"Captain?"Venera put on her best maiden-in-distress act. "What's happening?"

Sembry turned, looking patriarchal and sad. "I'm sorry, dear," he said, "but we can't allow a Slipstream ship to fall into enemy hands. I'm going to have to scuttle the Rook."

She widened her eyes. "But we'll all be killed, won't we?"

He sighed. "That is the nature of military service, I'm afraid."

"How do you scuttle a big ship like this?" she asked.

Sembry showed her the key in his hand. He nodded to a set of metal boxes on the wall behind him. "These charges can only be set off by electrical current," he explained. "This key—"

He blinked in surprise at the pistol Venera had produced from inside her silk pantaloons. Sembry opened his mouth to speak but Venera never learned what he might have said because at that moment she shot him in the forehead.

The rest of the bridge crew was nicely packed together, and consequently picking them off was just as easy.

Twitching bodies and drops of blood caromed around the bridge. Venera ducked through it all and grabbed Sembry, who still had a surprised look on his face.

First order of business, she thought: dispose of this key.

Second: open the doors and let in the pirates.

HAYDEN'S PLAN HAD worked. He and Martor hovered high above the action, at the only spot he'd found where they could see past cloud, contrail, smoke, and darkness. Four icebergs were nosing out of the mist now, trailing fog as they slowly garnered momentum in their long fall toward the Sun of Suns. The pirates had lost their advantage and were in disarray. The battle might have turned.

Something he hadn't anticipated was happening, though: as the icebergs fell, they brought their weather with them. The battle scene was fast disappearing in a vast billow of cloud. Already foghorns were sounding through the dimness as the ships struggled to avoid one another.

Martor was squirming with impatience. "Now back to the Rook!"

Hayden nodded and spun up the engine; but he was uneasy. with the ships separated by mist and mines it could be a long time before the Rook was relieved. He nudged them cautiously through the layers of mist, listening for the sound of gunfire or rockets. Ominously, he heard nothing.

A black hull loomed up suddenly and he had to spin the bike and hit the gas to stop in time. "It's the pirate!" said Martor as he groped for the sword he'd stowed in the sidecar. "Sounds like we've won!"

Hayden eased them around the hull, as quietly as he could. The pirate and the Rook were still bound together with rope, and lights burned in the portholes of both. He could see the gray shapes of men working on the Rook's engines, so the fight must indeed be over.

Martor was nearly bursting. "Come on, what are you waiting for?"

"Shh!" Cutting the engine entirely, Hayden let them drift toward the aft of the ships. The working figures resolved slowly, like images he'd once seen on a photographic emulsion.

"Hey, those aren't—" Quickly Hayden grabbed Martor's arm, putting a finger to his own lips. The boy pulled away.

"But that can't be! We have to do something."

"Martor, they've taken the Rook," Hayden whispered. "We can't go back now."

"But somebody has to protect Aubri! Listen," pleaded Martor, "we can catch a ride on the hull, like tired crows, and when they least expect it—" Hayden shook his head.

Martor tried again. "Then let's hang back in the clouds and follow them… What?"

"We have another ten minutes' worth of gas, tops. If they aren't out there already, the pirates are going to send out bikes any minute now to look for any followers. And you know perfectly well they'll check every inch of the hull, inside and out, for stowaways."

"You want to run back to one of the other ships? No! I'm staying to fight."

"Martor, that's ridiculous. You wouldn't last ten seconds." Let the boy think they were returning to the other ship. By the time he realized that their true destination was the tourist city, it would be too late.

Hayden felt sick at the thought of leaving. Consigning Aubri Mahallan to these monsters was another defeat in a lifetime of defeats. And for some reason, the thought that Admiral Fanning was dead or soon would be, was no consolation. Who cares about him? some unexpected part of him said. Only you, and what do you matter?

"I hate to do it," he said sincerely. "But we've got to—"

He glanced up just in time to see the black cylinder of a rocket, held in Martor's hands, swing toward his face. Then everything burst and went dark.

WHEN VENERA FANNING was a girl she lived in a room with canary-yellow walls. Little trees and airships were painted on them, and her bed had a canopy of dusty velvet and sat against one wall.

At night, if she pressed her ear to the uneven plaster, she could hear the screams of men and women being tortured in her father's dungeon.

She'd been reminded of home many times over the past day. Now, though, the sounds of screaming echoing through the Rook had died out. In the relative silence that followed she could hear someone big approaching through the lamplit dimness—whoever it was was banging back and forth off the walls in a freefall tantrum. As the figure passed the doors to the hangar where Venera was tied up, she saw that it was the pirate captain, Dentius was his name. It was apparent that he wasn't pleased with the results of the torture session.

Venera took the opportunity. "By now," she said loudly, "you'll have noticed that the crew have absolutely no idea where we were going."

Dentius whirled. His already small eyes narrowed further and his lips pulled back from his teeth. Swinging into the hangar he stopped himself by wrapping his legs around Venera's hips. He grabbed her by the throat.

"What do you know?" he shouted. "Tell me or you're next."

"Now, Captain," she croaked, rearing back, "there are easier ways. I'm quite willing to tell you… for a little consideration."

He sneered. Dentius wore the faded and patched uniform of an Aerie ship captain. His face, however, bore no traces of ever having been exposed to sunlight. Like most of his crewmen, his skin was as white as the inside of a potato, except where it was crisscrossed with pink scars. To Venera he looked like some giant, writhing grub stuffed into an officer's jacket.

She knew he was already inclined to treat her differently than the crew, who were mostly crammed into empty rocket racks or water lockers, out of sight and momentarily out of mind. Whether Chaison was with them, or whether he even lived, she had no idea.

Venera and Aubri Mahallan were tied up and on display in the hangar, "as an inspiration to the lads," Dentius had said—though both were still clothed because, he'd said, "there's a fine line between inspired and obsessed." Still, Mahallan was lashed spread-eagled in the center of the space and seemed dazed and despairing. Venera merely had her wrists fastened to a stanchion near the door.

It was clear what the captain had in mind for Mahallan. If he had no clear idea of what to do with Venera, she wanted to provide him with some alternatives before he thought about it too much.

He peered at her for a moment, then sucker-punched her in the kidneys. The pain was astonishing—but through Venera's mind flashed a memory of herself lying on marble tiles, moaning through a ruined mourn and staring at the blood-shrouded shape of a rifle bullet that lay next to her. While nobody came and her fury grew and grew…

Dentius grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. "Tell me!" he roared at her. "Or I'll kill you right now!"

"Th-that's the problem, isn't it?" She managed to smile, though her neck and jaw pulsed with pain and she could feel the hairs in her scalp starting to pull out. "You're going to kill me anyway. So why should I cooperate?"