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.

But as it began a slow tumble and return to the blue intricacies behind it, an errant beam of light from Candesce welled up from below. The glow heated the air behind the bullet just enough to make a sigh that welled out and pushed it away. Again it tumbled into dark emptiness.

Winter did not rule all the empty spaces of Virga. There were columns of warm air hundreds of miles long that rose up from the Sun of Suns. Before they cooled enough for their water to condense as clouds, they were transparent, and Candesce's light followed them up, sometimes penetrating all the way to Virga's skin. The bullet strayed into one such column and changed course, rising now and slowly circumnavigating the world.

It was the passage of an iceberg that galvanized the bullet into motion again. An eddy of the passing monster put a sustained wind at its back and soon the bullet was cruising along at a respectable * thirty miles an hour. On the crest of this wavefront it entered a dense forest that had supersaturated itself with oxygen. It narrowly j missed a hundred or so of the long spiderweb filaments of trunk and branch whose weave made up the forest. But then it happened: the bullet rapped a solitary, tumbling stone a few miles in and some sparks swirled after it. One spark touched a dry leaf that had been I circulating in the shadowed interior of the forest for ten years. The leaf turned into a small sphere of flame, then the other leaves floating nearby lit, and then a few nearby trees.

An expanding sphere of fire pushed the bullet faster and faster. Mile after mile the storm of flame pushed through the supercharged air, in seconds consuming threadlike trees bigger than towns. The forest transformed itself into a fireball bright as any sun in Virga. When it burned out its dense core of ashes and smoke would contain a sargasso—a volume of space sheltered from the wind by leagues of charred branch and root, where no light nor oxygen could be found.

The bullet was indifferent to this fate. It rode the explosion all the way out of the forest. When it left the roaring universe of flame it was once again speeding at nearly a mile a second. Several minutes later it entered the precincts of Aerie. It flashed past the towns and outrider stations of Slipstream. It narrowed its focus to a quartet of towns in the formation known as Rush. It lined up on a single window in the glittering wheel of the Admiralty.

It stopped dead in Venera Farming's jaw. Some blood tried to continue on, but that only made it a few meters farther. And while the doctors did dig it out of Venera's throat, it had remained in the Admiralty ever since.

Until now. As Venera slept uneasily and dreamed her way back down the long trajectory of the projectile, it bumped slowly back and forth inside the lacquer box in her luggage where she kept it. Its journey was not over yet.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ROOK'S HANGAR was a deep pie-shaped chamber taking up one-third of the length of the ship. Most of the space was bikes, all lashed to the walls like somnolent bees in a hive; but two big cutters made the stern area into a well of shadows, each boat a forty-footer armed to the teeth. Hayden eyed these as he slammed an access panel on the bike Venera Fanning had brought for him. The cutters were weapons, of course, and so distasteful to him; but they were also ships, and he couldn't help wondering how fast they were and how maneuverable they'd be to steer.

The bike was ready. He gave it one last appraising look.This wasn't his bike, but it was a racer, complete with two detachable sidecars and a long spool of grounding thread for those situations where you outran your own rate of static charge drain.

Hayden had been staying up late so as to be awake during nightwatch—there were fewer people around—so he was startled when Martor's min face popped over the bike's small horizon like some parody of the sun. "Watcha doin?" said the gopher in his usual challenging way.

"Shouldn't you be asleep?" He undipped the bike from its dry-dock clamps and hefted it, judging its mass. There were traces here and there of red paint, but sometime very recently it had been redone a glossy black. He didn't mind that.

"Could say the same about you." Martor hand-walked around the clamps to look at what Hayden was doing. As he did the wind keened particularly loudly past the ship's outer hatches. Martor jerked his head in that direction.

"Still worried about winter? It's a bit late for that," Hayden pointed out. "We've been in it for days."

"You're not taking that out in it?" Martor watched in distress as Hayden dragged the racer in the direction of the forward bike hatch. "Ain't it'll freeze you like a block of ice?"

"It's not that cold." The bike started to drift as they passed the center of the chamber so Martor steadied it with his own mass. "Clouds insulate the air," said Hayden. "So it only gets so cold. Usually doesn't even get down to freezing, most places. Hey, why don't you come along for the ride? I'm just taking her out for a practice run."

Martor snatched his hands back from the bike. "You crazy? I'm not going out there."