The Golden Way (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 3) Page 3

“I’d like to talk to him,” said Jaemon.

  “Sure,” said Zang. “I’ll tell Isaac.”

  Jaemon looked thoughtful.

  “What?” said Zang.

  “Nothing,” said Jaemon. “Just trying to figure out how to talk to this guy without Solomon Security around.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Zang said.

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “No reason. General principles. When I ask questions I like to do it with a minimum number of people watching.”

  “Why?” said Zang.

  “Easier to keep my cards close to my chest. Keep what I’m thinking to myself, you know?”

  Zang regarded him thoughtfully.

  “Erdos runs a straight operation,” she said.

  Jaemon said, “Sure. You would know.”

  “But?” said Zang.

  Jaemon grinned.

  “I’ve never gone wrong keeping things to myself.”

  Zang frowned.

  Jaemon looked at Doctor Yaug.

  “You’ve been quiet, Doc,” he said.

  “Watching and learning,” said Yaug.

  “What do you think?” said Jaemon.

  Yaug was still quiet. I’d made his metallic face and hands so that he could more easily participate in nonverbal communication. Now that he had them he seemed even more remote than before. The polished gold mask was serene, distant.

  “Tell me about the Sacred Host,” he said after a moment.

  9.

  “The Sacred Host is the army of the Church,” Zang said.

  “Yes, yes,” said Yaug. “I’m familiar with them. Tell me why they have an office on Solomon.”

  Jaemon and Zang looked at each other.

  “I never thought about it,” said Jaemon. “I guess they have offices everywhere.”

  “They didn’t used to,” said Yaug. “At least, they didn’t have offices aboard Jovian warships.”

  “When was that?” Zang said.

  “Well, it was before Autolycus,” Yaug said.

  “So a hundred years ago,” said Zang.

  “Yes,” said Yaug. “Maybe the practice is common now. Maybe it’s been common for a while. Maybe it doesn’t seem odd to you. It seems odd to me.”

  Jaemon frowned. “Hmm,” he said.

  I said, “The Fabric says it started during the Red Revolution on Mars.”

  “Yeah?” said Zang.

  “Apparently,” I said, “It was an accommodation between the Church and the Consortium. They were allied against the Second Imperium. Several dreadnoughts took station at Mars during the conflict and they served as staging resources for the Host.”

  “Ah,” said Yaug. “I was indisposed at the time.”

  “You mean you were dead,” said Zang.

  “Yes,” said Yaug with a little smile. “That’s what I mean.”

  “Dreadnoughts never carried the Host before then?” said Zang.

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s a Host office in Jupiter House,” said Jaemon.

  “On Mars?” said Yaug. “The Consular Estate?”

  “Right,” said Jaemon.

  “That’s new, too,” said Yaug. “There was no Host office in Jupiter House in my day. The only military presence on the Estate was the Diplomatic Guard.”

  Jaemon frowned.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Now that you bring it up, I’m not sure why they need an office in Jupiter House. Woaradan is just across the bridge.”

  “What does this have to do with our missing artifact?” said Zang.

  “I don’t know,” said Yaug. “Maybe nothing. I’m just curious about the presence of a foreign military aboard a Consortium vessel. A Consortium vessel where a commando raid has lately been executed against a merchant ship.”

  “Commando raid,” said Zang.

  Jaemon looked thoughtful.

  “That’s a pretty good description of what happened to us. Do we know what kind of work this guy—”

  “Jo Jetjirawat,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Jaemon. “What kind of work Jet-man does for the Host? What did he do for Solomon Security?”

  “Special weapons and tactics,” said Zang, frowning.

  “So he’s a commando,” said Jaemon.

  “Working for the Church,” said Yaug.

  We all looked at each other for a while. Jaemon and Zang frowned.

  “Interesting coincidence,” said Jaemon, finally. “What does it mean?”

  “I have no idea,” said Yaug.

  “Let’s ask him,” said Jaemon, pointing at the floating face.

