Sun of Suns v-1

by Karl Schroeder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Martor's eyes had gone round.

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

  "You're making that up."

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

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

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

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

  "Seems unlikely."

  "And what about the armorer?"

  "Huh? What about her?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Warea. It's one of the towns I… heard about back when… when I lived with some folks who traded into winter. I heard that Warea was dug into a small sea, as a defense against pirates."
r />   "You know this place?" Fanning had noticed him again. Hayden silently cursed himself for speaking up.

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

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

  "But why us?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER NINE

  "THERE'S NO SIGN." muttered Slew, the head carpenter. Hay-den shot him an incredulous look. There certainly was no garish, brightly colored sign over the entrance to Warea. "You mean one that says 'Loot Me'?" he asked.

  "How does it work?" Mahallan climbed down from one sidecar of the bike as Hayden reached out to clip a line to the nearest strut of the entrance framework. They floated just outside the dark shaft that led into Warea; nobody had come out to greet them. Mahallan's question was unnecessary, though. The scaffolding of the entrance shaft stuck ten feet out of the water, far enough to make it plain how it was constructed.

  "Look, it's simple," he said, slapping the translucent wall of the shaft; it made a faint drumming sound. The builders of Warea had taken a simple wooden skeleton, the sort the Rush docking tubes were made of, and wrapped it in wax paper. Then they'd stuck the assembly into the side of the sea, like a needle into the skin of a giant. Up this close, he could see faint striations of tangleweed matted under the surface of the water. Warea probably cultivated the stuff—which was an animal, not a plant—to provide structural integrity to the vast ball of water in which they lived. Without it, a stiff breeze could tear the sea apart.

  The shaft made an impenetrably dark hole in the water, unlit, possibly leading nowhere—except that a tickle of air teased Hayden's brow, and his bike was slowly being sucked inward.

  "We're wasting time." Carrier kicked forward, his foot-fins driving him quickly into the dark. Hayden flipped off the bike and gestured for Martor to follow. Mahallan was already inside the tunnel, flanked by the carpenters.

  Inside there was little to tell they were entering a world of water. The tunnel was a lattice of beams, like those of any freefall scaffold. The surface stretched between them could have been stone in the dimness of lamplight. Only the clammy chill suggested the nearby presence of the sea.

  "I would have thought the walls would bulge inward or something," said Mahallan. "But of course they don't. No gravity, no pressure."

  "I've heard that word before," said Martor in an overly casual way. "Gravity. Spin makes it, right?"

  Mahallan had been doing a hand-over-hand walk along the struts. Now she stopped to look at Martor, and in the dim light he saw her eyes had gone wide. "Sometimes I forget," she murmured, "that the strangest of things here are the ones I talk to."

  "Now what's that supposed to mean?" But she had turned away already. Ahead, Carrier shouted for them to be quiet.

  He was silhouetted by flickering lamplight from a number of fan-driven lanterns. Beyond him the tunnel opened up into a broad space—a cubic chamber walled in wax paper and about forty feet on a side. This was a hangar, Hayden realized, for it was filled with bikes and other flying devices. The air here was cold and damp but the six men who were pointing their rifles at the newcomers didn't seem to feel it. They were uniformly dressed in dark leathers, and their narrow pale faces had the sameness of kin. It seemed like a small welcoming committee, but Hayden was sure that the faint motion of the paper walls next to him indicated more men hiding in the water outside.

  "State your business," said their leader, who was clearly the oldest. The father of the others, perhaps?

  "Trade," said Carrier. "Carpentry supplies. We can pay you whatever you think is appropriate."

  "We're not trading," said the older man. "Be on your way."

  There was a momentary silence; Carrier hung perfectly still. "What now?" Mahallan whispered to Hayden. "Does he threaten them?"

  Hayden shook his head. "It's hardly worth our while to fight a pitched battle for some nails and wood, and they know it. I don't know what he'll—" He stopped, because Carrier was speaking again.

  "As you can plainly see," he said, "our charting expedition is well-enough supplied that we don't need your help. But it'll shorten our stay if you do help us."

