"This dispute with the pilot of Mavery is a distraction," she said. "It's intended to draw the bulk of our navy away from Rush. Then, these cruisers and that… thing, whatever it is, will invade from Falcon Formation. The Formation must have made a pact of some kind with Mavery."
Carrier nodded. "It seems likely. That is—it seems likely to my lady. The difficulty is going to be convincing your husband and the pilot that the threat is real."
"I'll worry about my husband," she said. "But the pilot… could be a problem."
"I will of course do whatever is in the best interest of the nation," said Carrier. Venera almost laughed.
"It won't come to that," she said. "All right. Go. I need to take these to my husband."
Carrier raised an eyebrow. "You're going to tell him about the organization?"
"It's time he knew we have extra resources," she said with-a shrug. "But I have no intention of revealing our extent just yet… or that it's my organization. Nor will I be telling him about you."
Carrier bowed, and retreated to the servants' door. Venera remained standing in the center of the room for a long time after he left.
A thousand miles away, it would be night right now around her father's sun. Doubtless the pilot of Hale would be sleeping uneasily, as he always did under the wrought-iron canopy of his heavily guarded bed. His royal intuition told him that the governing principle of the world was conspiracy—his subjects were conspiring against him, their farm animals conspired against them, and even the very atoms of the air must have some plan or other. It was inconceivable to him that anyone should act from motives of true loyalty or love and he ran the country accordingly. He had raised his three daughters by this theory. Venera had fully expected that she would be disposed of by being married off to some inbred lout; at sixteen she had taken matters into her own hands and extorted a better match from her father. Her first attempt at blackmail had been wildly successful, and had netted her the man of her choice, a young admiral of powerful Slipstream. Of course, Slipstream was moving away from Hale, rapidly enough that by the time she consolidated her position here she would be no threat to the old man.
She hated it here in Rush, Slipstream's capital. The people were friendly, cordial, and blandly superior. Scheming was not in fashion. The young nobles insulted one another directly by pulling hat-feathers or making outrageous accusations in public. They fought their duels immediately, letting no insult fester for more than a day. Everything political was done in bright halls or council chambers and if there were darker entanglements in the shadows, she couldn't find them. Even now, with war approaching, the Pilot of Slipstream refused to beef up the secret service in any way.
It was intolerable. So Venera had taken it upon herself to correct the situation. These photos were the first concrete validation of her own deliberately cultivated paranoia.
She resolutely jammed the pictures into her belt purse—they stuck out conspicuously but who would look?—and left by the front door.
Her servant waited innocently a good yard from the door. Venera was instantly suspicious that he'd been peering through the keyhole. She shot him a nasty look. "I don't believe I've used you before."
"No, ma'am. I'm new."
"You've had a background check, I trust?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, you're going to have another." She stalked back to the admiralty with him following silently.
Bedlam continued in the admiralty antechamber, but it all seemed a bit silly to her now—they were in a fever of anticipation over a tiny border dispute with Mavery, while farther out a much bigger threat loomed. Nobody liked migratory nations, least of all Slipstream. They should be ready for this sort of tiling. They should be more professional.
A page jostled Venera and the photos fell out of her purse. She laid a backhanded slap across the boy's head and stooped to grab them—to find that her servant had already picked them up.
He glanced at two that he held, apparently by accident, then did a double-take. Venera wondered whether he'd tripped the page behind her back just so he could do this.
"Give me those!" She snatched them back, noting as she did that it was the mysterious photos of the great, dim gray object that he'd looked at. She decided on the spot to have him arrested on some sort of trumped-up charge as soon as she reached the Fanning estate.
Blazing with anger, Venera elbowed her way through the crowd of couriers and minor functionaries, and took a side exit. Cold air wafted up from the stairs that led up to the cable cars connecting the other towns in this quartet. Fury and cold made her jaw flare with pain so that she wanted to turn and strike the insolent young man. with a great effort she restrained herself, and gradually calmed down. She was pleased at her own forbearance. I can be a good person, she reminded herself.
"Fifteen hundred feet," murmured the servant, almost inaudibly.
Venera whirled. He was trailing a few yards behind her, his expression distracted and wondering. "What did you say?" she hissed.
"That ship in the picture… was fifteen hundred feet long," he said, looking apologetic.
"How do you know mat? Tell me!"
"By me contrails, ma'am."
She stared at him for a few seconds. He was young, certainly, and his high-cheeked face would have seemed innocent but for the weatherbeaten skin that reddened his brow and nose. He had a mop of black hair that fell like a raven's wing across his forehead and his eyes were framed with fine lines in an airman's perpetual squint.
He was either far more cunning than she'd given him credit for, or he was an idiot.
Or, she reluctantly admitted to herself, maybe he really had no idea that she'd met with someone in the lathes' room, and didn't expect a lady like herself to be carrying sensitive information. In which case the photos, to him, were just photos.
"Show me." She fished out the two shots of the behemoth and handed them to him.
Now he looked doubtful. "I can't be sure."
"Just show me how you reached that conclusion!"
He pointed to the first picture. "You see in the near space here, there's a bike passing.That's a standard Gray forty-five, and it's running at optimum speed, which is a hundred twenty-five knots. See the shape of its contrail? It only gets that feathered look under optimum burn. It's passing close by the docks so you can tell…" he flipped to the second picture, "that here it's gone about six hundred feet, if that dock is the size it looks to be. It means the second picture was taken about two seconds after the first.
"Now look at the contrails around the big ship. Lady, I can't see any bikes that aren't Gray forty-fives in the picture. So if we assume that the ones in the distance are Grays too, and that they're going at optimum speed, then these ones skimming the surface of the big ship have traveled a little less than half its length since the first picture. That makes it a bit over twelve hundred feet long."
"Mother of Virga." Venera stared at the picture, then at him. She noticed now that he was missing the tips of several fingers: frostbite?
She took back the pictures. "You're a flyer."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then what are you doing working as a body servant in my household?"
"Flying bikes is a dead-end career," he said with a shrug.
They resumed walking. Venera was mulling things over. As they reached the broad clattering galleries of the cable car station, she nodded sharply and said, "Don't tell anybody about these, if you value your job. They're sensitive."
"Yes, ma'am." He looked past her. "Uh-oh."
Venera followed his gaze, and frowned. The long cable car gallery was full of people, all of whom were crowding in a grumbling mass under the rusty cable stays and iron-work beams that formed the chamber's ceiling. Six green cable cars hung swaying and empty in the midst of the throng. "What's the holdup?" she demanded of a nearby naval officer.