  “I’ll talk to Isaac,” Zang said.

  10.

  “How do we call one?” I said.

  We were floating in the tube outside Kestrel’s gangway watching transit cars skim by at high speed. Angier and Yarrow stood at the entrance to our cargo bay, hands on their sidearms.

  “An empty one will see us,” Zang said.

  Sure enough, an approaching car slid over toward our side of the tube and slowed. It pulled up to the dock where we floated and said, “Need a ride?”

  “Sure do,” said Jaemon.

  “This your ship here? Kestrel?”

  Zang passed the car a Rayleigh glyph. It slid its door open. I could see the car’s seats moving around and reshaping themselves. The interior was all white and silver and pale beige.

  Zang motioned us in. Jaemon went first and I followed. We floated in and grabbed handholds, then pulled ourselves into the seats. They took hold and snugged around us.

  “Where to?” said the car as Zang floated in.

  “History Office,” Jaemon said.

  “The museum?” said the car. “Which side? University Ave or Biru Park?”

  “The Park,” said Zang. She turned to Jaemon, “It’s nicer. Plus the main entrance is on that side.”

  “You got it,” said the car. Its door slid closed and it pulled away from the dock. It accelerated smoothly and slipped into traffic. It seemed magical the way the car instantly found a perfect opening in the flow.

  “First time on Solomon?” said the car.

  “No,” said Jaemon, just as I said “Yes.”

  “Come on,” said Zang, “You know me.”

  “Sure,” said the car. “Just making polite conversation, you know?”

  Zang turned to me.

  “I lived here most of my life,” she said, “If there’s anything you want to know, just ask.”

  “You’ve been away a couple of years, Ma’am,” said the car.

  “Yes,” said Zang. “I have.”

  There was a hint of warning in her tone. The car let the subject drop.

  I craned my neck, looking out through the car’s transparent hull. The positions of other cars around us were so steady that we might have been sitting still except for the piers and the moored spacecraft that streamed by us in the background. Far to our right Solomon’s hull loomed, a great golden ball rotating ponderously. Fine black lines traced patterns on his surface, accentuating his spherical shape.

  “Where are the torches?” I said.

  “Out at the ends of the main spine,” said the car. “You can’t see them when they’re not firing.”

  “That way,” said Zang, pointing to our left, along the main spine away from the hull. “The south torch is that way.”

  The car was right. I couldn’t see the torch. There was nothing that direction but the spine, its wrapping of transit tubes, and piers with spacecraft moored to them like exotic ornaments dangling from a tree. In the uttermost distance endless stars and galaxies stared at us from the depths of the universe.

  We approached the main spine and the transit tube curved to our right. The curve was gentle, but physics is inexorable. The weight of centripetal force began to descend on us and the car slid up the wall of the tube with its fellows, all of them rotating to keep their bottom decks aligned with the tube wall. For a long moment we were mashed harder and harder into our seats.

 
Then the weight lifted. We were on the main drive spine and floating again. Solomon’s golden ball was before us.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “He’s something to see, isn’t he?” said Zang.

  And he was. The hull, a sphere ten kilometers across, occupied the center of the sky, turning slowly. Our transit tube shrank to a point in front of us, tracing a straight path along the spine. Black longitudes radiated over the curved golden surface where the spine pierced Solomon’s hull. The lines were transport rails. I could see docked spacecraft being moved along them to or from Solomon’s equatorial piers. One of them was a torch like Kestrel, nearly two thousand meters long. It looked like a twig with one end glued to a black line on Solomon’s skin.

  Behind the golden ball a vast celestial scissors quartered the sky. One blade was the Milky Way, black and white and ragged and ancient. The other was the Golden Way, a yellow mist crossing the Milky Way at an acute angle. The Milky Way was our galaxy, the collection of a hundred billion stars that our solar system calls home. The Golden Way was newer, an artifact formed of a million inhabited asteroids reflecting the sun’s light from their shield envelopes. The Golden Way was a speck compared to the immensity of the galaxy, but it didn’t look that way. From where we sat it looked just as big. Solomon’s golden hull seemed to be of a piece with it, as if the honey-colored fog of the Way had somehow condensed into an enormous shiny droplet.

