Sun of Suns

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ROOK'S HANGAR was a deep pie-shaped chamber taking up one-third of the length of the ship. Most of the space was bikes, all lashed to the walls like somnolent bees in a hive; but two big cutters made the stern area into a well of shadows, each boat a forty-footer armed to the teeth. Hayden eyed these as he slammed an access panel on the bike Venera Fanning had brought for him. The cutters were weapons, of course, and so distasteful to him; but they were also ships, and he couldn't help wondering how fast they were and how maneuverable they'd be to steer.

The bike was ready. He gave it one last appraising look.This wasn't his bike, but it was a racer, complete with two detachable sidecars and a long spool of grounding thread for those situations where you outran your own rate of static charge drain.

Hayden had been staying up late so as to be awake during nightwatch—there were fewer people around—so he was startled when Martor's min face popped over the bike's small horizon like some parody of the sun. "Watcha doin?" said the gopher in his usual challenging way.

"Shouldn't you be asleep?" He undipped the bike from its dry-dock clamps and hefted it, judging its mass. There were traces here and there of red paint, but sometime very recently it had been redone a glossy black. He didn't mind that.

"Could say the same about you." Martor hand-walked around the clamps to look at what Hayden was doing. As he did the wind keened particularly loudly past the ship's outer hatches. Martor jerked his head in that direction.

"Still worried about winter? It's a bit late for that," Hayden pointed out. "We've been in it for days."

"You're not taking that out in it?" Martor watched in distress as Hayden dragged the racer in the direction of the forward bike hatch. "Ain't it'll freeze you like a block of ice?"

"It's not that cold." The bike started to drift as they passed the center of the chamber so Martor steadied it with his own mass. "Clouds insulate the air," said Hayden. "So it only gets so cold. Usually doesn't even get down to freezing, most places. Hey, why don't you come along for the ride? I'm just taking her out for a practice run."

Martor snatched his hands back from the bike. "You crazy? I'm not going out there."

"Why not? I am."

A couple of members of the hatch gang had heard this and laughed. They were lounging next to the big wooden doors, awaiting any order to open them. Hayden nodded and they reluctantly abandoned their cards to man the winch wheel.

"Hang on there!" Both Hayden and Martor turned.The eccentric armorer, Mahallan, was poised at an inside doorway. Her silhouette was very interesting, but she only perched there a moment before flying over to the hatch. "You boys going for a night flight?"

Hayden shrugged. "All flights are night flights right now."

"Hmm. Glad to see you've overcome your fear of winter," she said to Martor. The boy blushed and stammered something.

"Listen," continued Mahallan, "I'd like you to do something for me. While you're out there—I know it'll be dark so you probably won't see them—if you spot anything like this, could you bring it back?" She opened her fist to reveal a bent little glittering thing, like a chrome wasp.

Martor leaned close. "What's that?" Hayden plucked it from the air and turned it so its wings rainbowed in the gaslight. "I've seen these before," he mused. "But I don't know what they are. They're not alive."

"Not by ordinary standards, no," said Mahallan. She was perched on his bike, an angel in silhouette; rearing back she said with some obscure sense of satisfaction, "They're tankers."

Martor smiled weakly. "Ha?"

"Tankers. That little abdomen is an empty container. Usually when you catch one and open it, you'll find the tank full of ugly chemicals like lithium pentafluorophenyl borate etherate, medioxyphenyl-boronic acid or naphthylboronic acid. Very interesting. And where do you suppose they're taking it?"

"Couldn't tell ya," said Martor, whose eyes had gone very wide as the multisyllabic chemical names tripped off Mahallan's lips.

"They're going in," said the armorer. "Toward Candesce." She snatched the metal wasp out of the air. "Find me some more. If you can."

"Yes, ma'am." Martor saluted and turned to Hayden. "Let's get goin', then."

The hatch gang spun their wheel and the bike door opened into total darkness. As Mahallan kicked away to presumably return to her little workshop, Hayden leaned in to Martor and whispered, "You forgot the passenger saddle. It's over there." He pointed.

"Ah. Uh, thanks."

Mahallan left, and Hayden waited for Martor to back out of his impulse to come along. But he returned with the saddle and dutifully waited while Hayden strapped it to the side of the bike. And he climbed aboard meekly and waited while Hayden guided the fan-jet to the open hatch and shoved it out into the light breeze, following himself a second later.

