He sighed. "Have you ever worn a sargasso suit?"
"Have you?"
One of the little figures out there was waving its lantern in a strange pattern. The others were clustered around a dark opening in me side of the ship. The craft was smaller than the Rook, and unornamented; but the lines seemed archaic, even to Venera's untrained eye. "What's he doing?" She pointed.
"Signaling the all-clear. Apparently Anetene decided the sargasso was a big enough booby trap all by itself." The little figures began disappearing one by one into the dark hatch. little glints of light on the hull revealed portholes hidden in shadow around the curve of the ship.
"It'll be there," she said confidently. Either that, or she'd have to find a new home. Rush would no longer be a suitable dwelling once Falcon Formation took over.
Venera tried to pretend that this would be a there matter of convenience. But she kept imagining herself returning to her father's court with her exiled husband. They would eat him alive, those back-biting courtiers, the kohl-painted lathes with their poisoned hairpins, the gimlet-eyed men with their ready poniards. Chaison would be used as sport by the jaded or the marginalized, and he would have no one to defend him.
It would surely be a personal humiliation for her, if he were killed.
"Well, if it's safe, let's go men," she said, but a commotion from the chart room distracted Chaison. Venera scowled at him as he turned away.
"It's Gridde!" Travis was waving frantically at the admiral. "He's collapsed."
Chaison dove for the doorway. "Was it bad air?"
"I don't think so. Exhaustion, more like."
Venera followed the whole bridge staff back to the map room. This was a tiresome interruption, but she had to be supportive of her husband. She affected a look of concern as she entered the room. The air in here was close, stinking, but then so was the rest of the ship by now. Gridde hung limply in midair, tendrils of white hair haloing his head.
"I got you there," he whispered as Chaison moved to hold him by the shoulders. The old man's face quirked into a half-smile, though his eyes were half-closed. "Rest now."
"Slipstream will survive, because of you," said Chaison.
Gridde's head rose and his eyes focused on the admiral. He managed a weak laugh. "Don't give me platitudes, boy. Just make sure those damn fools in the academy hear about this. I proved it." He began to gasp. "Old ways—better than—gel charts…"
"Get the surgeon!" cried Chaison, but it was too late. Gridde shook and sighed, and then went still.
Some of the bridge staff began to weep. Venera crossed her arms impatiently, but there was nothing she could do but wait. The brief agony of military grief would burn itself out in a few minutes and then everyone would get back to work.
They had come too far to let one more death stop them now.
HER BREATH AND the suit pumps roared in Venera's ears. Every few minutes a loud bell sounded and she had to reach down to wind the clockwork mechanism drat ran the pumps. She could barely see out the brass helmet's little window. The unfamiliar oilcloth sack of the suit felt like prison walls against her skin, its chafing creating a subliminal anxiety that fed back with weightlessness and the dark to make her jaw throb.
She didn't care. Venera was in a state of rapture, gazing into the most wondrous place she had ever seen.
The others' bull's-eye lanterns sent visible shafts of blue light up and down, nicking from side to side—each darting motion lifting a cascade of sparkling reflections and refractions from the contents of Anetene's treasure trove.
Venera had seen clouds rub past one another and throw up a cyclone; at either end these looked like tubes full of turbulent snatches of vapor. The interior of the treasure ship was like that—except that here, it wasn't clouds that formed the spiral down which she gazed. It was jewelry, gold coin, faience, and ivory figurines by the thousand.
The nets that had once held the treasure to the walls had decayed over the centuries, and so every week or two a gem or coin would disengage from its neighbors and drift into the ship's central space. Once there, it would be caught up in the almost imperceptible rotation in which everything inside Virga participated. Something to do with orbits and tides, that was all she knew of mat. But the vortex had grown and remained stable for centuries, the drift of its objects slower man a minute hand but inexorable. The spiral pattern, so delicate, was now being erased by the blundering passage of treasure seekers.
For the moment, though, garnets, emeralds, and rubies made in the fires of Candesce trailed in lines and arcs through the air. Here and there gleamed dry-amber from sargassos on the other side of the world; chains of diamond like runnels of light flashed in her lantern's beam. The currency of two dozen nations sat fixed in air as though in solid glass (the stamped profiles of pilots and kings layered into shadow like a history lesson) among clouds of platinum and buttons of silver. Beneath the ragged netting the hull was still plated with paintings, skyscapes half-covering formal portraits whose eyes awoke like a sleeping ghost's when her light touched them. One painting, only one, had broken free, and so it was that at the center of the cyclone stood a tall stern man in dark dress, his black eyes those of a contemptuous father gazing accusingly at the looters. Only the gilt frame surrounding him spoiled the illusion of reality. There was a fresh bullet hole in his chest, put there by the first man of Slipstream to enter the ship.
They'd be joking about that startled shot for weeks, she was sure.
Chaison had swam indifferently through the shining constellations and disappeared into the ship's bridge. Venera followed, not without plucking a few choice items from the air on the way.
Chaison's hand-light floated free in the air, slowly turning to illuminate the fixtures of the old-style, cramped bridge. Venera kept expecting to see skeletons, but there was no evidence of violence here; apparently Anetene had been compulsively neat. In the center of the room was a chart pedestal, and clipped to the top of this was an ivory box, its sides inlaid with fantastical scenes out of mythology: men and women under gravity, riding beasts she remembered were called horses. Chaison's hand hovered over the lid of the box.
"Oh, just open it!" Of course he couldn't hear her; even to herself, Venera's voice sounded muffled in the suit. She bounced over to grab the box just as Chaison reached down and flipped back the lid. both of their lanterns lit the contents through the blue air.
The object was simple, a white cylinder a little longer than her hand with a single black band around its center, and a loop for grasping at one end. It was made of some translucent crystal that made it gather the light mistily. Chaison hesitated again, then grasped the handle and pulled it out.
He leaned his helmet against hers. "The key to Candesce," she heard, the distorted words barely audible through the metal. "Just as the old books described."
"Let's hope it works," she said.
"Candesce still works. Why shouldn't this?" He put it back in the case and closed it. Then he hung there in the air for a while, head down, as if praying.
Puzzled, Venera touched her helmet to his again. "What's wrong?"
Did she imagine the sigh or was it real? "I'm just trying to figure out what to do next," he said. "The Gehellens will be circling Leaf's Choir waiting for us to come out. How are we going to get to Candesce?"
"You're not one to live in the moment, are you?" she said. It was true she hadn't thought that far ahead, herself. Maybe she should have—-for he was right, this was a problem.
A wide moat of empty air lay between the principalities of Candesce and the Sun of Suns itself. Venera knew they would have to cross two or three hundred miles of open space to reach the ancient sun. Candesce was so hot that no clouds could persist in this zone, and no living thing nor habitation within a hundred miles. As the battered ships of the expeditionary force crossed this span they would be easy targets for the Gehellen navy.