“…A particularly annoying footman my mother had?”
“Madam, you wound me. Besides, I don’t believe you.”
“If there really is a way off of Spyre, why haven’t you ever taken it?”
He stopped and looked back at her. Little more than a silhouette in the dim light, Diamandis still conveyed disappointment in the tilt of his shoulders and head. “Are you deliberately provoking me?”
Venera caught up to him. “No,” she said, putting her fists on her hips. “If this exit is so dangerous that you chose not to use it, I want to know.”
“Oh. Yes, it’s dangerous—but not that dangerous. I could have used it. But we’ve been over this. Where would I go? One of the other principalities? What use would an old gigolo be there?”
“—Let the ladies judge that.”
“Ha! Good point. But no. Besides, if I circled around and came back to Lesser Spyre, I’d eventually be caught. Have you been up there? It’s even more paranoid and tightly controlled than this place. The city is… impossible. No, it would never work.”
As was typical of her, Venera had been ignoring what Garth was saying and focusing instead on how he said it. “I’ve got it!” she said. “I know why you stayed.”
He turned toward her, a black cut-out against distant lights—and for once Venera didn’t simply blurt out what was on her mind. She could be perfectly tactful when her life depended on it but in other circumstances had never known why one should bother. Normally she would have just said it: You’re still in love with someone. But she hesitated.
“In there,” said Diamandis, pointing to a long, low building whose roof was being overtaken by lopsided trees. He waited, but when she didn’t say anything he turned slowly and walked in the direction of the building.
“A wise woman wouldn’t be entering such a place unescorted,” said Venera lightly as she took his arm. Diamandis laughed.
“I am your escort.”
“You, Mr. Diamandis, are why escorts were invented.”
Pleased, he developed a bit of a bounce to his step. Venera, though, wanted to slow down—not because she was afraid of him or what waited inside the dark. At this moment, she could not have said what made her hesitate.
The concrete lot was patched with grass and young trees and they scuttled across it quickly, both wary of any watchers on high. They soon reached a peeled-out loading door in the side of the metal building. There was no breeze outside, but wind was whistling around the edges of the door.
“It puzzles me why there isn’t a small army of squatters living in places like this,” said Venera as the blackness swallowed Diamandis. She reluctantly stepped after him into it. “The pressures of life in these pocket states must be intolerable. Why don’t more people simply leave?”
“Oh, they do.” Diamandis took her hand and led her along a flat floor. “Just a bit further, I have to find the door… through here.” Wind buffeted her from behind now. “Reach forward… here’s the railing. Now, follow that to the left.”
They were on some sort of catwalk, its metal grating ringing faintly under her feet.
“Many people leave,” said Diamandis. “Most don’t know how to survive outside of the chambers where they were born and bred. They return, cowed; or they die. Many are shot by the sentries, by border guards, or by the preservationists. I’ve buried a number of friends since I came to live here.”
Her eyes were starting to adjust to the dark. Venera could tell that they were in a very large room of some sort, its ceiling ribbed with girders. Holes let in faint light in places, just enough to sketch the dimensions of the place. The floor…
There was no floor, only subdivided metal boxes with winches hanging over them. Some of those boxes were capped by fierce vortices of wind that collectively must have scoured every grain of grit out of the place. Looking down at the nearest box, Venera saw that it was really a square metal pit with clamshell doors at its bottom. Those doors vibrated faintly.
“Behold the bomb bays,” said Diamandis, sweeping his arm in a dramatic arc. “Designed to rain unholy fire on any fleet stupid enough to line itself up with Spyre’s rotation. This one chamber held enough firepower to carpet a square mile of air with bombs. And there were once two dozen such bays.”
The small hurricane chattered like a crowd of madmen; the bomb bay doors rattled and buzzed in sympathy. “Was it ever used?” asked Venera.
“Supposedly,” said Diamandis. “The story goes that we wiped out an entire armada in seconds. Though that could all be propaganda—if true, I can see why people outside Spyre would despise us. After all, there would have been hundreds of bombs that passed through the armada and simply kept going. Who knows what unsuspecting nations we strafed?”
Venera touched the scar on her chin.
“Anyway, it was generations ago,” said Diamandis. “No one seems to care that much about us since the other great wheels disintegrated. We’re the last, and ignored the way you pass by the aged. Come this way.”
They went up a short flight of metal steps to a catwalk that extended out over the bays. Diamandis led Venera halfway down the long room; his footfalls were steady, hers slowing as they approached a solitary finned shape hanging from chains above one of the bays.
“That’s a bomb!” It was a good eight feet long, almost three in diameter, a great metal torpedo with a button nose. Diamandis leaned out over the railing and slapped it.
“A bomb, indeed,” he said over the whistling gale. “At least, it’s a bomb casing. See? The hatch there is unscrewed. I scooped out the explosives years ago; there’s room for one person if you wriggle your way in. All I have to do is throw a lever and it will drop and bang through those doors. Nothing’s going to stop you once you’re outside, you can go a few hundred miles and then light out on your own.”
She too leaned out to touch the cylinder’s flank.
“So you’ll go home, will you?” he asked, with seeming innocence.
Venera snatched her fingers back. She crossed her arms and looked away.
“The people who ran this place,” she said after a while. “It was one of the great nations, wasn’t it? One of the ones that specialize in building weapons. Like Sacrus?”
He laughed. “Not Sacrus. Their export is leverage. Means of political control, ranging from blackmail to torture and extortion. They have advisors in the throne rooms of half the principalities.”
“They sell torturers?”
“That’s one of the skills they export, yes. Almost nobody in Spyre deals with them anymore—they’re too dangerous. Keep pulling coups, trying to dominate the Council. The preservationists are still hurting from their own run-in with them. You met one of theirs in Liris?” She nodded.
Diamandis sighed. “Yet one more reason for you to leave, then. Once you’re marked in their ledgers, you’re never safe again. Come on, I’ll give you a boost up.”
“Wait.” She stared at the black opening in the metal thing. The thought came to her: this won’t work. She could not return to Slipstream and pretend that things that had been done had not been done. She could not in silence retire as the shunned wife of a disgraced admiral. Not when the man responsible for Chaison’s death—the Pilot of Slipstream—still sat like a spider at the center of Slipstream affairs.
Thinking this made her fury catch like dry tinder. A spasm of pain shot up her jaw, and she shook her head. Venera turned and walked back along the catwalk.
Diamandis hurried after her. “What are you doing?”
Venera struggled to catch her breath. She would need resources. If she was to avenge Chaison, she would need power. “Yesterday you said something about a fourth choice, Garth.” She rattled down the steps and headed for the door.