Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder Page A

if not practical. What if she…
    He pushed the thought away. Against all expectation he’d been given a chance to return home; there was no use in speculating on what disasters might befall him when he got there.
    Richard groaned and sank to his knees. “This is hell,” he whined. “I need a soft bed.”
    “Rusted iron will have to do,” said Chaison. “Be glad that you have that to lie on.”
    “I don’t trust her,” said Darius. “She’s led us further into Falcon, not out of it. And she knows we caused the outage! How do you know she’s not bringing us to some hall of justice crammed with home guard judges and lawyers and juries?”
    “We don’t,” said Richard from his now prone position. “But the admiral is right. We have no choice but to go with her. She is being very systematic, isn’t she, Fanning?”
    “Yes…” He squinted upward again. “She looks childlike, but it’s a dangerous disguise. Her easy manner through all of this suggests that we’re not the first ones she’s rescued from a tight scrape. That may be her job, in fact.”
    “I still can’t believe she were the one who freed us,” said Darius. “Maybe it was…” He fell silent.
    Chaison thought about it. Who else could have done it? The admiralty?—No, they would never officially sanction an operation like that. And Chaison had been going against direct orders in undertaking his preemptive attack on Falcon. The pilot of Slipstream could not be publicly pleased by Chaison’s gambit, however he might feel privately. But perhaps a cabal of loyal officers…
    He shook his head. The officers most loyal to him were all dead, killed in the savage battle that had ended Falcon’s invasion attempt. He had seen their ships destroyed.
    This train of thought was as depressing as his speculations about Venera. Shifting from foot to foot, he forced himself to concentrate on the here and now. “Antaea wants information,” he said, “but she’s come to us alone and made no attempt to signal anyone else since she found us. As long as she’s unable to compel us to tell what we know, we have a bargaining position: we know exactly what caused the outage, and if Venera returned safely to Rush, we have the means to cause or prevent another one.” Provided Venera hasn’t thought up some other plan involving the key to Candesce. It was the key—an innocuous white wand you could put in a pocket—that had made the outage possible. It had given Chaison’s little fleet access to the interior of Virga’s oldest and most powerful sun, Candesce, which had operated without human intervention for centuries. While the key was in play, another outage was possible. And if Antaea was right about the consequences of even a few hours of defenselessness, Virga itself could be destroyed if Venera chose to use the key again.
    They talked more about what to do—how to sneak back into Slipstream and what to do when they got there—but eventually drifted into silence again. There was too much unsaid between them. There was the pain of long isolation and deprivation, of months living with the near-certainty that they would never see their homes and loved ones again. There was their complete ignorance of conditions back home; what had Antaea meant about “unrest” in Rush? Had any of the ships in Chaison’s expeditionary force returned home safely? Did the people even know that Falcon Formation had tried to attack Slipstream? And if and when they returned, would they be hailed as heroes, or hung as traitors?
    It wasn’t that he was ungrateful at having escaped, Chaison decided as Falcon’s suns began their evening fade; it was that everything in him had been suspended for months, both joys and, it turned out, worries. Both were returning to him now in equal measure, and he was unused to dealing with either. He was in emotional turmoil, and so must Darius and Richard be.
    By evening their gravity began to fail. Unless Antaea ran her jet constantly, air