  Solomon’s main access port, a circular opening two kilometers across, grew nearer and larger. Our car plunged straight into the protective membrane and on through. The car slid to the side of the transit tube and through a join that I never saw. Then we were in another tube. It led us away from the ship’s bustling Axis District and into a throughway that ran along the inside of the hull.

  Once in the new tube we seemed again to be sitting still. The new school of cars moved together as precisely as the previous one had. The walls of the throughway were dark yellow and smooth, amplifying the illusion of motionlessness. We could see neighboring tubes, though, and cars in them that whipped past us the other direction at startling speed. Columns of light pierced the perpetual dusk of the throughway from top to bottom in an endless row, one after another. They swelled swiftly before us and were past in an instant. I turned to look behind us, trying to see what they were. They had name glyphs floating in them: “Sato Place,” “Wright Station,” “Abercrombie.” I saw a car slow and enter one. The car began to rise toward the ceiling of the throughway.

  “Oh,” I said. “I see. They’re lifts.”

  Zang turned to look back, following my gaze.

  “You mean the station lifts,” she said.

  “I guess I do,” I said.

  “Ours is coming up,” she said.

  “Here it is,” said the car. “Biru Park.”

  The car began to slow. The other cars around it were magically out of the way and suddenly whipping past us. We came to a halt and then began to rise.

  “How do you do that?” I said.

  “What?” said the car.

  “Move in and out of traffic like that, with never a collision.”

  “Collision?” said the car. “Makers forbid. We wouldn’t do that. None of us would.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “Easiest thing in the world,” said the car. “Follow the tubes. Ride the magnets. You can all feel each other, coming and going, closer and farther. You just fit into the flow, you know?”

  I shook my head.

  “It must be an innate talent,” I said.

  “I guess,” said the car. “How do you folks keep track of all those limbs while you’re drifting around a promenade, all kinds of different people and things around you, coming and going, up and down, bending and turning, walking and jumping...how come you don’t smash into each other?”

  “Oh that’s easy,” I said.

  “Innate talent, I guess,” said the car.

  “I guess,” I said.

  Jaemon grinned at me.

  “Anyway,” said the car. “This is your stop.”

  It rose slowly next to a dock and halted, bobbing slightly, as if floating on water. There were people walking to and fro along the dock, none of them bumping into each other. I stood tentatively, feeling the spin gravity as the car slid back its door. Zang stepped out of the car onto the dock and bounced slowly a few times in place, hands out to the side for balance.

  “Feels good to have some gravity again,” she said.

  I stepped out next to her cautiously, instructing my balance routines to adjust. Jaemon followed me, looking a little wobbly.

  “Want me to wait for you?” said the car.

  “Nah, we’re good,” said Jaemon. “We’ll be here a while.”

  “Okay,” said the car. “Here’s my glyph in case you need me later.”

  The car’s glyph floated toward us. I touched it with my attention and filed it.

  “We’ll give it to Kestrel,” said Jaemon. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you,” said the car, and it sank out of sight.

  Biru Park Station was long and high, with several lanes and levels of docks for transit cars. People in all their variety moved purposefully along them. Lifts and ramps led down to ground level. I could see buildings and trees outside the station. Cars rose and fell on all sides, bringing visitors, discharging them, sinking away out of sight into the transit network below.

  Most of the people around us were roughly humanoid. A lot were humans or mechs. I saw several Ionians with their human shapes and their colorful metallic skin. Jaemon brushed at his face as a Tumbolian swarm passed us and a couple of its insect-like units wandered into his personal space. He and the Tumbolian exchanged polite glyphs of apology.

  Zang said, “This way,” and started down a ramp.

