Through dusty, unventful days the passenger carriage had trundled its way south. Calandria May knew the shape of the seats intimately now; she felt her body had become moulded to conform to them, it certainly wasn’t the other way around. The primitive suspension of the vehicle sent every jolt and rattle of the wheels up her spine and into her throbbing head. And the thing was slow, stopping frequently at mail drops or to exchange horses.
Still, it was all they’d been able to afford with the last of their funds. This route would take them unobtrusively into Iapysia, where hopefully they could acquire some faster transportation. The country was in enough chaos that hopefully a couple of stolen horses wouldn’t be missed.
“My, you’ve become a paragon of caution,” Axel had said to her when she told him of this plan. “What happened to ‘get the hell down and find Armiger at all costs?’”
She’d shrugged. “What’s the point? We don’t have the weapons necessary to destroy him anymore. All we can do is observe until we can contact a passing ship and call in a strike.”
Their last reliable information had Armiger on his way to visit Queen Galas, who was either dead now, or still holed up in her palace, depending on who you talked to. Either way, it seemed unlikely that Armiger would still be going there, because her cause was doomed. They were rattling along in this carriage because the queen was their only lead. But there was no urgency to the journey now.
Axel was mostly recovered now, though you wouldn’t know it from the way he slept most of the day away. Without action to sustain him, he folded in on himself and became a dead weight. Calandria didn’t have the fight left herself to try to bring him out of his lethargy.
Consequently, when on a completely typical evening of jolting over rutted tracks, her skull computer said without warning Incoming transmission, Calandria May sat up straight and said, “Thank the gods!”
The passengers seated opposite them in the carriage didn’t look up; all three of them were nodding drowsily. They would have found it hard to hear Calandria over the noise of the wheels anyway.
She turned to find Axel staring back at her. She was just opening her mouth to ask him to please tell her he’d heard it to, when a different voice spoke in her mind.
“This is Marya Mounce of the research vessel Pan-Hellenia_. Can anyone hear me?“_
Axel’s face split in a wide grin. “A ride!” he said.
The other passenger on their side of the carriage mumbled something, and butted Axel with his shoulder.
The voice continued. “_I’m on a reentry trajectory. The Winds are after me. The Diadem Swans went berserk a couple of days ago and they’ve either captured or driven away all ships in the system. I tried to ride it out but they’re on to me now. I’m going to try to land at the coordinates of the last transmission we received from our agent on the surface._”
“Agent?” whispered Calandria. “So there really are some researchers down here right now?”
Axel looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes, but maybe not like you think,” he said.
It took her a minute to catch on. “You’re the agent she’s referring to?” Calandria said to him.
“Yeah, yeah. Look, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t make some money on the side, so when those galactic researchers asked whether I could feed them regular observations while I was here, I jumped at it. Why not? I didn’t think the Winds would be jumping down our throats quite so enthusiastically.”
She had to laugh. “You are full of surprises, you know that?” Usually they were unpleasant, but if this Mounce person was on her way to this part of the continent…
Calandria reached out and rapped on the top of the doorframe. “Driver. You can let us out here, please.”
*
An hour later they paused in the center of a darkening field in the very middle of nowhere. The milky way made a broad swath of light across the sky. Diadem was setting, its light glittering darkly off a lake near the horizon. There were no houses visible anywhere; other than the road, the nearest feature to the landscape was a dark row of trees along a nearby escarpment.
“There she is.” Calandria pointed to a slowly falling star at the zenith. “We’re going to have to break radio silence.”
Axel nodded. If Mounce’s ship landed back at the Boros manor, it would take them a week to reach it, and by then she would surely have lifted off again. Particularly if the Diadem Swans came down after her.
They watched the little spark overhead grow. Chill autumn wind teased at Axel’s long black hair. Neither spoke. Axel wasn’t sure what Calandria was feeling, but that dot of light represented escape to him, if they could get aboard it and evade the things that were chasing it.
“We may have to act quickly,” Calandria said. “Where would be a good spot?”
“Nowhere’s a good spot,” he said. “So we might as well flag her down right here. At least it’s level and open.”
“Here goes,” said Calandria. Then her voice spoke in his mind. “This is Calandria May calling the Pan-Hellenia_. Can you hear me?“_
They waited in tense silence. The brightening star had begun to drift away over the lake, following Diadem.
_”Hello! Yes, it’s me, Marya. Are you with Axel chan?“_
_”Yes.“_
_”They’re behind me, so I’m coming down at your last location—“_
_”No! Can you find us from this signal? We’re a couple hundred kilometers south of where he last contacted you.“_
_”Oh. I don’t know if I can… Yes, it says it can do that. Do you have shelter?_”
Axel and Calandria exchanged a glance. He squatted down and began pulling stalks of grass out of the ground. “Shit. Shit, shit shit.”
