Sun of Suns

"… Up to us to do the job…"

Hayden shrugged. "Saddle, foot straps, and handlebars will be it. Touch the bike at any other point and it'll burn you. But it's the price we pay for decent speed with this baby."

"… Not only rich, but heroes…"

Hayden reached out to flip a gold chain that looped around Mar-tor's neck. "What are you going to do now that you're rich?" In the absence of gravity, the trinkets hung off the boy every which way, making an absurd tangled cloud in front of his face that he wiped to the side every few moments.

"I du

Hayden gri

"I didn't like the fighting, come right down to it," he said seriously. "Some things are great to talk about, but awful to see or do." He looked away shyly. "But, you know… talking about it was great fun. The lads loved my stories and they were easy to think up. I was thinking, maybe when we get back, I might try to learn to read and write."

"You, a storyteller?" Hayden nearly laughed, but he could see that the boy meant it. "That's a great idea," he said. "You'd be good at it. Uh, hand me that wrench, will you?"

"Hi." Hayden looked up as Aubri entered the hangar. She wore practical leather flying gear including an airman's cap with goggles. She swam over to the bike and stopped herself with one hand on it and one on Martor's shoulder. "How are you?" she asked the boy. Martor stammered something incoherent.

"You need to stay out of trouble while we're gone," she told him. "No fighting and no profiteering, you hear? We're going to check up on you when we get back."

Martor smiled at her shyly. "I'll survive—if only to see you again, Ms. Mahallan."

Aubri looked troubled for a moment, then smiled as well. "It's only ten days," she said. "That's how long it'll take for you to get to Falcon Formation, assuming you escape the Gehellen dragnet. And assuming you don't run into anything, and assuming that the navigation team can find your sun and you don't end up wandering around and around in winter til the end of time." She gri

"That's what worries me," muttered Hayden. This was the weakest part of the plan: Fa

Just fly straight into the Sun of Suns.

"And what are you go

Hayden shrugged. "Haven't thought that far ahead." He avoided Aubri's gaze, though she also seemed to be looking elsewhere.

THE NIGHT WATCH WAS well under way when Hayden came back to the hangar. The Rook and its sisters were creeping toward the outskirts of Leaf's Choir, much more cautiously than when they'd entered. The hatch gang had left the hangar, but the place resounded to the snores of the various Unseen Hand crew members who'd been billeted here. Hayden wove in and out of the men who hung like pupae from the walls, floor, and ceiling, until he came to his bike. Then he eased the folded cargo net and heavy coil of cable off his shoulder and parked it in midair next to him. Unfolding his tool kit, he selected a wrench; he dug in his pocket for a moment and brought out some brackets and bolts. Quietly, so as not to wake the men, he proceeded to bolt the brackets onto the back of the bike, over the afterburner.

Hayden had been taken aback by Admiral Fa

He'd stammered some sort of reply and extricated himself from the conversation. Going to a porthole, he stared out at the blank nothingness of the sargasso, as an unfamiliar sense of lightness crept over him.

Words whispered in his mind; was he drinking them, or were they a memory of long ago? It might have been his father's voice saying, "Candesce is the mother of all suns. If Aerie is to have a new sun, its core will come from there."

No one had ever told Hayden how Candesce gave up its treasures; but he had heard that collecting them was easy. "Like picking fruit," one of the Resistance engineers had said.

Now as he worked as quietly as he could, he reflected upon the irony that Fa

He plucked out the stuffing of the bike's saddle and replaced it with the coiled cargo net. little tufts of stuffing started floating away and he jammed them in his pockets. Then he reached around the bike's exhaust vent and began coiling the dun cable inside the bike's housing. He wired it in tightly and leaned back with a satisfied smile to admire his work.

Miles and his cronies in the Resistance had been right about one tiling: it wasn't what you fought that mattered; the only tiling that mattered was what you built. Hayden's own parents had known that, but he'd forgotten it for years after their deaths. Wasted years?—No, they had brought him here, now, to finish something that should have been done a long time ago.

He put away his tools, patted the bike, and headed for the ship's centrifuge to sleep under gravity for the last time in a long while.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CANDESCE BLAZED BENEATH Hayden's feet. Even here hundreds of miles away, the heat from the Sun of Suns was almost intolerable. If he shielded his eyes and looked near the light Hayden could just make out the bright tails of infalling lakes that were boiling away as they approached that point of incandescence "They look like comets," Aubri had said when she first saw them.

Other things moved near Candesce. Ships from all the principal! ties hovered just outside its zone of heat, moving in after sunoff. Among the principalities it was common custom to consign th< coffins of the dead to the Sun of Suns; Hayden imagined that they toe must become comets at the last, never reaching their goal but evaporating back into the stuff of Virga to become places and people again So must his mother have gone when Aerie's new sun exploded. Hi! father would have become compost for some Slipstream farm.

Some of the ships hiding in Candesce's light would be funeral vessels. But some had another purpose.

"What are you doing?" Aubri looped an arm around his waist "You'll burn your eyes out doing that. Come inside."

Hayden had been thinking about the ships that ventured close to Candesce during darkness. They were the harvesters—boats that scrounged the garbage cast out of the Sun of Suns. That garbage was Virga's chief source of sun components. His parents had used fusion-core pieces bought from the principalities to build Aerie's secret sun.

For now, Hayden would not let his speculations run away with him. He let Aubri draw him inside the charcoal-harvester's hut they had found on the outskirts of Leaf's Choir. It perched like an angular bug on the black branch of a tree whose roots lay miles away in darkness. Venera Fa