Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

'Are you all right?' asked the emissary. Behind it, the oak writhed as lines of light began shooting along its trunk. The light became blinding and with it came an overwhelming roar of noise. Keir crouched, shielding his face with one hand, but the metal cheetah curled its own head around to put its nose an inch from his.

'Where are we?' it said.

Keir began to laugh hysterically. 'I remember,' he said. 'They could never figure it out. They built scientists-- made their own Renaissance to reinvent physics like we did. But they couldn't figure it out.'

The cheetah blinked. 'And you did?'

'Quantum gravity,' he babbled. 'The final theory. It's a formal system. Every time they tried to rediscover the science, they were led right back to it. Of course. It's what all obvious experiments lead to. But it's a formal system!' He'd begun to laugh uncontrollably. Then he stood and staggered away from the cheetah and the tree.

'Where are you going?' asked the cat.

Keir turned once and grinned. He was walking away from the dragonfly; he'd commanded it to stay where it was. 'I can't do what I need to here,' he said. 'And there's no time. Talk to them.' He waved at the other paths, where a babble of voices and running feet could now be heard. 'Make a treaty. You've only got a few hours; waste no time.' Then he'd turned and disappeared into the darkness.

The dragonfly settled onto the loam and watched as Antaea Argyre peered fearfully out from behind the trunk of a tree.

Keir ended the recording and, back now in the sunlit conference room, watched as Maerta and the others sat for a while in stunned silence.

At last Maerta looked up. 'What did you mean? That our physics is a formal system?'

He shrugged. 'Every formal language, like say, mathematics, has a fatal flaw: It's always possible to write self-contradictory statements in it. Like 'X equals not-X.' About a year ago I realized that if you could do that in math, you could do it in quantum gravity. But here's the thing: Every statement in QG corresponds to a real phenomenon. So what would happen if I found a self-contradictory formulation in QG, and then made it?'

Maerta blinked at him. 'Made it?'

'Built a machine to create the phenomenon described in that statement. A particle that simultaneously existed and didn't exist, for instance. Negative and positive charge in one, gravity and nongravity.'

'You did it.'

He nodded. 'In secret. I'd planned it out, as the sort of mad-scientist experiment from an ancient movie; but I was afraid to actually do it, until the oak came to me. The night it told me there was a spy among us, I packed up a fab unit and a small Edisonian and went into the city alone, and I did the experiment. And then I knew how Candesce's field works, and I built a tiny version of it.'

'And you put it inside one of your dragonflies.'

He nodded. 'And then I planned my own de-indexing, because the oak had showed me that scry was compromised. Something was on to us, and whatever it was could move at any moment.' He looked down at the table. 'I was afraid we were all about to be netted like fish and our minds taken apart. I was afraid to run, or say anything, because we were being watched. So I had to make sure we weren't seen as a threat.'

No one said anything. After a while, Keir became aware of a distant rumbling. He knew the sound that avalanches made, had lived with them for many months. This was different.

He stood up and went to the window. The sky was full of pops and brief sheets of light. The battle was getting closer.

'What now?' asked Maerta.

With his dragonflies and his own eyes, he could see them and himself looking at them, could see his cheekbones revealed and shaded by the patter of dozens of faraway nuclear blasts.

'I need our biggest fab and our best Edisonian,' he said. 'And I need something else, too, that might be harder to retrieve.'

He put his forehead to the window so he could see down the dizzying slope of Aethyr's skin, to where coiling cloud and the mottled green of landforms lay half-veiled by distance. 'I need to retrieve a machine,' he said, 'from the plain where Leal Maspeth and the Home Guard crashed.'

23

EVERYBODY KNEW, IN an abstract sort of way, that if the legendary Virga Home Guard did exist, they must have ships. Yet even Antaea, who knew the Guard intimately, found herself silent in the face of the truth.

Inshiri Ferance's alliance had its own armada, and it might have been the biggest of its kind ever assembled. Antaea had braced herself in a gunnery port and, with wind whipping past her and sky above, below and to both sides, watched the muster of a thousand battleships. They filled the sky like swarming insects, each surrounded by a buzzing retinue of smaller craft. Contrails confused the view. Yet behind them, something impossible was looming.

The First Line fleet was in cube formation. From here, many miles away, it appeared as a solid thing, a blued- out silhouette moving behind a veil of pale sky. Clouds and cities drifted in front of it. There was no way to distinguish individual ships in that mass, but she knew some were the size of Rush's town wheels.

This was not the flagship of Inshiri's fleet. Ferance would never have been so stupid as to ride in that big a target. Instead, she had commandeered the Thistle, the fastest courier-class sloop she could find, a powder-blue needle bristling with engines. Around the Thistle flew a swarm of armored bikes, an escort armed with ship-busting missiles and heavy machine guns. Antaea badly wanted to be riding one of those, but Inshiri had forbidden it. She had to keep reminding herself that, vile as Ferance was, her cause was the right one. If it hadn't been, Antaea would cheerfully have killed the woman by now.