Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

He glanced over, did a double take, and let go of the glass. "Leal!" Leaving his drink twirling in midair, Hayden Griffin launched himself across the bar, nearly colliding with another man who'd chosen the same moment to head for the toilets. Hayden opened his arms and docked with Leal, crushing her in his embrace. "There you are!"

She returned the hug, only now aware of how dangerously thin he was. Pushing him back, she gave him a once-over. He was dressed in an ill-fitting airman's uniform in Slipstream colors. His cheeks were hollow, his face and hands sunburnt. But he was alive, and he looked happy.

He looked past Leal and grew suddenly serious. "Lady Fanning."

"Griffin." Venera nodded coolly to him. They had a history, these two, Leal remembered, and not a romantic one. There was blood between them.

"Did all of your men make it?" Venera went on. She was looking around the room, taking in what was now clearly a strange mix of ill-sized Slipstream uniforms and ragged black ones that must belong to Home Guard members.

Hayden shook his head. "We lost ten. Four on the plains, six yesterday."

Venera looked startled. "What happened yesterday?"

"Your secret city was attacked!" The speaker was a lean Home Guard officer, his uniform stained and torn. He hopped over to perch by the door. "They looked like pirate ships, but there were eight of them and they were packed with men. They jumped us just as we were ferrying the last of our men out of Brink."

"Venera Fanning, Niels Lacerta of the Home Guard," said Hayden. "Without Niels and his men, we wouldn't have survived long in Aethyr."

"I remember you," said Leal. "You came to sit by our fire that first night after the crash. We talked about my message."

He nodded. "We've talked about little else since you left us, ma'am. --Whether you were right; whether your 'emissary' is a devil or an angel."

"But..." Hayden looked from Leal to Venera and back. He ignored Keir, whom he'd after all never met. "What are you doing here?"

Venera shrugged. "A courier found us six hours ago, said there were damaged Slipstream ships at one of our designated rendezvous. Tell me more about this attack."

"They definitely knew where to find the city, and they knew we were there," said Hayden. "It was a coordinated assault. They meant to capture Serenity, I'm sure of it. We managed to beat them back, but they may return. The base commander sent two frigates to Rush for reinforcements."

"But who could it be?" Keir burst out. "Nobody knows about the city but us!"

"Us, and Jacoby Sarto," said Venera.

There was a momentary silence. Leal was confused. "I thought he was a friend of yours?"

Venera appeared to consider this concept for a time. Finally, she held one hand out, and waggled it from side to side. "Even odds," she said. "I'm going to say it was him."

"The commander had planned to send Niels and his men straight back to the Guard, and us directly to Rush," Hayden went on. "But we were attacked again on the way out of the city. One of the cruisers was holed; we've been leaving a trail of fuel all the way across winter. The captain pulled us in here to patch us up and buy enough fuel to get us home. We were just..." He glanced around, grinning. "... celebrating being back."

He shook his head impatiently. "But anyway, what I meant was--Leal, we met your friends in the city and they told us a little of what happened. Is it true about Tarvey?"

"Ah," she said, suddenly stabbed by deep sadness. Tarvey had been Hayden's loyal servant and friend. Loyalty had brought him to Aethyr, had led to him risking his life for Hayden more than once. Ultimately, it had cost him everything.

"Hayden, I don't know what to say."

"Say what happened," advised Venera. "And I suggest you be quick about it. The admiralty's not going to like this tab we're running up."

* * *

THEY REMAINED ATthe way station for a day, while final repairs were completed on the cruiser. Venera spent much of that time as the queen of a buzzing hive of courier bikes, who zipped in from all six points of the compass to drop off and pick up dispatches. She was planning something, that was obvious, and it was equally obvious that she didn't want her husband to know about it until it was too late for him to veto her. At one point as Keir flew by the main room in her yacht, he heard her telling one of the cruiser's captains, "We're on the far side of the world from Slipstream. I have no time to send home for orders ! No, we do this now, or the opportunity is lost."

Later, Hayden Griffin and the Home Guard commander Lacerta came by. After an intensive grilling from Venera, they stayed to sample her liquor cabinet and talk. Keir was finally introduced to the famous sun lighter, and after some initial caution, found that he quite liked Griffin. They had something in common, after all: they both loved machines.

Maybe that was the trigger--thinking about machinery--because late that night, Keir began to remember.

There was a storm that night, and even though the Judgment was lashed to the station's dock, the winds howled past and shook it like a child's toy. Slotted into his bunk like a wasp in its hive, Keir found himself in total darkness, and weightless except when a gust caught the ship. The close walls of the sleeping closet would tap him unexpectedly, and he'd jolt awake to the sounds of flight or the strange rumble of thunder in an echoless sky. He had no idea how long this went on; and while it did, his mind drifted from Hayden's description of sun-building to jumbled images of things he'd built in Brink--and then beyond.

At first, yes, it was just Brink, and Maerta and the others, though Leal appeared to him, too, more than once. Something about his changing feelings for her reminded him of other memories--but he couldn't find them, he couldn't find them. He kept groping for scry's emblems, but scry didn't work in Virga.

That was Candesce's fault. Right now he hated the sun of suns, and its dark influence on technologies it didn't approve of. He resented its secretive mystery; how it hid itself in wreaths of flame at the heart of Virga, while its vast invisible wings unfurled to the very walls of the world and beyond.

So good, then, that he'd plucked one of its feathers--turned, triumphant, to wave it to Maerta except, no, hadn't it been Sita? Sita all along?

--And suddenly there he was, perched on a bench in a garden whose hedge mazes and flower-dewed trellises draped like the skirts of a seated woman around a round-towered, coral-hued house. The white sun Vega blazed in the zenith, and heat haze and the buzzing of insects complicated the air around him.

The planet's name was Revelation; the continent's, Aegeas, and the city whose floating aerostats peppered the horizon was Atavus. He'd grown up here.

His wife, Sita, was humming as she aerated the roots of some little yellow flowers with her long fingers, lovingly tending the little lives. She was also standing on a ladder and frowning at the gutters of the house, where stalks of grass were poking up. One of her was a proxy, but it would never have occurred to Keir to wonder which one. Sita inhabited both bodies simultaneously and with equal ease.

"Sandrine introduced me to this man the other day," her Self in the garden was saying. The glyphs around her head indicated she was talking to Fethe, one of her oldest friends, who was a thousand kilometers south of them today. "She said you know him a little?"

Keir watched her closely, as if he could learn something this time that he hadn't been able to perceive the last hundred times he'd visited this record within his scry.

"Yes, she said you thought I should meet him." Sita laughed. "His name is Keir Chen..." Her expression grew troubled, and she looked around herself, and spotted him.