Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"And then?" Harper asked.

"There's two cities, one on the Virga side and this one on our side. Each has a room like this. The rooms can move. In about ten minutes the cities are going to exchange their rooms."

Harper looked puzzled. "But--we're turning; compared to Virga, this whole city is going..."

"About four hundred miles per hour," Keir admitted. "Which is why you'd better hope that these seats can withstand the strain when we're suddenly accelerated up to speed."

He put his head back against the rusted metal seat frame and waited. That was enough time for him to wonder about what he was about to lose--not metaphorically, but literally--by entering Virga. His dragonflies were perched about the room. He'd had them to see with for most of his life. They were as much a part of him as his two native-born eyes.

He turned his head to the left, saw Leal Maspeth. She raised one hand to her shoulder, briefly touching the chest of the little doll on her shoulder. Did she feel the same as him?

The silence was absolute, and it stretched out for one minute, then another. Then somebody giggled. "Is anybody else starting to feel foolish?"

Something hit the back of Keir's chair. The room didn't seem to be moving but he was suddenly being crushed into the seat with tremendous force. A buzzing vibration rolled in waves through him from its metal frame.

He heard a sharp crack and a shout, then a tumbling crashing noise as one of the other chairs flew backward. Then, with shocking suddenness, the pressure disappeared. Keir had been bracing his body against it and in the sudden absence he flew forward out of his chair.

The others were doing the same in a chaos of flailing limbs and shouts. They were weightless--naturally, he'd known they would be, but it still felt like falling.

Part of that feeling was visual: his dragonflies were tumbling to the back wall, and as they fell, their vision went out. He could see one twirling toward him and watched himself reach out and grab it from the air.

There was silence, and in the feeling of falling, some steadiness. Things began to drift.

Several loud bangs rang out, shocking and sudden in the darkness. Keir couldn't see, couldn't feel his dragonflies at all anymore. "Who's shooting?" shouted Piero Harper.

"Not us! It's coming from there!"

Keir tried to look around himself, failed, and then forced his head and eyes to turn. It was an unfamiliar gesture, the sort of movement you reserved for those times when you wanted to make eye contact with people you were speaking to. There were the other chairs, a cloud of silhouetted people and weaving flashlight beams--and orange flashes from the black rectangle of the room's suddenly open other door.

"We're in Virga!" he shouted--maybe unnecessarily, maybe they knew it better than he--but something was out there.

"Quiet!" It was Harper again, and as the clamor of voices fell away Keir heard others shouting--and someone screamed.

Then someone appeared in the dark doorway, for just a moment, but fully lit by flashlight beam. Without the competing vision of his dragonflies, untagged by distracting scry, her image burned into Keir's mind:

An oval face, its fine, perfect features dominated by two gigantic eyes. The face framed by hair in a black pageboy cut that held its shape even in freefall. Her garb, black leather that made her limbs disappear--though he could see her toes sticking out of the half-shoes she wore. She was staring straight at him, lips in an O of surprise.

Something flashed over her shoulder and she whirled, raising something--a sword --and sparks flew as it struck something. The force of the blow knocked her right through the doorway.

The thing that tried to follow her was made entirely of metal. Lacking any tags or annotations, it was all movement and eerily smooth metallic sheen. The absence of any tags made Keir's hackles rise--as if the thing had moved in some perfect silence, as though it had stolen his ability to understand what it was. All knives, saws, and swords, it gripped the doorjamb with three of four bladed limbs and twisted this way and that as if looking for something.

It had struck at the woman's spine but the blow had been absorbed by the battered leather satchel slung over her shoulder.

The others seemed paralyzed at the sight of the dagger-thing, but the sheer terror of seeing an untagged machine moving on its own made Keir pull out the weapon the Edisonians had built. He'd had no time to learn how it worked, but it had been evolved for human use and it felt satisfyingly solid in his arms. His finger found a trigger right where one should be, and he pulled it.

The bang! was deafening. He was suddenly blind in a whole new way. Afterimage lozenges were smeared across his vision and so he groped for the sight of his dragonflies, but they weren't there. Suddenly panicked, he kicked away from the doorway and the thing that had been there.

"Help us!" It was the woman. He heard Harper shout something, then a tumble of motion around him. The shocking report of the new guns crashed and roared through the room--but now, it was coming from beyond the door.

"Are you okay?" Long fingers touched his hand, then his face. He flinched.

"Just the flash. I'll be all right." He blinked at her, saw a jacketed shoulder and pale fingers around the fading afterimage. The smear of light was oddly reassuring; it made her look as if she were tagged in some way that he couldn't quite focus on. "Did I get it?"

She laughed, a bit wildly. "It's not there anymore, if that's what you mean."

Her accent was thick from the centuries of Virga's isolation. She smelled of sweat and leather and lamp oil. "Can you shoot?" she said suddenly. "If not, give me the gun."

He squinted, shook his head, gave up, and handed it to her. "Careful," he said. "It's a lot more powerful than you're probably used to."

"I saw," she said. "Don't worry, I'm experienced with firearms."

He could see well enough to show her its operation and did so; then they pulled themselves through the doorway and into a rapidly subsiding firefight.

Knotted in the center of a long gallery was a large group of Virgans, all dressed in piratical glory compared with Keir's utilitarian coverall. They were firing enthusiastically into a cloud of knife-drones, splintering and exploding them. The drones responded by whirling at high speed and throwing blades at the men; Keir saw that several were pulling shrapnel out of their forearms or hips. Several more were drifting, ominously still.

The leather-clad woman aimed and fired. Keir shut his eyes just in time. She barked in triumph and aimed again. The new guns were making quick work of the drones, and quite suddenly they were all ruined--the last one sparking from multiple gunshots as it tumbled away.

There was silence, then a ragged cheer.

The woman turned to Keir. "Where did you come from? We couldn't get the other door open."

"It was locked on your side," he said. It would just take too long to explain what was beyond it. "But what are you--" He stopped, and so did she, with a laugh: they'd spoken simultaneously.

"--doing here?" he said. "Mine's a long story. What about yours?"

She tilted her head, considering. "Long," she said. "Forget it. Can we go your way?"

"The door won't open again for another hour," he said. "I don't think those drones will leave us alone that long."

A man's voice, clear and sharp, cut through the gabble of voices. "Listen up! Who are we all? There's two groups here. Will somebody from each introduce themselves?"

Everybody looked at the man who'd spoken. He bowed in midair. "I'm Jacoby Sarto of Sacrus. We're docked at the edge of the city. We're here on ... Home Guard business."

Leal moved out of the doorway. "I'm Leal Maspeth of Abyss," she said. "We--"