6. The Eaters
Horza was weightless for a second. He felt himself caught by the eddying wind swirling through the rear doors, drawing him towards them. He grabbed at the channel in the wall he had held onto earlier. The shuttle dipped its nose, and the roar of the wind increased. Horza floated, his eyes closed, his fingers jammed into the wall slot, waiting for the crash; but instead the shuttle levelled out again, and he was back on his feet.
“Mipp!” he shouted, staggering forward to the door. He felt the craft turning and glanced out through the rear doors. They were still falling.
“It’s gone, Horza,” Mipp said faintly. “I’ve lost it.” He sounded weak, calmly despairing. “I’m turning back for the island. We won’t get there, but… we’re going to hit in a few moments… You’d best get down by this bulkhead and brace yourself. I’ll try to put her down as soft as I can…”
“Mipp,” Horza said, sitting down on the floor with his back to the bulkhead, “is there anything I can do?”
“Nothing,” Mipp said. “Here we go. Sorry, Horza. Brace yourself.”
Horza did exactly the opposite, letting himself go limp. The air roaring through the rear doors howled in his ears; the shuttle shook underneath him. The sky was blue. He caught a glimpse of waves… He kept just enough tension in his back to keep his head against the bulkhead surface. Then he heard Mipp shout; not words — just a shout of fear, an animal noise.
The shuttle crashed, slamming into something, forcing Horza hard back against the wall, then releasing him. The craft raised its nose slightly. Horza felt light for a moment, saw waves and white spray through the open rear doors, then the waves went, he saw sky, and closed his eyes as the shuttle’s nose dipped again.
The craft smashed into the waves, crashing to a stop in the water. Horza felt himself squashed into the bulkhead as though by the foot of some gigantic animal. The wind was forced out of him, blood roared, the suit bit at him. He was shaken and flattened, and then, just as the impact seemed to be over, another shock sledge-hammered into his back and neck and head, and suddenly he was blind.
The next thing he knew there was water everywhere about him. He was gasping and spluttering, striking out in the darkness and hitting his hands off hard, sharp, broken surfaces. He could hear water gurgling, and his own choked breath frothing. He blew water out of his mouth and coughed.
He was floating in a bubble of air, in darkness, in warm water. Most of his body seemed to be aching, each limb and part clamouring with its own special message of pain.
He felt gingerly round the small space he was trapped in. The bulkhead had collapsed; he was — at last — in the flight-deck area with Mipp. He found the other man’s body, crushed between seat and instrument panel, trapped and still, half a metre under the surface of the water. His head, which Horza could feel by reaching down between the seat head-rest and what felt like the innards of the main monitor screen, moved too easily in the neck of the suit, and the forehead had been crushed.
The water was rising higher. The air was escaping through the smashed nose of the shuttle, floating and bobbing bow-up in the sea. Horza knew he would have to swim down and back through the shuttle’s rear section and out through the rear doors, otherwise he’d be trapped.
He breathed as deeply as he could, despite the pain, for about a minute, while the rising water level gradually forced his head into the angle between the top of the craft’s instrument panel and the flight-deck ceiling. He dived.
He forced his way down, past the wreckage of the crushed seat Mipp had died in, and past the twisted panels of light metal which had made up the bulkhead. He could see light, vaguely green-grey, forming a rectangle beneath him. Air trapped in his suit bubbled round him, along his legs, upwards to his feet. He was slowed for a moment, buoyed up by the air in his boots, and for a second he thought he wasn’t going to make it, that he was going to hang there upside-down and drown. Then the air bubbled out through the holes in his boots punched there by Lamm’s laser, and Horza sank.
He struggled down through the water to the rectangle of light, then swam through the open rear doors and into the shimmering green depths of the water under the shuttle; he kicked and went up, breaking out into the waves with a gasp, sucking warm, fresh air into his lungs. He felt his eyes adjust to the slanted but still bright sunlight of late afternoon.
He grabbed hold of the shuttle’s dented, punctured nose — sticking above the water by about two metres — and looked around, trying to see the island, but without success. Still just treading water and letting his battered body and brain recover, Horza watched the up-tilted nose of the craft sink lower in the water and tip slowly forward so that the shuttle gradually floated almost level in the waves, its top surface just awash. The Changer, his arm muscles straining and hurting, eventually hauled himself onto the top of the shuttle, and lay there like a beached fish.
He started to shut off the pain signals, like a weary servant picking up the litter of breakables after an employer’s destructive rage.
It was only lying there, with small waves washing over the top surface of the shuttle’s fuselage, that he realised that all the water he had been coughing up and swallowing was fresh. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Circlesea would be anything other than salt, like most planetary oceans, but in fact there was not even the slightest tang of it, and he congratulated himself that at least he would not die of thirst.
He stood up carefully, in the centre of the shuttle roof, waves breaking round his feet. He looked around, and could see the island — just. It looked very small and far away in the early evening light, and, while there was a faint warm breeze blowing more or less towards the island, he had no idea which way any currents might be taking him. He sat down, then lay back, letting the waters of the Circlesea wash over the flat surface beneath him and break in small lines of surf against his much-damaged suit. After a while he just fell asleep, not really meaning to, but not stopping himself when he realised that he was, telling himself to sleep for only an hour or so.
He woke up to see the sun, though still high in the sky, looking dark red as it shone through the layers of dust above the distant Edgewall. He got to his feet again; the shuttle didn’t seem to have sunk any lower in the water. The island was still far away, but it looked a little nearer than it had earlier; the currents, or the winds, such as they were, seemed to be carrying him in roughly the right direction. He sat down again.
The air was still warm. He thought of taking the suit off but decided against it; it was uncomfortable but perhaps he would get too cold without it. He lay back again.
He wondered where Yalson was now. Had she survived Lamm’s bomb, and the wreck? He hoped so. He thought she probably had; he couldn’t imagine her dead, or dying. It was little enough to go on, and he refused to believe he was superstitious, but not being able to imagine her dead was somehow comforting. She’d survive. Take more than a tactical nuke and a billion-tonne ship impacting a berg the size of a small continent to polish that girl off… He found himself smiling, remembering her.
He would have spent more time thinking about Yalson, but there was something else he had to think about as well.
Tonight he would Change.
It was all he could do. Probably by now it was irrelevant. Kraiklyn was either dead or — if surviving — unlikely ever to meet Horza again, but the Changer had prepared for the transformation; his body was waiting for it, and he could think of nothing better to do.
The situation, he told himself, was far from hopeless. He wasn’t badly injured, he seemed to be heading for the island, where the shuttle might still be, and if he could make it in time there was always Evanauth, and that Damage game. Anyway, the Culture might be looking for him by now, so it wouldn’t do to keep the same identity for too long. What the hell, he thought; he would Change. He would go to sleep as the Horza the others knew him as, and he would wake up as a copy of the captain of the Clear Air Turbulence.