Pirate Sun (27 page)

The men who’d just lowered the bar across the doors were falling, felled by bullets from the gallery fifteen feet up. The catamarans or bikes that had carried this ambush party were nowhere to be seen; after smashing through the windows of the empty hall and disgorging their passengers, they’d probably been tipped out into the open air again. The invaders had then hidden in the gallery.

Chaison had gambled that Sempeterna would return to this section of the palace. The royal apartments were here and this was the origin of the elevator to the pool. Luck was finally with him.

The guardsmen were all behind the pillars with the pilot now. Chaison started to sprint for the stairs to the gallery but heard the click of weapons cocking behind him. He glanced back to find at least five weapons aimed at him. The party in the gallery couldn’t put down decent covering fire at this angle; Chaison was alone in the center of the floor, completely exposed to the pilot’s men. Cursing foully, he raised his hands and walked back to them. All firing ceased as he did so.

Of course his team had been in the gallery. He should have made a break for it the instant he entered the room.

“Chaison?” The pilot stood facing the wall with his back pressed firmly against a pillar. “Are these your people?” He had a wild look in his eye. In the momentary lull, the sound of something massive crashing against the hall doors rumbled under the screech of the wind.

“This is my element,” Chaison shouted back. “Chaos. Yes, I set it in motion. But that doesn’t mean I can control it.”
I just hang on and ride it,
he thought. Hopefully that would be enough.

His moment’s hesitation a moment ago might have cost him his life, though. The captain of the guard gestured Chaison over and put a pistol to his temple. He frowned at Sempeterna, who appeared to consider, then shook his head.

“You in the gallery!” he shouted, his well-trained voice blurred but not extinguished by the roaring wind. “We have your admiral. Give up or we shoot him!”

There was a long pause. Then—barely audible—the words, “Then we shoot you.”

Chaison could feel the cold circle of the captain’s weapon next to his ear. It was jumping about nervously.

The pilot rolled his shoulders and deliberately sighed a long sigh, staring off into the distance. Then he turned to Chaison. “All we have to do is hold them off until the rest of my men break down the doors,” he said. “Which shouldn’t take long. Then they’ll surrender or die.”

Chaison glanced at the doors. Sempeterna was right. The palace guardsmen in the waiting room had heard the gunfire in here and were pounding heavily on the doors. Armored though they might be, the doors would have to fall soon.

He looked longingly at the broken windows. Too far to make a break for those. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s just agree to end this right now. Then you and I can walk out of here and shake hands in front of the whole city. You’ll still be pilot and you can exile me for all I care, as long as you spare the
Severance
’s crew.”

Sempeterna looked away for a moment. “What about Falcon?” he asked.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re being overrun by the Gretels right now. I hardly think Falcon is a problem.”

“True…” Sempeterna tilted his head back and forth, thinking. Then he said, “It’s not so unreasonable. Let’s—”

A thunderous crash drowned whatever he said next, as the doors to the waiting room blew out on a fist of smoke.

The pilot laughed. “Then again, maybe not!”

“
KEEP YOUR HEAD
down, boy!” shouted Richard Reiss. “We didn’t bring you all this way to get you killed at the last moment!”

Antaea watched him make an example for Darius by ducking and weaving toward the gallery stairs. Flaming pieces of the hall doors were still in motion as the
Severance
’s crewmen fanned out under the great stained-glass windows. She ran in herself and without discussion went back-to-back with Travis; they aimed their weapons about, looking for a shot.

“Good work, Darius!” she shouted. The boy grinned.

As the
Severance
’s crew had clattered down the final flight of steps to the level of the hall entrance, Darius had raced ahead. Travis cursed and made a grab for him but the boy was too quick. As they reached the main corridor Antaea saw that the guardsmen had made a six-foot-high barricade of furniture across a grand, gold-filigreed archway to the left. If that was a defensive point there should be men atop the pile, but there weren’t any. Darius raced up to the heaped chairs and cabinets but staggered to a halt when shouts came from the other side of the barrier.