  "Charting?" The older man looked alarmed. "Charting what?"

  "Oh, just the various objects in this part of winter," said Carrier with a negligent wave of his hand. "Forests, rocks, lakes—anything that might drift into our space someday. Or that might be useful or militarily significant."

  "We're of no use to nobody," said the leader. He was visibly tense now. "We want to be left alone."

  "Well, then," purred Carrier, "I'm sure our captain could be persuaded to leave one or two objects off of the charts. If, that is, we received something in return."

  "Wait here." The man turned and left through a prosaic-looking door that opened out of the hangar's far wall. A few minutes later he returned, looking unhappy. "Come ahead," he said. "You can trade."

  So it was that they entered Warea and learned how the cast-out and the fugitive lived in the empty spaces between the nations. The walls of the short corridor between the hangar and the town complex glowed from distant lamplight; long shadows cast on the paper walls suggested some sort of layered barrier between the cold of the sea and the town. In fact as they passed through the next door the temperature rose and the dampness receded. The silhouetted bodies of the people in front of Hayden split off one by one, opening more and more of the space to his view until he was there himself, gaping about at the cave that was Warea.

  Mostly it was just a cube like the hangar, but several hundred feet across. Floating in this space in a disorganized jumble were various multisided houses, each one tethered to its neighbors or the space's outer struts. Numerous openings led off from the main cube, some terminating almost immediately in walls of gelid water, others twisting away, their lamplit outlines faintly visible through the paper walls of the cave. The place reeked of burning kerosene and rot but it was reasonably warm, and the big industrial lanterns with their grumbling fans at least prevented an aura of total gloom from overtaking the citizens.

  Some of these were staring in open hostility as Carrier led his group into their crowded airspace. The town elders who had decreed that they could enter had discretely retreated, or chose to remain anonymous within the mass of people. Carrier stopped to ask directions and while he did, Hayden examined the people. They had a familiar look: sallow, overstretched, and glum. For the most part they were exiles who remembered growing up within the light of a sun. Unhappy they might be, but few of them showed the signs of weight-deprivation.

  In a few minutes he saw why. The far wall of the cube was moving
—swinging up and to the left with a constant rumble that quivered the walls. The cube was only part of Warea. An entire town was embedded in the sea, and on part of its rotation the wheel passed through the cube like a giant saw cutting into a block of wood. Hayden watched houses, shops, and markets pop out of the cube's wall and swing up to vanish through the ceiling in steady and relentless motion.

  "It's not a small place," muttered Carrier. "There's two markets. Dry goods on the wheel, Armorer. Building materials here."

  "We'll split up, then," said Mahallan helpfully.

  "I'll join you in a few minutes," said Carrier with a disapproving frown. "Watch yourselves."

  Hayden, Martor, and the armorer watched the others vanish into a cloud of people in the building market. The place was crowded with huge baskets filled with white bricks and beams. "Looks like they'll find what they need right off," said Mahallan worriedly. "Let's hurry, we wouldn't want to keep them waiting."

  Hayden shrugged and turned to coast in the direction of the wheel's axis. "I didn't see any wood back there," he commented.

  "But what was all that white stuff?"

  "Same as these houses are built with." He did a course correction by slapping one on the way by. Its white brick surface undulated slightly. "Paper. They fold origami bricks and beams in triangular sections and then fill them with water. You get beams and bricks that are stiff and incompressible."

  "Really?" She seemed inclined to stop and admire the buildings. Hayden pressed on; now that he'd escaped Carrier's roving eye, he could run an errand of his own.

  Mahallan and Martor caught up to him as he was entering the big barrel-shaped axis of the wheel. A sullen local flapped by on ragged foot-wings, and the armorer watched him go. "Who are these people?" she asked. "They don't seem happy to see us."

  "Refugees, most of them," he said. "A lot of them will be from Aerie, which was conquered by Slipstream about ten years ago. And some are pirates."

  "This is a pirate town?" Mahallan laughed in apparent delight as they hand-walked down the top few yards of the yin-yang staircase that led to the rim of the wheel.