Sun of Suns

CHAPTER THREE

A FLOCK OF fish had wandered into the airspace inside Quartet One, Cylinder Two. Disoriented by the city lights spinning around them and caught in the cyclone of air that Rush's rooftops swept up, they foundered lower and lower in a quickening spiral, until with fatal suddenness they shot between the eaves of two close-leaning, gargoyle-coigned apartments. They banged off window and ledge, flagpole and fire escape, to end flapping and dying in a narrow street along which they'd scattered like a blast of buckshot.

Hayden ignored the cheering locals who ran out to scoop up the unexpected windfall. He paced on through the darkened alleys of Rush's night market, noticing nothing, but instinctively avoiding the grifters and thieves who also drifted through the crowds of out-country rubes. He felt slightly nauseated, and twitched at every loud laugh or thud of crate on cement.

The market was stuffed into a warren of small streets. Hayden loved walking through the mobs; even after living here for two years, the very fact that the city comprised more than one cylinder amazed him. The rusting wheels of the city provided gravity for over thirty thousand souls. Throw in the many outlying towns and countless estates that hung in the nearby air like sprays of tossed seed, and the population must push a hundred thousand. The anonymity this afforded was a heady experience for an unhappy young man. Hayden could be with people yet aloof and he liked it this way.

He was dead tired after another long day at the Fanning estate; but if he went back to the boarding house now, he would just pace until his downstairs neighbors complained. He would pull at his hair, and mutter to himself as if he were mad. He didn't want to do that.

He paused to buy a sticky bun at a vendor he favored, and continued on down a twisting run sided with fading clapboard. Slip-stream's sun was on its maintenance cycle, and darkness and chill had settled over the city. Here and there in the alleys, homeless people kept barrel fires going and charged a penny or two to anyone who stopped to warm their hands. Hayden sometimes stopped to talk to these men, whose faces he knew only as red sketches lit from below. They could be valuable sources of information, but he never revealed anything about himself to them, least of all his name.

To be so close to his goal and yet be unable to act was intolerable. He walked through the Fanning household like a dutiful servant for hours while his mind raced through scenarios: Fanning walking by distracted in a hallway; Hayden slipping into the Admiralty unnoticed by the omnipresent security police… It was all useless. The chances never came, and he was getting desperate.

He'd driven Venera Fanning again today—unnecessarily, for she could easily have taken a cable car. He wondered at her motives in riding with him. When he'd returned to his room he'd discovered that a faint scent of her perfume still hovered on his jacket. It was alluring, as she was with her porcelain complexion—marred only by the scar on her chin—and her hair the color of winter skies. Attractive she might be, but she was also without doubt the most callous human being he'd ever met. And she traded on her beauty.

How strange that she should be the first woman he'd given a ride to since arriving in Rush.

Halfway down the alley was a cul-de-sac. A knife seller had set up his table across its entrance, and had mounted targets on the blank wall at the dead end. Hayden stopped to balance a sleek dart knife on his finger. He held it out facing away from him, then at right angles to that.

"It's good in all the directions of gravity," said the vendor, who in this light was visible only as a black cutout shape with a swath of distant lamplight revealing his beige shirt collar. The black silhouette of an arm rose in an indistinct gesture. "Try it out."

Hayden balanced the knife for a second more, then flipped it and caught it behind the guard fins. He threw it with a single twitch of his wrist and it buried itself in the center of a target with a satisfying thump. The vendor murmured appreciatively.

"That's not our best, you know," he said as he waddled back to retrieve the knife. His mottled hand momentarily became visible as he pulled the knife from the wall. "Try this." Back at the table, he fished in a case and drew out a long arrow shape. Hayden took it from him and turned it over with a professional eye. Triangular cross-section to the blade, guards that doubled as fins for throwing, and a long tang behind that with another fin on its end. Its heft was definitely better than the last one.

He drought of Admiral Fanning and his purpose in coming to this city. with a muttered curse he spun and let fly the knife. It sank dead center in the smallest target.

"Son, you should be in the circus," said the vendor. Hayden heard the admiration in his voice, but it didn't matter. "Say, do you want to hang around a while and throw for the crowd? Could bring in some business."

Hayden shook his head. He wasn't supposed to have skills like knife throwing. "Just dumb luck," he said. "I guess your knives are just so good that even an idiot can hit the bull's-eye with one." Ducking his head and aware of the lameness of his excuse, he backed away and then paced hurriedly down the alley.

