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 yearsadmittedly the result of Slipstream patronagewould 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 itand 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.