He spun, a look of terror on his face. He was completely exposed in the middle of the hallway. Just in time he ducked under a chair on the edge of the pile, as three guardsmen surmounted its top.

Antaea ducked back just in time and turned, arms out, to block the way. “Shhh!” she hissed, nodding in the direction Darius had taken. “Twenty feet away.”

Travis peeked around the corner. Then he grinned. “Perfect!” He turned to a couple of battered and mean-looking airmen. “Give me covering fire for five seconds.”

Antaea watched as the men popped out, firing wildly, and Travis stepped carefully into the hall beside them. He cocked his head, hands cradling something at his chest. Then he bent, one leg sliding back, and swung his arm. Something small rolled swiftly away.

All three men fell back as a fusillade of bullets ripped through the spot where they’d been standing. Travis winked at Antaea. “Rolled a grenade to the boy,” he said.

It was almost two minutes later that the barricade blew up. The delay was just long enough for Antaea’s body to start to relax, so the explosion when it came shocked her into biting her tongue. The airmen leaped out into the corridor past tumbling wardrobes and spinning chair legs and she followed, spitting blood.

Darius still stood with his back flat against the wall next to the archway. He looked stunned. The
Severance
’s men ran past him into a fierce but brief gunfight. Antaea walked up to Darius and took his head in her hands. He blinked up at her and smiled tentatively.

When the shooting stopped a moment later, his expression hardened and he stepped away from her. Antaea knew in that moment that Chaison’s quest to bring the boy home had been pointless. Darius knew nothing but war. He would never leave the navy; and his reckless focus meant his life would probably be short.

Did her devotion to her causes doom her in the same way?

The others had planted explosives on the reception hall doors, and now they were inside. The place was huge, a long rectangle of light and stone currently paved with rubble and glass. Some sort of a fight was developing at the far end and Antaea headed that way.

Under covering fire from the gallery, the
Severance
’s men were mopping up a knot of guardsmen who were making a break for the hall’s only other door, which was near a raised dais under a broken wall of stained-glass. Antaea glanced around, noted the figure of Darius walking slowly into the hall with a finger in his ear, and ran for the action.

Suddenly the firing stopped. Antaea arrived to find her men spread in a half-circle around the dais, where only two men still stood. One was the pilot. He had an arm clamped around Chaison Fanning’s throat. His other hand held a pistol at the admiral’s head.

“I can see where this is going,” cried Sempeterna over the roar of the wind. “Your people may win the city, Chaison, but you’re not going to see it.”

The pilot was edging them toward a big gap in the glass wall. A sideways vortex of wind was billowing out that hole. If he turned and jumped he would be falling free in the air of the city, and gone before anyone could reach the window. Antaea knew that he would kill Chaison on his way out, but though there were sixteen men with rifles trained on the pilot, none had a clear shot.

Chaison looked up and his eyes met hers. He grimaced, a smile of resignation. He didn’t seem afraid, just tired.

The two men had almost reached the gap in the window. Chaison scuffed his feet in an attempt to unbalance them, but Sempeterna kept his footing. He glanced at the window, obviously judging whether he was close enough to jump for it. Antaea’s heart seemed to stop and her breath caught in her throat as her hand involuntarily reached out.

Then sunlight fell across the scene in a silent thunderclap. The pilot winced and staggered back.

Antaea turned, held up her hand and saw Richard Reiss doing the same. Two hundred feet down the hall, the windows at the far end framed a halo of white in the center of which shone a tiny point of impossible brilliance.

“A sun!” someone cried. “A new sun!” For a moment everyone froze in a state of almost superstitious awe. A sun was a device, yes of course you could build one—but only Candesce could supply some of the crucial pieces. A sun was just a light—but in Virga, radiance like this, silently raging where moments ago the sky had held the deepening blue of uninhabited winter—such radiance signaled the birth of nations.

She heard a sound from behind her. Antaea spun, raising her pistol in time to see Chaison twist out of Sempeterna’s grasp and dive for the floor. For a moment the pilot stood transfixed, staring dumbfounded at the eye of brilliance that had opened somewhere on the edge of Slipstream’s territory. Then a single shot sounded.