“Why do you need shelter?” asked Calandria. “Are you trying to pick us up, or—”
“Pick you up? I’m trying to stay alive! The Swans are behind me, they’re closing in. They’ve picked off every ship that’s tried to get past Diadem. I’ve stayed ahead of them this far by skimming the top of the atmosphere, but they’re all over. Everywhere! I— hang on—”
Axel could see his shadow on the grass. He glanced up, in time to see the star brighten again to brilliant whiteness, and swerve quickly in their direction. Around and above it, a coruscating glow had sprung up, like an aurora.
All over, thought Axel. Great.
“The forest,” said Calandria. “Come on!” She began sprinting. He looked up again, then followed.
Low rumbles like thunder began. Instead of fading, they grew. The sound was familiar to Axel, and unmistakable: something was coming in to land. The sound had a ragged edge to it. Years of exposure to spacecraft told him it was a small ship. The big ones sang basso profundo all the way down.
Their shadows sharpened as they ran. Axel began to feel heat on his face. The roar became a steady, deafening thunder. On the shoreline below, the crescent of sand lit amber under a midnight dawn. Axel knew better than to look directly at the spear of light settling towards them, though it seemed as though Mounce was going to bring her ship down right on top of them.
The sky was starting to glow from horizon to horizon. He’d never seen that effect accompany the arrival of a starship.
Axel redoubled his effort, though he had twisted his ankle and it spiked pain up his leg with every step. Calandria was pulling ahead, but he didn’t have the breath to spare to tell her to slow down.
Suddenly spokes of light like heat lightning washed across the sky. Their center was the approaching ship.
A blinding flash staggered Axel. Childhood memory took hold: he counted. One, two, three, four— Ca-rack! The concussion knocked him off his feet. He came up tasting grass and dirt.
Whatever that flash had been, it had happened less than a kilometer away. He blinked away lozenges of afterglow in time to see the brilliant tongue of fire overhead waver, and cut out.
A dark form fell with majestic slowness into the forest. As it disappeared a white dome of light silhouetted the treetops, and Axel felt the deep crump of impact through his feet.
Calandria was waiting at the edge of the forest. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Let’s go.” They waded into the underbrush. The darkness would have been total under the trees, except that a fire had started somewhere ahead, and the sky was alive with rainbow swirls. Axel would have found them beautiful if he hadn’t been so frightened.
Of course, if there were any witnesses to this within fifty kilometers, they’d all be cowering under their beds by now. No sane person would want to be caught in the open when the swans touched ground.
It was dark enough that Axel couldn’t spot branches and twigs fast enough to prevent himself getting thoroughly whipped as they went. Stinging, his feet somehow finding every hidden root and rock, he soon lost sight of Calandria, who as usual moved through the underbrush like a ghost. He could hear his breath rattling in his lungs, and somewhere nearby the crackling of the fire. Above that, though, a kind of trilling hiss was building up. It seemed sourceless, but he knew it must be coming from the sky. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end; so did those on his arms. He might have preferred it if they were doing that from fright, but he knew it must be the effect of a million-volt charge accumulating in the forest.
“Axel!” He hurried in the direction of the voice. Past a wall of snapped tree trunks and smouldering loam, Calandria stood on the lip of the crater Marya Mounce’s ship had dug.
The ship was egg-shaped, maybe fifteen meters across. It was half-buried in the earth. Smoke rolled up from its skin, which was blackened and charred. Neither the heat of reentry nor the crash could have cindered the fullerene skin to that degree. “She can’t have survived that,” Axel said as he staggered to a halt next to Calandria. “What did they do?”
“Can’t you feel it?” she asked. Stray wisps of her hair were standing up. Little sparks danced around Axel’s fingers when he wiped them on his trousers. “They hit her with a lightning bolt.”
“Well they’re about to fire another one,” he said. “We’d better get out of here—” He was interrupted by a flash and bang! of thunder. He ducked instinctively, though it had come down at least a few hundred meters away.
“There!” Calandria pointed. Warm orange light was breaking from somewhere around the curve of the egg. A hatch had opened.
They clambered over the smoking debris, and rounded the ship in time to see a small figure step daintily out of the hatch, arms out for balance.
“Hello!” shouted Marya Mounce. “Is anybody there?”
