A black mass blowing spray rushed towards him; lights blazed high above. A siren sounded, then the crushing black bulk was over him, hitting him, knocking him flat, pounding at his eardrums with noise and pressure, pressing, pressing, pressing… Horza heard a gurgling sound; he was being rammed into Kraiklyn’s chest; they were both being rubbed into the concrete as though by an immense thumb.
Another hovercraft; the second one in the line he’d seen.
Abruptly, with a single sweeping stroke of pain bruising him from feet to head, as if a giant was trying to sweep him up off the floor with a huge hard brush, the weight was lifted off. In its place was utter darkness, noise fit to burst skulls, and violent, turbulent, crushing air pressure.
They were under the skirts of the big vehicle. It was right above them, moving slowly forward or maybe — it was too dark to see anything — stationary over the concrete apron, perhaps about to settle on the concrete, crushing them.
As though it was just another part of the maelstrom of battering pain, a blow thudded into Horza’s ear, knocking him sideways in the darkness. He rolled on the rough concrete, pivoting on one elbow as soon as he could and bracing one leg while he struck out with the other in the direction the punch had come from; he felt his foot hit something yielding.
He got to his feet, ducking as he thought of whirling impeller blades just overhead. The eddies and vortices of hot oil-filled air rocked him like a small boat bobbing in a chopping sea. He felt like a puppet controlled by a drunk. He staggered forward, his arms out, and hit Kraiklyn. They started to fall again, and Horza let go, punching with all his might at the place he guessed the man’s head was. His fist crashed into bone, but he didn’t know where. He skipped back, in case there was a retaliatory kick or punch on its way. His ears were popping; his head felt tight. He could feel his eyes vibrating in their sockets; he thought he was deaf but he could feel a thudding in his chest and throat, making him breathless, making him choke and gasp. He could make out just a hint of a border of light all around them, as though they were under the middle of the hovercraft. He saw something, just an area of darkness, on that border, and lunged at it, swinging his foot from low down. Again he connected, and the dark part of the border disappeared.
He was blown off his feet by a crushing down-draught of air and tumbled bodily along the concrete, thumping into Kraiklyn where he lay on the ground after Horza’s last kick. Another punch hit Horza on the head, but it was weak and hardly hurt. Horza felt for and found Kraiklyn’s head. He lifted it and banged it off the concrete, then did it again. Kraiklyn struggled, but his hands beat uselessly off Horza’s shoulders and chest. The area of lightness beyond the dim shape on the ground was enlarging, coming closer. Horza banged Kraiklyn’s head against the concrete one more time, then threw himself flat. The rear edge of the skirt scrubbed over him; his ribs ached and his skull felt as though somebody was standing on it. Then it was over, and they were in the open air.
The big craft thundered on, trailing remnants of spray. There was another one fifty metres down the dock and heading towards him.
Kraiklyn was lying still, a couple of metres away.
Horza got up onto all fours and crawled over to the other man. He looked down into his eyes, which moved a little.
“I’m Horza! Horza!” he screamed, but couldn’t even hear anything himself.
He shook his head, and with a grimace of frustration on the face that was not really his own and which was the last thing the real Kraiklyn ever saw, he gripped the head of the man lying on the concrete and twisted it sharply, breaking the neck, just as he had broken Zallin’s.
He managed to drag the body to the side of the dock just in time to get out of the way of the third and last hovercraft. Its towering skirt bulged past two metres away from where he half lay, half sat, panting and sweating, his back against the cold wet concrete of the dock, his mouth open and his heart thudding.
He undressed Kraiklyn, took off the cloak and the light-coloured one-piece day suit he wore, then climbed out of his own torn blouse and bloody pantaloons and put on what Kraiklyn had been wearing. He took the ring Kraiklyn wore on the small finger of his right hand. He picked at his own hands, at the skin where palm became wrist. It came away cleanly, a layer of skin sloughing off his right hand from wrist to fingertips. He wiped Kraiklyn’s limp, pale right palm on a damp bit of clothing, then put the skin over it, pressing it down hard. He lifted the skin off carefully and positioned it back on his own hand. Then he repeated the operation using his left hand.
It was cold and it seemed to take a very long time and a lot of effort. Eventually, while the three big air-cushion vehicles were stopping and letting passengers off half a kilometre down the dock, Horza finally staggered to a ladder of metal rungs set into the concrete wall of the dock, and with shaking hands and quivering feet hauled himself to the top.
He lay for a while, then got up, climbed the spiral stairs to the small footbridge, staggered across it and down the other side, and entered the circular access building. Brightly dressed and excited people, just off the big hovers and still in a party mood, quietened when they saw him wait near the elevator doors for the capsule which would take them down to the spaceport area half a kilometre under their feet. Horza couldn’t hear very much, but he could see their anxious looks, sense the awkwardness he was causing with his battered, bloody face and his ripped, soaking clothes.
At last the elevator appeared. The party goers piled in, and Horza, supporting himself on the wall, stumbled in too. Somebody held his arm, helping him, and he nodded thanks. They said something which he heard as a distant rumble; he tried to smile and nod again. The elevator dropped.
The underside greeted them with an expanse of what looked like stars. Gradually, Horza realised it was the light-speckled top of a spacecraft larger than anything he’d ever seen or even heard about before; it had to be the demilitarised Culture ship, The Ends of Invention. He didn’t care what it was called, as long as he could get aboard and find the CAT.
The elevator had come to a halt in a transparent tube above a spherical reception area hanging in hard vacuum a hundred metres under the base of the Orbital. From the sphere, walkways and tube tunnels spread out in all directions, heading for the access gantries and open and closed docks of the port area itself. The doors to the closed docks, where ships could be worked on in pressurised conditions, were all open. The open docks themselves, where ships simply moored and airlocks were required, were empty. Replacing them all, directly underneath the spherical reception area, just as it was directly underneath almost the entire port area, was the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle The Ends of Invention. Its broad, flat top stretched for kilometre after kilometre in all directions, almost totally blocking out the view of space and stars beyond. Instead its top surface glittered with its own lights where various connections had been made with the access tubes and tunnels of the port.
He felt dizzy again, registering the sheer scale of the vast craft. He hadn’t seen a GSV before, far less been inside one. He knew of them and what they were for, but only now did he appreciate what an achievement they represented. This one was theoretically no longer part of the Culture; he knew it was demilitarised, stripped bare of most equipment, and without the Mind or Minds which would normally run it; but just the structure alone was enough to impress.