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 kilometres 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.
“What is it?” Kraiklyn said over the cabin speaker. “I’m looking for a place to put down. If that’s you, Lamm, just sit down.”
Lamm stared at the door with a look first of surprise, then of annoyance. He snorted and went back to his seat, shoving past Lenipobra again. “Bastard,” he muttered, then put his helmet visor down and turned it to mirror.
“Right,” Kraiklyn said. “We’re putting down.” Those still standing sat again, and in a few seconds the shuttle bumped carefully down. The doors jawed and a cold gust of air entered through them. They filed out slowly, into the wide views of the silent, rock-steady Megaship. Horza sat in the shuttle waiting for the rest to go, then saw Lamm watching him. Horza stood and gave a mock bow to the darksuited figure.
“After you,” he said.
“No,” Lamm said. “You first.” He nodded his head to one side towards the open doors. Horza went out of the shuttle, followed by Lamm. Lamm always made a point of being last out of the shuttle; it was lucky for him.
They stood on a flyer landing pad, near the base of a large rectangular tower of superstructure, perhaps sixty metres tall. The decks of the tower soared into the sky above, while over the surface of the cloud bank in front, and to all sides of the pad, towers and small bulges in the mist showed where the rest of the ship was, though where it ended it was impossible to tell now that they were so low down. They couldn’t even see where the nuke had gone off; there was no list, not a tremor to reveal that they were really on a damaged ship travelling over an ocean, not standing in a deserted city with clouds moving smoothly past.
Horza joined some of the others by a low restraining wall at the edge of the pad, looking down about twenty metres to a deck just visible now and again through the thin surface of the mist. Streamers of vapour flowed across the area below in long sinuous waves, sometimes revealing, sometimes obscuring a deck covered with patches of earth planted with small bushes, with little canopies and chairs scattered about and small tent-like buildings on the surface. It all looked deserted and forlorn, like a resort in winter, and Horza shivered inside his suit. Ahead of them, the view led to an implied point about a kilometre away, where a few small, skinny towers poked out of the cloud bank, near the unseen bows of the craft.
“Looks like we’re heading into even more cloud,” Wubslin said, pointing in the direction they were heading. There a great canyon wall of cloud hung in the air, stretching from one side of the horizon to the other, and higher than any tower on the Megaship. It shone for them in the increasing sunlight.
“Maybe it’ll go away as it gets warmer,” Dorolow said, not sounding convinced.
“If we hit that lot we can forget about these lasers,” Horza said, looking round from the rest towards the shuttle, where Kraiklyn was talking to Mipp, who was to stay on guard at the shuttle craft while the rest went forward to the bows. “With no radar we’ll have to lift off before we go into the cloud bank.”
“Maybe—” Yalson began.
“Well, I’m going to take a look down there,” Lenipobra said, bringing his visor down and putting one hand on the low parapet. Horza looked across at him.
Lenipobra waved. “See you at the b-bows; ya-hoo!”
He vaulted cleanly over the parapet and started to fall towards the deck five storeys below. Horza had opened his mouth to shout, and started forward to grab the youth, but, like the rest of them, he had realised too late what Lenipobra was doing.
One second he was there, the next he had leapt over.
“No!”
“Leni—!” Those not already looking down rushed to the parapet; the tiny figure was tumbling. Horza saw it and hoped that somehow it could pull up, stop, do something. The scream started in their helmets when Lenipobra was less than ten metres from the deck below; it ended abruptly the instant the spread-eagled figure crashed onto the border of a small earthed area. It bounced slackly for about a metre over the deck, then lay still.
“Oh my God…” Neisin suddenly sat down, took off his helmet and put his hand to his eyes. Dorolow put her head down and started to unfasten her helmet.
“What the hell was that?” Kraiklyn was running over from the shuttle, Mipp behind him. Horza was still looking over the parapet, down at the still, doll-like figure crumpled on the deck below. Mist thickened around it as the wisps and streamers grew thicker for a while.
“Lenipobra! Lenipobra!” Wubslin shouted into his helmet microphone. Yalson turned away and swore to herself softly, turning off her transmit intercom. Aviger stood, shaking, his face blank inside his helmet visor. Kraiklyn skidded to a halt at the parapet, then looked over.
“Leni—?” He looked round at the others. “Is that—? What happened? What was he doing? If any of you were fooling—”
“He jumped,” Jandraligeli said. His voice was shaky. He tried to laugh. “Guess kids these days just can’t tell their gravity from their rotating frame of reference.”
“He jumped?” Kraiklyn shouted. He grabbed Jandraligeli by the suit collar. “How could he jump? I told you AG wouldn’t work, I told you all, when we were in the hangar…”
“He was late,” Lamm broke in. He kicked at the thin metal of the parapet, failing to dent it. “The stupid little bastard was late. None of us thought to tell him.”
Kraiklyn let go of Jandraligeli and looked around the rest.
“It’s true,” Horza said. He shook his head. “I just didn’t think. None of us did. Lamm and Jandraligeli were even complaining about having to walk to the bows when Leni was in the shuttle, and you mentioned it, but I suppose he just didn’t hear.” Horza shrugged. “He was excited.”
He shook his head.
“We all fucked up,” Yalson said heavily. She had turned her communicator back on. Nobody spoke for a while. Kraiklyn stood and looked round them, then went to the parapet, put both hands on it and looked down.
“Leni?” Wubslin said into his communicator, looking down too. His voice was quiet.
“Chicel-Horhava,” Dorolow made the Circle of Flame sign, closed her eyes and said, “Sweet lady, accept his soul in peace.”
“Wormshit,” Lamm swore, and turned away. He started firing the laser at distant, higher parts of the tower above them.
“Dorolow,” Kraiklyn said, “you, Wubslin and Yalson head down there. See what… ah, shit…” Kraiklyn turned round. “Get down there. Mipp, you drop them a line or the medkit, whatever. The rest of us… we’re going forward to the bows, all right?” He looked around them, challenging. “You might want to go back, but that just means he’s died for nothing.”