"That wasn't smart," said a shadow at his elbow.

Hayden shrugged and kept going. "What's it to you?"

The other fell into step beside him. Hayden glimpsed a tall, rangy figure in the dim light. "Somebody you owe a favor, Hayden."

He stepped away involuntarily. "Who the—"

The man in the shadows laughed and moved into a pale lozenge of candlelight that squeezed out between the cracks of a low window. The profile revealed was of a lean, bald man with bushy eyebrows. "Don't cha recognize me, Hayden? Last time I saw you, you were dropping out of Gavin Town on a runaway bike!"

"Miles?" Hayden just stood there, painfully aware of how meetings like this were supposed to go: the prodigal and the old soldier, laughing and slapping each other's backs in surprise and delight. They would head for a bar or something, and regale each other with stories of their exploits, only to stagger out again singing at three the next morning. Or so it went. But he'd never much liked Miles, and what did it matter, really, to find out now that one other person had survived the attack on the sun? It didn't change anything.

"What are you doing here?" he asked after the silence between them had stretched too long.

"Looking after you, boy," said the ex-soldier. "You're not happy to see me?"

"It's not that," he said with a shrug. "It's… been a long time."

"Well, long or not, I'm here now. What do you say?"

"It's… good to see you."

Miles laughed humorlessly. "Right. But you'll be thanking me before long, believe me." He started walking. "Come on. We need to find a place to talk."

Here it came, thought Hayden: the bar, the war stories, the laughing. He hesitated, and Miles sighed heavily. "Kid, I saved your ass today. If it weren't for me, you'd be on your way out of Rush by now with a permanent deport order issued against you."

"I don't believe you."

"Suit yourself." Miles started walking. After a moment Hayden ran after him.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"'It's so good to see you, Miles. How are you doing, Miles? How did you survive Gavin Town?' " The ex-soldier glared at Hayden as they crossed a busy and well-lit thoroughfare. "Jeez, you were always a surly little runt, but let me tell you, I'm wondering whether I should have bothered faking the docs for your background check."

"What background check?" He'd had two of them already, he knew, a cursory one when he first applied for Rush residency, and a more thorough check after he answered the call for work at the Fanning residence. It seemed all too plausible that somebody somewhere should want to do more digging—and now he realized who. "Venera Fanning. She had me investigated."

"But not by the legal authorities," said Miles as he ducked into another alley. This one was empty, and meandered in the general direction of one of the town spokes. The spoke jabbed into the heavens above all rooftops, a tessellation of wrought-iron girders barnacled here and there by shanty huts built by desperate homeless people. Some spokes had municipal elevators in them and were quite well-kept; this one was a rusty derelict unlit from any source. "It's just lucky we have a man in Fanning's network." Miles had disappeared in the darkness ahead. Hayden followed his voice, idly wondering if he'd been lured in here to be mugged. "This time they weren't going to just hold your papers up to a light and check the birth registries. Friends, family, coworkers—I had to come up with them all at the last minute."

"But how did you know about it?"

"Ah, finally, a sensible question. Here, watch your step" They had reached the gnarled fist of beam and cable that was the spoke's base. Someone had built a crude set of stairs by simply jamming boards into the diamond-shaped gaps in the ironwork. Miles plodded up this, wood bending and twanging under his feet.

His voice drifted down from overhead. "I review intercepted dispatches about security checks. It's my job in the Resistance."

Hayden stopped climbing. "Resistance? You still believe in that?"

Miles spun around, glaring. "Hayden, how can you of all people say that? You were born into the Resistance—you were the first baby born of two members, didn't you know that?"

He shrugged uncomfortably. "That's not the point, is it? When they blew up the sun they beat us. It was our last hope."

"Is that what you thought?" Miles sounded outraged. "Son, we were just getting started! And after the attack we needed you more than ever. We searched for you for days after the attack…"

"I didn't know. I fell into winter." He looked down, noticing distractedly how the rooftops looked from just overhead, with their shingled peaks and streamlined eaves. From here the whole circular geometry of the town spread out below him, with its mazes of close-packed buildings, streetlights glowing overhead and on two sides, and the permanent winds of Slipstream whisting from the dark open circles of night to left and right. A gust shook him and he realized that he'd fall hard enough to be killed if he got blown off this precarious vantage point. Keep following Miles or go back? Hayden reluctantly groped for the next ladder-like step. "Where are we going, Miles?"

