“The weaponry of the end of the universe, and this young idiot is practically coming in his pants.”
“Aw, you’re just a spoilsport, Ligeli,” Lenipobra said to the Mondlidician, stopping dancing and dropping his punching arms to turn away and slouch off towards 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 kilometres 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 kilometres: 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 kilometres 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 metres 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 kilometres 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 towards its line of summit. The shuttle crossed that knife-edge, two thousand kilometres 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 magnetised 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 falclass="underline" 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 kilometre 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 vapour. The clouds seemed to stretch for ever, 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 per cent 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 grey.
“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 grey again as they entered another bank or pillar of vapour. 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 vapour, through kilometres 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 metres 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 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 or an arrowhead.