Celestial Matters (24 page)

The tail of the main kite opened like a flower and from it squadrons of men dropped down, falling impossibly slowly toward the center of
Chandra’s Tear.
As they descended they threw small metal stars that flew too fast and cut through our soldiers’ armor like scythes through wheat. Huge balls of flame vomited from the dragon’s mouth and exploded on our port side, melting the twisted evac cannons into slags of gold and steel.

Our soldiers ran up the hill to reinforce Aeson and Yellow Hare just as the first Middlers touched down in the courtyard. Both sides opened fire at once, filling the air with stars and tetras. Yellow Hare killed four of the enemy with her thrower before they reached her, then she drew her sword and engaged them hand to hand.

She stabbed one man through the throat and fell back to keep between me and the other three. Aeson paralleled her, shooting down the enemy with Spartan calm and accuracy.

One of the Middlers shouted a single word in their language. “Blood!”

Four warriors who had held themselves at a distance threw four large steel stars toward Aeson. My co-commander saw them coming, dove to the ground, and started to roll away, but the Middler who had given the order pointed a handheld Xi lance at the flying stars. As they were about to pass harmlessly over him, the projectiles turned impossibly in midair and spun downward, piercing Aeson’s head and chest.

I screamed Aeson’s name and started to run across the courtyard toward the Middler who had given the orders, but Yellow Hare pushed me aside and shot the man through the heart. He fell as noiselessly as Aeson had.

Reinforcements arrived—our reinforcements, thank Ares and Athena. They pushed the Middlers off the hill with a coordinated barrage of tetras. I ran over to Aeson and knelt down. He was still breathing, but his eyes were closed and his heartbeat was ragged. Yellow Hare ordered the soldiers to form a perimeter around the hilltop. Then she methodically removed Aeson’s helmet and armor, pulled the stars from his body, and bound his wounds.

Forcing myself to remember my duty, I turned away from Aeson to survey the battle. The dragon had made its way to the bow of the ship, curling and darting to avoid the barrage from the forward cannons. The kite’s head spat fire again and the amphitheater exploded. As if that were a signal to them, the squadrons of bats left their single assaults and turned to follow their mother’s lead, converging on the navigation tower.

“Protect the tower!” I shouted over the hill to our soldiers. “Save Kleon!”

But I need not have bothered. As I was yelling my orders, a line of gold light appeared, clarifying the air to our right as the primary starboard impellers were deployed. A yellow halo rose to cover the starboard edge of the ship as ten lift balls emerged from the right-side rim. Kleon’s voice boomed across the ship. “Hang on.”

“Yellow Hare, bring Aeson!” I shouted as I realized what Kleon was doing. She and I grabbed the base of Aristotle’s statue and clutched my co-commander’s body close to ours.

Pulled by the imbalance of rarefied air,
Chandra’s Tear
spun a swift quarter circle, until the deck was perpendicular rather than parallel to the earth’s surface. The turning ship swatted down the small kites like so many flies and slammed our port edge into the head of the dragon. The bamboo skeleton of the dragon shattered under the force of spinning moonstone.

Without the mass of moon rock to hold them up, dozens of crewmen were caught out in the open, unable to grab on to some support. For a second they hovered stationary in the air; then they were gripped by their natural earthward motion and fell off the ship. A few moments later their bodies smashed into the sphere of Aphrodite, staining the purity of the goddess.

I screamed at the strain of holding on against nature, but Yellow Hare pulled me up, her strength sufficing for the three of us.

For one long moment the corpse of the dragon kite was frozen in space, still held up by the mysterious power that permitted it to fly in defiance of all known laws of physics, but then that power failed and the splintered body plummeted down through the rarefied air, snapping off half of our starboard impellers before joining its children as celestial jetsam.

The enemy gone, Kleon pulled back the starboard lift balls and the remaining impellers while simultaneously deploying their port-side counterparts. The ship rocked again and righted itself. Kleon quickly withdraw all the balls and rods into the body of
Chandra’s Tear
before the ship tipped to the other side.