"There." The lean ex-soldier—who, when it came right down to it, Hayden didn't know that well—pointed straight up. The inside of the open-work spoke was blocked by a wood ceiling ten feet farther up. The surface was white with strange, broad black bands painted across it. with a start Hayden realized they were intended to look like shadows; this box was supposed to be invisible if looked at from some particular perspective—probably from the direction of the Office of Public Infrastructure.

Miles ascended the last distance by ladder and raising his fist, knocked it against wood. A square of light appeared above his head, and he clambered up. "Come on in, Hayden."

He cautiously raised his head above the lip of the trapdoor, and then, for the first time in many years, he entered a cell of the Resistance.

"No, it's not our headquarters," said Miles as Hayden looked around the little room. "Just a watching post. We're at a rare spot that lets us look down the window of the semaphore room in the Admiralty. But we also store sensitive materials here—like guns." He gestured to a stack of long boxes on the floor.

The place was little more than ten feet on a side, though a ladder led up to what was presumably a second level. Blackout curtains covered three walls. A little chair in the out-of-fashion Lace style perched in front of a desk where a man with thick glasses and a halo of white hair sat muttering over a pile of paper. In the opposite corner crouched a lanky man dressed entirely in black. He was walking his fingers over a map of Rush, evidently trying to gauge distances in one of the cylinders.

"Meet Hayden Griffin. He's the son of the original sunlighters."

The man in black just grunted; but the balding fellow at the table sat up straight and cranked his glasses down to get a look at Hayden. "Grace! So it is! You probably wouldn't remember me, Hayden, but I babysat for you when you were four."

"Martin Shambles," said Miles. "And this one, he's V.I.P. Billy. Our assassin."

Hayden nodded to them both, trying not to sneak another look at Billy. Shambles stood up and held out his hand. "Well met, Hayden! Looks like we saved your ass today."

"I wasn't aware it needed saving," said Hayden. But he shook the offered hand.

"'Course, it would have been easier if we'd known you were still alive." Shambles sat back down, chuckling. "And working in the Fanning house, no less! That caused a stir. Some of our boys went so far as to claim you'd turned, gone over to their side—"

"But we know you wouldn't do that, would you?" asked V.I.P. Billy, who was now standing. Hayden suddenly realized that he was unfavorably placed with his back to a corner, with Miles and Billy on either side of him.

"Of course, there's the question of where you've actually been the past several years," continued Shambles, who was unconcernedly peering at his papers again. "We had a back story ready for somebody else, papers, friends—it's the sort of in-depth investigation Venera Fanning goes in for. She's much more thorough than the Admiralty that way. I mean, we traced you as far as we could, but that wasn't far. Not far at all, in fact."

Despite the cold air, Hayden was starting to sweat. "But—but I could ask you the same thing," he said. "Where were you? When the sun blew up and I fell into winter, where were you? It wasn't the Resistance who found me and nursed me back from frostbite. Hell, I fell four hundred miles before I finally hit a mushroom farm run by this weird old couple… - Nobody came after me. Did you even look?"

Miles nodded gravely. "We looked. Your falling into winter was one possibility. Being captured by one of Fanning's ships was another. It was fifty-fifty which had happened."

"These people…" Hayden had trouble thinking of what to say. He knew his life was on the line here. "They were exiles. A man and woman named Katcheran. Said Aerie had kicked them out twenty years ago. They had no gravity, they were as fragile as birds. They grew mushrooms on this little rock they'd found in the emptiness, and occasionally they'd jet over to the outskirts of Aerie to drop some off for supplies. But it took them ages to ferment enough alcohol for fuel… he tended to drink it away."

Miles looked skeptical, but Shambles perked up. "Did you say Katcheran?" Hayden nodded. Shambles pursed his lips. "Haven't heard that name in years." He tilted his head to one side and looked at Hayden shrewdly. "Go on."

Hayden did his best to describe his stay in the dark regions outside civilization. The volumes of air there were vast, and not all of it was cold, or dark. The little mushroom farm was just a cave to live in hollowed out of a clay ball no more than fifty feet in diameter. Katcheran and his wife bickered in a constant, monotonous murmur. Hayden had spent most of his time outside, watching the skies for any sign of a passing ship.