"IT'S NOT COLD at all!" Martor squinted over his shoulder as Hayden opened the throttle a bit. They shot away from the Rook. The bike was admirably quiet, so Hayden was able to lean back and say, "Like I said, the clouds trap the heat."

Now that they were in winter, the ships of the expeditionary force had all their lights on. Distant clouds made a tunnel that curled away ahead of them, but the air was clear for miles around. It was an opportunity to open up the ships' throttles that their pilots were stolidly ignoring. True, they were making twenty or thirty miles per hour, but each could do five times that without straining.

"Shall we see what she'll do?" Hayden asked. He didn't wait for Martor's answer, but gripped the throttle and twisted it.The fan-jets grumble became a roar and they shot ahead and into the full blaze of the Rook's headlamp.

Martor pounded him on the back. "Quit showin' off!"

Hayden laughed. "No! Look back!"

Martor turned awkwardly and gasped. Hayden knew that their corkscrew contrail would be gleaming in the cone of the Rook's headlight like a thread of fire.

"Come on, Martor. Let's do some stitching!"

The bike was capable of nearly two hundred miles an hour, and he tested it to this limit over the next few minutes, running lines back and forth parallel to the Rook's course. Laying down parallel lines like this was called stitching. Following his own contrail was the safest way to test the bike's speed; if he entered cloud or deviated too far from air he knew was clear, he could kill himself and Martor if he ran into something unseen.

Hunkered down behind the windscreen, he could nonetheless feel the rip of the air inches away, and cautioned Martor not to stick his head—or hands or feet—out lest he get them ripped off. The bike performed well and he quickly got a feel for it.

"Right!" he said eventually. "Let's do a bit of exploring." He eased back on the throttle and nosed them in the direction of the encircling clouds. As they were about to enter a huge puffball he turned the bike and hit the throttle again; the ground wire trailing behind them whipped ahead into the cloud, and sparks flew.

"Is this a good idea?" Martor had been whooping with delight a minute before. He seemed afraid of anything new, Hayden mused.

"It's a great idea." Now that they'd shed their static potential, it was safe to push the bike into the cloud, a transition noticeable only in the drop in temperature and sudden appearance of the cone of radiance from the bike's headlight. Hayden glanced back; the Rook was invisible already.

Martor shook Hayden's shoulder. "H-how are we going to find me ship again?"

"Like this." He reached down and shut off the engine. As the whine faded, he heard a distant grumble—the other ships—but it seemed to be coming from all around them at once. "Wait for it."

The foghorn's note sounded low and sonorous through the darkness. "Where did that come from?" he asked Martor.

"That way?" The boy pointed.

"Right. Now, we're not going far. I just want to see if there's another side to these clouds." He spun up the bike again.

The mist seemed to go on forever, an empty silver void. After a few minutes, though, Hayden began to see pearl-like beads gleaming in the headlight. They shot by on either side, and at their lower speed Martor was able to reach out and grab one. It splashed into a million drops in his hand.

The water spheres grew more numerous and larger. "Could they stall the engine?" asked Martor nervously.

"A big one could," he replied. "Like that one." He dodged the bike around a quivering ball the size of his head.

Visibility was improving. They were now idling their way through a galaxy of turning, shivering drops, some of them tiny, some big as men. Reflections and refractions from the bike's headlamp lit the water cloud in millions of iridescent arcs and glints.

Martor was silent. Hayden looked back at him; the boy's jaw was slack as he gaped at the sight.

"Look." Hayden cut the engine and with the last of their momentum steered them over to a water-beaded stone that hung in solitary majesty amid the water. The rock was less than two feet in diameter.

"Well?" he said to Martor. "Aren't you going to claim this piece of land for Slipstream?"

The boy laughed and reached up to grab the stone. "Not like that!" Keeping one hand on the bike, Hayden flipped himself out of the saddle and wrapped his legs around the rock. "You've got to sit on a piece of land to claim it, you know.

"I decree this land the property," he said, "of…" Aerie.

"Of Hayden Griffin!" shouted Martor.

"Okay. Of the sovereign state of Hayden. Uck, it's wet." He kicked it away and settled into a perch on the windscreen of the bike.

"I didn't know it was like this out here," said Martor. "I grew up in Rush."

