clouds, then the wall of bay doors on the other side. They were in a spin. Horza looked over at Wubslin as he
fought with the controls. The
engineer was staring at the main screen with a glazed expression on his face. “Wubslin!" Horza
screamed. The fusion motors stayed dead.
“Aaah!" Wubslin seemed to have woken up to the fact that they were falling out of control; he leaped at the controls in front
of him. “Just fly
it!" he shouted. “I’ll try the primers! Must have over-pressured the motors!"
Horza wrestled with the controls while Wubslin tried to restart the engines. On the screen, walls spun crazily about them
and clouds beneath
them were coming up fast—beneath them; really beneath them; a dead flat layer of clouds. Horza shook the
controls again.
The nose motor burst into life, guttering wildly, sending the spinning craft careering off toward one side of the artificial
cliff of bay doors and
walls. Horza cut the motor out. He steered into the spin, using the craft’s control surfaces rather
than the motors, then he aimed the whole ship
straight down and put his fingers on the laser buttons again. The clouds flashed
up to meet the vessel. He closed his eyes and squeezed the
laser controls.
The Ends of Invention
was so huge it was built on three almost totally separate levels, each over three kilometers deep. They were
pressure levels,
there because otherwise the differential between the very bottom and the very top of the giant ship would have been the
difference
between standard sea level and a mountaintop somewhere in the tropopause. As it was, there existed a three-and-a-half-thousand-
meter
difference between the base and roof of each pressure level, making sudden journeys by traveltube from one to the other inadvisable.
In
the immense open cave that was the hollow center of the GSV the pressure levels were marked by force fields, not anything
material, so that
craft could pass from one level to another without having to go outside the vessel, and it was toward one
of those boundaries, marked by cloud,
that the
Clear Air Turbulence
was falling.
Firing the laser did no good whatsoever, though Horza didn’t know that at the time. It was a Vavatch computer, which had taken
over the
internal monitoring and control from the Culture’s own Minds, which opened a hole in the force field to let the falling
vessel through. It did so in
the mistaken assumption that less damage would be caused to
The Ends of Invention
by letting the rogue vessel fall through than having it
impact.
In the center of a sudden maelstrom of air and cloud, in its own small hurricane, the
CAT
burst through from the thick air at the bottom of one
pressure level and into the thin atmosphere at the top of the one below.
A vortex of rag-clouded air blew out after it like an inverted explosion.
Horza opened his eyes again and saw with relief
the distant floor of the GSV’s cavernous interior, and the climbing figures on the main fusion
motors’ monitor screens. He
hit the engine throttles again, this time leaving the nose motor alone. The two main engines caught, shoving Horza
back in
his seat against the cloying hold of the restrainer fields. He pulled the nose of the diving craft up, watching the floor
far below gradually
disappear from view as it was replaced by the sight of another wall of opened bay doors. The doors were
much larger than those of the
Smallbays in the level they had just left, and the few craft Horza could see either nosing into
or appearing out of the lit lengths of the huge
hangars were full-size starships.
Horza watched the screen, piloting the
Clear Air Turbulence
exactly like an aircraft. They were traveling quickly along a vast corridor over a
kilometer across, with the layer of clouds
about fifteen hundred meters above them. Starships were moving slowly through the same space, a
few on their own AG fields,
most towed by light lifter tugs. Everything else was moving slowly and without a fuss; only the
CAT
disturbed the
calm of the giant ship’s interior, screaming through the air on twin swords of brilliant flame pulsing from
white-hot plasma chambers. Another
cliff-face of huge hangar doors faced them. Horza looked about him at the curve of main
screen and pulled the
CAT
over on a long banking left
turn, diving a little at the same time to head down an even broader canyon of space. They flashed
over a slow-moving clipper being towed
toward a distant open Mainbay, rocking the starship in their wake of superheated air.
The wall of doors and opened entrances slanted toward
them as Horza tightened the turn. Ahead, Horza could see what looked
like a cloud of insects: hundreds of tiny black specks floating in the air.
