Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

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IT LOOKED LIKEnothing so much as a bush made of knives. It even shone as if it were made of metal, but it moved as though alive--and as it advanced on Jacoby and his men, its blades fanned open like deadly flowers.

Jacoby grabbed a pedestrian rope and drew his sword. "Maybe we can..." But his men were diving away through the bodies; Antaea looked at them, looked at Jacoby, shrugged; and followed the others. To buy time, Jacoby drew his pistol and fired it at the center of the shapeless jagged thing that was advancing on him.

Jacoby's shot struck the knife thing in its knotted metal heart, but it simply pulsed like a steel jellyfish, jetting backward, then opened up multiple arms and came on.

A jumble of bodies and whirling lanterns ricocheted down the passage. His men were shouting to one another and somebody kept on firing, the bullets narrowly missing Jacoby as he struggled to catch up. Behind them, loud cracking noises signaled the birth of more of the dagger-balls.

In the tangle of the corridor Jacoby had to jump from rope to rope, or bounce his shoulder or hip off the walls, then plow through clouds of debris. The dagger-balls simply cut through the lines and batted any obstacles aside.

"Wait, maybe they're friendly!" Antaea shouted, then she laughed wildly. But she was hanging back, waiting for Jacoby. "Come on!" She let go of the lantern she was holding and extended a hand to Jacoby. The lantern spun lazily, sweeping shadows across the bladed thing on Jacoby's heels. They weren't going to get away from it.

In desperation he kicked the lantern. It sailed straight into the snicking complex of blades and exploded. He and Antaea dove away from it; they'd made several jumps from rope to rope before Jacoby realized that the burning thing wasn't following.

"Hold." He grabbed a line to steady himself and looked back. The dagger-ball hovered motionless in the center of the passage, its brothers crowded behind it but unable to get past. "Did we kill it?"

Antaea shook her head. "I think it's too clever for that. Look!"

In zero gravity, fire needed moving air to sustain it. Even as Jacoby realized what the dagger-ball was doing, the globe of flame enveloping it exhausted the available oxygen, flickered, and went out.

"Hell!" They fled as the monsters surged forward again.

A hundred feet on and Mauven had stopped dead. He was waving his lantern in frantic puzzlement at a branching of the passage. "Which way?" Antaea shouted.

Jacoby cursed again. "Just pick one!" It was too late as scything blades filled the air between them. "Fall back!" he shouted, but Desick, his boatswain, drew his sword and leaped at a monster. Desick had fought in three wars and was the best swordsman on the Page , but he couldn't parry the six blades that found him and he tumbled backward, silent and trailing red beads.

The dagger-balls had split the party, with Jacoby, Mauven, and Antaea on one side and the others on the other. There was a passage open to each group, so Jacoby yelled "Go!" across the bladed air and dragged Antaea with him into the dark way.

* * *

"MY MIND WON'Tbe able to go with you." It was the little golden doll speaking from its perch on Maspeth's shoulder. "The interference from Candesce will drive me mad again."

Maspeth nodded. "We knew you'd have to leave us before we got home. I guess it's good-bye?"

"I can supplement these weapons so that they are more effective," it said. "Would that be helpful?"

"Oh!" She smiled, almost bashfully. "That's a great idea."

"Ach! Come on, then," said Piero Harper. "Everybody up and at 'em." He turned to Keir. "By your leave, sir, show us the way to Virga." Keir nodded; his second body was already on its way to the door. "Come on."

"What are those?" Harper was pointing at the faint glitter of the distant ships that sat silently in the space just outside Virga's hull.

"Keir called it an armada," said Maspeth. "I believe that is what you came to warn us about," she added, speaking to the doll.

Keir saw it nod. "Those ships would be powerless inside Virga. Candesce's suppression field is fatal to the technologies they rely on. They're waiting for the field to fail, as it did a couple of years ago."

"Gods, I hope Hayden never hears about this," she muttered.

They had been bounding along the transparent bridge tube that led to the place Keir called the Glass Jaw. It had been very difficult to discern that they were making any headway these last several minutes; but now a long shape began to resolve out of the darkness ahead. The bridge terminated in the side of this.

"That's where we're going," he said. "The door to Virga."

Harper frowned. "Doesn't look like much. It's not even connected to Virga, I can see that. Is there another bridge on the other side?"

"Can't be," said Leal. "We're turning, Virga is not. How would any sort of bridge connect a still object to a moving one?" She turned to Keir. "What's this all about?"

"There's no bridge," he said quickly, "it's something else. You'll see when we get there."

"What do you mean?" she said, suddenly suspicious.

"It's not like any door you've ever seen."

What they had come to was a vast blockhouse, forbidding and dark, its metal sides devoid of windows or running light. The whole structure--which must have been two thousand feet long and half that in height--hung at the bottom of a set of half-visible gnarled buttresses that must have been dozens of miles long. They rose up into dizzying perspective, ultimately disappearing within the chaos of machinery that sealed Virga to Aethyr and allowed one of those worlds to turn against the other.

"It's like a big version of Complication Hall," one of the airmen said about that ceiling, just before they passed through the round entrance leading into the blockhouse and what little pale light there was vanished.

There was a pause while lamps were switched on. Keir took the opportunity to send his dragonflies ahead and make sure that everything was normal in the Jaw room. Then he said, "This way," and led them past side passages and rooms he'd never explored to Virga's door.

Various hulking robot forms waited in the darkness. Some of these were guardians, Keir knew, heavily armed and keyed to wake once an hour. The rest of the bots were sensing devices the Renaissance was preparing to send through the Jaw. Scry showed all of this detail, but of course the Virgans couldn't see it. "This is it?" somebody muttered as flashlight beams roved to and fro. "It looks like a theater."

"Except they won't be puttin' any plays on in this one," said Harper. As Keir knew, there was no stage, nor any screen facing those tall seats--just a blank wall. Many of the seats had been torn out of the metal flooring and now lay jumbled against their neighbors or broken against the back wall. The remainder looked as though they'd once been deeply padded, but the material was torn out in clumps and strewn about the floor. "Looks like some angry monster chewed on these," Piero joked.

"That's about right," Keir agreed. They all looked at him.

"Sometimes things come through," he explained, "from the Virga side. Agents of the virtuals, sort of advance scouts for the armada you saw a minute ago. They're barely able to survive Candesce's radiation, and it makes 'em a bit rabid. These bots put them down when they climb through."

"Climb through," said Leal. "From where?"

Keir pointed at another door on the opposite side of the chamber. "When this door is open, that door is closed, and vice versa." He checked his scry; it was almost time. "We've got about ten minutes. We have to check these chairs, make sure that there's enough secure ones for all of us. What we're going to do is sit down in them and wait."