SUN OF SUNS

KARL SCHROEDER

Virga | BOOK ONE

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

SUN OF SUNS: VIRGA, BOOK ONE

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Cover art by Stephan Martiniere

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Acknowledgments

As always, I'd like to acknowledge the hard work and good advice of my editor, David Hartwell, as well as Denis Wong at Tor Books; my agent Donald Maass for having the good grace to run with this project when I unexpectedly dropped it in his lap; and of course, Janice and Paige for their patience during my extended periods of impractical musing and daydreaming.

TO THE INDISPENSABLE:

Cory Doctorow, Phyllis Gotlieb, Sally McBride,
David Nickle, Helen Rykens, Sara Simmons,
Michael Skeet, Hugh A. D. Spencer, Dale Sproule,
Allan Weiss, and Theresa Wojtasiewicz

SUN OF SUNS

1

HAYDEN GRIFFIN WAS plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang. The dull clang penetrated even the thick wooden walls of the corporation inn; it was designed to be heard all over town. Hayden paused, frowned, and experimentally let go of the fish. Four tumbling feathers flashed like candle flames in an errant beam of sunlight shooting between the floorboards. The fish landed three feet to his left. Hayden watched the feathers dip in a slow arc to settle next to it.

"A bit early for a spin-up, ain't it?" said Hayden. Miles grunted distractedly. The former soldier, now corporation cook, was busily pouring sauce over a steaming turkey that he'd just rescued from the oven's minor inferno. His bald skull shone in the firelight. "They might need me all the same," continued Hayden. "I better go see."

Miles glanced up. "Your ma left you here," he said. "You been bad again. Pick up the fish."

Hayden leaned back against the table, crossing his arms. He was trying to come up with a reply that didn't sound like whining when the bell rang again, more urgently. "See?" he said. "They need somebody. Nobody in town's as good with the bikes as I am. Anyway, how you gonna boil this fish if the gravity goes?"

"Gravity ain't gonna go, boy," snapped Miles. "It's solid right now."

"Then I better go see what else is up."

"You just want to watch your old lady light the sun," said Miles.

"Don't you?"

"Today's just a test. I'll wait for tomorrow, when they light it for real."

"Come on, Miles. I'll be right back."

The cook sighed. "Go, then. Set the bikes going. Then come right back." Hayden bolted for the door and Miles shouted, "Don't leave that fish on the floor!"

As Hayden walked down the hall to the front of the inn another stray beam of sunlight spiked up around the plank floorboards. That was a bad sign; Mom would have to wait for deep cloud cover before lighting the town's new sun, lest the Slipstreamers should see it. Slipstream would never tolerate another sun so close to their own. The project was secret—or it had been. By tomorrow the whole world would know about it.

Hayden walked backward past the well-polished oak bar, waving his lanky arms casually at his side as he said, "Bell rang. Gotta check the bikes." One of the customers smirked doubtfully at him; Mama Fifty glared at him from her post behind the bar. Before she could reply he was out the front door.

A blustery wind was blowing out here as always, even whistling up between the street boards. Sunlight angled around the edges of the street's peaked roof, bars and rectangles of light sliding along the planking and up the walls of the buildings that crammed every available space. The street boards gave like springs under Hayden's feet as he ran up the steep curve of the avenue, which was nearly empty at this time of day.

Gavin Town came to life at dusk, when the workers who slept here flooded back from all six directions, laughing and gossiping. Merchants would unshutter their windows for the night market as the gaslights were lit all along the way. The dance hall would throw open its doors for those with the stamina to take a few turns on the floor. Sometimes Hayden picked up some extra bills by lighting the streetlights himself. He was good with fire, after all.

If he went to work on the bikes Hayden wouldn't be able to see the sun, so he took a detour. Slipping down a narrow alleyway between two tall houses, he came to one of the two outer streets of the town—really little more than a narrow covered walkway. Extensions of houses and shops formed a ceiling, their entrances to the left as he stepped into the way. To the right was an uneven board fence, just a crack open at the top. An occasional shuttered window interrupted the surface of the fence, but Hayden didn't pause at any of them. He was making for an open gallery a quarter of the way up the street.

At moments like this—alone and busy—he either completely forgot himself or drowned in grief. His father's death still weighed on him, though it had been a year now; was it that long since he and his mother had moved here? Mother kept insisting that it was best this way, that if they'd stayed home in Twenty-two Town they would have been surrounded by reminders of Dad all the time. But was that so bad?

His father wouldn't be here to see the lighting of the sun, his wife's completion of his project—their crowning achievement as a family. When Hayden remembered them talking about that, it was his father's voice he remembered, soaring in tones of enthusiasm and hope. Mother would be quieter, but her pride and love came through in the murmurs that came through the bedroom wall and lulled Hayden to sleep at night. To make your own sun! That was how nations were founded. To light a sun was to be remembered forever.

WHEN HAYDEN WAS twelve his parents had taken him on his first visit to Rush. He had complained, because lately he'd come to know that though Slipstream was a great nation, it was not his nation. His friends had jeered at him for visiting the camp of the enemy, though he didn't exactly know why Slipstreamers were bad, or what it meant to be a citizen of Aerie instead.

"That's why we're going," his father had said. "So that you can understand."

"That, and to see what they're wearing in the principalities," said Mother with a grin. Father had glowered at her—an expression his slablike face seemed designed for—but she ignored him.

"You'll love it," she said to Hayden. "We'll bring back stuff to make those pals of yours completely envious."

He'd liked that thought; still, Father's words had stuck with him. He was going to Rush to understand.

And he thought he did understand, the moment that their ship had broached the final wall of cloud and he glimpsed the city for the first time. As light welled up, Hayden flew to a stoutly-barred window with some other kids—there was no centrifuge in this little ship, so everybody was weightless—and shielded his eyes to look at their destination.

The nearby air was full of travelers, some riding bikes, some on prop-driven contraptions powered by pedals, and some kicking their feet to flap huge white wings strapped to their backs. They carried parcels, towed cargos, and in the case of the fan-jets, left behind slowly fading arcs and lines of white contrail to thatch the sky.

Their cylindrical frigate had emerged from the clouds near Slipstream's sun, which it made an inferno of half the sky. Seconds out of the mist and the temperature was already rising in the normally chilly ship's lounge. The other boys were pointing at something and shouting excitedly; Hayden peered in that direction, trying to make out what was casting a seemingly impossible shadow across an entire half of the view. The vast shape was irregular like any of the rocks they had passed on their way here. Where those rocks were usually house-sized and sprouted spidery trees in all directions, this shape was blued with distance and covered with an even carpet of green. It took Hayden a few seconds to realize that it really was a rock, but one that was several miles in diameter.

He gaped at it. Father laughed from the dining basket, woven of wicker, where he perched with Mother. "That's the biggest thing you've ever seen, Hayden. But listen, there's much bigger places. Slipstream is not a major state. Remember that."

"Is that Rush?" Hayden pointed.

Father pulled himself out of the basket and came over. With his broad laborer's shoulders and calloused hands, he bulked much bigger than the kids, who made a place for him next to Hayden. "The asteroid? That's not Rush. It's the source of Slipstream's wealth, though—it and their sun." He leaned on the rail and pointed. "No . . . That is Rush."

Maybe it was because he'd never seen anything like it before, but the city simply hadn't registered in Hayden's mind until this moment. After all, the towns of Aerie were seldom more than two hundred yards across, and were simply wheels made of wooden planks lashed together and spoked with rope. You spun up the whole assembly and built houses on the inside surface of the wheel. Simple. And never had he seen more than five or six such wheels in one place.

The dozens of towns that made up Rush gleamed of highly polished metal. They were more cylindrical than ring-shaped, and none was less than five hundred yards in diameter. The most amazing thing was that they were tethered to the forested asteroid in quartets like mobiles; radiating from each cylinder's outer rim were bright sails of gold and red that transformed them from mere towns into gorgeous pinwheels.

"The asteroid's too big to be affected by the wind," said Father. Hayden shifted uncomfortably; Father was not trying to hide the burr of his provincial Aerie accent. "The towns are small enough to get pulled around by gusts. They use the sails to help keep the wheels spun up." This made sense to Hayden, because wind was the result of your moving at a different speed than whatever airmass you were in. Most of the time, objects migrated outward and inward in Virga to the rhythm of slowly circulating rivers of air. You normally only experienced wind at the walls of a town or while flying. Many times, he had folded little propellers of paper and let them out on strings. They'd twirled in the rushing air. So did the towns of Rush, only much more slowly.