The distant beacons of Aerie teased him whenever he looked in its direction. But every now and then dawn would come as clouds parted around some distant sun. Then he could see just how far away from home he'd come. Hazy depths of emptiness opened out to all sides, not even a stray boulder or water ball visible for miles upon miles. He was stranded in a desert of air, and a few times he'd curled into a ball, hovering above the stinking fungus, and wept.

On two or three occasions, though, he saw more. The shells of cloud that enveloped the center of Virga sometimes parted, revealing the sun of suns, Candesce. Daylight would suddenly flash out to fill the entire volume of winter. Each time, Hayden had stood on the air, amazed at the brilliance of it—at the sheer size of an ancient, untended fusion engine that put all other suns in Virga to shame. Dozens of civilizations depended on that single central light, he'd heard. It was the greatest source of heat in the world; it drove the circulation cells in which Aerie and the other nations migrated slowly inward and outward.

The core components of his parents' sun had come from Candesce; the sun of suns was the wellspring for all of Virga's lesser lights.

"It was a year before Katcheran had enough fuel for us to fly back, and then he followed the beacons he knew, which brought us in a hundred miles away from Gavin Town. Of course, the town was a legend by then, but nobody knew much about it. Any pieces that were left after Slipstream attacked had been dismantled or drifted away. I didn't have anybody to go to… any way to get in touch with the Resistance, unless I came to Rush, and I didn't have any money to travel. I got a job in a kitchen in Port Freeley and saved until I could get passage here.

"But you know what I found out when I finally got back to Aerie? Nobody knew about our sun! Nobody knew. We'd built it in secret, and Slipstream attacked in secret, and nobody told the people what had happened. If they'd known… something might have been done." He shook his head. "Maybe the Resistance couldn't have kept Slipstream from finding the sun and destroying it. I don't know. But you could have told—you had the responsibility to tell the people of Aerie what had happened.

"How could I get involved with you again after that?"

Miles looked troubled, but Billy just raised an eyebrow. "So why are you working for the Fanning's? It took you a lot of effort to do it—you even forged your Slipstream citizenship yourself, by the looks of it."

Hayden stared at him. "Well, why do you think I came here? I came to kill Admiral Fanning."

There was a brief silence while the other three looked at one another. Then Billy cracked a slight smile. "Why in Virga would you want to do that?"

"Because he's the one." Hayden didn't care that the man in black was a killer. The indignity of having his motives suspected was just too much. "I saw the name on the side of the flagship that attacked us. The Arrogance. It was Fanning's ship when he was still commodore. He blew up our sun! He killed my mother! I care about that. Don't you care? What have you been doing here, all these years? What kind of a resistance is this? You're supposed to be an assassin, why haven't you killed him?" He stepped over to Shambles's table and tossed some of the papers in the air. "What, are you gonna plan them all to death? Is that the idea? Well, while you've been squatting on your asses in your little box, I've been doing something with my time. I was ten feet away from him today; tomorrow I'll be right there, and then he'll be dead."

He glared at them. "That's why I came here. That's what I'm doing. So what are you doing?"

Shambles adjusted his glasses and patted down the papers. "Well, Hayden my lad, we're trying to save our country. That would seem like a very different goal from yours, now wouldn't it?"

"Oh, please," said Hayden, crossing his arms. "What's to save? Slipstream annexed Aerie ages ago. I don't even remember how it was before that happened. It's ancient history."

"What you say is very true," said Shambles with a thoughtful nod. "However, it is also true that, since Slipstream is a migratory nation, it will someday migrate its way out of Aerie. Our concern is with what happens when that occurs."

Hayden looked at him blankly.

"Hmm." Shambles turned in his chair, crossing his legs. "It is a fact of youth that it has no concept of the future. Yet that is what we are here to discuss. The future of Aerie—and your future."

Hayden snorted.

"Tell me," said Shambles, "what is it, fundamentally, that keeps a nation together?"

Hayden decided to take the bait. "A sun."

Shambles shook his head. "No. It's formation flying. That is what keeps a nation together. If all your towns and farms and water balls are sailing off in different directions, it hardly matters if you've got a sun of your own, does it? What's essential is that you keep everybody flying on the same heading, maintaining the same altitude and position above the Sun of Suns. Aerie is still doing that—for now. The danger is that the presence of the Slipstream sun in our skies will cause parts of the nation to drift away, leave the formation, and join other countries. Hayden, that is a threat far greater than any police actions or propaganda by Slipstream could be."