Far beyond them, maybe five or six kilometers away, a thousandmeter square of blackness, bordered with a slowly flashing strip
of
subdued white light, was the exit from
The Ends of Invention.
It was a straight run.
Horza sighed and felt his whole body relax. Unless they were intercepted, they had done it. With a little luck now, they might
even get away
from the Orbital itself. He gunned the engines, heading for the inky square in the distance.
Wubslin suddenly sat forward, against the pull of acceleration, and punched some buttons. His repeater screen set in the console
magnified
the center section of the main screen, showing the view ahead. “They’re people!" he shouted.
Horza frowned over at the man. “What."
“People! Those are people! They must be in AG harnesses! We’re going to go right through them!"
Horza looked briefly over at Wubslin’s repeater screen. It was true; the black cloud which almost filled the screen was made
up of humans,
flying slowly about in suits or ordinary clothes. There were thousands of them, Horza saw, less than a kilometer
ahead, and closing quickly.
Wubslin was staring at the screen, waving his hand at the people. “Get out of the way! Get out
of the way!" he was shouting.
Horza couldn’t see a way round, over or beneath the mass of flying people. Whether they were playing some curious mass aerial
game or
were just enjoying themselves, they were too many, too close, too widespread. “Shit!" Horza said. He got ready to
cut the rear plasma motors
before the
Clear Air Turbulence
went into the cloud of humans. With luck they might make it through before they had to relight them, and so not
incinerate
too many people.
“No!" Wubslin screamed. He threw the restraining straps off, leapt across toward Horza and dived at the controls. Horza tried
to fend the
bulky engineer off, but failed. The controls were wrenched from his hands, and the view on the main screen tipped
and swirled, pointing the
nose of the speeding ship away from the black square of the GSV exit, away from the huge cloud of
airborne people, and toward the cliff of
brightly lit Mainbay entrances. Horza clouted Wubslin across the head with his arm,
sending the man falling to the floor, stunned. He grabbed
the controls back from the relaxing fingers of the engineer, but
it was too late to turn away. Horza steadied and aimed. The
Clear Air
Turbulence
darted for an open Mainbay; it flashed through the open entrance and swept over the skeleton of a starship being rebuilt
in the bay,
the light from the
CAT
’s motors starting fires, singeing hair, smoldering clothes and blinding unprotected eyes.
Horza saw Wubslin lying unconscious on the floor out of the corner of his eye, rocking gently as the
CAT
careered through the half-kilometer
length of Mainbay. The doors to the next bay were open, and the next and the next. They
were flying through a twokilometer tunnel, racing over
the repair and docking facilities of one of Evanauth’s displaced shipbuilders.
Horza didn’t know what was at the far end, but he could see that
before they got there they would have to fly over the top
of a large spaceship which almost filled the third bay along. Horza vectored the fusion
fire ahead so that they started to
slow. Twin beams of fire flashed on either side of the main screen as the fusion power kicked forward.
Wubslin’s unrestrained
body slid forward on the floor of the bridge, wedging under the console and his own seat. Horza lifted the
CAT
’s nose
as the blunt snout of the parked spacecraft sitting in the bay ahead approached.
The
Clear Air Turbulence
zoomed toward the ceiling of the Mainbay, flashed between it and the top surface of the ship, then fell on the
other side
and, although still slowing, shot through the final Mainbay and into another corridor of free air space. It was too narrow.
Horza dived
the craft again, saw the floor coming up and fired the lasers. The
CAT
burst through a rising cloud of glowing wreckage, bumping and shaking,
Wubslin’s squat frame sliding out from under the console
and floating back up toward the rear door of the bridge.
At first Horza thought they were out at last, but they weren’t; they were in what the Culture called a General bay.
The
CAT
fell once more, then leveled out again. It was in a space which seemed even larger than the main interior of the GSV. It
was flying
through the bay they had stored the Megaship in: the same Megaship Horza had seen on the screen earlier being lifted
out of the water by a