Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder

Author:Karl Schroeder [Schroeder, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: SteamPunk, Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Space Opera
ISBN: 9780765315458
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2008-08-04T22:00:00+00:00

11

DAWN FOUND THE city transformed. Antaea couldn’t believe what she saw from the spinning windows of the circus dormitory; she went outside and stood in the air, and it was still there.

Work gangs coordinated by Chaison’s lieutenants had spent the previous day and all of last night sawing Stonecloud apart. Now the city was in pieces, each a neighborhood a thousand or more feet across comprised of green forest, gray stone, and flashing glass. Straining jets and propellers on all manner of tugs, taxis, trucks, and buses struggled to rearrange the blocks in a new order. Stonecloud had been a bowl-shaped city before, in keeping with the theatrical style of architecture. Now that bowl was exploded, transforming over the hours into an expanding, medusa-shaped cloud. Its farthest reaches were made up of bikes, catamarans, market craft, and anything else that had its own engine; inside this were individual buildings, then whole blocks, and at the center of it all the majestically turning town-wheels. These at first appeared untouched. As Antaea looked more closely, she realized they had slowed their rotation. Over the hours they slowly edged to a stop, and then thousands of odd objects, never made for freefall or intended to be tied down, rose up and drifted into a cloud in the wheels’ centers. Chairs, ornamental pots, statues, bookcases, books, and whole wardrobes full of clothing lofted out of windows and doors, exhaled into the air like mist in winter.

“That’s deliberate,” said Chaison when he returned from the planning session he’d attended before daybreak. He sat on her bike in some bizarre circus outfit/dress uniform they’d cobbled together for him (“it’s not meant to be pretty, just visible,” he’d said with a grimace) and pointed to different features of the shattered city with the rifle he held.

“The airspace inside the town-wheels is full of hazards to stop bikes or missiles—or battleshops—getting in there. If they’re going to fire upon the city, they’ll have to do so from outside.”

“And this…obscene destruction?”

“Move maneuverable items to the periphery. A cloud formation to make it hard for them to surround us. Most delicate objects at the center.” He pointed again. “Semaphore stations to relay orders from the command center. I’m going there now, I came to pick you up.”

She jumped and he grabbed her ankle, lowering her into the seat behind him. They shot into a chaotic airspace filled with contrails, unattached ropes, families pushing huge nets containing their worldly possessions; under, over, and around zipping bikes, undulant dolphins, and bewildered, winged people. Shafts of sunlight lit the turbulent flocks unpredictably as forests and buildings drifted about.

A shrill siren cut the air and vessels and people darted away from something happening just ahead. Chaison brought the bike to a stop, turning it so she could watch.

They hovered near what had once been a beautiful park. Spherical, its outer shell a delicate filigree of intertwined tree limbs, it held a water drop two hundred feet across—a small lake. The park had been peeled like an orange, and the work gang who had done that work were fleeing.

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