Hayden frowned. "If that big rock isn't moving with the air, won't it drift away from the rest of Slipstream?"

"You've hit on the very problem," said Father with a smile. "Slipstream's more migratory than most countries. The Slipstreamers have to follow their asteroid's orbit within Virga. You can't see from here, but their sun is also tethered to the asteroid. Ten years ago, Slipstream drifted right into Aerie. Before that, we were a smaller and less wealthy nation, being far from the major suns. But we were proud. We controlled our own destiny. Now what are we? Nothing but vassals of Rush."

Hayden barely heard him. He was eagerly staring at the city.

Their ship arrived at midday to find a traffic jam at the axis of one of the biggest cylinders. It took an hour to disembark, but Hayden didn't care. He spent the time watching the heavily built-up inner surface of the town revolve past. He was looking for places to visit. From the axis of the cylinder, where the docks sat like a jumble of big wooden dice, cable-ways radiated away to the other towns that made up the city. One wheel in particular caught his eye—a huge cylinder whose inside seemed to be one single building with balconies, coigns and glittering glass-paneled windows festooning it. This cylinder was surrounded by warships, which Hayden had seen in photos but never been close to before. The massive wooden vessels bristled with gun ports, and they trailed smoke and ropes and masts like the spines of fish. They were majestic and fascinating.

"You'll never get there," said Father drily. "That's the pilot's palace."

After ages they were finally able to descend the long, curving, covered stairway to the street. Here Hayden had to endure another interminable wait while a man in a uniform examined Father's papers. Hayden was too distracted at the time to really notice his father's falsely jovial manner, or the way his shoulders had slumped with relief when they were finally accepted into the city. But after some walking he turned to Mother and kissed her, saying quietly, "I'll be back soon. Check us into the hotel, but don't wait for me. Go and do some shopping, it'll take your mind off it."

"Where's he going?" Hayden watched as Father disappeared into the crowd.

"It's just business," she said, but she sounded unhappy.

Hayden quickly forgot any misgivings this exchange might have raised. The town was huge and fascinating. Even the gravity felt different—a slower turnover of the inner ear—and there were points where you couldn't see the edges of the place at all. He followed his mother around to various outlets and while she haggled over wholesale paper prices for the newspaper she helped run, Hayden was happy to stare out the shop's windows at the passing crowds.

Gradually, though, he did begin to notice something. Mother was dressed in the layered and colorful garments of the Aerie outer districts and, like Father, made no attempt to hide her accent. Even her black hair and dark eyes marked her as different here in this city of fair-haired, pale-eyed people. Though the shopkeepers weren't actually hostile to Mother, they weren't being very friendly either. Neither were the other kids he saw in the street. Hayden smiled at one or two, but they just turned away.

He could have forgotten these details if not for what happened next. As they approached the hotel late that afternoon—Hayden laden with packages, his mother humming happily—he spotted Father at the hotel entrance, standing with his hands behind his back. Hayden felt his mother clutch his shoulder even as he waved and shouted a hello. It was only then that he noticed the men standing with his father, men in uniform who turned as one at the sound of Hayden's voice.

"Shit," whispered Mother as the policemen converged on her and a very confused Hayden.

The rest of the trip mostly consisted of waiting in various pale-green, bare rooms with his mother, who sat white-faced and silent, not answering any of Hayden's increasingly petulant questions. They didn't go back to the hotel to sleep, but were given a couple of rough cots in a small room in the back of the police station. "Not a cell," said the sergeant who showed them to it. "A courtesy apartment for relatives."

Father had reappeared the next day. He was disheveled, subdued, and had a bruise on his cheek. Mother wept in his arms while Hayden stood nearby, hugging his own chest in confused anger. Later that day they boarded a passenger ship considerably less posh than the one they had arrived on, and Hayden watched the bright pinwheels of Rush recede in the distance, unexplored.

Later Father had explained about the Resistance and the importance of assembling the talent and resources Aerie needed to strike out on its own. Hayden thought he understood, but what mattered was not the politics of it; it was the memory of walking through Rush's crowded streets next to his father, whose hands were bound behind his back.

THE GALLERY WAS just a stretch of street empty of fence, but with a railing you could look over. Mother called it a "braveway"; Miles used the more interesting term "pukesight." Hayden stepped up to the rail and clutched it with both hands, staring.

A gigantic mountain of cloud wheeled in front of him, nearly close enough to touch. The new sun must be behind it; the ropes of the road from Gavin Town to the construction site stabbed the heart of the cloud and vanished inside it. Hayden was disappointed; if the sun came on right now he wouldn't see it.

He laughed. Oh, yes he would. Father had impressed it upon him again and again: when the sun came on, there would be no missing it. "The clouds for miles around will evaporate—poof," he'd said with a wave of his fingers. "The temperature will instantly shoot up, in fact everything within a kilometer is going to catch fire. That's why the sun is situated so far from any towns. That, and security reasons, of course. And the light . . . Hayden, you have to promise not to look at it. It's going to be brighter than anything you can imagine. Up close, it could burn your skin and dazzle you through your closed eyelids. Never look directly at it, not until we've moved the town."

The cloud appeared to rotate as Hayden gazed at it; Gavin Town was a wheel like all towns, after all, and spun to provide its inhabitants with centrifugal gravity. It was the only form of gravity they would ever know, and it was a precious resource, costly and heavily taxed. Grant's Chance, the next nearest town, lay a dozen miles beyond the sun site, invisible for now behind cloud.

Cloud was why the Griffins had come here. At the edges of the zone lit by Slipstream, the air cooled and condensation began. White mist in all its shapes made a wall here separating the sunlit realm from the vast empty spaces of winter. This was the frontier. Here you could hide all manner of things—secret projects, for instance.

The town continued to turn and now sky opened out beyond the barrier of mist—sky with no limits, either up, down, or to either side. Two distant suns carved out a sphere of pale air from this endless firmament, a volume denned by thousands upon thousands of clouds in all shapes and sizes, most of them tinged with dusk colors of rose and amber. There were ragged streamers indicating currents and rivers of air; puffballs and many-armed star shapes; and many miles away, its outlines blurred by intervening dust and mist, a mushroom head was forming as some current of cold impacted a mass of moist air. Below and above, walls of white blocked any further view, while whatever lay on the other side of the suns was obscured by dazzle and golden detail.

As it radiated through hundreds of miles of air, that light would fade and redden, or be shadowed by the countless clouds and objects comprising the nation of Aerie. If you traveled inward or up to civilized spaces, the light from other distant suns would begin to brighten before you ran out of light from yours; but if you went down or back, you would eventually reach a point where their light was completely obscured. There, a creeping chill took over. In the dark and cold, nothing grew. There began the volumes of winter that made up much of the interior of the planet-sized balloon of air, called Virga, where Hayden lived.

Gavin Town hovered at the very edge of civilization, where the filtered light of distant fires could barely keep crops alive. It wasn't lonely out here, though; above, below, and all about hung the habitations of Man. Three miles up to the left, a farm caught the suns' light: within a net a hundred feet across, the farmer had gathered pulverized rock and soil, and was growing a crop of yellow canola. Each plant clutched its own little ball of mud and they all tumbled about slowly, catching and losing the light in one another's shadow. The highway that passed near the farm was busy, a dozen or more small cars sailing along guided by the rope that was the highway itself. The rope extended off into measureless distance, heading for Rush. Below and to the right, a sphere of water the size of a house shimmered, its surface momentarily ridged by a passing breeze. Hayden could see a school of wetfish swirling inside the sphere like busy diamonds.

There was way too much to take in with a single glance, so Hayden almost didn't spot the commotion. Motion out of the corner of his eye alerted him; leaning over the railing and sighting left along the curving wall of the town, he saw an unusually dense tangle of contrails. The trails led back in the direction of the sun and as he watched, three gleaming shapes shot out of the cloud and arrowed in the same direction.

Strange.

Just as he was wondering what might be happening, the gravity bell rang again. Hayden pushed himself back from the rail and ran for the main street. It wouldn't do for somebody else to get the bikes running after he'd promised Miles he'd be there.

