"I can supplement these weapons so that they are more effective," it said. "Would that be helpful?"
"Oh!" She smiled, almost bashfully. "That's a great idea."
"Ach! Come on, then," said Piero Harper. "Everybody up and at 'em." He turned to Keir. "By your leave, sir, show us the way to Virga." Keir nodded; his second body was already on its way to the door. "Come on."
"What are those?" Harper was pointing at the faint glitter of the distant ships that sat silently in the space just outside Virga's hull.
"Keir called it an armada," said Maspeth. "I believe that is what you came to warn us about," she added, speaking to the doll.
Keir saw it nod. "Those ships would be powerless inside Virga. Candesce's suppression field is fatal to the technologies they rely on. They're waiting for the field to fail, as it did a couple of years ago."
"Gods, I hope Hayden never hears about this," she muttered.
They had been bounding along the transparent bridge tube that led to the place Keir called the Glass Jaw. It had been very difficult to discern that they were making any headway these last several minutes; but now a long shape began to resolve out of the darkness ahead. The bridge terminated in the side of this.
"That's where we're going," he said. "The door to Virga."
Harper frowned. "Doesn't look like much. It's not even connected to Virga, I can see that. Is there another bridge on the other side?"
"Can't be," said Leal. "We're turning, Virga is not. How would any sort of bridge connect a still object to a moving one?" She turned to Keir. "What's this all about?"
"There's no bridge," he said quickly, "it's something else. You'll see when we get there."
"What do you mean?" she said, suddenly suspicious.
"It's not like any door you've ever seen."
What they had come to was a vast blockhouse, forbidding and dark, its metal sides devoid of windows or running light. The whole structure--which must have been two thousand feet long and half that in height--hung at the bottom of a set of half-visible gnarled buttresses that must have been dozens of miles long. They rose up into dizzying perspective, ultimately disappearing within the chaos of machinery that sealed Virga to Aethyr and allowed one of those worlds to turn against the other.
"It's like a big version of Complication Hall," one of the airmen said about that ceiling, just before they passed through the round entrance leading into the blockhouse and what little pale light there was vanished.
There was a pause while lamps were switched on. Keir took the opportunity to send his dragonflies ahead and make sure that everything was normal in the Jaw room. Then he said, "This way," and led them past side passages and rooms he'd never explored to Virga's door.
Various hulking robot forms waited in the darkness. Some of these were guardians, Keir knew, heavily armed and keyed to wake once an hour. The rest of the bots were sensing devices the Renaissance was preparing to send through the Jaw. Scry showed all of this detail, but of course the Virgans couldn't see it. "This is it?" somebody muttered as flashlight beams roved to and fro. "It looks like a theater."
"Except they won't be puttin' any plays on in this one," said Harper. As Keir knew, there was no stage, nor any screen facing those tall seats--just a blank wall. Many of the seats had been torn out of the metal flooring and now lay jumbled against their neighbors or broken against the back wall. The remainder looked as though they'd once been deeply padded, but the material was torn out in clumps and strewn about the floor. "Looks like some angry monster chewed on these," Piero joked.
"That's about right," Keir agreed. They all looked at him.
"Sometimes things come through," he explained, "from the Virga side. Agents of the virtuals, sort of advance scouts for the armada you saw a minute ago. They're barely able to survive Candesce's radiation, and it makes 'em a bit rabid. These bots put them down when they climb through."
"Climb through," said Leal. "From where?"
Keir pointed at another door on the opposite side of the chamber. "When this door is open, that door is closed, and vice versa." He checked his scry; it was almost time. "We've got about ten minutes. We have to check these chairs, make sure that there's enough secure ones for all of us. What we're going to do is sit down in them and wait."
"And then?" Harper asked.
"There's two cities, one on the Virga side and this one on our side. Each has a room like this. The rooms can move. In about ten minutes the cities are going to exchange their rooms."
Harper looked puzzled. "But--we're turning; compared to Virga, this whole city is going..."
"About four hundred miles per hour," Keir admitted. "Which is why you'd better hope that these seats can withstand the strain when we're suddenly accelerated up to speed."
He put his head back against the rusted metal seat frame and waited. That was enough time for him to wonder about what he was about to lose--not metaphorically, but literally--by entering Virga. His dragonflies were perched about the room. He'd had them to see with for most of his life. They were as much a part of him as his two native-born eyes.
He turned his head to the left, saw Leal Maspeth. She raised one hand to her shoulder, briefly touching the chest of the little doll on her shoulder. Did she feel the same as him?
The silence was absolute, and it stretched out for one minute, then another. Then somebody giggled. "Is anybody else starting to feel foolish?"
Something hit the back of Keir's chair. The room didn't seem to be moving but he was suddenly being crushed into the seat with tremendous force. A buzzing vibration rolled in waves through him from its metal frame.
He heard a sharp crack and a shout, then a tumbling crashing noise as one of the other chairs flew backward. Then, with shocking suddenness, the pressure disappeared. Keir had been bracing his body against it and in the sudden absence he flew forward out of his chair.
The others were doing the same in a chaos of flailing limbs and shouts. They were weightless--naturally, he'd known they would be, but it still felt like falling.
Part of that feeling was visuaclass="underline" his dragonflies were tumbling to the back wall, and as they fell, their vision went out. He could see one twirling toward him and watched himself reach out and grab it from the air.
There was silence, and in the feeling of falling, some steadiness. Things began to drift.
Several loud bangs rang out, shocking and sudden in the darkness. Keir couldn't see, couldn't feel his dragonflies at all anymore. "Who's shooting?" shouted Piero Harper.
"Not us! It's coming from there!"
Keir tried to look around himself, failed, and then forced his head and eyes to turn. It was an unfamiliar gesture, the sort of movement you reserved for those times when you wanted to make eye contact with people you were speaking to. There were the other chairs, a cloud of silhouetted people and weaving flashlight beams--and orange flashes from the black rectangle of the room's suddenly open other door.
"We're in Virga!" he shouted--maybe unnecessarily, maybe they knew it better than he--but something was out there.
"Quiet!" It was Harper again, and as the clamor of voices fell away Keir heard others shouting--and someone screamed.
Then someone appeared in the dark doorway, for just a moment, but fully lit by flashlight beam. Without the competing vision of his dragonflies, untagged by distracting scry, her image burned into Keir's mind:
An oval face, its fine, perfect features dominated by two gigantic eyes. The face framed by hair in a black pageboy cut that held its shape even in freefall. Her garb, black leather that made her limbs disappear--though he could see her toes sticking out of the half-shoes she wore. She was staring straight at him, lips in an O of surprise.
Something flashed over her shoulder and she whirled, raising something--a sword--and sparks flew as it struck something. The force of the blow knocked her right through the doorway.