and slouch off toward the shuttle. As he passed Yalson and Horza he muttered, “Yalson, what the hell is C-CAM
anyway."
“Collapsed Anti-Matter, kid." Yalson smiled as Lenipobra kept on walking. Horza laughed soundlessly as the young man’s head
nodded
inside the open neck of his suit. He walked into the open rear of the shuttle.
The
Clear Air Turbulence
rolled. The shuttle left the hangar and flew along the underside of the Vavatch Orbital, leaving the spacecraft flying
underneath
like a tiny silver fish under the hull of some great dark ship.
On a small screen, fitted at one end of the shuttle’s main compartment since its last outing, the suited figures could watch
the seemingly
endless curve of ultradense base material stretching off into the dark distance, lit by starlight. It was like
flying upside-down over a planet made
of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort,
it was one bested for what the Culture would call
gawp
value
only by a big Ring, or a Sphere.
The shuttle crossed a thousand kilometers of the smooth undersurface. Then suddenly above it there was a wedge of darkness,
a slant of
something which looked even smoother than the base material, but which was clear, transparent and angling out from
the base itself and slicing
into space like the edge of a crystal knife for two thousand kilometers: the Edgewall. This was
the wall bordered by sea, on the far side of the
Orbital from the thread of land they had seen on their approach in the
CAT.
The first ten kilometers of the flat curve were dark as space; their
mirror surface showed only when stars reflected on them,
and looking at that perfect image the mind could spin, seeing for what looked like
light-years when in fact the surface was
only a few thousand meters away.
“God, that thing’s big," Neisin whispered. The shuttle continued to rise, and above it there appeared through the wall a glow
of light, a
shining expanse of blue.
Into sunlight, hardly filtered through the transparent wall, the shuttle climbed in empty space beside the Edgewall. Two kilometers
away there
was air, even if it was thin air, but the shuttle climbed in nothing, angling out along with the wall as it sloped
toward its line of summit. The shuttle
crossed that knife-edge, two thousand kilometers up from the base of the Orbital, then
started to follow the slope of wall back down on the
inside; it passed through the Orbital’s magnetic field, a region where
small magnetized particles of artificial dust blocked out some of the sun’s
rays, so making the sea below it cooler than elsewhere
on the world, producing Vavatch’s different climates. The shuttle continued to fall:
through ions, then thin gases, finally
into thin and cloudless air, shuddering in a coriolis jetstream. The sky above turned from black to blue. The
Orbital of Vavatch,
a fourteen-million-kilometer hoop of water seemingly hung naked in space, spread out before the falling craft like some vast
circular painting.
“Well, at least we’re in daylight," Yalson said. “Let’s just hope our captain’s information about exactly where this wonderful
ship is turns out to
be accurate." The screen showed clouds. As the shuttle fell and flew, it was coming down onto a false
landscape of water vapor. The clouds
seemed to stretch forever, along the curved inside surface of the Orbital, which even
from that height looked flat, then sweeping up into the
black sky above. Only much further away could they see the blue expanse
of real ocean, though there were hints of smaller patches closer to
hand.
“Don’t worry about the cloud," Kraiklyn said over the cabin speaker. “That’ll shift as the morning wears on."
The shuttle was still dropping, still flying forward through the thickening atmosphere. After a while they started going through
the first few very
high altitude clouds. Horza shifted slightly in his suit; ever since the
CAT
had matched velocities and curve with the big Orbital, and turned off its
own AG, the craft and the Company had been under
the same fake gravity of the construction’s spin—slightly more, in fact, because they were
stationary relative to the base
but further out from it. Vavatch, whose original builders had come from a higher-G planet, was spun to produce
about twenty
percent more “gravity" than the accepted human average which the
CAT
’s generator was set for. So Horza, like the rest of the
Company, felt heavier than he was used to. His suit was chafing
already.
Clouds filled the cabin screen with gray.
“There it is!" Kraiklyn shouted, not trying to keep the excitement from his voice. He had been quiet for almost a quarter
of an hour, and people
had started to get restless. The shuttle had banked a few times, this way and that, apparently searching
for the
Olmedreca.
Sometimes the
screen had been clear, showing layers of cloud beneath; sometimes it hazed over with gray again as they entered
another bank or pillar of
vapor. Once it had iced over. “I can see the topmost towers!"
The Company crowded forward in the cabin, getting out of their seats and coming closer to the screen. Only Lamm and Jandraligeli
stayed
sitting down.
“About fucking time," Lamm said. “How the hell do you have to look all this time for something four K long."
“It’s easy when you’ve no radar," Jandraligeli said. “I’m just thankful we didn’t
hit
the damn thing while we were flying through those awful
clouds."
“Shit," Lamm said, and inspected his rifle again.
“… Look at that," Neisin said.
In a wasteland of clouds, like some vast canyon torn in a planet made of vapor, through kilometers of levels and in a space
so long and
wide that even in the clear air between the piled clouds the view simply faded rather than ended, the
Olmedreca
moved.
Its lower levels of superstructure were quite hidden, invisible in the ocean-hugging bank of mist, but from its unseen decks
rose immense
towers and structures of glass and light metal, rearing hundreds of meters into the clear 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 kilometers
above.
As those huge towers moved through the air, they left behind them wisps and strands of vapor, 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’shouse-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 kilometers long and nearly three wide,
and shaped like a stubby pointed
leaf 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 kilometers 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.