The stairwell to the gravity engines led off the center of the street. Gravity was a public service and the town fathers had insisted on making its utilities both visible and accessible to everyone. Consequently, Hayden was very surprised when he clattered down the steps into the cold and drafty engine room and found nobody there.

Bike number two still hung from its arm above the open hatchway in the floor. It wasn't a bike in the old gravity-bound sense; the fan-jet was a simple metal barrel, open at both ends, with a fan in one end and an alcohol burner at its center. You spun up the fan with a pair of pedals and then lit the burner, and you were away. Hayden's own bike lay partly disassembled in the corner. He'd been meaning to get it running tonight.

When started and lowered through the hatch, bikes one and two would produce enough thrust to spin Gavin Town back up to a respectable five revolutions per minute. This had to be done once or twice a day so normally the engine room would have somebody in it either working, topping up the bike's tanks, or doing maintenance. Certainly if the gravity bell rang, somebody would always be here in seconds and the bike operational in under a minute.

The wind whistled through the angled walls of the room. Hayden heard no voices, no running feet.

After a few seconds, though, something else came echoing up through the floor. Somewhere within a mile or two, an irregular popping had started.

It was the unmistakable sound of rifle fire.

A CRACKING ROAR shook the engine room. Hayden dropped to his stomach to look out the floor hatch, just in time to see a bike shoot by just meters below. It flashed Slipstreamer gold. A second later another that gleamed Aerie green followed it. Then the town had curved up and away and there was nothing out there but empty sky. The firing continued, dulled now by the bulk of the town.

Now he heard pounding footsteps and shouting from overhead. Shots rang out from nearby, making Hayden jump. The volleys were erratic, undisciplined, while in the distance he heard a more even, measured response.

As he ran back up the steps something whistled past his ear and hit the wall with a spang. Splinters flew and Hayden ducked down to his hands and knees, knowing full well that it wouldn't do any good when this section of the town rotated into full view of whoever was firing. The bullets would come straight up through the decking.

He emerged onto the still-empty street and ran to the right, where he'd heard people firing. A narrow alley led to the town's other outer street. He skidded around the corner to face the braveway—and saw bodies.

Six men had taken up firing positions at the rail. All were now slumped there or sprawled on the planks, their rifles carelessly flung away. The wood of the rail and flooring was splintered in dozens of places. There was blood everywhere.

Something glided into view beyond the railing, and he blinked at it in astonishment. The red and gold sails of a Slipstream warship spun majestically there, not two hundred yards below. Hayden could make out the figures of men moving inside the open hatches of the thing. Beyond it, partly eclipsed, lay another ship, and another. Contrails laced the air between and around them.

Hayden took a step toward the braveway and stopped. He looked at the bodies and at the warships, and took another step.

Something shot past the town and he heard a shout from the empty air outside. Gunshots sounded from below his feet and now a wavering contrail dissipated in the air not ten feet past the railing.

He ran to the braveway and took one of the rifles from the nerveless fingers of its former owner. He vaguely recognized the man as someone who'd visited the inn on occasion.

"What do you think you're doing?" Hayden whirled, to find Miles bearing down on him. The cook's mouth was set in a grim line. "If you poke your head out they're gonna shoot it off."

"But we have to do something!"

Miles shook his head. "It's too late for that. Take it from somebody who's been there. Nothing we can do now except get killed, or wait this out."

"But my mother's at the sun!"

Miles jammed his hands in his pockets and looked away. The sun was the Slipstreamers' target, of course. The secret project had been discovered. If Aerie could field its own sun, it would no longer be dependent on Slipstream for light and heat. Right now, Slipstream could choke out Aerie's agriculture by shading their side of the sun; all the gains that Hayden's nation had made in recent years—admittedly the result of Slipstream patronage—would be lost. But the instant that his parents' sun came on the situation would change. Aerie's neighbors to the up and down, left and right would suddenly find a reason to switch allegiances. Aerie could never defend its sun by itself, but by building it out here, on the edge of darkness, they stood to open up huge volumes of barren air to settlement. That real estate would be a tremendous incentive to their neighbors to intercede. That, at least, had been the plan.

But if the sun were destroyed before it could even be proven to work . . . It didn't matter to Hayden, not right now. All he could think was that his mother was out there, probably at the focus of the attack.

"I'm the best flyer in town," Hayden pointed out. "These guys made good targets 'cause they weren't moving. Right now we need all the riflemen we can get in the air."

Miles shook his head. "Listen, kid," he said, "there's too many Slipstreamers out there to fight. You have to pick your battles. It ain't cowardice to do that. If you throw your life away now, you won't be there to help when the chance comes later on."

"Yeah," said Hayden as he backed away from the braveway.

"Drop the rifle," said Miles.

Hayden spun and raced down the alley, back to the main street. Miles shouted and came after him.

Hayden clattered down the stairs to the engine room, but only realized as he got there that his bike was still in pieces all over the floor. He'd planned to roll it out the open hatch and fire it up when he was in the air. The spin of the town meant he would leave it at over a hundred miles an hour anyway; plenty of airflow to get the thing running, if it had been operable.

He was sitting astride the hoist that held bike number two when Miles arrived. "What do you think you're doing? Get down!"

Glaring at him, Hayden made another attempt to pull the pins that held the engine to the hoist. "She needs me!"

"She needs you alive! And anyway, how are you gonna steer—"

The pin came loose, and the bike fell. Hayden barely kept his hold on it, and in doing so he dropped the rifle.

Wind burst around him, blinding him and taking his breath away. Fighting it, he managed to wrap his legs around the barrel shape of the bike and used his own body as a fin to turn it so that the engine faced into the airstream. Then he grabbed the handlebars and hit the firing solenoid.

The engine caught under him and suddenly Hayden had a new sense of up and down: down was behind the bike, up ahead of it— and it was all he could do to dangle from its side as it accelerated straight into the nearby cloud.

His nose banged painfully against the bike's saddle. Icy mist roared down his body, threatening to strip his clothes away. A second later he was in clear air again. He squinted up over the nose of the jet, trying to get a sense of where he was.

Glittering arcs of crystal flickered in the light of rocket-trails: Aerie's new sun loomed dead ahead. Jet contrails had spun a thick web around the translucent sphere and its flanks were already holed in several places. Its delicate central machinery could not be replaced; those systems came from the principalities of Candesce, thousands of miles away, and used technologies that no one alive could replicate. Yet two Slipstream cruisers had stopped directly over the sun and were veiling themselves in smoke as they launched broadside after broadside into it.

Mother would have been topping up the fuel preparatory to evacuating her team. Nobody could enter the sun while it was running; you had to give it just enough fuel for its prescribed burn. The engineers had planned a two-minute test for today, providing there was enough cloud to block the light in the direction of Slipstream.

A body tumbled past Hayden, red spheres of blood following it. He noticed abstractly that the man wore the now-banned, green uniform of Aerie. That was all he had time for, because any second now he was going to hit the sun himself.

Bike number two had never been designed to operate in open air. It was a heavy-duty fan-jet, powerful enough to pull the whole town into a faster spin. It had handlebars because they were required by law, not because anybody had ever expected to use them. And it was quickly accelerating to a point where Hayden was going to be ripped off it by the airstream.

He kicked out his legs, using them to turn his whole body in the pounding wind. That in turn ratcheted the handlebars a notch to the left; then another. Inside the bike, vanes turned in the exhaust stream. The bike began—slowly—to bank.

The flashing geodesics of the sun shot past close enough to touch. He had a momentary glimpse of faces, green uniforms, and rifles, and then he looked up past the bike again and saw the formation of Slipstream jets even as he shot straight through them. A few belated shots followed him but he barely heard them over the roar of the engine.

And now dead ahead was another obstacle, a spindle-shaped battleship this time. It flew the bright pennants of a flagship. Behind it was another bank of clouds, then the indigo depths of winter that lurked beyond all civilization.

Hayden couldn't hold on any longer. That was all right, though, he realized. He made sure the jet was aimed directly at the battleship, then pulled up his legs and kicked away from it.

He spun in clear air, weightless again but traveling too fast to breathe the air that tore past his lips. As his vision darkened he turned and saw bike number two impact the side of the battleship, crumpling its hull and spreading a mushroom of flame that lit a name painted on the metal hull: Arrogance.

