Chaison Fanning half-rose. "Mr. Prime Minister, I know this is a lot to take in, and my apologies again for dragging you away from the opera. We've only just learned many of these details ourselves; in fact, we're not done yet, but the conversation had gotten to a point where I thought it best to bring you in." The delay had cost them an hour, but Fanning had been insistent that they wait. With no safe topics of conversation, the time had dragged as they sipped their coffees and stared at one another--but Chaison had kept them in line, glaring around the table like a disciplinary father.
"Here's where we stand," he said now. "Item one: We have learned that foreigners have made the offer of an alliance to all the humans in Virga."
It was Leal Maspeth's tale that had convinced Fanning to call in the prime minister. Granted, her story alone would have been enough to bring the house down in any decent theater, especially the revelation about the existence of other spheres like Virga. It had been hard for her to drag the Fannings past that realization, and now the admiral demanded that she do it again for Kestrel. When she finished, Kestrel steepled his hands, scowled at her, and said only, "You're telling me that they brought this to us first, instead of taking it to the Guard?"
Maspeth raised her chin defiantly--an admirable posture she was clearly unused to. "Good," said Kestrel. "Go on."
Venera Fanning was nodding. "If you'd gone to the Guard you would have been placing yourself at their mercy. I wouldn't have done it."
"Item two," Fanning said now; he looked every inch the bureaucrat as he ticked off another finger. "The Guard seem to be divided about what to do. Even worse, they seem to have been caught napping by the offer."
Now it was Antaea's turn to throw in what she knew about Jacoby Sarto's serpentine cousin Inshiri, and her apparent alliance with forces from outside Virga. Kestrel looked skeptical, but surprisingly, Venera sprang to Antaea's assistance. "I can vouch for this," she said. "My own people have seen increasing civilian traffic to the tourist center at the walls of Virga, and also to the place where the Gates of Virga are supposed to be. Some kind of high-level governmental liaison is going on between certain key governments in Virga and the Home Guard."
"I've heard nothing of this," said Kestrel, clearly disturbed.
"Slipstream would be the last place they'd include in their consultations," Antaea pointed out. "Sarto was quite clear about it, though; he told me they're visiting pilots and kings and presidents and making them some sort of proposal. I don't think it's the same as the one Leal's beasts are suggesting."
"What my people are seeing," ventured Venera, "is consistent with the view that the Guard's traditional allies outside Virga are putting political pressure on both the Guard and the ruling class of Virga itself."
"Pressure about what?" asked the prime minister.
"This is where we'd gotten to when I decided to bring you into the conversation," said Fanning. "Keir Chen? Can you show our guest what you showed us?"
He hopped up from his chair, nearly knocking it over. Damn--he still wasn't used to the gravity in Rush. Stepping around the main table, he went to a side table under a window, where a white tablecloth draped Exhibit A. "On our way into Virga," he said to Kestrel, "we ran into some of these." With what he hoped was an appropriate flourish, he pulled the tablecloth away, revealing the inert knife-ball that had fixed itself to Sarto's ship. Kestrel swore and did knock his own chair over as he stood up.
"What the hell is that?" He came around to look at it, and as he did, Keir described the gigantic invasion fleet waiting in the frigid blackness just beyond the world's skin. "These are the tiniest motes compared to those vessels," he pointed out.
"You found these in an abandoned city, you say?" Kestrel ran his fingertip along one of the thing's blades. "I know that traditionally, monsters hang around empty places for no apparent reason--and I've always assumed that the lack of a decent food supply in crypt clouds and abandoned town wheels explained why said monsters are not more plentiful. But you say they guarded a door. If these things were scouts--pickets waiting for a signal..."
Antaea was nodding. "After the outage, my sister and I fought beasts a lot like those ones," she said. "There's all sorts of eggs and seeds and dormant dragons slumbering among the icebergs of the world's wall. The Guard and their precipice moths patrol the wall, rooting them out where we find them. Where they find them ... Candesce keeps them at bay, so when the outage happened, thousands of them woke up, and they came in. The dagger-balls at the city aren't just aimlessly hanging around there; they're waiting for an opportunity ... waiting for another outage."
"And that," said Fanning, "means we have an item four: Some enemy of our world is waiting to pounce if we let our guard down." He glanced at his wife and said, "In large part, this current crisis is my fault. In order to win a local war, I sent Venera and Hayden Griffin into Candesce. They caused the outage, which allowed me to win an important battle. But what we didn't know was that it also opened the door for the monsters Antaea and her people had to fight. And it seems to have encouraged those monsters. They've started trying different tactics to get in. This latest one seems to be diplomatic."
"--Backed up by an invasion force," Venera pointed out.
"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "That's how diplomacy works."
"And anyway," Venera went on, "it wasn't our fault. We were manipulated by that bitch, Aubrey Mahallan. It was her idea to shut down the sun of suns--and she came from outside Virga."
"So." Chaison Fanning stood with his arms crossed; except for Kestrel, who was still examining the knife-ball, the rest of the dinner party was still seated.
"Item five," said Fanning, "and it's the most significant. We have little proof of any of these things. Worse, although there's rumors and wide-eyed legends galore about recent events, almost nobody in Virga has heard anything like the stories we've just traded. Most people still don't even know there's a universe beyond our own walls."
"My people don't believe it," agreed Maspeth. "They think Virga is the universe, and that it's always existed just as it is. They'd never believe in a threat to the whole world, especially one from outside."
"Yes," said Kestrel as he returned to his seat, "and while your story is interesting, Ms. Maspeth, I'm not compelled to believe it, either, on the strength of your word and this--" He leaned forward and plucked up her doll from the table. "--this figurine that you claim talks, but only to you, and only when you're conveniently outside of the world..."
Maspeth glared at him. "Proof is easy to get! Just send a ship to Serenity. The rest of our men should have been rescued by Keir Chen's people by now. And with them is Hayden Griffin--"
Kestrel held up a hand. "I'd be a fool not to at least try to verify your story. So the admiral will be sending the ship--although the logical thing to do would be tell the Guard about the situation at Serenity and go in there together."
"Ah," said Venera. "But how do we contact the Guard? They stay in the shadows. Antaea is the one and only Guardsman we've ever met, and even she's a pariah to them now. Mr. Prime Minister: Since you've been in power, has the Guard contacted you in any way?"
With obvious reluctance, he shook his head.
The admiral smiled slightly. "They might sit up and notice if we were to rescue not just Griffin, but their own men from Aethyr."
"A public handover would humiliate them," Kestrel pointed out. "I wouldn't do that--"