"What are you doing here, anyway? You're—" He was about to say "just a boy" but figured Martor would resent mat. "—not a volunteer."

"Press-ganged," said Martor with a shrug. "I don't mind. It was that or the orphanage. I been in the fleet a year now, but this is the first time I've been out of dock."

"So you don't know much about the fleet—say, the admiral?"

"I do." Martor glared at him. "Admiral Fanning's the youngest one to take that job. Got it by doing some sort of secret mission for the Pilot, years back. 'Cept he really doesn't like to talk about that, I saw him get all red in the face one time when somebody just mentioned his promotion."

"Maybe it was his wife who got it for him," speculated Hayden. "She's at least as dangerous as he is."

"Ah," said the boy, "she's pretty, that's sure."

"Actually," said Hayden dryly, "I meant put-a-bullet-in-you dangerous. But yes, she's pretty."

Hayden sighed and looked off into the dark. "Well, I hope you get a chance to see more of the world. It's not all like this out here." He smiled slyly. "There's… things in the dark, you know."

Martor looked alarmed. "I thought you said there wasn't!" -

"Well, I've never seen anything. But you hear stories. Like the ones about the black suns. Ever heard of them?"

Martor's eyes had gone round.

"Pirate suns. They're small and weak, they only heat a few miles around them but it's enough for several towns to thrive. And they only shine through a few portholes, to spotlight the towns and nothing else. Black suns, they call them, each one surrounded by the ships the pirates have captured, in a cloud of wreckage that hides the glow of the towns… They're migratory, like Rush, and they could be anywhere…"

"You're making that up."

"Strangely enough, I'm not." The chill was starting to eat at him, so Hayden swung back into the saddle and pedaled the engine to life again. "We should get back."

They flew in the direction of the most recent foghorn, not talking for a while. As the water cloud tapered out, replaced by mist again, Martor said, "Do you think we'll be coming home? After whatever it is we're out here to do, I mean."

Hayden frowned. "I don't know. I… wasn't counting on it, personally." What's there to come back to? But he didn't say mat.

"Do you suppose there's something in winter that's threatening Slipstream?"

"Seems unlikely."

"And what about the armorer?"

"Huh? What about her?"

"I overheard some of the officers talking. They said she's… not from here. Not from the world."

"What do you mean, not from the world?"

"Not from Virga. That doesn't make any sense, does it?"

Hayden thought about it. She did have a funny accent, but that didn't mean any thing. He dimly remembered his parents talking about a wider universe beyond Virga; he tried to recall what his father had told him. "There's other places, Martor. Places that are all rock or all water, just like Virga's all air. It could be that she's from somewhere like that. After all, they say we all were, originally."

"Oh, now you're—" Martor swallowed whatever he was going to say, as a giant shape loomed up ahead of them. It was one of the ships, though not the Rook.

"Home again," said Hayden. "Let's find our own scow."

"Hey! Don't call the Rook a scow!"They accelerated past the ship and into its light. Hayden intended to make a spiral and locate the other ships by their lights, so he took them ahead of this ship's outrider bikes, into the night.

So it was that he had several seconds in which to be surprised as he saw a gleam of light shooting straight for him, a gleam that quickly resolved into the light of a bike—a light that quavered and shook—and time to shout a curse and turn the racer, nearly toppling Martor off his saddle. Time to hit the collision warning on his horn and narrowly miss plunging them into the solid wall of black water that blocked the sky in all directions.

Time enough to turn and watch as the ship they'd passed sounded its own alarm and began to deploy its emergency braking sails. Too late: it flew in stately majesty into the wall of water and disappeared in a cloud of foam and spray.

SPOTLIGHTS PINIONED THE crashed ship—although it wasn't so much crashed in the small sea as embedded. The surface of the sea curved into the mist in four directions, and clouds formed another wall directly behind the six free vessels whose headlamps were aimed at it. The cones reflected off its intact sides and into the water, making a diffuse blue aura there that was attracting fish.

The Tormentor was stuck three-quarters into the water, its forlorn tail orbited by a halo of water balls. As Hayden and Martor watched from the hangar hatchway of the Rook, gangs of engineers and carpenters were slinging lines to me other ships to pull her out. A breeze, chilly and damp through and through, teased and prodded at the warmer air inside the ship, and intermittently ruffled the surface of the sea.