The woman revealed by the glow of the ship’s lights was not the brave rescuer Axel had hoped for. Marya Mounce was tiny, with pale skin and broad hips. Before seeing her face he noticed the frizz of her dun-coloured hair, which was held back by an iridescent clip. She was dressed in a blouse that swirled like oil, and a black skirt. It was evidently some inner system fashion, spoiled by the kakhi bandoliers slung over her shoulders.
What made his heart sink, though, was the sight of her feet.
Mounce had succumbed to a fashion sweeping the inner worlds, and had her Achilles tendons shortened. Her toes, the balls of her feet and calf muscles were augmented, so she stood en pointe at all times. All she wore on her feet were metallic toe-slips. He doubted she could run, much less climb over the broken trees strewn about this new clearing.
“There you are!” she shouted as Axel and Calandria fell over one last log. “See, we survived! You—you are May and Chan, aren’t you?”
“Who else would be crazy enough to be here?” he said. “Are you alone?”
“Yes, it’s just me.” Mounce turned and waved vaguely at the ship. “I was doing a demographic survey, it involved some close orbits, so that’s why I got caught in the—”
“You can tell us later,” said Calandria in her most diplomatic voice. “The swans are coming.” She pointed.
“Ah. Yes.” Mounce’s looked disappointed, but not frightened.
The sky was full of arcing incandescent lines. They stretched in a spiral all the way to the zenith, like ladders to heaven. Axel had seen the Heaven hooks when they came to destroy the Boros estate, and those too had been skyhooks of a sort, but nothing like this. Where the Heaven hooks had been cold metal and carbon-fibre, the swans seemed bodiless, creatures made of light alone.
From his scant reading on the subject, Axel knew the swans were nanotech, like most of the Winds. They were constituted from long microscopic whisker-like fibres. These could manipulate magnetic fields, and in their natural environment in orbit they meshed together in their trillions to form tethers hundreds of kilometers long. They drew power from the planetary magnetic field, and projected it by the gigawatt to where ever it was needed.
They could fly apart in an instant and recombine in new forms, he knew. Some of these forms could apparently reach down through the atmosphere itself, maybe even touch down on the surface of Ventus.
Calandria took Mounce by the shoulders. “Do you have any survival supplies?”
“Y-yes, it’s a institute policy to carry some.”
“Where are they?” Calandria vaulted into the ship. “We need stealth gauze. Have you got any?”
“I don’t—” began Mounce. The voice of the ship interrupted her. Axel couldn’t hear what it said over the roar of a nearby fire.
With a curse he hauled himself in the hatch after Calandria. She was rooting in a suit locker near the lock.
For a second Axel just let himself drink in the sight of the clean white floors, padded couches and trailing wall ivy decorating the ship. The Pan Hellenia represented civilization, with all the amenities—flush toilets, air beds, hot showers and sonic cleansers, VR, fine cuisine…
“Axel, help me!” He sighed, and turned away from it all.
Calandria was throwing things indiscriminately into a survival bag. Axel spotted a first-aid kit, diagnostic equipment, some emergency rations, a flashlight—
“Aha!” He pounced on the laser pistol. “Now I feel whole again.”
“Forget that—help me with this.” She was struggling to unclip a heavy box from the wall.
“What’s that? Cal, it’s way too heavy—”
“Nanotech customization kit. It’ll save our lives, believe me.”
“Okay.” He helped her wrestle it down and into the bag.
“Uh, guys?” Mounce stood in the entrance, framed nicely by a vision of burning forest. “We’d better get going. The swans are here.”
Calandria leapt past her, carrying two metal cases. Axel had never seen Calandria like this. It made him more than a little uneasy—as if his own vivid imagination was underselling the danger they were in.
“Hell!” Caught in her urgency, Axel swung the survival bag onto his shoulder and, staggering under the load, followed. Mounce accompanied him, her hands fluttering as she visibly tried to find a way to help.
A strange twilight glow pervaded the shattered clearing. Calandria had dumped both cases on the ground and was frantically rooting through one of them when Axel and Mounce caught up to her. Drifts of wood smoke stung Axel’s eyes and the roar and heat of nearby flames made his head spin. Sparks of static electricity were flying everywhere, and Mounce’s clean hair puffed out around her head like a dandelion.
Suddenly Calandria cried out, and collapsed. She curled into a ball on the smoking ground, hands clutching her head.
Axel felt it too—a ringing pain his head. It was centered on the left side, just above his ear. Mounce cursed in some foreign language and pulled off her crescent-shaped hair clip.
“What’s happening?” she shouted over an impossible roar of sound. The sound of the fire was drowned out by the approach of the swans. It wasn’t a single sound, but many, like a thousand strings. The swans sang a single unison chord as they reached to touch ground.