With the last of his strength Hayden went spread-eagle to maximize his wind resistance. The world disappeared in silvery gray as he punched his way into the cloud behind the flagship. A flock of surprised fish flapped away from his plummeting fall. He waited to freeze, lose consciousness from lack of air, or hit something.

None of that happened, though his fingers and toes were going numb as he gradually slowed. The problem now was that he was soon going to be stranded inside a cloud, where nobody could see him. With the din of the battle going on, nobody would hear him either. People had been known to die of thirst after being stranded in empty air. If he'd been thinking, he'd have brought a pair of flapper fins at least.

He was just realizing that anything like that would have been torn off his body by the airstream, when the cloud lit up like the inside of a flame.

He put a hand up and spun away from the light but it was everywhere, diffused through the whole cloud. In seconds a pulse of intense heat welled up and to Hayden's astonishment, the cloud simply vanished, rolling away like a finished dream.

The heat continued to mount. Hayden peered past his fingers, glimpsing a silhouetted shape between him and a blaze of impossible light. The Slipstream battleship was dissolving, the flames enfolding it too dim to be seen next to the light of Aerie's new sun.

Though he was slowing, Hayden was still falling away from the battle. This fact saved his life, as everything else in the vicinity of the sun was immolated in the next few seconds. That wouldn't matter to his mother: she and all the other defenders were already dead, killed in the first seconds of the sun's new light. They must have lit the sun rather than let Slipstream have it as a prize.

The light reached a peak of agony and abruptly faded. Hayden had time to realize that the spherical blur flicking out of the orange afterglow was a shockwave, before it hit him like a wall.

As he blacked out he spun away into the blue-gray infinity of winter, beyond all civilization or hope.

2

THE HEADACHE WASN'T so bad today but Venera Fanning's fingers still sought out the small scar on her jaw as she entered the tiled gallery separating her chambers from the offices of Slipstream's admiralty. A lofty, pillared space, the hall ran almost the entire width of the royal townwheel in Rush; she couldn't avoid traversing it several times a day. Every time she did she relived the endless time after the bullet hit, when she'd lain here on the floor expecting to die. How miserable, how abandoned.

She would never enter the hall alone again. She knew it signaled weakness to everyone around her, but she needed to hear the servant's footsteps behind her here, even if she wouldn't look him in the eye and admit her feelings. The moaning of the wind from outside was the only sound except for her clicking footsteps, and that of the man behind her.

While that damnable hall brought back the memories whenever she entered it, Venera hadn't had the place demolished and replaced as her sisters would have. At least, she would not do that until the pain that radiated up her temples morning, noon, and night was ended. And the doctors merely exchanged their heavy-lidded glances whenever she demanded to know when that would be.

Venera flung back the double doors to the admiralty and was assailed by noise and the smells of tobacco, sweat, and leather. Right in the doorway four pages of mixed gender were rifling a file cabinet, their ceremonial swords thrust out and clashing in unconscious battle. Venera stepped adroitly around them and sidled past two red-faced officers who were bellowing at one another over a limp sheet of paper. She dodged a book trolley, its driver invisible behind the stacks of volumes teetering atop it, and in three more steps she entered the admiralty's antechamber, there to behold the bedlam of an office gearing up for war.

The antechamber was separated into two domains by a low wooden barrier. On the left was a waiting area, bare except for several armchairs reserved for elderly patrons. On the right, rows of polished wooden tables were manned by clerks who processed incoming reports. The clerks passed updates to a small army of pages engaged in rolling steep ladders up and down between the desks. They would periodically stop, crane their necks upward, then one would clamber up a ladder to adjust the height or relative position of one of the models that hung like a frozen flock of fish over the clerks' heads. Two ship's captains and an admiral stood among the clerks, as immobile as if stranded by the hazard of the whizzing ladders.

Venera strolled up to the rail and rapped on it smartly. It took a while before she was noticed, but when she was, a page abandoned his ladder and raced over to bow.

"May I have the key to the ladies' lounge, please?" she asked. The page ducked his head and ran to a nearby cabinet, returning with a large and ornate key.

Venera smiled sweetly at him; the smile slipped as a pulse of agony shot up from her jaw to wrap around her eyes. Turning quickly, she stalked past the crowding couriers and down a rosewood-paneled corridor that led off the far side of the antechamber. At its end stood an oak door carved with bluejays and finches, heavily polished but its silver door-handle tarnished with disuse.

The servant made to follow her as she unlocked the door. "Do you mind?" she asked with a glower. He flushed a deep pink, and only now did Venera really notice him; he was quite young and handsome. But, a servant.

She shut the door in his face and turned. The lounge's floors were smothered in deep crimson carpet, its walls of paneled oak so deeply varnished as to be almost black. There were no windows, only gaslights in peach-colored sconces here and there. While there were enough chairs and benches for a dozen ladies to wait in while others used the two privies, Venera had never encountered another woman here. It seemed she was the only wife in the admiralty who ever visited her husband at work.

"Well?" she said to the three men who awaited her, "what have you learned?"

"It seems you were right," said one. "Capper, show the mistress the photos."

A high-backed chair had been dragged into the center of the room and in it a young man in flying leathers was now weakly rifling through an inner pocket of his jacket. His right leg was thickly bandaged, but blood was seeping through and dripping on the carpet, where it disappeared in the red pile.

"That looks like a main line you've cut there," said Venera with a professional narrowing of the eyes. The youth grinned weakly at her. The second man scowled as he tightened a tourniquet high on the flyer's thigh. The third man watched this all indifferently. He was a mild-looking fellow with a balding head and the slightly pursed lips of someone more used to facing down sheets of paper than other people. When he smiled at all, Venera knew, Lyle Carrier lifted his lips and eyebrows in a manner that suggested bewilderment more than humor. She had decided that this was because other people's emotions were meaningless abstractions to him.

Carrier was a deeply dangerous man. He was as close to a kindred spirit as she'd been able to find in this forsaken country. He was, in fact, the one man Venera could never completely trust. She liked that about him.

The young man hauled a sheaf of prints out of his jacket with a grimace. He held it up for Venera to take, his hand trembling as though it were lead weights he was handing her and not paper. Venera snatched up the pictures eagerly and held them to the light one by one.

"Ah . . ." The fifth photo was the one she'd been waiting to see. It showed a cloudy volume of air filled with spidery wooden dock armatures. Tied up to the docks was a row of stubby metal cylinders bristling with jets. Venera recognized the design: they were heavy cruisers, each bearing dozens of rocket ports and crewed by no less than three hundred men.

"They built the docks in a sargasso, just like you said," said the young spy. "The bottled air let me breathe on the way through. They're pumping oxygen to the work site using these big hoses . . ."

Venera nodded absently. "It was one of your colleagues who discovered that. He saw the pumps being installed outside the sargasso, and put two and two together." She riffled through the rest of the pictures to see if there was a better shot of the cruisers.

"Clearly another secret project," murmured Carrier with prim disapproval. "It seems nobody learned from the lesson we gave Aerie."

"That was eight years ago," said Venera as she held up a picture. "People forget. . . . What's this?"

Capper jerked awake in his chair and with a visible effort, sat up to look. "Ah, that . . . I don't know."

The image showed a misty, dim silhouette partly obscured behind the wheel of a town. The gray spindle shape suggested a ship, but that was impossible: the thing dwarfed the town. Venera held the print up to her nose under one of the gaslights. Now she could see little dots scattered around the gray shape. "What are these specks?"

"Bikes," whispered the spy. "See the contrails?"

Now she did, and with that the picture seemed to open out for a second, like a window. Venera glimpsed a vast chamber of air, walled by cloud and full of dock complexes, towns, and ships. Lurking at its edge was a monstrous whale, a ship so big that it could swallow the pinwheels of Rush.

But it must be a trick of the light. "How big is this thing? Did you get a good look at it? How long were you there?"

"Not long . . ." The spy waved his hand indifferently. "Took another shot . . ."

"He's not going to last if I don't get him to the doctor," said the man who was tending the spy's leg. "He needs blood."

Venera found the other photo and held it up beside the first. They were almost identical, evidently taken seconds apart. The only difference was in the length of some of the contrails.

"It's not enough." Frustration made hot waves of pain radiate up from her jaw and she unconsciously snarled. Venera turned to find only Carrier looking at her; his face expressed nothing, as always. The leather-suited spy was unconscious and his attendant was looking worried.