"Who sounded the alarm?" somebody asked behind Hayden. Without thinking, he said, "I did."

"You're not one of their outriders." He turned and found himself facing Admiral Fanning, who floated in the hangar in a cloud of lesser officers.

"W-what?" Hayden felt like he'd been kicked in the stomach. He'd hated this man at a distance for so many years that the very idea of talking to him seemed impossible.

"He was doing a practice flight on my instructions." Venera's bloodless servant, Carrier, hung in the shadows to one side.

"Ah." Fanning rubbed his chin. "I can't decide whether the warning helped or did more damage. If they hadn't tried to extend the braking masts they wouldn't have snapped off when they hit the water. However, doubtless your heart was in the right place." He peered at Hayden, seeming to notice him for me first time. "You're one of the civilians."

"Yes, Admiral, sir." Hayden's face felt hot. He wanted to squirm away and hide somewhere.

The admiral looked disappointed. "Oh. Well, good work."

"Lights!" someone shouted from the absurd jut off the Tormentor's tail. "Lights!"

"What's he going on about?" Fanning leaned out, right next to Hayden, his face a picture of epicurean curiosity.

"Shut down! All! Lights!" It was one of the foremen, who while yelling this was pointing dramatically at the water.

They looked at one another. Then Fanning said, "Well, do as the man says." It took several minutes, but soon the spotlights and headlights were going out, one after another, leaning shadows back and forth through the indigo water.

"There! "The faint silhouette of the foreman was pointing again. Hayden craned his neck with the others. The man was indicating a patch of water near the Tormentor—a patch where suddenly, impossibly, a gleam of light wavered.

When Hayden had seen the size of this sea, he'd wondered. Now he was sure.

"It's just a glowfish!" somebody yelled derisively. But it wasn't. Somewhere in the depths of the miles-wide ball of water that the Tormentor had hit, lanterns gleamed.

"Do a circuit!" shouted Fanning to a waiting formation of bikes. Their commander saluted and they took off, contrails spreading to encircle the spherical sea like thin grasping fingers. Almost immediately one of the bikes doubled back. It shut down and did a highspeed drift past the Rook. "There's an entrance!" shouted its rider. "Half a mile around that way."

Hayden nodded to himself. You could dig a shaft into a water ball as easily as a dirt or stone pile. Farmers regularly used such shafts as cold-storage rooms. From the faintness of the shimmer here, though, the ones who'd dug this tunnel had taken it deep into the sea. And the extent of the lights suggested more than just a few rooms carved out of the cold water.

"Warm," he muttered. He turned to Martor. "This might be Warea."

"Huh?" Martor goggled at him. "What you talking about?"

"Warea. It's one of the towns I… heard about back when… when I lived with some folks who traded into winter. I heard that Warea was dug into a small sea, as a defense against pirates."

"You know this place?" Fanning had noticed him again. Hayden silently cursed himself for speaking up.

"It's a small independent station," he told the admiral. "Paranoid about pirates and military raids—they won't take kindly to seeing your ships out here, sir."

"Hmm. But they could have some of the supplies we need to fix the Tormentors masts, eh?" Fanning squinted at the distant glow. "They've probably got divers in the water now, watching us dig her out. Can't hide that we're military…" He thought for a second, then nodded. "You, the boy. Carrier, and two carpenters. Go in, negotiate a purchase. Foreman'll give you a manifest. Tell them we've no interest in them beyond buying what we need."

"But why us?"

"You because you know the place. The boy because he looks harmless. Carrier because he also looks harmless, and because you and he are obviously civilians." He looked down his nose at Hay-den's shabby shirt and trousers.

"Sir!" It was the armorer, Mahallan, coming up from below. "This settlement—they might have some of the things I need."

"Go on with you, then." Venera Fanning had also appeared. As she sailed in from the left the admiral glared at her and said, "Not a chance."

"He's my pilot." She indicated Hayden. "He takes orders from me.

"I'm the only one who gives orders on this ship." Fanning turned away from her. Venera's eyes narrowed, but then she smirked good-naturedly, and Fanning grinned back for a second. Hayden was surprised; he'd never seen Venera acquiesce like that, hadn't even known it was possible for her.

One of the carpenters thumped a hand onto his shoulder. "Stop gawking and get your coat, boy. We're going to town!"