  11.

  We emerged from Biru Park Station onto a wide plaza. A row of fountains bubbled in front of us. A broad lane meandered past the plaza ahead, separating us from a line of tall, leafy trees. Beyond the trees stood rows of buildings, and beyond them, Solomon’s patchwork sky.

  “Whoa,” said Jaemon. “The first look always makes me dizzy.”

  “Really?” said Zang. “The sky on Mars made me dizzy.”

  “Hunh,” said Jaemon.

  “That really makes you dizzy?” said Zang.

  She pointed up. Solomon’s ground rose in the distance and folded over, becoming the vault of the sky.

  “It really does,” said Jaemon. He winced and looked at the ground.

  “Hunh,” said Zang. “I thought Mars made me dizzy because it was empty overhead.”

  “Maybe it did,” Jaemon said. “Maybe it’s all in what you’re used to.”

  “Maybe so,” said Zang.

  We were on the interior surface of a sphere. Solomon’s rotation gave us nearly half a G of spin gravity. Looking straight up we could see the distant rooftops of neighborhoods on the other side of the sphere. They were organized into terraced bands, with boundaries on lines of latitude.

  “What happens when Solomon fires his torches?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Zang said. “His orbit changes.”

  “But that means acceleration. Won’t that change the direction of gravity? Wouldn’t things fall sideways?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” she said. “The districts tilt.”

  I stared at her, then up at the spherical city that surrounded me.

  “That seems...unlikely,” I said.

  “You thought it was clever on Angel of Cygnus,” she said.

  I thought about it. She was right. Angel of Cygnus was a starship we had visited. She had habitats in rings. The rings rotated to provide simulated gravity, just like Solomon. The habitats were gimbaled so that when she fired her torches they could tilt to adapt to the change in gravity’s direction.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s the same principle. But Angel’s habitats were nowhere near this big.”

  She shrugged.

  “I guess
people have had a few thousand years to get better at building.”

  “I’m trying to imagine whole city blocks tilting,” I said, tipping my head back to look at the sky.

  “Maybe the Captain-General will order a course change while we’re here,” Zang said. “Then you won’t have to imagine it. You can see it for yourself.”

  “What does it look like?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Pretty much the way it looks right now, except the districts tilt. The terrace walls get taller.”

  “That would be something to see,” said Jaemon. He ventured a cautious glance upward.

  Zang looked at him.

  “You guys are funny,” she said. “It really isn’t a big deal.”

  “If you say so,” said Jaemon.

  Dividing the sky between our side and the other side of the city, the Axis District ran straight through Solomon from his north pole to his south, a kilometer-thick cylinder of windows and glyphic displays and the bright sun lamps that gave Solomon his day and night. The Axis District was full of hotels and shops and cafes and free of spin gravity. It was a haven for visitors who were more comfortable weightless. Our Lambertan guests were probably already exploring it.

  “You all right to go on?” Zang said.

  “Sure,” Jaemon said. “Where’s the History Office?”

  “Other side of the park.”

  Zang pointed straight ahead at the row of trees. Pedestrians and open ground cars moseyed along the lane in front of us. Zang marched straight into traffic between them. Jaemon and I followed more cautiously. Somehow, our careful maneuvering seemed to cause more trouble than Zang’s confident straight-ahead march. Pedestrians dodged us and excused themselves. One Ionian with shiny black skin and red eyes stopped still and looked us up and down before stepping around and moving on. Cars swerved or slowed. A group of wooden-skinned Kenthians muttered to each other as Jaemon and I hurried past their stopped vehicle.

  “Keep up, guys,” said Zang, tapping her foot as she waited for us on the edge of the park.

  A little to our left was a tall white statue of Ilona Biru, rendered in an idealized style. She looked classically Jovian, with narrow features, an aquiline nose, and long, pointed ears. Her blank white eyes made me think of Doctor Yaug. She was depicted raising an unfurled scroll that represented the Instrument of Confederation.