Lightning arced from the top of the starship. “Our implants!” shouted Axel. “We’ve all got hardware in our skulls. It’s shorting out from all this power! Calandria’s got more than either of us—she’s augmented in a dozen ways.” She lay insensible now, twitching next to the golden gauze she had half-pulled from the case.
“We’ve got to get her out of here!” He grabbed Calandria’s arm, hoisting her into a fireman’s carry. “Bring the stuff!”
Marya threw the cases into the survival bag and bent to haul it after her. Axel didn’t look back to see how she was doing; it took all his concentration just to navigate the splintered branches and gouged earth around the ship. Finally he reached untouched forest and toppled into a thorn bush with Calandria on top of him. The singing pain in his head continued, but not as strongly as it had right next to the ship.
Marya Mounce struggled her way across the obstacles, the huge bulging sack getting caught on every jutting spar. She seemed determined, her mouth set in a grim line.
She had nearly made it to the trees when a rain of white light pattered into the loam right behind her. The ground sizzled and smoked under it.
“Run!” Axel waved frantically at her. “Forget the sack! Just run!” He knew she couldn’t hear him over the chorus of the swans.
The rain intensified. It was like a funnel somewhere overhead was pouring down liquid light. Where it landed, the light coalesced, pulsing. The rain stopped abruptly, and started up again farther around the clearing.
The glow it had left behind flashed brightly once, and stood up.
Axel’s voice died. He was glad Marya seemed oblivious to the thing behind her, because it would have paralyzed him were he in her place. It looked like a man, but was entirely made of liquid light. Long electric streamers flew from its fingertips and head. As another such being grew behind it, the first began to pirouette this way and that, like a dancer, obviously looking for something.
Marya landed heavily next to Axel. The survival bag spilled open. “Damn,” she said meekly. Then she grinned crookedly at him. “Made it!”
Calandria pushed herself onto her elbows. “Steath gauze,” she croaked. “Where’zit?”
Axel grabbed the golden filigree she had been trying to unwind earlier. He pushed himself to his knees and flipped it open, letting it drape over all three of them, as Marya hauled the survival bag in under it.
The creature that had built itself behind Marya turned and looked in their direction. Axel forgot to breathe. He felt the other two freeze too, ancient instinct kicking in to save them from a superior predator. Slowly, deliberately, the thing stalked toward them.
“Oh, shit.” Axel fingered the laser pistol. It felt hot under his hand; he wondered if it was shorting out too. It looked like he would find out in a second, when he had to use it.
The thing’s head snapped to the left. It paused, chin up as though sniffing the air. Then it stepped over a log and headed away. The gauze had worked.
Axel blew out his held breath. Of course the stealth gauze worked—it was designed to fool the senses of the Winds. At times like this, though, he found it hard to remember that the technology of the Winds, including the swans, was a thousand years older than his own.
Old, maybe. But not primitive. He sucked in a new breath, and tried to will his racing heart to slow.
Soon six humanoid forms walked the clearing. Everything they touched caught fire. They tossed downed trees aside, and sent beams of coherent light into the treetops, hunting high and low, but never noticing the three small forms huddled right on the edge of the clearing.
One entered the ship. Loud concussions sounded inside, and the lights went out. Then spiral tendrils of light drifted down from above, and gently but firmly gripped the sides of the ship. The five remaining humanoid forms reached out, and dissolved into the ropes of light. Then, with hardly a tremor, the swans pulled the Pan Hellenia out of the ground, and retreated into the sky with it in tow.
The stellar glow faded; the full-throated cry of the swans diminished; soon the clearing was lit only by ordinary fire. But over the smell of burning autumn leaves lay the sharp reek of ozone.
For a time the three lay where they had fallen, head to head, watching the spiral aurora recede into the zenith, until finally the stars came out one by one, like the timid crickets.
Marya Mounce sat up and brushed dirt off her sleeves. “Well,” she said briskly. “Thank you both, very much, for rescuing me.”
*
Hours later they paused, halfway around the lake under the eaves of an abandoned barn. Axel was unused to this level of activity, and he had begun to stagger badly. Calandria favoured her wounded arm, so she could only carry so much. Marya had managed to keep up amazingly well, considering her feet. Whatever augmentation had been done to support her shortened tendons had toughened the balls of her feet immensely, and she could indeed run if she needed to.
As Axel slumped down wearily, and Calandria moved slowly to gather old planks for a fire, he noticed that Marya was shivering violently—whole body shivers accompanied by wildly chattering teeth.
“Thermal wear,” she muttered. “There must be some thermal wear here.” She knelt down and began rummaging through the bag.
