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.