Tiffany peered down. A silver shape protruded out onto a dark landing pad. She realized she was seeing a small semi-rigid airship from above. Crouched beside her, Ja-lan whispered, “This is our ship. Lower yourselves lightly onto the upper deck. Side ladders lead into the cabin below. But be as quiet as you can.”
“Why so much secrecy?” she whispered back.
“Because we are borrowing her.”
“Without permission?” Miko suggested.
“Exactly.” Ja-lan grinned. He was obviously having a time of it, breaking into a women’s tower, stealing an airship, making off with female outworlders. Tiffany guessed that Floreal did not offer a champion swordsman many chances for high adventure.
She did as he said, lowering herself to the silver back of the ship, then climbing down a curved ladder to the cabin below. Where Dee-vi waited. Their serving girl helped her and Miko through the cabin window. Ja-lan swung in behind them, going straight to the cabin controls. He started up the engine, then released the landing grapples. They were off.
The airship sailed swiftly through the perfumed night beneath artificial stars. Tiffany spotted another aerostat to starboard, a soft pyramid of gleaming rooftops and lamp-lit windows. Dee-vi told her, “That is Eyrie, where my mother’s cousins live.”
Pursuit soon caught up with them. Just as they reached topless moonlit cliffs, Tiffany’s audio sensors picked up the whap-whap of rotors. She spotted a flier’s running lights, coming up fast. Ten times as swift as the airship, the VTOL swooped down to grapple them from above, like a white spider falling on its prey.
The two ships hung there, beside dark towering cliffs that were really one end of the habitat. The High Court’s landing stage lay less than a kilometer away, but the VTOL’s jet rotors kept them from moving so much as a micron.
Tiffany heard footsteps on the upper deck, then on the ladders leading down to the cabin. Moments later, swordsmen came swinging in the cabin windows, blades drawn. Ja-lan leaped to meet them in the middle of the cabin, keeping the women at his back. His blade flashed in the cabin light, disarming one intruder, then pinking another in the shoulder, drawing first blood.
Ja-lan was in his element, eager to show off his swordsmanship. His opponents were not so pleased. Tiffany’s sensors showed they were hesitant. Not happy to be dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, then forced to face the local fencing champion in a narrow cabin, where only two of them could come at him at once.
She yelled, “Stop at once, by order of the Queen.”
Slowly the men lowered their swords. Accustomed since birth to taking commands from women, they looked warily at Tiffany. Stepping past Ja-lan, she put herself between him and the boarding party. “We are here to see the Sacred Queen. And travel under her protection.” That last part was diplomatic license, but who could contradict her?
“We are here to get this ship back.” The man who spoke was the one holding his shoulder. Blood oozed between his fingers, giving him the most right to complain.
“You shall have it,” Tiffany told them. “But we all want to be let off at the High Court landing stage. You have no right to keep us from seeing the Queen.”
Apex’s loose personalized relations played to her advantage. The boarding party had to decide among themselves what to do, there being no way to send back for orders. They could return in triumph with the ship they were sent to get. Or they could get cut to ribbons by a master swordsman, attempting to forcibly prevent three women from seeing the Queen. None of them wanted to risk his skin getting drawn into something that would ultimately be decided by females. Better to bring the ship back empty than to return with disgruntled women aboard. Who knew what story they would tell the Flower Princess?
So they were set down on the moonlit landing stage. Topless cliffs towered out of sight above them. Kilometers above, at the zero-g level of the habitat, up and down reversed themselves, and the cliffs extended on to meet the jungle floor again. No wonder they called it World’s End.
Tall Bug warriors stood on the steps leading up to the High Court, looking like giant Hindu war gods, each clutching four huge shining scimitars in its four upper limbs. Ja-lan bowed to Tiffany, saying, “I can come no farther.”
“You have done more than enough,” she assured him.
“Way more,” Miko added.
The smiling swordsman straightened up, saluting them with a sweep of his blade. “Happy to be of service.”
They left him on the landing stage at the base of the steps. What went on inside was women’s business. Some laws and decisions applied to everyone, like the silent ban on firearms. But enforcement was by gender. Women had to pass on her and Miko, before their case went to the men. Ja-lan was jumping the gun a bit, but only at Dee-vi’s request.
Their serving-girl-cum-guide bounded up the stairs, ignoring the towering Bug warriors, anxious to show them the High Court. Nothing so far prepared Tiffany for what she saw inside. The Queen’s court had a giant-sized audience chamber, partly to accommodate the Bugs. A Hive Queen half-filled the chamber, something few humans saw in the flesh. A titanic thirty-two-legged monster, she lifted her forward segments in the air, looking them over as they entered. Eight-legged workers scurried about regurgitating food and water for her, and carrying off egg cysts.
Between them and the Bugs stood a crowd of women, mostly older women in great belled dresses, with a few younger ones sprinkled among them. But none of them were real. Tiffany’s sensors told her these were all holos, giving off no brain waves or skin response. Dee-vi had told her the memories and personalities of dying queens were downloaded to advise the living one—appearing as holos when needed.
This ghostly court flanked a raised dais supporting an empty throne. A cushioned stool actually, low and backless, Roman-style with carved ivory legs, and the same ancient simplicity as the Archangel’s Picassos. But empty nonetheless. Tiffany surveyed the hall, looking for someone to sit in it. All she saw were holos and xenos. Aside from her and Miko there was only one flesh-and-blood female in the room…
Dee-vi bounded gleefully up the dais steps, then turned toward them, seating herself triumphantly on the throne. She laughed at their surprise, like a mischievous kid sitting in her elder’s seat. Only this was for real. The Flower Princess was the Sacred Queen’s daughter only in a metaphorical sense.
“Do you have anything to add?” Dee-vi asked. “Any more proof to offer?” It was plain that their interview with the Sacred Queen had been going on throughout their stay at Apex.
Tiffany stood at the foot of the dais, digesting this diplomatic surprise, shocked at how easily she had been fooled. She had run her sensors over Dee-vi repeatedly; all she had seen was a happy headstrong kid, eager to learn and utterly open. She had never thought to ask Dee-vi if she were the Sacred Queen.
She shook her head. “Why did we have to go through the motions of stealing a ship?” That seemed an unneeded hazard.
“You said you were a diplomat. I wanted to see.” Dee-vi said it the way a child would. She had been half testing Tiffany, and half just wanting to see for herself.
Tiffany surveyed the chamber, looking for anything that might bolster her case. Her gaze fixed on the Hive Queen, rearing over the humans and holos like some titanic centipede. “Ask the Bugs.”
“Ask them what?” Now Dee-vi looked surprised.
“They can chart the course of that white giant I told you about, Orion 4673.” Humans might turn inward, trying to seal themselves off from the cosmos—but not Bugs. Bugs were great celestial navigators. (But bad shipbuilders.) In fact, it was probably the Bugs who kept the Flower Princess informed of the Hiryu’s movements.