"Get him out of here," she said, gesturing to the servants' door at the back of the lounge. "We'll need to get a full deposition from him later." Capper was roused enough to lean on the shoulder of his attendant and they staggered out of the room. Venera perched on one of the benches and scowled at Carrier.

"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 me, 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 thing. 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 that? Tell me!"

"By the 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 ladies' 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.

"Cable snapped," he said with a sigh. "Wind shear pulled the towns apart and the springs couldn't compensate."

"Don't drown me in details, when will it be fixed?"

"You'd have to ask the cable monkeys, and they're all out there now."

"I have to get to the palace!"

"I'm sure the monkeys sympathize, ma'am."

She was about to erupt in a tirade against the man, when the servant touched her arm. "This way," he murmured.

With a furious hmmph, Venera followed him out of the crowd. He was heading for an innocuous side entrance. "What's down there?" she asked.

"Bike berths," he said as he opened the door to another windy gallery. This one was nearly empty. It curved up and out of sight, its right wall full of small offices with frosted-glass doors, its left wall opening out in a series of floor-to-ceiling arched windows. Beyond the windows was a braveway and then open turning air.

The gallery floor was full of hatches. About half had bikes suspended over them. The place smelled of engine oil, a masculine smell Venera found simultaneously rank and intriguing. Men in coveralls were rebuilding a bike nearby. Its parts were laid out in a neat line across a tarpaulin, their clean order betraying the apparent chaos of the opened chassis.

She was in a place of men; she liked that. "You have your own bike?" she asked the servant.

"Yes. It's right over there." He took a chit to the dock master and traded it in for a key and a worn leather jacket. They went over to the bike and he knelt to unlock the hatch beneath the gently swaying machine.

"Let me guess," she said. "A Gray forty-five?"

He laughed. "Those are work-haulers. This is a racer. It's a Canfield Arrow, Model fourteen. I bought it with my first paycheck from your household."

"There's a passenger seat," she said, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of riding the thing.

He squinted at her. "Have you never flown a bike, lady?"

"No. Does that surprise you?"

"I guess it's always been nice covered taxis for you," he said with a shrug. "Makes sense." He winched open the hatch and she took an apprehensive step back. Venera had no fear of the open air; it was speed that frightened her. Right now the air below the hatch was whipping by at gale force.

"We'll get blown off!"

He shook his head. "The dock master's lowering a shield ahead of the hatch. It'll give us several seconds of slipstream to cruise in. Just hunker down behind me—the windscreen's big—and you'll be fine. Besides, I won't take us flat out, too dangerous inside city limits."

He straddled the bike and held out his hand. Venera suppressed her grin until she was seated behind him. There were foot straps but she had nothing to hold on to with her hands except him. She wrapped her arms tightly around his waist.

He pushed the starter and she felt the engine rumble into life beneath her. Then he said, "All set?" and reached up to unclip the winch.

They fell into the air and for a few seconds the curve of the town's undersurface formed a ceiling. There was the shield, a long tongue of metal hanging down but pulling up quickly. "Head down!" he shouted and she buried her face in his back. Then the engine was roaring to drown all thought, the vibration rattling up through her spine, and they were free in the air between the city cylinders. The wind wasn't tearing her from this man's grasp, so Venera cautiously leaned back and looked around. She gave an involuntary gasp of delight.

Contrails like spikes and ropes stood still in the air around them. Tethers with gay flags on them slung here and there, and everywhere taxies, winged humans, and other bikes shot through the air. The quartet of towns that included the admiralty was already receding behind them; she turned to look back and saw that the cable car system, whose independent loop touched the axle of the vast spinning cylinder, was indeed slack. Men floated in open air around the break, their tools arrayed in constellations about them as they argued over what to do. Venera turned forward again, laughing giddily at the sensation of power that pulled her up and up toward the next quartet.

They passed heavy steel cables and then the broad cross-shaped spokes of a town's pinwheel. Up close the brightly colored sails were torn and patched. In far too little time the bike was rising under another town, the long slot of a jet entrance visible overhead. Venera's flyer expertly inched them into a perfect tangent course, and it seemed as if the town's curving underside simply reached out and settled around them. Her flyer shut down the engine and held up a hook, clipping it to an overhead cable just as they began to fall again. And there they were, hanging in a gallery almost identical to the one they just left. A palace footman ran up and began winching them away from the slot. They had arrived.

Venera dismounted and staggered back a few steps. Her legs had turned to jelly. Her servant swung off the back of the bike as though nothing had just happened. He grinned happily at her. "It's a good beast," he said.

"Well." She cast about for something to say. "I'm glad we're paying you enough that you can afford it."

"Oh, I never said I could afford it."

She frowned, and led the way out of the gallery. From here she knew the stairs and corridors to take to reach Slipstream's strategic command office. Her husband, Admiral Fanning, was tied up in meetings there, but he would see her, she knew. She thought about how much she would tell him regarding her spy network. As little as possible, she decided.

At the entrance to the office she turned and looked frankly at the servant. "This is as far as you can go. Wait down at the docks, you can run me back home the same way you brought me."

He looked disappointed. "Yes, ma'am."

"Hmm. What's your name, anyway?"

"Griffin, ma'am. Hayden Griffin."

"All right. Remember what I said, Griffin. Don't talk about the photos to anyone." She waggled a finger at him, but even though her head was pounding she couldn't summon any anger at the moment. She turned and gestured for the armed palace guard to open the giant teak doors.

As she walked away she thought of the beautiful freedom Griffin must have in those moments when he flew alone. She'd caught a glimpse of it when she rode with him. But entangled as she was in a life of obligation and conspiracy, it could never be hers.

HAYDEN WATCHED HER go in frustration. So close! He'd gotten to within a few yards of his target today. And then to be thwarted at the very entrance to the command center. He eyed the palace guard, but he knew he couldn't take the man and the guard was eyeing him back. Reluctantly, Hayden turned and headed back toward the docks.

He'd nearly blown it picking up those pictures. Obviously he'd underestimated Lady Fanning. He wouldn't do it again. But since he had been assigned to her, he hadn't been able to get anywhere near Fanning himself. If she liked him, though . . .

It was only a matter of time, he decided. Admiral Fanning would come within arm's reach one day soon.

And then Hayden would kill him.

3

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. Slipstream'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 thought 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'tcha 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 whistling 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 Fannings? 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 forth 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.

4

AT THE DOCKS the master was screaming, "No civilian craft, no civilian craft!" at a hundred panicked men crowding the doors. Hayden showed the security guard his pass to the Fanning estate and the grim-faced man reluctantly let him by. Once through the press of people he leaped on the back of his jet and kicked it into life. He dropped into turbulent air and the wail of attack sirens.

The sky was a storm of vehicles. Hayden had to twist and turn to avoid colliding with flocks of police bikes and ambulances. He kept his speed way down and held up his pass as he shot through narrow checkpoint gaps in ship-catcher nets that hadn't been there an hour before. In the distance other nets were slowly unfurling, distance making them appear like gray stains spreading in water.

Hayden never tired of flying between the cylinders of Rush at night. Even in this emergency, he found himself turning his head to watch the running lights of Quartet One, Cylinder Two as it showed him its black underside and, after he passed it, a crescent-shaped vision of glowing city windows and rooftops inside. The air was normally full of lanterns showing where invisible cables and stations waited in the dark; the lights were doubling, tripling now as he flew. To complicate matters, it looked as though a lightning storm was moving in: the sky below him was lit with intermittent flickers of white.

He was coming up underneath the Admiralty cylinder when bright radiance slapped his shadow against the town's spinning metal hull. He nearly missed the entrance slot in surprise: they'd turned the sun on, seven hours early!

After he'd hooked his bike to its crane and climbed off, he saw that this wasn't a normal dawn cycle. The skies visible through the arched windows of the dock were still a deep indigo. There must be some sort of spotlight feature to the sun that he'd never heard of before; Rush was pinioned in a beam of daylight but the rest of the world was a cave of night.

Another pilot was standing by the windows. "Now I believe it happened," he muttered under his breath. Hayden frowned and hurried out of the dock and up the stairs.

He could hear the tumult in the Fanning household before he even opened the servants' door. Inside, the kitchen staff were running back and forth piling cutlery in boxes, searching for anything with the Fanning monogram on it.

