She followed him from the gutted cab. Within seconds he was meters above her, sliding up through the crane like an arboreal python. She gritted her teeth and climbed after. It wasn't as bad as she'd feared; a narrow ladder ran up the inside of the structure like a trachea, sprouting safety hoops at one-meter intervals. But the wind buffeted on all sides, and surrounding girders sliced it into quarrelsome and unpredictable vortices. They pushed her against the ladder, twisted her sideways, slipped under her backpack and tried to yank it from her body.
A sharp thunderclap from her left. She turned, and froze, and clung to the ladder for dear life; she'd hadn't realized how high she'd already climbed. The waterfront shuddered behind and beneath her, not quite a tabletop model yet but close enough, too close. Far below, the harbor churned green and white.
Another thunderclap. Not weather, though. The wind, for all its strength, howled beneath a blue and cloudless sky. That sound had come from the lifter. Seen from above the vehicle looked like a great gunmetal jewel, faceted into concave triangles: skin sucked against geodesic ribs by the buoyant vacuum inside. It roared briefly above the wind, a hissing bellow of gaseous ballast. Its belly nearly touched the water; its back curved higher than the warehouse roof, several stories above.
Tame lightning, she remembered. For buoyancy control. High-voltage arcs, superheating trapped gases in the trim tanks.
And Ken's going to ride this monster.
Better him than me.
She looked up. Lubin had reached his departure point and was untying one end of the rope, his legs wrapped around ambient scaffolding. He gestured impatiently at her— then staggered, knocked briefly off-balance by a gust of wind. His hand shot out to steady himself on a nearby cable.
She kept going, steadfastly refusing to look down again no matter how many obscene noises the lifter made. She counted rungs. She counted girders and crossbeams and rivets as the wind howled in her ears and tugged at her limbs. She counted bare steely patches where the red and yellow paint had sloughed away—until it reminded her that she was climbing a structure so ancient that its color wasn't even intrinsic to the material, but had been layered on as an afterthought.
After a year or two she was at Lubin's side, somewhere in the jet stream. Lubin was studying the lifter, the ubiquitous binocs clamped around his head. Clarke did not follow his gaze.
One end of the rope was still tied firmly down. From that terminus it led out and up to the apex of the next crane, looped through whatever needle's eye Lubin had found up there, and stretched back to the final half-meter of polyprope now wrapped around his diveskinned hand. A satcam, looking down on the tableau, would have seen two thin white lines pointing towards the lifter from their current roost.
It would also have seen an ominously large, empty space between the point where the line ended and the point where the lifter began.
"Are you sure it's long enough?" Clarke shouted. Lubin didn't answer. He probably hadn't heard the question through the wind and the 'skin of his hood. Clarke had barely heard herself.
His tubular eyes stayed fixed on the target for a few more moments. Then he flipped the binocs up against his forehead. "They just deployed the teleop!" he called. The wind blew most of his decibels sideways and pitched in fifty of its own, but she got the gist. All according to plan, so far. The usual firestorm from on high wouldn't do the trick this time around: the hot zone Lubin had reported was too deep in the warehouse, too close to the waterline. It would take a free-moving teleop to scope the situation and personally deliver the flames—and local architecture hashed radio so badly that the little robot would have to stay virtually line-of-sight just to maintain contact with the mothership. Which meant bringing the lifter down low.
So low that a sufficiently motivated person might be able to drop onto it from above…
Lubin had one arm hooked around a cable as thick as his wrist—one of the fraying metal tendons that kept the necks of the cranes upright. Now he unhooked his legs from their purchase and ducked under that cable, coming up on the other side. The out side. He was now hanging off the edge of the crane, not rattling about within it. He had one arm wrapped in polypropylene and the other hooked around the cable, his feet braced against a girder by nothing beyond his own weight.
Suddenly Ken Lubin looked very fragile indeed.
His mouth moved. Clarke heard nothing but wind. "What!"
He leaned back towards the structure, enunciating each syllable: "You know what to do."
She nodded. She couldn't believe he was actually going to go through with this. "Good lu—" she began—
And staggered, flailing, as the hand of an invisible giant slapped her sideways.
She grasped out blindly, at anything. Her hands closed on nothing. Something hard cracked against the back of her head, bounced her forward again. A girder rushed by to her right; she caught it and hung on for dear life.
Ken?
She looked around. Where Lubin's face and chest had been, there was nothing but howling space. His forearm was still wrapped around the cable, though, like a black grappling hook. She lowered her gaze a fraction: there was the rest of him, scrabbling for purchase and finding it. Regaining his balance in the gale, pulling himself back up, that fucking plastic rope still wound around one hand. The wind slackened for the briefest moment; Lubin ducked back into the wireframe cage.
"You okay?" she asked as the wind rose again, and saw in the next instant the blood on his face.
He leaned in close. "Change of plans," he said, and struck her forearm with the edge of his free hand. Clarke yelped, her grip broken. She fell. Lubin caught her, pulled her abruptly sideways. Her shoulder slammed against metal and twisted. Suddenly the crane wasn't around her any more. It was beside her.
"Hang on," Lubin growled against her cheek.
They were airborne.
She was far too petrified to scream.
For endless seconds they were in freefall. The world rushed towards them like a fly-swatter. Then Lubin's arm tightened around her waist and some new force pulled them off-center, into a sweeping arc that only amended gravity at first, then defied it outright. They swooped down over whitecaps and churning flotsam, and she seemed to grow kilograms heavier; then they were rising again, miraculously, the wind catching them from behind. The colossal squashed spheroid of the lifter loomed above and then ahead and then below, its numberless polygons reflecting like the facets of some great compound eye.
And then they were dropping again, through an invisible tingling barrier that scratched sparks across her face, and Clarke barely put her hands out in time to break the fall.
"Ow!"
They were on a steep slope, facing uphill. She lay on her stomach, hands splayed forward, in a triangular depression perhaps three meters on a side. Her diveskin squirmed like a torture victim. Lubin lay half on top of her, half to one side, his right arm pressed into the small of her back. Some defiantly functional module in her brain realized that he'd probably kept her from rolling off the edge of the world. The rest of her gulped air in great whooping breaths and played I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive on infinite loop.
"You all right?" Lubin's voice was low but audible. The wind still pushed at their backs, but it seemed suddenly vague, diffuse.
"What—" Tiny electric shocks prickled her tongue and lips when she tried to speak. She tried to slow her breathing. "What the fuck are you—"
"I'll take that as a yes." He lifted his hand from her back. "Keep low, climb up the slope. We're far too close to the edge of this thing." He clambered away uphill.
She lay in the depression, the pit in her own stomach infinitely deeper. She felt ominously lightheaded. She put one hand to her temple; her hair was sticking straight out from her scalp as if her head had its own personal Van Allen belt. Her diveskin crawled. These things have static-fields, she realized.