"Well, you'd be right," said Fanning, "if Mavery were our target."
Several of the captains had been muttering together, but these words shocked them silent. "What do you mean?" asked Flosk, his voice momentarily reduced to a whine. "After the damned sneak attack the other day—"
"Almost certainly not them," said Fanning dryly. "Oh, their munitions, right enough. But Mavery's border dispute with us has been trumped up by a third party—one with deep pockets and spies throughout Slipstream." He took one of the slides his wife had prepared for him and slipped it into the hooded lantern under the chart box. Opening a little door on the side of the lantern, he projected the image onto the wall behind him.
"This," he said, "is a secret shipyard of Falcon Formation. One of, uh, our spies took this photo less than a week ago." Several of the captains rotated in place to try to find a better view of the picture. Fanning glanced back to verify that he'd chosen the correct slide: it was Venera's picture of the giant warship.
"The dreadnought you see in the deep background is fifteen hundred feet long," he announced. Again, the captains went still. "Nothing like it has ever flown in Virga. It's big enough to be a carrier for midsized hunter sloops, as well as a substantial assault force. We believe she will be the flagship of a fleet aimed at Slipstream. We have learned that they are using the dispute with Mavery as a ruse to draw our forces away from Rush. Once our fleet is entangled in Mavery, they will move in and take the city." He didn't have to add that Rush was Slipstream. Take one and you had the other.
There was a long silence. Then Flosk said, "Who's this 'we' who believes all of this crap? You and the Pilot?"
"The Pilot, yes," Fanning lied. "He is well aware of our nation's failings in the espionage area. He's taken steps—hence the pictures." He changed the slide for another that showed the shipyard itself. "That's the strategic situation. I'm sure you can appreciate how important it's been to keep our knowledge of the situation secret."
"Wait," said someone. "You mean we're going to attack Falcon?"
"Suicide," someone else mumbled.
"Clearly we need any advantage we can get," said Fanning with a reluctant nod. "Your ships were either designed as winter ships or have been refitted as part of a winter fleet. These upgrades have been going on for some years, since my predecessor discerned a need for such a fleet."
"But these are hardly the best winter ships," objected Flosk. "The new ones are off with the force that's heading to Mavery."
"Naturally. Mavery and Falcon will notice if our finest winter ships don't show up for the border dispute. Your ships—and I hate to put this indelicately, gentlemen—are the inconspicuous ones. Not very powerful, not very important. Nonetheless, they are all rigged for operations in cold, darkness, and low-oxygen conditions. They will be sufficient."
He closed the cover on the projector and restored the light to the chart box. "This is the local constellation of nations," he said. "We are here. Falcon is there." The chart box contained dense clouds of colored sparks, each hue representing a different nation. The nations coiled around and pressed against one another in intricate contact, like the internal organs of some creature of light. "The chief nations of Merithan all follow the rise and fall of the Merithan Five Hadley cell that's powered by heat from the Sun of Suns, which is below the table in this view. Rush Asteroid is largely unaffected by the air currents and continues to follow its orbit around Candesce, at something less than walking speed. As you can see, Rush will soon leave Aerie and migrate into Mavery's territory. But after mat…" He turned the box to show a mass of glittering green stars that took up much of one side of the box. "After that we will, by force of celestial mechanics, have to pass through Falcon."
Three suns—diamonds among emeralds—gleamed within the broad dazzle of green.
"Now, here is the location of the secret shipyard we discovered." He flipped a lever in the base of the map box. All the little pinpricks of light dimmed save for one amethyst that lit up deep inside Falcon territory.
The captains broke into a babble of complaint. Flosk burst out laughing. "How are we expected to get to that spot without fighting our way through the whole of Falcon?"
"Simple," said Fanning. "The location of the shipyard is secret because it's in an underpopulated area—a volume filled with sargassos. It's really at the terminus of a long tongue of winter that extends hundreds of miles into Falcon. The sargassos shade this volume and much of it is oxygen-poor. A wilderness. We're going to circle all the way around the Merithan constellation and sneak in through this alley of dead air."
"… And raid the shipyard," said somebody. There were nods all around.
"Well, it's bold," said Flosk grudgingly. "Still suicidal. But then we're not too many ships. Slipstream can afford to lose us."
"I have no intention of sacrificing us," said Fanning.
"But how are we going to survive and get home again?"
"That's a part of the plan that has to remain secret for now," said the admiral. "But what it means in the short term is that, before we circle around through winter, we have to make a… a detour."
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT MIGHT HAVE been two thousand miles away; it could have been twice that.They were never able to tell her for sure. But somewhere, and not too long ago, there had been a war.
Nobody knew whether the shot was fired by a lone sniper, or whether it was one of a salvo loosed in the midst of a confused melee involving thousands of men. But it was a military-grade weapon of some sort, that much was sure. The bullet had come out of its muzzle at a velocity of more than a mile per second. It outran its own sound.
She knew what had happened next. The bullet had gathered its experiences with it as it flew, remembering what it saw and where it went; and these memories came to Venera Fanning now and then, as dreams and nightmares. They must be from the bullet, there was no other possible source for them. She herself could never have imagined the vision of fantastically prowed vessels ramming one another and tumbling in burning embraces into blood-red clouds. Nor could she have drought up the rope-connected freefall city the bullet had sailed through shortly after being fired. The city owned no wheeling towns. Its towers and houses were nodes in a seemingly infinite lattice of rope, and its scuttling citizens were long as spiders, their bones fragile as glass. The bullet passed through the city going hundreds of miles per hour, so the faces and rippling banners of the place were blurred and unidentifiable.
The bullet shot past farms and forests that hung in the air like green galaxies. In places the entire sky was alive with spring colors as distant suns lit the delicate leaves of billions of independently floating plants, each one clinging by its roots to a grain of dirt or drop of water. The air here was heady with oxygen and, for the humans who tended the farms, redolent with the perfume of growing things.
In contrast, the vast expanses of winter that opened up ahead of the bullet were clear as crystal. Falling into them was like penetrating a sphere of purest rainwater, a deep fathomless blueness wherein the bullet cooled and shrank in on itself just a little. It threaded through schools of heavily feathered, blind fish and past the nearly identical birds that fed off them. It entered a realm of sky-spanning ice arches, a froth of frozen water whose curving bubbles were tens of miles on a side. Black gaps pierced their sides. Snow nestled in the elbows of icicles longer than Rush's shadow. Here the air was dense, exhausted of oxygen as well as heat. The bullet slowed and nearly came to a halt as it reached the farther edge of this shattered cathedral of ice.