged out of the way and ran behind a pillar.