Yellow Hare and I let go of the statue and carried Aeson to Euripos’s hospital across a silver field littered with scraps of steel, silk, blood, and bone. The tunnel down to the hospital was filled with injured soldiers being tended by the doctors and the hospital slaves. Yellow Hare and I wended our way through the crowded cavern until we reached the surgery cave.

“Euripos!” I shouted.

The doctor came running out of the ward.

“Tend to Aeson,” I said.

“Yes, Commander.”

The old Roman doctor had Aeson taken down to the private ward and set grimly to work. He had seen too many battles to waste his time on words.

He laid Aeson down on a slab of marble covered with a thick woolen cloth. Then Euripos injected him with a quill full of Sanguine Humour and waited for his breathing to become regular. Then he pulled two long rubber tubes with fire-gold tips out of a panel in the side of the slab, unwrapped the makeshift bandages Yellow Hare had tied around Aeson’s chest, and cauterized the wounds with quick jabs of the needles; blood-scented smoke rose up from the table.

Euripos sewed spontaneously generated human skin over the holes in Aeson’s flesh and poured Sanguine on the joins to speed up healing.

He unwrapped the bandages and studied the punctures in Aeson’s skull.

“How is it?” I asked, unable to bear the unknowing silence.

“It does not look good,” he said. “Please leave so I can work.”

Yellow Hare and I worked our way up to the surface of the ship. As we passed through the wards, those soldiers who were conscious all asked the same question, no matter what their own injuries. “How is the commander?”

“Alive,” I said, hoping he would remain so.

By the time we managed to reach the surface, the dynamicists and engineers had taken the heavy cranes and ground graders from storage and were using them to clear away the debris and fix the cracks in the buildings. The amphitheater was a total loss, but I didn’t think anyone would be in the mood for plays anymore.

Two trains of thought warred for my attention. Was Aeson going to live, and how did a battle kite get out here through the patrolled spheres of Selene and ’Ermes? But I had little time to think about these questions as person after person came to me for orders. What should be fixed first? Batteries and impellers. What should be done with the remaining bodies? Place them in the storage cave; we’ll hold funeral games once we know the full complement of the dead, and so on.

Anaxamander and Kleon found me by the statue of Aristotle, surveying the damage to the hill. The security chief’s armor had two gashes in it where stars had nearly cut him. His helmet was gone, and his sword had snapped in two. Kleon’s robes were torn and there were bruises visible on his arms and chest.

Kleon ran up to me wringing his hands. “Alas, I swear to you it was my only option to protect the ship. I’m sorry about the soldiers. I don’t think the mania took me again. It was the only thing I could do.”

“You’ve done well, Kleon,” I said. “You saved
Chandra’s Tear,
you did the right thing.”

“Thank you, Aias.”

I turned to Anaxamander. “What’s the damage, Security Chief?”

“Half the soldiers are dead. Most of the others are injured. Seven scientists and about twenty slaves went over the side as well.”

“What about structural damage?”

Anaxamander checked one of his lists. “Port-side battery’s gone. We’ll have to move some of the cannons around to compensate. We’ve lost a quarter of the primary impellers—”

“We can fix that,” Kleon said.

“See to it, Chief Navigator,” I said.

“Yes, Commander,” he said.

Anaxamander continued. “Stores suffered only minor damage, but half of the animals in spon gen were killed. Mihradarius says the net came through without a tear, and he’s sent out some of our moon sleds to retrieve the Aphroditean matter from the wreckage of
Ishtar’s Necklace.
”

“What about Ramonojon?”

Anaxamander snarled. “The traitor suffered a few minor bruises, nothing more. But one of the enemy soldiers broke into the other cell and killed that Middler doctor.”

He paused, and looked down from the hill to the hospital cave. “How is the commander?”

I put on my best mock Spartan face, not wanting to show my sadness or rage to Anaxamander. “Euripos is still operating, but he wasn’t confident.”

Anaxamander straightened up and threw back his shoulders. His eyes gleamed with confidence as he looked over our heads toward the sun. “Commander Aias,” he said. “As Aeson’s second in line, I herewith assume the position of military commander of
Chandra’s Tear.
”

II

ι

Anaxamander strode off, bellowing orders. At that moment, I made a critical mistake. I assumed that the rank-and-file troops would see the great difference between their old commander and their new one, that they would understand Anaxamander as Yellow Hare and I did. But I did not comprehend how much the unexpected attack, coupled with the lack of command, terrified the soldiers. I failed to see that their need for military leadership far outweighed their ability to judge the worth of a leader.

