'Stop stalling!' Inshiri drew an intricately etched pistol from inside her jacket.
Venera examined her nails. 'Fine line between stalling and outright rebellion, isn't it?'
'Enough of this petty sniping,' snapped Remoran. 'Mrs. Fanning, we need your cooperation because under our agreement, it will be natives of Virga who make any changes to Candesce's defensive field. Our guests,' he nodded at Holon and his party, 'are here to observe. However, if you should prove uncooperative, we may have to enlist one of them to operate the machinery instead of you. They all know how to do it. Would you prefer we take that route?'
She scowled. 'No.'
'Then take us to the controls.'
'We're already there,' said Venera sullenly. She turned to face the frame on the wall, and spoke several words in what sounded like some foreign language. The area in the rectangle lit up, and then, miraculously, images began to form there.
Jacoby had heard of this sort of technology, but seeing it still took his breath away. The projections of Kaleidogig were laughable next to this. He saw the reaction on Inshiri's face, and knew exactly what she was feeling: hunger for this power to be hers. He was feeling the same thing.
'I can show you how to make the changes,' Venera told Remoran. 'I watched Aubrey Mahallan do it. And one thing I learned was that control mirrors like this one don't discriminate. They'll take the commands of anyone and everyone gazing into them. Which means that they,' she indicated the outsiders, 'had better leave until this is over.'
Remoran gestured to his men. 'If you wouldn't mind?' he asked Holon politely. The outsider glanced at his fellows, and Inshiri Ferance said breezily, 'Oh, it's all right. I'll come with you.' Holon ducked his head politely, and his group, along with Inshiri and her bodyguards, left escorted by several well-armed guardsmen.
Venera frowned gravely at the general secretary of the Virga Home Guard. 'I hope you know what you're doing,' she said. 'Now, you see that clutch of suns there? The knot of six of them?' Jacoby spotted them before Remoran did: six spiky balls, each at least a hundred feet across, all made of what looked like pale stained glass. 'Do you see what they're hiding?'
Remoran peered at the command mirror. 'That black thing?'
'That 'black thing' is it. The great mystery,' she said in a cynical tone. 'Now you're going to concentrate on it, and you will begin to see words and numbers forming around it.'
'Oh! Yes, I see.' Remoran was silent for a long minute, both he and Venera focused on the picture before them. Then he said, 'I see how to do it. We'll start with a little adjustment...'
Jacoby drifted backward.
So, he was expecting something; yet he still jerked in surprise when the screaming started.
* * *
ANTAEA HAD WASTED no time in finding the tanks Jacoby had talked about. Whatever he was playing at, she needed to get it over with right now, and get inside that blockhouse. As she hauled the heavy tarpaulin away from the water containers, though, her hands were shaking.
Since the trial, a night hadn't gone by when she hadn't thought about what it would have been like to have been here, with Telen at her side. Chaison had allowed her to describe that plan in her book, a plan to put more control of humanity's fate in its own hands, by adjusting Candesce's ability to suppress technologies. But this had not been her idea. It had been Telen's.
There was too much misery in the world. There might well be monsters circling Virga, clawing at the walls of the world to get in. Yet, what more misery could they cause than the hereditary nobles, dictators, and disease and famine already did? The educated in Virga knew what they lacked. They knew about machines that could look inside the body and diagnose or fix diseases before you were even aware of them. They knew about miraculous mechanisms, like Keir Chen's Edisonians, that could evolve the design for any device or object you wanted. They also knew that such things were not just forbidden to all who dwelt in Virga; they were impossible.
Antaea and Telen had dreamt together of a different world. A Virga where Artificial Nature remained outside, but scanners and fabs and computers could exist. Telen had understood the nuances of the plan better than Antaea. She'd been the more intellectual of the two. What Antaea understood was the outcome, if it worked.
And that was why she was here, allied with people she hated and feared, and enduring humiliation after humiliation. To see it through, for Telen's sake, and the sake of millions of people she would never meet, and who would probably never know her name. To prove that their lives were not predestined to be miserable and brief.
She hauled on the lid of one of the tanks at the back, and with a reluctant pop, it sprang open. Antaea hunkered down in the space between the tank and the back bulkhead, and looked inside.
The thing was oval and a kind of translucent gray, and filled the large container almost completely. Various ragged patches on its sides suggested that it had been glued in some way to something else, and torn roughly loose at some point.
Tears started in Antaea's eyes. She couldn't breathe; she watched one of her trembling hands reach up as though to touch her hair, and hang in the air, helpless. Her other hand came up, in a warding gesture. She realized with a distant sort of wonder that she was whimpering.
She had seen such a thing as this before. The last time had been in the abandoned city of Serenity, in a black corridor filled with bodies.
The sound of murmuring voices snapped her back to the here and now. It was the pilot and two crewmen who'd been left behind to guard the ship.
They were Inshiri's people. She reached for her pistol. Did they know about this thing?
Probably not. But the heft of the gun in her hand reminded her of something. She held it up in the dim cabin light. This had come from Brink; it had been made for Keir Chen's group by the Edisonians. It seemed to have been designed--no, 'evolved,' apparently--especially to handle monsters like this one. She hadn't fired it since the fight in Serenity, and it still had a full clip of its original ammunition in it.