“Ah. Here we are.” She pulled out a pair of silvery overalls and stood up. Axel expected her to walk away or at least turn around to remove her skirt, but she just pulled the overalls on—and the skirt vanished as she did, leaving nothing but a cloudy blackness that disappeared as she zipped up the overalls.
“What was that?” he said.
“What? What’s what?” Marya peevishly squatted down, hugging herself.
“Your dress—it was holographic.” He heard Calandria pause in the midst of prying a board off the old barn’s door.
“Of-f c-course it-it is,” Marya chattered. “It’s a-a holo unitard. W-what do y-you expect me to w-wear? Cloth?”
Calandria sent Axel an eloquent look that said, you deal with this. She went back to prying at the door.
Axel wasn’t actually that surprised. Holo unitards were increasingly common in the inner systems. They allowed unrestricted and unlimited costume changes for the wearer—but were only practical in climate-controlled environments.
“Well,” he said, “you’re on Ventus now.”
“I know. Anyway, the holo’s not supposed to be visible to the W-Winds.”
“That’s not the point,” said Axel. “You’ll freeze to death in that thing.”
“Anyway, you’ll have to get rid of it,” said Calandria. “We can’t take the chance that the Winds might see it.”
“The ship had no cloth apparel in it. And I didn’t get a chance to put the thermals on before we landed,” muttered Marya. “Too busy falling out of the sky.” She shuddered violently again.
She had a point there. “We’d better get this fire going,” he said. Calandria dropped another load of scraps at his feet and he bent to whittle some kindling. Marya watched him avidly.
“Pretty ironic,” said Calandria as she came to sit on the other side of Marya. She and Axel framed her; he could feel her shudders as he whittled. “A couple of hours ago we were nearly burned to death. Now we’re freezing. Typical.”
“There.” Axel had his kindling. He built a little pyramid of small scraps over, leaving an opening, and began laying larger blocks above and around that. Satisfied, he brought out the lighter from the survival kit.
“I can earn my keep,” said Marya. “Here, let me prove it.” She reached for the lighter.
“Anybody can use a lighter, Marya.”
“I want to do it the old-fashioned way. Do you have a flint and iron?”
“Yes� Have you spent time on Ventus, then?” asked Axel.
“I’m not ground survey staff.” Marya stood over them both, still shaking but looking strangely determined. “But I am a cultural anthropologist. I’ve studied more societies than you’ve heard about. I know sixteen ways to start a fire. We should save your lighter for a real emergency.”
Calandria exchanged another glance with Axel. Then she said, “Let her try.”
“I don’t want to be useless,” said Marya as she took the flints from Axel. She began frantically whacking the flintstone with her iron. She hit her own fingers and dropped it. “Ow!” Before Axel could move she had snatched it up again and resumed, more carefully and also more accurately. A small spray of sparks flew into the shavings.
She bent forward to blow gently on the embers. To Axel’s surprise, the tinder caught. She nursed it for a few minutes like a doting parent, while Calandria and Axel watched with bated breath.
Finally Marya sat back, triumphant, as the little fire began to burn on its own. “See! I did it!”
Both Axel and Calandria made approving noises. Maybe Marya wouldn’t be as useless as her gaudy exterior threatened.
The anthropologist sat down cross-legged, and beamed at her accomplishment. Axel sighed. “Okay, Cal, let’s look at your arm.”
“Well,” said Calandria as Axel poked and prodded, “What do we do next?”
Marya was beginning to warm up, and seemed to be regaining her poise as well. She said, “Obviously we need to get offworld as soon as possible. Something’s happening—I’ve never seen the swans like this!”
Axel and Calandria exchanged a glance. Armiger. It could only be him.
“Listen,” continued Marya. “I know Ventus like the back of my hand, even if I’ve never been here. We’ve had agents down here on and off for decades—people like Axel who’ve sent back reports, brought back books. I know the history. I know the geography, every city and hamlet on this continent. I speak six local languages, without the need for implant dictionaries. I’ve studied the religions twelve different ways.” She leaned forward to warm her hands on the new fire. “I know I’m not the outdoorsy type, I think I can help you.”
Calandria nodded. “Thank you. We need the help, right about now. One thing, though—you should get rid of that unitard. I know you say it’s supposed to be invisible to the Winds, but do we know that for sure? I don’t think we should take the chance.”
“Yes, I agree,” said Marya. She jerked a thumb at the sky. “Especially after seeing the swans close up—not something I want to do again, let me tell you!” She stood up and unselfconsciously unzipped her coveralls.
“Hang on,” said Axel. “I disagree. Marya, I think you should keep your unitard.”
“Why?” asked Calandria.
Axel grinned. “I’ve got an idea.”