The pilot’s head snapped back. He slumped against green and gold panes then slid down the window to lie crumpled on the floor.

Before Chaison could regain his feet Antaea was with him. She drew him up and wrapped her arms around him fiercely, burying her face in his throat. She heard him chuckle and say, “there there,” as if it were she who had almost died seconds ago.

Antaea disengaged just enough to look around, and saw some admiralty airmen staring at her and Chaison—and some looking up.

A deep shadow fell through the light of double suns as someone dived from the gallery rail. The figure spread giant wings and touched down gracefully a few feet away.

Those wings were black as a crow’s; she was dressed in black leather breeches and a jacket of crimson brocade. The woman had striking features and a fan of black hair. The only thing that marred the perfection of her tanned features was a white scar on her chin.

She held a smoking rifle in her hands.

“I see you’ve met my husband,” she said.

ALL CHAISON COULD
see was her. Venera looked care-worn but she was alive and her skin glowed with health. Her hair was carefully coiffed, her outfit perfect as always, and rich jewels glowed at the base of her throat—remnants he recognized, as they had plundered them together from the hoard of Anetene. Still, her gaze, direct as always, was nonetheless different somehow. In her eyes was no anger, only a question.

He had to smile at that.

Chaison looked down at Antaea. She smiled at him wistfully, then stepped back. “Admiral,” she murmured. “I’m glad I was able to see you home.”

“So aren’t you going to intro—” Venera wasn’t able to finish as Chaison pulled her to him and kissed her fiercely and for a long time. When he let her go she said, “Oh,” and that was all.

“Antaea,” said Chaison, turning to find her—but she had already passed the riflemen clattering down the gallery steps on her way to the doors. He wanted to run after her, but then what? He felt an awful paralysis as the moment passed and she vanished out of sight.

Venera had been following his gaze. “It’s been an eventful time,” she said, almost making a question of it.

“Was that your shot?” He nodded to the still form of Adrianos Sempeterna III.

The old Venera would have grinned and preened, but this one had a much more complicated expression on her face as she gazed at the fallen sovereign of Slipstream. “Doubtless this will start something else unpleasant,” she said in a resigned tone.

They were suddenly surrounded by cheering people. Richard Reiss stepped forward to shake Chaison’s hand. “Capital plan, old man. Went off like clockwork.”

“I didn’t know if everybody got my messages,” he said. “And anyway…” He squinted at the unexpected new sun that sent dusty shafts of light the length of the hall. “I didn’t plan
that.
”

“But we did.” A bespectacled man with a shock of white hair stepped carefully through the rubble. Behind him was a sizable and growing crowd of men and women, all of whom were dressed in ordinary street clothes. More were streaming in through the broken doors at the far end of the hall.

The white-haired man stepped up and held out his hand. “Martin Shambles, late of Aerie. That’s our sun out there,” he said. “Built for us courtesy of a friend of yours, Admiral. A certain young airman who used to work for your wife, here.”

Chaison blinked in surprise. “Surely not…Hayden Griffin?”

“He sends his greetings from Aerie’s new territory, carved out of winter by the light of our new sun.” Shambles turned his attention to Venera. “I’m told you are the real prime mover of these events. Amandera Thrace-Guiles, I believe?”

Venera nodded gravely. “That is one of my names.”

Shambles nodded quickly. “Of course, of course. You’re the one who started the rumors that Fanning was alive—that he was returning. You’ve been printing propaganda, financing the malcontents…” He wound down, looking troubled. “You manipulated public sentiment. Because you intended to pull a coup.”

“Of course,” she sniffed. “What of it?”

“But the people’s will…”

“Was always
my
will,” she said with a superior smile.

Shambles looked crestfallen. “So now what? The pilot is dead, so,” he looked pointedly at Chaison, “long live the pilot?”

Venera draped herself on Chaison’s arm. “That sounds quite delicious, I think.”

Chaison had been so focused on survival through all of this that he hadn’t even thought of that possibility. He turned the notion over in his head: to be a pilot, which was every boy’s dream; to rule from this palace, not just as admiral but sovereign…