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.
CHAPTER FOUR
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 bream. 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 form 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 mis—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 drink 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 Farmings 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 Farming'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."