air. Seemingly unconnected, they moved slowly and smoothly over the flat
surface of the low bank of cloud like pieces on an endless game board, casting
dim and watery shadows on the opaque top of the mist as the sun of Vavatch's
system shone through layers of cloud ten kilometres above.
As those huge towers moved through the air, they left behind them wisps and
strands of vapour, ruffled from the mist's smooth top by the passage of the
great ship beneath. In the small, clear spaces that the towers and higher
levels of superstructure left in the mist, lower levels could be seen:
walkways and promenades, the linked arches of a monorail system, pools and
small parks with trees, even a few pieces of equipment like small flyers and
bits of tiny, doll's-house-like furniture. As the eye and brain grasped the
scene, they could, from that height, make out the overall bulge in the surface
of the cloud that the ship made - an area of slight uplift in the mist four
kilometres long and nearly three wide, and shaped like a stubby pointed leaf
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or an arrowhead.
The shuttle came lower. The towers, with their glinting windows, their
suspended bridges, flyer pads, ariels, railings, decks and flapping awnings,
sailed by alongside, silent and dark.
'Well,' Kraiklyn's voice said in a businesslike way, 'looks like we'll have a
bit of a walk to the bows, team. I can't take us under this lot. Still, we're
a good hundred kilometres away from the Edgewall, so we've got plenty of time.
The ship isn't heading straight for it anyway. I'll put us down as close as I
can.'
'Fuck. Here we go,' Lamm said angrily. 'I might have known.'
'A long walk in this gravity is just what I need,' Jandraligeli said.
'It's vast!' Lenipobra was still staring at the screen. 'That thing is huge!'
He was shaking his head. Lamm got up from his seat, pushed the youth out of
the way and banged on the door of the shuttle flight deck.
'What is it?' Kraiklyn said over the cabin speaker. 'I'm looking for a place
to put down. If that's you, Lamm, just sit down.'
Lamm stared at the door with a look first of surprise, then of annoyance. He
snorted and went back to his seat, shoving past Lenipobra again. 'Bastard,' he
muttered, then put his helmet visor down and turned it to mirror.
'Right,' Kraiklyn said. 'We're putting down.' Those still standing sat again,
and in a few
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the shuttle bumped carefully down. The doors jawed and a cold gust of air
entered through them. They filed out slowly, into the wide views of the
silent, rock-steady Megaship. Horza sat in the shuttle waiting for the rest to
go, then saw Lamm watching him. Horza stood and gave a mock bow to the
darksuited figure.
'After you,' he said.
'No,' Lamm said. 'You first.' He nodded his head to one side towards the open
doors. Horza went out of the shuttle, followed by Lamm. Lamm always made a
point of being last out of the shuttle; it was lucky for him.
They stood on a flyer landing pad, near the base of a large rectangular tower
of superstructure, perhaps sixty metres tail. The decks of the tower soared
into the sky above, while over the surface of the cloud bank in front, and to
all sides of the pad, towers and small bulges in the mist showed where the
rest of the ship was, though where it ended it was impossible to tell now that
they were so low down. They couldn't even see where the nuke had gone off;
there was no list, not a tremor to reveal that they were really on a damaged
ship travelling over an ocean, not standing in a deserted city with clouds
moving smoothly past.
Horza joined some of the others by a low restraining wall at the edge of the
pad, looking down about twenty metres to a deck just visible now and again
through the thin surface of the mist.
Streamers of vapour flowed across the area below in long sinuous waves,
sometimes revealing, sometimes obscuring a deck covered with patches of earth
planted with small bushes, with little canopies and chairs scattered about and
small tent-like buildings on the surface. It all looked deserted and forlorn,
like a resort in winter, and Horza shivered inside his suit. Ahead of them, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]