Karl Schroeder - Sun of Suns

It was a mesmerizing sight; but he couldn't dally.

Chaison made sure he was well groomed and had a confident aim as he entered the bridge. The bridge crew looked up blearily, then snapped to attention. "Sound general quarters," he said as he strapped himself into the captain's chair. "I want the excursion teams suited up and ready to go." He thought of sending someone to wake his wife, but an unfamiliar but pleasurable spitefulness stopped him. Let her sleep through the discovery. It would serve her right.

For a while he presided over the rousing of the ship. Ultimately he couldn't resist, though, and returned to a porthole to watch. And so he was one of the first to see it as they rounded a knee of forest that almost blocked the vast autumnal tunnel, and the fabled treasure of Anetene hove into view.

THE ANCIENT SHIP hung in the center of a cave of leaves six hundred feet in diameter. In the dancing light of lanterns waved by the gang of red-suited sargasso specialists, Venera could see occasional flashes of the ropes that suspended the old corsair like a fly in a spider's web.

"They're taking too long," she grated. "What's the holdup?"

Her husband rested his hand lightly on her shoulder and peered out the porthole. "They're testing for booby traps, dear. On my orders."

"And then we go over?"

"I go over. To find the box."

"We go. This expedition was my idea. The box was my discovery. You can't let me miss out on the final moment."

He sighed. "Have you ever worn a sargasso suit?"

"Have you?"

One of the little figures out there was waving its lantern in a strange pattern. The others were clustered around a dark opening in me side of the ship. The craft was smaller than the Rook, and unornamented; but the lines seemed archaic, even to Venera's untrained eye. "What's he doing?" She pointed.

"Signaling the all-clear. Apparently Anetene decided the sargasso was a big enough booby trap all by itself." The little figures began disappearing one by one into the dark hatch. little glints of light on the hull revealed portholes hiddenin shadow around the curve of the ship.

"It'll be there," she said confidently. Either that, or she'd have to find a new home. Rush would no longer be a suitable dwelling once Falcon Formation took over.

Venera tried to pretend that this would be a there matter of convenience. But she kept imagining herself returning to her father's court with her exiled husband. They would eat him alive, those back-biting courtiers, the kohl-painted lathes with their poisoned hairpins, the gimlet-eyed men with their ready poniards. Chaison would be used as sport by the jaded or the marginalized, and he would have no one to defend him.

It would surely be a personal humiliation for her, if he were killed.

"Well, if it's safe, let's go men," she said, but a commotion from the chart room distracted Chaison. Venera scowled at him as he turned away.

"It's Gridde!" Travis was waving frantically at the admiral. "He's collapsed."

Chaison dove for the doorway. "Was it bad air?"

"I don't think so. Exhaustion, more like."

Venera followed the whole bridge staff back to the map room. This was a tiresome interruption, but she had to be supportive of her husband. She affected a look of concern as she entered the room. The air in here was close, stinking, but then so was the rest of the ship by now. Gridde hung limply in midair, tendrils of white hair haloing his head.

"I got you there," he whispered as Chaison moved to hold him by the shoulders. The old man's face quirked into a half-smile, though his eyes were half-closed. "Rest now."

"Slipstream will survive, because of you," said Chaison.

Gridde's head rose and his eyes focused on the admiral. He managed a weak laugh. "Don't give me platitudes, boy. Just make sure those damn fools in the academy hear about this. I proved it." He began to gasp. "Old ways—better than—gel charts…"

"Get the surgeon!" cried Chaison, but it was too late. Gridde shook and sighed, and then went still.

Some of the bridge staff began to weep. Venera crossed her arms impatiently, but there was nothing she could do but wait. The brief agony of military grief would burn itself out in a few minutes and then everyone would get back to work.

They had come too far to let one more death stop them now.

HER BREATH AND the suit pumps roared in Venera's ears. Every few minutes a loud bell sounded and she had to reach down to wind the clockwork mechanism drat ran the pumps. She could barely see out the brass helmet's little window. The unfamiliar oilcloth sack of the suit felt like prison walls against her skin, its chafing creating a subliminal anxiety that fed back with weightlessness and the dark to make her jaw throb.

She didn't care. Venera was in a state of rapture, gazing into the most wondrous place she had ever seen.

The others' bull's-eye lanterns sent visible shafts of blue light up and down, nicking from side to side—each darting motion lifting a cascade of sparkling reflections and refractions from the contents of Anetene's treasure trove.

Venera had seen clouds rub past one another and throw up a cyclone; at either end these looked like tubes full of turbulent snatches of vapor. The interior of the treasure ship was like that—except that here, it wasn't clouds that formed the spiral down which she gazed. It was jewelry, gold coin, faience, and ivory figurines by the thousand.

The nets that had once held the treasure to the walls had decayed over the centuries, and so every week or two a gem or coin would disengage from its neighbors and drift into the ship's central space. Once there, it would be caught up in the almost imperceptible rotation in which everything inside Virga participated. Something to do with orbits and tides, that was all she knew of mat. But the vortex had grown and remained stable for centuries, the drift of its objects slower man a minute hand but inexorable. The spiral pattern, so delicate, was now being erased by the blundering passage of treasure seekers.

For the moment, though, garnets, emeralds, and rubies made in the fires of Candesce trailed in lines and arcs through the air. Here and there gleamed dry-amber from sargassos on the other side of the world; chains of diamond like runnels of light flashed in her lantern's beam. The currency of two dozen nations sat fixed in air as though in solid glass (the stamped profiles of pilots and kings layered into shadow like a history lesson) among clouds of platinum and buttons of silver. Beneath the ragged netting the hull was still plated with paintings, skyscapes half-covering formal portraits whose eyes awoke like a sleeping ghost's when her light touched them. One painting, only one, had broken free, and so it was that at the center of the cyclone stood a tall stern man in dark dress, his black eyes those of a contemptuous father gazing accusingly at the looters. Only the gilt frame surrounding him spoiled the illusion of reality. There was a fresh bullet hole in his chest, put there by the first man of Slipstream to enter the ship.

They'd be joking about that startled shot for weeks, she was sure.

Chaison had swam indifferently through the shining constellations and disappeared into the ship's bridge. Venera followed, not without plucking a few choice items from the air on the way.

Chaison's hand-light floated free in the air, slowly turning to illuminate the fixtures of the old-style, cramped bridge. Venera kept expecting to see skeletons, but there was no evidence of violence here; apparently Anetene had been compulsively neat. In the center of the room was a chart pedestal, and clipped to the top of this was an ivory box, its sides inlaid with fantastical scenes out of mythology: men and women under gravity, riding beasts she remembered were called horses. Chaison's hand hovered over the lid of the box.