Plot
Hayden Griffin is a young, fatherless boy living in Aerie. Though exactly when or how his father died is never discovered, Hayden continually says that he was murdered by Slipstream, a rival nation migrating through Virga. Slipstream's sun is tethered to a migrating asteroid that has provided the nation with its wealth. As Slipstream follows its sun, it occasionally moves through other nation's territories, as it does with Aerie, Hayden Griffin's home nation. In these cases, it uses its military headed by a leader simply known as "the Pilot" to make this nation a client nation of Slipstream, only to leave these nations again when the asteroid moves far enough. His parents' ambition was to liberate Aerie from Slipstream's rule by constructing their own sun in secret. After his father's death, Hayden's mother made this her final goal in life. At the opening of the story, Aerie's sun is nearly finished, and the construction team was planning a test to assure of its functionality. Hayden gets out of his job as an apprentice in a kitchen, intending to watch the test from a jet bike. However, airships flying Slipstream's flag appear on the horizon and begin to attack the new sun. Aerie's resistance starts to defend themselves from the assault, but don't appear to be a true match against the highly trained Slipstreamers. In a suicidal last-ditch effort, Hayden's mother and the construction crew start the sun while inside of it, incinerating the ships attacking the sun itself but allowing at least one reported Slipstream ship to have escaped. During the fighting, Hayden is thrown off the town's spinning wheel and, as the first chapter leaves him, floating weightlessly in the darkness, where pirates call home and no suns or true governments have been established.
Years later, the story picks up again with Venera Fanning (wife of Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream fame) and her page walking down the hall to the office of the Admiralty in Rush, capital of Slipstream. Venera reminisces on another times, years ago, when she was walking down this hall and a bullet ripped through her jaw line, and she was left bleeding on the floor with no one around. She enters the office, and then continues to the bathroom, where she holds a secret meeting with an informant and a few others. Bleeding and exhausted, the informant shows Venera pictures of a secret dock and ship building facility of a rival nation, Falcon Formation, in a sargasso, which is an area where there is a build up of toxic gases that no one can enter without a specially designed sargasso suit. One of the pictures shows a frightfully large dreadnought approximately 3 km in length, as well as many other warships. Venera leaves the meeting and returns to her waiting page. As they walk out of the crowded office, the page accidentally bumps into Venera, knocking the pictures out of her hands. Venera then catches the page staring at the pictures of the dreadnought as they collect them off the floor. After she dismisses it as awe, they step outside, when the page gives his approximation and explanation of the length of the dreadnought. After the page flies Venera back to the Fanning household, he curses himself for his failure to get inside the house, and the page is revealed to be Hayden Griffin, who intends to kill Admiral Fanning for revenge. However, Griffin learns that Fanning was not present in Slipstream's attack of Aerie.
Admiral Fanning is instructed by the Slipstream Pilot to move his fleet against Mavery but decides to divert part of the fleet including the ship Rook to attack the hidden Falcon Formation ship dock. Instead of moving there directly, Fanning decides to make a detour in order to recover the fabled treasure of Antene, the map to which is hidden in the Winding Tree of Fate artifact which, in turn, is stored in a station on Virga's skin.
On the Rook, Griffin learns that the ship's armorer, Aubri Mahallan, is from outside Virga. She explains that the outside world is governed by Artificial Nature, apparently an artificial intelligence possessing vast power. However, some systems of Candesce, Virga's largest sun, disrupt Artificial Nature and prevent it from entering Virga.
While passing icebergs that formed on the inside of Virga's skin, the fleet is attacked by winter pirates which are repelled by dislodging icebergs that then are drawn by gravity towards the center of Virga. During the fight, the Rook is boarded by pirates. Venera Fanning kills the Rook's captain and some of its crew as they try to scuttle the ship. Both Venera Fanning and Mahallan are taken prisoner by the pirate captain Dentius but regain control of the ship later.
After retrieving the Tree of Fate, Admiral Fanning reveals that the treasure of Antene includes the key to Candesce and therefore means to turn off Candesce's disruption systems. He intends to temporarily shut off these systems in order to use radar while fighting Falcon Formation's ships. Mahallan is building the radar units.
The treasure of Antene is located in Leaf's Choir, a sargasso near Gehellen. On the way, Mahallan explains to Griffin that Admiral Fanning had opposed the destruction of Aerie's sun. It was Slipstream's Pilot who led the attack, later presenting Fanning as the head behind it. Mahallan also explains that she was exiled to Virga because of her trying to overthrow Artificial Nature. Mahallan and Griffin become lovers.
Having retrieved the key to Candesce, Venera Fanning, Mahallan, and Griffin eventually gain control of the sun while Admiral Fanning fights Falcon Formation. Mahallan disables Candesce's countermeasures, enabling Fanning to hit Falcon Formation hard. However, he is forced to steer his ship into the Formation's dreadnought. In Candesce, it is revealed that Mahallan is wired by Artificial Nature, forcing her to keep the countermeasures down. This enables Artificial Nature to invade Virga. Fanning kills Mahallan and re-enables Candesce's countermeasures.
Griffin flees from Candesce which is about to re-ignite. He wants Fanning to accompany him but she declines, fearing that he wants to kill her as revenge for her killing his lover. At the last moment, she clings to Griffin's bike, to launch off it later after steering clear of the sun.
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SMS Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand was an Austro-Hungarian Radetzky-class pre-dreadnought battleship commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian Navy on 5 June 1910. She was named after Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The first ship of her class to be built, she preceded Radetzky by more than six months. Her armament included four 30.5 cm (12 in) guns in two twin turrets, and eight 24 cm (9.4 in) guns in four twin turrets.
HDMS Lougen was a brig of 18 guns, launched in 1791, and the name-vessel of her class of six brigs designed by the naval architect Ernst Stibolt. She was the first Danish warship to be copper-sheathed. She was active protecting Danish merchant shipping and suppressing pirates in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean. In March 1801, she fought off the British privateer Experiment and the 22-gun warship HMS Arab in a single action. When the British captured the Danish West Indies in 1801, Lougen was part of the booty. The British later returned her to Denmark where she was broken up in 1802.
The High Seas Fleet (Hochseeflotte) was the battle fleet of the German Imperial Navy and saw action during the First World War. The formation was created in February 1907, when the Home Fleet (Heimatflotte) was renamed as the High Seas Fleet. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was the architect of the fleet; he envisioned a force powerful enough to challenge the Royal Navy's predominance. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, championed the fleet as the instrument by which he would seize overseas possessions and make Germany a global power. By concentrating a powerful battle fleet in the North Sea while the Royal Navy was required to disperse its forces around the British Empire, Tirpitz believed Germany could achieve a balance of force that could seriously damage British naval hegemony. This was the heart of Tirpitz's "Risk Theory", which held that Britain would not challenge Germany if the latter's fleet posed such a significant threat to its own.
The Sack of Campeche was a 1663 raid by pirates led by Christopher Myngs and Edward Mansvelt which became a model for later coastal pirate raids of the buccaneering era.
SMS Tegetthoff was the second of four Tegetthoff-class dreadnought battleships built for the Austro-Hungarian Navy. Tegetthoff was named for the 19th-century Austrian Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, most notable for defeating the Italian Regia Marina at the Battle of Lissa in 1866. The ship was armed with a main battery of twelve 30.5 cm (12.0 in) guns in four triple turrets. Constructed shortly before World War I, she was built at the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino shipyard in Trieste, where she was laid down in September 1910 and launched in March 1912.
