Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

Lavin believed in were based on those ancient scriptures, and the stories that surrounded them. Was Galas right? Were they all lies too?

The world spun around him in a particularly savage gyre, and Lavin’s gorge rose. It wasn’t just him, though—men were shouting and running. He forced himself to sit up, and observed green foliage moving past the open hatchways of the moon. Crowds of men had begun to cluster there.

One of his commanders hurried over. “We’re coming down, sir. There are some horsemen and the bast creatures on the ground below.”

“All right.” He took several deep breaths to quiet his stomach. “Bring them to me before they speak to anyone else.”

The moon took ten minutes to drop the last few meters, and it didn’t actually touch the ground. From his seated position Lavin saw a long grey metal ramp extend out and down into the darkness of the moon’s shadow. Horsemen began rattling up the ramp. He saw some men with stretchers carrying bloodied white forms—two of the basts had been injured somehow. Despite himself he smiled grimly at that. So they could be hurt after all.

The moment the last horse stepped into the cavernous space of the moon, the ramp began to retract and the ground dropped away. The Winds were punctual, it seemed.

The leader of the horsemen had dismounted and was walking over. He was flushed with excitement.

“Sir! They would not let us bring the bodies aboard sir. I’ve left a guard with her, but brought you—”

“Her?” He stood up, leaning on the cane Hesty had had made for him. “The queen? Is she with you?”

“No, sir. That’s what I’m saying. The Winds allow only the living aboard these moons.”

The sergeant’s face seemed to recede. A chaotic gabble of sound filled Lavin’s ears. He felt someone take him by the shoulders; people were shouting. They lowered him into a camp chair.

“Only the living… She is…”

“She is dead, sir. The queen is dead. It was a stray shot, accidental. We were trying to bring down her horse—I had given orders that no one should shoot above its legs, but a shot went wild and she was leaning, sir…”

“I, I see.”

“I have left an honour guard with them, and sent two men to fetch her royal guard from the palace.”

A spark of hope made Lavin look up. “What proof do you have that this was the queen?”

“Her rings of office, sir.” The sergeant withdrew a square of cloth from a belt pouch, and opened it to reveal familiar circles of gold. “It is she.”

He stared at the rings. They looked so unnatural, alone in that square of black.

“Sir?”

True, she had not worn them when they first made love, in that inn near the academy. It was only later that he saw them, when he saw her in regal glory on the throne, and she recognized him and sent him her most secret of smiles—waggling her fingers slightly as she raised her hand for him to kiss it.

“Sir?”

The commander took the sergeant’s arm and muttered something. They moved aside, talking in low tones.

She had subtly taunted him on that day, showing off her new position; but he knew it was only that she was proud and surprised at where she was. Her father slunk in the shadows, deposed by an act of the desals, and at that moment Galas had believed she could do anything. So had Lavin, and he had trusted that they would be together again, somehow.

“I must go to her,” he said. He reeled to his feet. “Put us down. I must attend her.”

“Sir, the Winds say we must continue. We failed to capture Armiger. They say to continue the march to the Titan’s Gates.”

He cursed savagely, and stalked toward the pillar of fire. His men silently parted before him. Dimly he wondered at this. Had they known all along that he loved her? They stood with heads bowed; none would meet his eye. They had known he loved her and yet they still fought for him? It couldn’t be.

He stopped, gasping, two meters from the blazing swans. “Turn us around!” he commanded. “Put us down!”

There was no answer.

“Do as I say! The queen needs me!”

“We have other concerns,” said the crystalline voice of the pillar.

“Please.” He found it hard to speak past the savage pain in his chest. “Let me go to her.”

“No. We have a schedule to meet. Your queen is not important.”

He froze. Suddenly he felt all eyes on him. Should he shout the fury he felt now, with his army watching? What would they do if they realized that he, and they, were prisoners of the Winds, pawns in some game of theirs that had nothing to do with Iapysia, or humanity at all?

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was the priest, his face grim, a message of caution in his eyes.

Deliberately, jaw clenched, Lavin bowed to the flame. “I understand,” he said. “You are correct, of course.”

Walking away was somehow easy. He moved as if weightless, bobbing along. People were speaking to him, but their words made no sense. Light and shape registered, but none of it had any meaning. She was dead, and it was his fault, as surely as if he had shot her himself. This moment had haunted his dreams for months, and he had steeled himself every morning to deny it, using the force of his will to command himself, his men, the world and Winds to preserve her. Just yesterday he had awoken sure that she was alive and free, and his heart had lofted like a swallow, serene and happy. But that was gone now, and he would never feel again.