"What's going on?" Hayden asked mildly, sitting down at the large table beside the stove.

"They're going to war," said a maid on her way past. At that moment the chief butler swept into the kitchen and immediately spotted Hayden. "Griffin! Get into uniform. We're going to need you."

"Yes, sir."

He felt a pulse of resentment, but as he turned to go to the cloakroom Lynelle, another of the maids, passed close by and whispered, "This throws all my well-laid plans to waste."

"Uh, what?" He turned to look at her as she leaned in the kitchen doorway. She was pretty, he hadn't failed to notice that. But maybe he'd failed to notice her noticing him.

"I was going to throw a little party at my place on our shift's off-day. And I was going to invite you when I saw you tonight." She shrugged sourly. "Can't do it now."

"I—, I guess not." He backed away.

She followed. "Was it really an attack by Mavery?" she asked.

"I don't know. Listen, I . . . I have to get ready for work."

"Oh. All right, see you." He knew she was watching him walk away; his ears burned.

Hayden had been careful to cultivate a respectful attitude since being hired. In truth, he hated it when the other servants were nice to him. How could good people, in all conscience, work for a monster? It seemed perverse and incomprehensible to him. He went to his locker in the men's cloak room and donned the livery of the Fanning household. Once he was dressed, he sat down on the dressing bench for a moment to gather his courage.

Obviously, he would never get a better chance than this—if Fanning was home. Chances were he was in the Admiralty office or the palace right now. But Hayden would have to assume otherwise, and do what so far he had not had a chance to do: venture unescorted into the Fanning's living quarters. He checked that the knife in the back of his belt was accessible, then stood up.

One little detail kept nagging at him. Hayden's search for his mother's killers had led him here. He had verified that the Arrogance was under Fanning's command at the time of the attack on Aerie's new sun. But there was a troubling photograph in one of the hallways of this mansion. It showed Chaison Fanning standing with an academy graduating class, his easy smile contrasting their own serious pride. He had given a speech and attended a dinner there, six hundred miles away from the edge of Aerie.

The picture was dated the very day of the attack.

His hands were trembling. With a curse he strode out of the cloakroom and made for the stairs. Somebody shouted after him, but he ignored them. Let them think he had business upstairs—well, it was true anyway.

He was feeling lightheaded. The lamps in their amber sconces throwing rings of light on the ceiling; the looming portraits of ancestral Fannings glaring at him from all sides; the distant shouting and clanging, all lent an unreal atmosphere to the night. Hayden passed several people on the stairs, one of whom was an admiralty attache; they all ignored him. As he reached the landing to the second floor he heard muttering sounds coming from the admiral's office. So Fanning was here after all.

But not alone. Hayden paused outside the door, which was ajar. Fanning was talking to someone in low, clipped tones. It came to Hayden that this was exactly where Miles and the other Resistance members would have wanted him to be, had he agreed to join their cause. For a moment the wild thought came to him that he might be able to kill Fanning and escape, and that if so, he could pull a double coup if he returned to Miles with strategic information. So he listened.

". . . Won't accept any of it. He's getting way too trusting in his old age." Hayden recognized Fanning's voice, which he had only ever heard from behind closed doors. Was the admiral talking to only one person, or was there a full-blown staff meeting going on in there? Hayden couldn't find an angle where he could look around the door without being seen.

"But our orders are clear," said another man. "We're to take the Second Fleet into Mavery and deal with them now."

"We don't need the Second Fleet to eradicate Mavery," said Fanning contemptuously. "And the old man knows that. He's afraid that the First Families are going to side with me and order the fleet to investigate this buildup of ships in the sargasso. If he moves us all into Mavery we can't do that."

"He doesn't believe the sargasso fleet's a threat?"

"He doesn't believe it's real." Hayden heard papers shuffling. "So. Here are your orders."

There was a pause, then Hayden heard a sharp intake of breath from the other man. "You can't mean this!"

"I can. We'll deal with Mavery, like the old man wants. But I'll be damned if I'm going to sit in the air occupying a second-rate province while somebody else moves in full force against Rush."

"But—but by the time we do this—"

"The sargasso fleet's not ready. That's clear from the photos. And we won't be able to put Mavery down right away; it'll take a minimum of two months before we're inextricably engaged with them, and whoever's behind this knows to wait for that to happen. We have the time."

The other muttered under his breath, then seemed to catch himself. "Sir. It's audacious, Admiral, but . . . I can see the logic of it."

"Good. Well, go to it, Captain. I'll join you when I've completed preparations here."

Hayden just had time to close the door of the linen closet as a captain of the navy in full dress attire strode out of Fanning's office and down the stairs.

As soon as he was gone, Hayden was out and sidling up to the door to the office. There was no one but Fanning in there now, he was sure of it. His mouth was dry, and his pulse pounding in his ears as he steeled himself for what he had to do. In all likelihood he wouldn't survive the night, but he had a debt to pay.

Taking a deep breath, he reached for the doorknob.

"There you are!"

He snatched his hand back as if it had been burned, and turned to find Venera Fanning standing at the head of the stairs. She had a hand on one cocked hip, and was glaring at him in her usual withering way. She was dressed in traveling attire, complete with trousers and a backpack thrown over her shoulder.

"I'm going to need a good driver," she said as she stalked up to him. "You're the only one I know who can handle himself outside of an air carriage."

"Uh—thank you, ma'am?"

"Wait here." She swept past him and into the office, leaving the door wide open. This gave Hayden his first glimpse of Fanning's office; it was not what he'd expected. The place was a mess. All four walls were crammed with bookshelves of differing pedigree. Books swelled out of the shelves and sheets of paper stuck out between the volumes like the white leaves of some literary ivy. More papers stood in precarious stacks on the floor, all leaning left to accommodate the Coriolis tilt of the town's artificial gravity. The admiral himself was leaning back in his chair, one foot propped up next to the table's only lamp. He scowled up at Venera as she walked in.

"This is low even for you," he said as he tossed a sheaf of papers onto the desk. He looked older in person than in the photos Hayden had seen, with crow's-feet around his eyes, and his hair was starting to recede. Whipcord thin, he nonetheless moved gracefully under gravity, unlike people who spent most of their time in freefall.

"Oh, come now," Venera was saying. "I'm just asserting my prerogative as a wife, to be with her husband."

"Wives don't travel on ships of the line, especially when they're going into battle!" As if to emphasize his words, a flash of lightning lit the sky outside the office's one narrow window.

"I admit I underestimated you, Venera," continued Fanning. "No—actually, I misunderstood you. This intelligence network you created, it's . . ." He shook his head. "Beyond the pale. Why? What's it for? And why are you so insistent on joining the expeditionary force that you're willing to blackmail your own husband to guarantee that I'll say yes?"

"I did it all for us," she said sweetly as she came around the desk to lean over him. Venera smoothed the hair away from Fanning's forehead. "For our advantage. It's the way we do things back home, that's all."

"But why come along? This will be dangerous, and you'll be leaving the capital just when it would be most advantageous for you to remain here as my eyes and ears. It's a contradiction, Venera."

"I know you hate mysteries," she said. "That's what makes you good at your job. But I'm afraid this particular mystery will have to remain unsolved for a while. You'll see—if all works out as I hope. For now, you'll just have to trust me."

He laughed. "That's the funniest thing you've said in a long time. Well, all right then, pack your things and get down to the docks. We'll be sailing tonight."

"Under cover of darkness?" She smiled. "You do some of your best work then, you know."

Fanning just sighed and shook his head.

Venera returned to the hallway, and taking Hayden's arm, drew him away from the office and toward the stairs. He let her do it. "I'm going to send a man around to your flat," she said to Hayden. "Tell him what to collect for you. You're not to leave the house today; wait for me by the main doors at six o'clock tonight, or your contract is terminated. Is that understood?"

"But what's—"

She waved a hand imperiously, indicating that he should retreat down the stairs.

She stood between him and the man he'd come to murder.

"Well?" she said. Venera seemed to see him for the first time; a muscle in her jaw flexed, causing the star-shaped scar there to squirm. "What are you waiting for?"

Hayden took a step down. He'd been planning this moment for years. In his mind it had always been clear: the traitor revealing his cowardice at the end, Hayden making some pronouncement— different every time—of just vengeance for his people's loss. An execution, clean and final.

But in order to get at the admiral now, he would have to leave Venera Fanning bleeding out her own life in the hallway.