"For ten years now we've been keeping Aerie in formation," said Miles. "That's what the Resistance does. What possible good would revenge do us? If you kill Fanning, he'll just be replaced."

"Yes," said Hayden, "but he'll also be dead."

Miles sighed. "I brought you here tonight because I hoped we could bring you back into the net. With your position in the Fanning household, you could be invaluable to us—especially now that Slipstream's finally moved close enough to our neighbors that it's been perceived as a threat. Mavery is moving against Slipstream. Slipstream will move into Mavery territory in a year or two and at that point they'll find themselves fighting a two-front war, against Mavery and us. Our job is to prepare for that, and to make sure that when the time comes, we either win or convince them to commit all their forces to Mavery, and leave us behind. If we had a spy in the very heart of the Admiralty…" His expression was greedy.

"Aerie is gone," Hayden said. "When Slipstream leaves they'll take their sun with them. Without a sun, Aerie will freeze in the dark. The people will leave. I've lived in winter. I know what it's like."

"We're working on that," said Shambles. "With the right components we could—"

Hayden shook his head. "I'm only here to do one thing. And after that… I don't care."

"But, Hayden my boy," purred Billy as he put an arm around Hayden's shoulder, "the problem is, we care. It's a worry, you know—the vision of you shooting Fanning and then being caught and tortured. You might talk about us, you see."

"Oh! No, I—"

"Now it would be supremely gauche of me to threaten your life at this point," Billy went on. "After all, as you say, you have your own path to take. That's fine. But if you're not going to join us, then we have one simple request."

"What's that?"

"If you're going to kill Fanning up close and personal like, say in the middle of the Admiralty itself… Just make sure you kill yourself too, hmm? As a favor to us, you see. So we don't have to."

Hayden bolted to the trapdoor and flung it up. "You know where to find us if you change your mind," Shambles called cheerfully.

"You won't hear from me," snapped Hayden as he lowered himself down to the invisible ladder. Slamming the trapdoor he began clumsily backing his way down to the city, fuming and muttering as he went.

He was just above the rooftops when a lurid orange flash lit up the sky. A distant grumble like thunder reached his ears. Hayden paused, clinging to the swaying planks, and listened.

The tearing sound of a jet could be heard fading in the distance. Then another one, growing closer. Funny; he knew all about bikes, but he couldn't identify the type from this one's sound.

Then something flashed by outside the iron stanchions. He poked his head out between the girders in time to see something bright shoot straight into the lit window of a mansion near the far end of the cylinder. To his amazement, the outer wall of the house seemed to dissolve in flame and the whole roof lifted off.

Another missile tore past, this one miraculously threading its way through spokes, guy wires, and ladder-ways to exit the other end of the cylinder. Seconds later he heard gunfire, and a distant bloom of light signaled the missile's destruction.

A head poked out next to his. The windburned homeless man spared Hayden a single glance before gaping at the next missile to appear out of the darkness. Belatedly, sirens were starting up throughout the city, animal voices Dopplered weirdly by distance and rotation.

The new missile hit one of the other spokes. The unfolding red flower lit the stubbled face next to Hayden's, tiny arcs of reflection glinting in the man's eyes.

Then he heard shouts from above. Miles and the others were coming down. Hayden pulled his head in and clambered the rest of the way down to the street, where people were now running back and form shouting.

He felt a momentary surge of exultation. Slipstream was paying at last! He hid his grin; laughing out loud would probably be a bad idea right now.

Hayden walked through the chaos for a few minutes. No more missiles appeared but firefighting crews were battling their way through the mob and fights were breaking out. All lights were on and somewhere engines were throbbing. He felt a pull to the right and creaking, groaning sounds echoed through the street as his weight diminished. The hit on that spoke must have spooked the gravity department.

His feet had unconsciously led him toward the docks. When he realized where he was, he frowned. He should just go home—ride this out. But where would Fanning be just now? This attack meant that the fleet would be mobilized. For all he knew, the admiral might be aboard his flagship already, and then Hayden would never get a chance at him.

With a curse he ran for the docks, where he had parked his bike.