Gradually the hands fell away, the voices receded. He found himself standing near one of the giant hatchways. Cold air moved across his face, but it didn’t revive him. It had the feel of death to it. Far below he could see patches of snow, bare trees. No one should ever die in winter, he had always felt. And now she was that cold, limbs frozen. He should be with her, arms around her to keep her warm.

Lavin walked to the edge of the opening. Someone shouted his name. He heard it like a curse.

He decided to let himself fall, and teetered for a moment on the edge. He could just close his eyes, and let it happen. It would be a relief, after holding himself up for so long.

Lavin turned, and dropped to his knees facing away from the hatchway.

No. He didn’t deserve such an easy escape.

Sunk in misery, he hung his head and in full view of his army, wept.

40

Sixteen battleships from the Archipelagic fleet were scattered like jewels across the velvet of space near Ventus’ trailing trojan point. They kept the regulation two hundred kilometers distance from one another, but to the Desert Voice, watching from the window of a cutter approaching the flagship, they seemed very close. Each was the size of a mountain, and harnessed energies capable of reducing the surface of Ventus to char. The Voice had a good grasp of the scale of things here, and knew that even a thousand such ships could not boil the rock of Ventus and Diadem down to the mantle, unless they spent decades nudging asteroids and comets into a collision-course with it. And that crude attack was bound to eject colossal amounts of potentially infected debris into stellar orbit, which could hide the escape of one or more of the Winds’ ships now being built on the moon.

In all the boiled magma seas the navy proposed leaving behind here, there was good odds that some tiny pocket of cool stone would preserve grains of mecha, perhaps too small to be seen, that might regrow all of Ventus again, given a thousand or a million years. The corollary to that was that if 3340 had began to infest the Winds with the algorithms of a resurrection seed, then 3340 itself might reappear here, in a millennia or an epoch.

Marya Mounce had told the Voice that all of Ventus had come from a package of nanotech assembler seeds massing less than twenty kilos. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Armiger, so much more complex a being than the Winds, had the potential to regrow from himself a god.

The cutter docked gently with the side of the flagship. For a moment the Voice felt a pulse of empathy with the ship—she knew what docking felt like to a starship. Then the spell was broken as the door before her slid open, and a uniformed human glided in.

The man led her past steel bulkhead doors as thick as she was tall, and into the narrow buttressed interior of the battleship. There were no straight lines here, nor any corridor longer than ten meters. Everything was organized in tight armored cells, each with its own power supply and life support. To kill the crew of a ship like this, you had to literally batter it to pieces. The Voice was awed by the strength of the vessel; she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have it as her body.

They passed honeycombed cells full of fluid, where humans wearing inscape gear floated in seeming sleep. The consciousness of these men and women lay outside the ship, in swarms of micro-and macro-missiles, or in system-wide simulations where they targeted and tracked every object bigger than a grapefruit.

Her guide left her at another set of pneumatic pressure doors. As these valved open, the Voice heard the sounds of angry debate coming from the chamber beyond.

“Look at that pattern! It’s obvious they’re ready to make a run for it.”

“To you, maybe,” said another. She recognized the timbre of the voice as belonging to an artificial intelligence. There were other beings like herself here. The Voice stepped inside.

It was impossible to gauge the dimensions of the chamber, because the walls had disappeared under a holographic projection of the Ventus system. The planets were all pinpointed with arrows, and to her upper left floated a rotating box containing a zoomed-in view of Ventus and Diadem. Dozens of tiny specks representing ships hung in the black space of the main display. Many of them trailed Ventus in its orbit, like a wreath of fog left behind it.

Diadem was almost obscured under a cloud of thousands of specks.

“Ah, our Diadem expert is here,” someone said. The Voice looked behind herself; no one had entered after her.

Fifteen men and women floated under the system display. About half wore uniforms and moved with the cat-like grace of cyborgs. Four more were holograms of generic human beings; each wore a complex heraldic symbol on its chest showing which faction of Archipelagic politics it represented. These were artificial minds whose attitudes and intentions were controlled by the aggregate will of millions or billions of humans back home. True to the principles of Archipelagic politics, however, each perspective on an issue held only one vote. These beings were not as powerful as they might at first seem.

Of the remaining three, one was not known to the Voice. The woman appeared to be a pilot. The last two were Marya and Axel. When she saw them the Voice glided immediately over to them.

“Now that you’re here, we can ask the burning question,” said one of the cyborgs. He wore admirals bars on his shoulders.

“How many copies of you can Diadem produce per day? And how many in total?”

The Voice blinked. “I— I’m not qualified to answer that.”

“Come on now. You were there for