Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Inshiri Ferance's alliance had its own armada, and it might have been the biggest of its kind ever assembled. Antaea had braced herself in a gunnery port and, with wind whipping past her and sky above, below and to both sides, watched the muster of a thousand battleships. They filled the sky like swarming insects, each surrounded by a buzzing retinue of smaller craft. Contrails confused the view. Yet behind them, something impossible was looming.

The First Line fleet was in cube formation. From here, many miles away, it appeared as a solid thing, a blued-out silhouette moving behind a veil of pale sky. Clouds and cities drifted in front of it. There was no way to distinguish individual ships in that mass, but she knew some were the size of Rush's town wheels.

This was not the flagship of Inshiri's fleet. Ferance would never have been so stupid as to ride in that big a target. Instead, she had commandeered the Thistle , the fastest courier-class sloop she could find, a powder-blue needle bristling with engines. Around the Thistle flew a swarm of armored bikes, an escort armed with ship-busting missiles and heavy machine guns. Antaea badly wanted to be riding one of those, but Inshiri had forbidden it. She had to keep reminding herself that, vile as Ferance was, her cause was the right one. If it hadn't been, Antaea would cheerfully have killed the woman by now.

Trailing well behind the sloop was a fuel tanker disguised as a hospital ship. A little breaking of the rules of war ... Inshiri had shrugged: Well, these things happen.

The armada and the First Line fleet were only here to open the door a tiny crack; then Inshiri's ship would slip in. The Last Line was in sphere formation around Candesce, their own forces supplemented by those principalities that had sided with them at the last minute. Somewhere far away, Chaison's relief force would be approaching.

The thought of him made Antaea sad. His own glorious armada was an afterthought. It could do nothing. It was a joke. Everything would be over by the time it got here.

Antaea had come out here to watch sunoff. Candesce's great beacons had been dimming for some minutes, and now they were flicking off one by one. From a distance, the sun of suns looked like a single incandescent point of light, but she knew it was really an entire region of air populated by dozens of suns. Suns--and other ancient mechanisms whose purpose and potential no one understood.

While Candesce was alight, the Last Line fleet had an advantage. They had fire and blinding radiance at their backs. But as soon as that light faded ...

A faint sound reached her over the tearing noise of the engines. Sirens--bells. Abruptly, the cruisers of the armada began to turn and flock, and the carriers coughed bikes and armored catamarans into the air. She took a deep breath, leaned out, and saw orange and white flashes dotting the sky where the last of Candesce's light was fading.

It was time.

* * *

TWO WALLS OFships met in the hot air just inside Candesce's exclusion zone. Fire erupted along the line of that meeting as cruisers and battleships unleashed broadside after broadside at one another. In seconds the battle scene became opaque with smoke. The smaller escorts began peeling off from the core of the battle because visibility was nil, the air was full of shrapnel and debris, and worst of all, all the oxygen was getting used up. Any jet that flew into the expanding spherical aftermath of a fire would choke and die from anoxia, and if its pilot didn't get out he would quickly follow. From outside, the grinding and convulsion of vast whale-like ships, the bikes and catamarans and trimarans, poured withering machine-gun fire at the larger craft, and each other.

Venera Fanning, watching through a tiny porthole in Inshiri Ferance's ship, saw the traces of bullets flung in random directions--bullets that might travel a thousand miles before finding a destination--and fingered the scar on her chin.

* * *

SHEER MOMENTUM CARRIEDthe invaders through ten miles of Last Line defenses. The plan was to punch a hole in the shell and pour the rest of the fleet in behind it. The Last Line knew this, so as the blunt needle of battleships pushed forward, they gave way--then, at a signal, re-formed in torus formation, and squeezed .

The principalities were sleepless--and the citizens of many nations muttered in wonder at what appeared to be Candesce waking only hours after it had gone to sleep. An ominous red smudge appeared in the purple air inward of the six-hundred-mile-diameter shell of city lights and new suns that surrounded Candesce; and gradually it grew. It became a roiling sphere of fire, dozens of miles across, flickering with internal explosions and clots of smoke. In the cities, among the farms, errant missiles suddenly appeared out of nowhere, shattering ancient buildings and scattering crops. A whisper filled the air--not some echo of the battle, but the sound of millions of wings as countless birds and schools of disoriented fish fled the battle.

Leal had found an out-of-the-way corner in the bridge of Chaison Fanning's flagship, the Surgeon . This spot boasted a tiny quartz window, inches thick, and in an unwitting mirror image to Venera, she had watched the battle through this for hours. The alliance fleet was moving to join the action as quickly as it could, but the air here was thick with hazards: trees, houses, town wheels, and a million untethered and lost objects. Chaison's ships had to nose their way through this dense cloud, while at any moment the battle ahead of them might end.

The bridge was full of muted sounds, the hum of machinery, tactical discussions, the crackle of chart paper. Despite her best efforts, Leal nodded off, one hand against the window. She was still there when, hours later, light began to well up between her fingers. Candesce was lighting again.

Startled voices roused her. Blinking, she saw the bridge crew surrounding a circle of light on the back wall of the cone-shaped chamber. There were no large windows in this room, which was set well behind the armored prow. Outside light was piped from telescopes in the nose and projected on the white rear wall. With the flip of a lever, close-in or distant images could be put there, an effect that had seemed magical to Leal when she first saw it; but the images were dim, and they wavered. What she saw now was clear enough.

A long scar of smoke and wreckage led from the edge of the exclusion zone almost all the way to Candesce. Ferance's battleships had pushed the Last Line fleet back, and pouring in behind them came a gray cloud that must be the First Line armada.

Leal pushed off from her corner. "We're too late?"

Chaison was chatting with two officers and, perversely, smiling. He saw Leal and waved her over. "They took too long," he said. "Look at what's happening ahead of them."

She could hardly miss it: Candesce's suns were coming on line, one by one. "They're caught!"

Chaison nodded. The Last Line fleet had retreated, maybe deliberately, drawing Ferance's battleships and cruisers ever closer to the sun of suns. That was their destination--but they had to get there in time to deploy the key and enter Candesce's control rooms. The Last Line had given them hope, falling back quickly enough to draw them in, then putting up a fierce resistance right outside the machineries of the giant sun. The goal was tantalizingly close--too close to give up. When the attackers realized that the rest of the Last Line fleet had circled around behind to cut them off, it was too late.

"But..." She shook her head in horror. "They'll all be incinerated!"

"Not the Last Line," said Chaison. "Their ships are mirrored and insulated. They can't stay for long, but they'll survive this."