He took another step down.

Something came over Venera's face. Softness? Some subtle givingin to an interpretation of his actions that he didn't understand? "It will all be made clear tonight," she said in as soothing a tone as she was likely capable of.

He could have retreated around a corner, waited for her to leave. He might have staked out Fanning's office for the rest of the night. Instead he found his feet take another step and another, and then he was turning and clattering down the steps as though he actually had some other place to go. Somehow he ended up passing the photograph of Fanning posing with a graduating class. He stopped and stared at the date written on it until a hand descended on his shoulder and someone spoke his name.

He pushed past the other manservant as the world spun around him—and when he came to himself again he was kneeling in one of the servant's washrooms vomiting wretchedly into the privy.

5

ADMIRAL CHAISON FANNING pulled himself hand over hand up the docking rope and did a perfect free-fall flip to land on the quarterdeck of the Rook. He'd practiced that maneuver many times when he was younger, just as he'd practiced wearing the uniform of the Admiralty, keeping the cut of the jacket just so, the toeless boots polished to perfection and his toenails manicured and clean. The men watched for weakness using every possible standard—some couldn't follow a man with a thin voice, others couldn't respect an officer who didn't occasionally smile. Sometimes it seemed he'd spent the past two decades learning sixty varieties of playacting, with a special role for every rung on the ladder to his success.

There was a particular style to be cultivated when you were leaving port; he needed to project confidence and purpose to the airmen so that they didn't look back and obeyed his orders without question.

Rook was not the flagship of the fleet. A midsized cruiser, she was beginning to show her age, and several years ago had been refitted to buttress Slipstream's dwindling winter fleet. Still, she was a good ship: a hundred feet long, thirty in diameter, basically cylindrical but with curving ends that terminated in vicious spiked rams. Her thick wooden hull was festooned with hatches and ports through which could be thrust rifles, rocket racks, jet engines, braking sails, or mutineers as the situation warranted. Many of the hatches were open as she hung in the air next to the docking scaffolds, a mile from the Admiralty. The sun was glowering from behind the docks, whose caged catwalks cast long curving shadows across the amber hull of the ship, while tongues of light had found and lit random intricacies of its interior. Inside, the ship was a series of interlocking cells, most of them made of wooden lattices through which you could see men working or the tanned sides of tarpaulined and lashed crates. Some of the cells were big blocks of metal, such as the armory and the rocket magazine. And to the fore of the ship, just behind the bridge, an exercise centrifuge spun lazily. Its side walls made a turning mandala of Admiralty notices, wooden walls, and plumbing. The men were required to spend a few hours a day in the centrifuge, and he would too; nobody was going to lose their fighting trim on this voyage.

Captain John Sembry saluted the admiral. His staff were lined up in midair behind him, their toes pointed precisely in the same direction. "The ship is ready, sir," announced Sembry.

A quick glance told Chaison that everything was where it should be, and the men were all working hard—or at least giving the impression of working hard. That was all that mattered, if things were truly ready. "Very good, Captain. I'll be on the bridge. Carry on." He turned and did a hand-over-hand walk through a narrow passage under the centrifuge, heading for the prow.

On the way to the bridge he checked his cabin. Venera was not there. Neither was her luggage. Fuming, he continued on up to the cylindrical chamber just behind the fore rocket battery. The navigator and helm were waiting, looking expectant. They hadn't yet received their orders and were expecting to be told to set a course for Mavery. He was going to surprise them.

But not, apparently, yet. "Where is she?" he demanded of a petty officer. The man snapped to attention, slowly drifting upward and away from his post.

"Semaphore said, on her way, sir!"

"And when was that?"

"Half—half an hour ago, sir."

He turned away, composing himself before the man could see his mask of professionalism slip. He was looking for something to do— a tie-down to criticize, a chart crib to fold—when the navigator said, "She's here, sir," with some relief in his voice. He was floating next to a porthole; Chaison stepped over fifteen feet of empty air to join him there, and look where he pointed.

Hanging limbs akimbo in the cage of a docking arm twenty meters away was a long-haired woman with an imperious nose and heavily made-up eyes. She wore an outlandishly bright jumpsuit that was also too tight in all the right (or, on a ship like this, wrong) places. Her hands were twisting nervously, but her expression was intent and focused as she directed some navvies to push a small mountain of crates and trunks through the narrow exit of the docking arm.

Aubri Mahallan was not the "she" Chaison had been hoping to see. He'd assumed this particular passenger was already on board. Forgetting himself he frowned virulently at her, as if she could see him behind the sun-drenched hull.

"That . . . costume . . . will not do," he muttered under his breath.

"Two women on board, sir," said the navigator neutrally. "It's—"

"Far from unprecedented," Chaison finished smoothly. "There's a great tradition of female ship officers in Virga, Bargott—just not of late in the enlightened principality of our beloved pilot."

"No, sir, ah, yes, sir."

"Summon the armorer to the chart room when she boards. I'll meet her there." Chaison left without another glance at the bridge staff.

Located behind the bridge, the chart room was the traditional inner sanctum of the ship's commanding officer. Nobody was allowed in here except the bridge staff and Chaison himself—nobody except for the one person he did find when he entered the drum-shaped room. Gridde, Chaison's chart-master, was fabulously old and bent over—so much so that he retained the stoop even in freefall. As Chaison entered he was teasing a tiny ruby clip out of its nestle in the crook of two fine hairs inside the chamber's main chart box. "Ah, Admiral," he said without turning around, "it's an interesting challenge you've given me this time."

Chaison's irritability evaporated, as it always did around Gridde. "It would have been a shame for you to retire without helping us navigate winter."

"I've done it before," wheezed Gridde, smiling at Chaison's surprise. "Thirty-five years ago," continued the chart-master. He returned his attention to the large glass chart box. Inside the box was a three-dimensional lattice of fine, almost invisible blond strands— actual hairs, harvested from the rare young lady whose locks met Gridde's standard. Clipped to these strands were dozens of tiny jewel-clusters: a single sapphire stood for a small town, double-sapphires for larger towns, and so on. The box was a scintillating galaxy of light: sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topaz and jet, pale quartz and peridot. At the very center of the chart was a large diamond, which stood for the Slipstream sun. Gridde was adjusting the position of a ruby according to the latest semaphore information.

"Well, don't leave me drifting," said Chaison, crossing his arms and smiling. "What happened thirty-five years ago?"

Gridde snorted. "Why, the whole damn nation nearly drifted into winter! Don't they teach you any history at that academy? I remember a day when half the chart box was empty!" Despite the vehemence of his tone, his fingers were absolutely steady as they gripped the tiny ruby between a pair of wires and moved it infinitesimally to the left. "There. That ought to hold you for a day or two."

Chaison gripped the side of the chart table and pulled himself close to examine the three-dimensional representation of the one hundred miles of air surrounding Rush. "And our course?"

"Don't push me." Gridde slowly withdrew his wires and shut the case. "See, if this was one of those new gel charts, just drawing the wires out would move everything! You can't let them standardize on gel charts, sir. Would be a disaster."

"I know, Gridde, you've only told me a thousand times."

The chart-master sailed over to the wall and shut the metal bullet shield over the porthole. Now the room was lit only by the gleam of a gas lantern. Chaison wound up the lantern's little fan, without which it would starve itself of oxygen in seconds, and handed it to Gridde. The chart-master closed the metal door of the lantern, and now light only shone out of a tiny pipette. He carefully arranged this miniature spotlight in a set of flexible arms attached to the chart table, and aimed it.

Only a narrow column of jewels was lit now; the big diamond gleamed at its end. "The way-point," said Gridde, "is Argenta Town, the double-ruby." The two little red gleams were the only town within the beam of light. The beam represented the course the expeditionary force would take; Chaison could see that they would pass unseen by the majority of the local population.

"Good—" Chaison turned his head at a rap on the door. "Enter!"

Sunlight washed away the illusion of hovering above a miniature world. Silhouetted in the doorway was the curving shape of Aubri Mahallan. "That will be all, thank you, Gridde," said Chaison. "Come in, Armorer."