Yellow Hare knew, of course, but I did not talk to her about it, and she could not bring herself to say anything that would undermine the discipline of the army.

Thus it was that instead of seizing the moment when I might have managed, in contravention of all Delian tradition, to cross the chasm that separated military from scientific authority and taken full control of
Chandra’s Tear,
I stayed on my side of the division of duty and waited for news of Aeson.

I stood in the middle of the courtyard, watching crews of men and machines clear away the debris of flesh and stone. I gave no orders during the hours I waited, but several times I caught the glance of an engineer or dynamicist indolently checking the structural integrity of a column or numbly directing slaves to remove the shattered remnants of a crewman. At those moments, a memory of Aeson would rise up in my thoughts, and, through the light that passed between my eyes and the woe-stricken worker, I would send a little of my injured friend’s spirit of Spartan resolution. Then the man’s eyes would brighten, not with cheer but with determination, and he would return to his task with renewed vigor.

Sometime during my vigil the sun passed directly overhead, and for the first time in my life, I saw ’Elios alone amid the mead bright sky. Nothing lay between me and the celestial fire but eighty thousand miles of empty air; no crystal spheres stood in the way to shield me from the rain of light and heat.

The sun god pulled at my eyes, wanted me to stare up at him as he burned me with his spear shafts; he wanted to remind me of the hubris of Prometheus, of the penalty inflicted on one who would try to steal fire from heaven. But I had long ago prepared for this moment. I ordered those slaves who were not cleaning the ship to distribute solar protective gear to the crew. Clovix himself brought Yellow Hare and me green smoked-glass goggles to protect our eyes from the overwhelming glare of the universal luminary and burnooses that had been laced with air-silver wires to keep our bodies cool from the bombardment of atomic fire.

Thus protected by the contrivances of man, I turned to face the sun.

“You are not the god,” I said to the shimmering orb, and gazed directly into its muted fires, dulled by the glass from pure yellow to a dull green-orange. “You are matter, not spirit. You are not holy. There is no sacrilege in taking from you.”

But even as I spoke those words, knowing they were meant to reassure me, my mind filled with the vision of scar-covered Selene, and my voice faltered. Was he not ’Elios, was the sun not the body of the god? Questions never asked in the Akademe, never touched upon in all the studies of Ouranology, came to me, and for the first time I thought of ordering Kleon to sail the ship home to Earth.

But then I looked at Yellow Hare, staring not defiantly but confidently up at the sun. And I knew that if she felt it her duty to storm Olympos itself, she would do so. And I could do no less.

I was about to speak to her when Euripos’s voice entered my muffled ears from behind; “Aeson will live.”

All my concerns about gods and men vanished in the relief I felt in hearing those words. I turned to look at the old Roman doctor. Through the wrappings and goggles, I could not see his expression. But I could see that his white tunic was stained with his own. dried sweat and Aeson’s blood; he must have been operating for all the time I had stood mute in the courtyard.

“May Apollo bless you, old man,” I said, and reached out to take his hands in thanks, but he shied away from my grasp.

“When can I talk to Aeson?” I asked.

Euripos stared down at the ground, where the silver of the ship had been washed away to the total darkness of the new moon by the glare of the sun. “I said he’d live, but, Aias, Aeon is in a coma. We can keep him supplied with Sanguine and force-feed him so he won’t starve, but it might be weeks before he wakes up. If he wakes up. We know so little about comas.…”

“Do what you can for him, Euripos,” I said. “We need him back.”

“Yes, Commander … Aias … I…” He looked up at me. I don’t know what that old man who had known me from birth saw through the linen and glass mask on my face, but whatever it was frightened him. “Permission to return to the hospital, sir?”

“Granted,” I said, and he hurried back down into his cave.

A coma, not alive, not speaking or commanding, not able to touch me with his voice. And not dead, not mourned, not praised with funeral games, not able to come and give warnings in the Khthonian ceremonies. But completely out of reach of my body or spirit.