AS VENERA FANNING'S small party wound their way through the labyrinth of docking arms, Hayden stared at their destination with claustrophobic dread. Above him, below, and to all sides hung the bannered cruisers of Slipstream. These were the very ships that had invaded and conquered Aerie. He found himself searching the nearest ship for some sign of a scar—of burned hull, long since painted over—though the ship he had flown Can Two into six years ago had been incinerated before his eyes. He would not have been surprised had it turned up here, intact, a malignant ghost. Indeed, the cluster of bloated cylinders that shadowed the walkway seemed more nightmarish than real. This was the very last place in Virga he would have chosen to go.

"I'm definitely going to miss those Friday evening soirees," Venera was saying to some acquaintance of hers who had come to see her off. "Strange. The crowd has stopped cheering."

Only a low muttering came from the wall of people who pressed against the naval base's security netting. Hayden knew exactly why, but he was obligated to hold his tongue in the presence of his mistress. The crowd had come out to watch the fleet depart. They were eager for spectacle—for the proof that the Pilot was acting decisively after last night's outrageous attack on the city. People had been arriving all day, forming a curving half-shell made of human beings like tiles in a mosaic, that gradually came to obscure the backdrop of Rush's whirling towns. Charged up and indignant, they periodically broke into chants and songs, while continuously flinging sandwiches, drinks, and children up and down the surface of the wall. Bikes and folded wings, picnic baskets and man-sized wicker spheres containing food and souvenir vendors made a kind of base coat behind the human surface.

The fleet had been due to depart an hour ago. The sun was shutting down for the day, its light sputtering and reddening. The light made the docks seem like an alternation of photographs with different exposures and tints—now sepia, now plum-red, now black-and-white. As soon as the sun shut down, heat would flee the air. Few in the crowd had dressed for that. So now they were complaining.

Also muttering were the noncoms and military police who were hurrying Venera's party down the arm to the shadow-striped Rook. As they approached, the ship's jets growled into life for a moment, and it began to rotate until it was vertical compared to the approaching party. The rest of the ships began executing the same turn as word of their initial course and heading was relayed from the Rook.

"Ooh, Venera," said the socialite clinging to Fanning's arm, "they're excited to see you!" She waved at the crowd, which had burst into song again at the sight.

The grumbling engines and motion of ships made Hayden's head spin—but he kept going. There was only one way for him to redeem himself for his earlier cowardice. Fanning was leaving Rush, and Hayden had to follow.

And if—an idea so heretical he refused to take it seriously—if he should be unable to kill Fanning (he would never choose not to!), then Hayden could still do some good by acting as a spy aboard the Rook. If what he'd heard outside Fanning's office was any indication, there was more to this expedition than met the eye.

They reached the end of the docking arm. Hayden hauled on the rope to halt the forward drift of Venera's trunks while she showed her papers to the waiting deck officer. He barely glanced at them, waving her on.

"Now don't forget my camera!" shouted the socialite from behind the shoulders and arms of the MPs. Venera's other friends waved and shouted similar platitudes, as though Lady Fanning were going on a Sunday cruise and not leaving the country under mysterious circumstances. Hayden gathered the two trunks, each by its leather handle, and stepped across the two-meter gap between the arm and the ship.

As the big doors swung shut behind him Hayden was met by a chaos of detail: beams and ropes in gaslight, the smell of jet fuel and soap, racks of rifles and swords, the flickering motion of a giant centrifuge wheel—and everywhere people, a mob of silent men all of whom seemed to be looking at him.

He spun around, because it was Venera Fanning they were staring at. She stared back for a second, a half-smile crinkling the scar on her chin. Then she turned and shot in the direction of a narrow corridor that passed under the centrifuge. Hayden was left holding her bags.

As he moved to follow her he realized that only one other person had accompanied them on board: a nondescript, passive-faced man of middle age. He looked like some minor bureaucrat. Now he smiled at Hayden.

"But the other servants—"They had come here in a large group. Surely Hayden wasn't the only one who was going?

"You're the driver?" asked the bland man; his voice was as colorless as his appearance.

"Uh . . . yes."

"Stow the bags in the captain's cabin and then go to the centrifuge. You bunk with the carpenters."

"Ah." He stuck out his hand tentatively. "I'm Hayden Griffin."

The man shook it distractedly. "Lyle Carrier. Get going, then."

Hayden grabbed the trunks in an awkward embrace and went to find Venera Fanning.

DARKNESS SHUTTERED THE sky well before the last ship had left the docks. Chaison Fanning sat in the command chair, chin on his fist. He had no duties at this moment: the ship was in the hands of Captain Sembry. Sembry's voice rang out confidently, sending commands down the speaking tubes to the engines and rudder gangs. All eyes were on him just now, and that was a relief.

Chaison rotated a little cup-shaped object in his fingers. It had been given to him by that problematic armorer, Mahallan, a few minutes ago. This device was intended to make real for him an idea he'd thought ridiculous when Venera had first brought it to him. He supposed he should try it.

It was hard to focus past his anger, however. He glanced around; nobody was looking at him. No, they wouldn't. But it would be all through the fleet in hours. This was a humiliation he wouldn't be able to escape.

Why had she done it? He wondered. More importantly: why had he let her? He could have set sail and forced her to catch up. Except that she had information that she could—and would—use against him, her own husband, if he didn't do exactly what she said. He had no doubt she would move against him, he had known Venera long enough not to doubt her ruthlessness.

He gripped the cup tightly and almost threw it at the wall. But that would just add to the talk later, he knew. With a sigh he held it up to his ear.

The sound was surprisingly loud—he pulled the cup away, then gingerly replaced it. What he heard was a roaring din—a steady hissing, weird warbling noises that came and went, and a sound like giant teeth grating. Overlaid on all this was a deep tearing sound, like some impossibly heavy fabric being ripped. It went on and on, hypnotic, an argument between demons.

He took the speaker away from his ear. This was supposed to explain everything, this incessant grumbling. He did admit it was a compelling demonstration, but in no way did it lend credence to any of the wild claims Venera had made.

Anyway, he didn't care. All Admiral Fanning could think of right now was the fact that his wife had, no doubt deliberately, made the national fleet of Slipstream . . . late.

6

A COLUMN OF ragged clouds twisted like smoke in the night. The shapes wheeled grandly like wary duelists, occasionally testing one another's defenses with half-hearted lightning bolts. Every now and then, a transient corridor of clear air would open to some distant sun through the shuffle of gray shapes that receded for thousands of miles in every direction. Then the flanks of one or another silent combatant would momentarily throw the rest into invisibility as it shone in shades of dusty rose and burgundy.

These were young clouds, the progeny of a mushroom-shaped column of warmer air that had penetrated into Slipstream territory earlier in the day. Being young, these banks and starbursts of mist had just begun to condense. The realm through which they drifted was filled with the remnants of an earlier mass of clouds: its droplets had come together and fused over the hours and days, each collision making fewer and larger drops. Now great spheres of water, some head-sized, some as large as houses, punched through the clouds like slow cannonballs, adding to the chaos of the mixing air.

Wakeful citizens on bikes hovered outside the two towns and a farm that were the only habitation for miles. The sentries kept a watch out for any large mass of water that might loom out of the dark on a collision course with the spinning wheels, or the dark nets of the farm. For one sentry, the only sound was the whirring of the little fan that kept his lantern alive as he waited in silence, cloak drawn around his shoulders to ward off the damp, feet ready on the pedals to kick his bike into motion.

Thus huddled, he at first didn't notice something nose out of a cloud shaped like a bird's head. When he finally spotted it he muttered a curse, because initially it looked like a town-wrecker of a water ball. He reached for his horn with numb fingers, but as he raised the brass horn to his lips he hesitated. The shape no longer appeared rounded, but rather like an extra beak to the diaphanous bird, this one hard and sharp. It was the prow of a ship.

Now that he could see what it was he realized he'd been hearing it for a minute or two already—a distant whine in several keys from its engines. He could also see two spotter bikes weaving in spirals ahead of it. You never knew what might lurk inside a cloud, so the spotters went ahead of the ship to ensure that there were no rocks, water balls, or habitations in the way. On dark nights like this, spotters sometimes found obstacles by running into them. So ships tended to move slowly at night.

They also used headlights to probe the blackness—that was simple prudence. This ship, however, was running dark. As it left the cloud in a whirl of eddied mist, another nose appeared behind it, and another.

The sentry raised the horn again, suddenly fearing an invasion; then he saw the lantern-lit sigil of Slipstream on the hull of the lead vessel. He slowly lowered the