Horza watched the screen, piloting the Clear Air Turbulence exactly like an aircraft. They were travelling quickly along a vast corridor over a kilometre across, with the layer of clouds about fifteen hundred metres above them. Starships were moving slowly through the same space, a few on their own AG fields, most towed by light lifter tugs. Everything else was moving slowly and without a fuss; only the CAT disturbed the calm of the giant ship’s interior, screaming through the air on twin swords of brilliant flame pulsing from white-hot plasma chambers. Another cliff-face of huge hangar doors faced them. Horza looked about him at the curve of main screen and pulled the CAT over on a long banking left turn, diving a little at the same time to head down an even broader canyon of space. They flashed over a slow-moving clipper being towed towards a distant open Mainbay, rocking the starship in their wake of superheated air. The wall of doors and opened entrances slanted towards them as Horza tightened the turn. Ahead, Horza could see what looked like a cloud of insects: hundreds of tiny black specks floating in the air.
Far beyond them, maybe five or six kilometres away, a thousand metre square of blackness, bordered with a slowly flashing strip of subdued white light, was the exit from The Ends of Invention. It was a straight run.
Horza sighed and felt his whole body relax. Unless they were intercepted, they had done it. With a little luck now, they might even get away from the Orbital itself. He gunned the engines, heading for the inky square in the distance.
Wubslin suddenly sat forward, against the pull of acceleration, and punched some buttons. His repeater screen set in the console magnified the centre section of the main screen, showing the view ahead. “They’re people!” he shouted.
Horza frowned over at the man. “What?”
“People! Those are people! They must be in AG harnesses! We’re going to go right through them!”
Horza looked briefly over at Wubslin’s repeater screen. It was true; the black cloud which almost filled the screen was made up of humans, flying slowly about in suits or ordinary clothes. There were thousands of them, Horza saw, less than a kilometre ahead, and closing quickly. Wubslin was staring at the screen, waving his hand at the people. “Get out the way! Get out the way!” he was shouting.
Horza couldn’t see a way round, over or beneath the mass of flying people. Whether they were playing some curious mass aerial game or were just enjoying themselves, they were too many, too close, too widespread. “Shit!” Horza said. He got ready to cut the rear plasma motors before the Clear Air Turbulence went into the cloud of humans. With luck they might make it through before they had to relight them, and so not incinerate too many people.
“No!” Wubslin screamed. He threw the restraining straps off, leapt across towards Horza and dived at the controls. Horza tried to fend the bulky engineer off, but failed. The controls were wrenched from his hands, and the view on the main screen tipped and swirled, pointing the nose of the speeding ship away from the black square of the GSV exit, away from the huge cloud of airborne people, and towards the cliff of brightly lit Mainbay entrances. Horza clouted Wubslin across the head with his arm, sending the man falling to the floor, stunned. He grabbed the controls back from the relaxing fingers of the engineer, but it was too late to turn away. Horza steadied and aimed. The Clear Air Turbulence darted for an open Mainbay; it flashed through the open entrance and swept over the skeleton of a starship being rebuilt in the bay, the light from the CAT’s motors starting fires, singeing hair, smouldering clothes and blinding unprotected eyes.
Horza saw Wubslin lying unconscious on the floor out of the corner of his eye, rocking gently as the CAT careered through the half kilometre length of Mainbay. The doors to the next bay were open, and the next and the next. They were flying through a two kilometre tunnel, racing over the repair and docking facilities of one of Evanauth’s displaced shipbuilders. Horza didn’t know what was at the far end, but he could see that before they got there they would have to fly over the top of a large spaceship which almost filled the third bay along. Horza vectored the fusion fire ahead so that they started to slow. Twin beams of fire flashed on either side of the main screen as the fusion power kicked forward. Wubslin’s unrestrained body slid forward on the floor of the bridge, wedging under the console and his own seat. Horza lifted the CAT’s nose as the blunt snout of the parked spacecraft sitting in the bay ahead approached.
The Clear Air Turbulence zoomed towards the ceiling of the Mainbay, flashed between it and the top surface of the ship, then fell on the other side and, although still slowing, shot through the final Mainbay and into another corridor of free air space. It was too narrow. Horza dived the craft again, saw the floor coming up and fired the lasers. The CAT burst through a rising cloud of glowing wreckage, bumping and shaking, Wubslin’s squat frame sliding out from under the console and floating back up towards the rear door of the bridge.
At first Horza thought they were out at last, but they weren’t; they were in what the Culture called a General bay.
The CAT fell once more, then levelled out again. It was in a space which seemed even larger than the main interior of the GSV. It was flying through the bay they had stored the Megaship in: the same Megaship Horza had seen on the screen earlier being lifted out of the water by a hundred or so ancient Culture lifter craft.
Horza had time to look around. There was plenty of space, lots of room and time. The Megaship lay on the floor of the giant bay, looking for all the world like a small city sitting on a great slab of metal. The Clear Air Turbulence flew past the stern of the Megaship, past tunnels full of propeller blades tens of metres across, round the side of its rearmost outrigger, where beached pleasure craft waited for a return to water, over the towers and spires of its superstructure, then out over its bows. Horza looked forward. The doors, if they were doors, of the General bay faced him, two kilometres away. They were that same distance from top to bottom, and twice that across. Horza shrugged and checked the laser again. He was becoming, he realised, almost blasé about the whole thing. What the hell? he thought.
The lasers picked a hole in the wall of material ahead, punching a slowly widening gap which Horza aimed straight for. A vortex of swirling air was starting to form around the hole; as the CAT rushed closer, it was caught in a small horizontal cyclone of air and started to twist. Then it was through, and in space.
In a quickly dispersing bubble of air and crystals of ice, the craft burst from the body of the General Systems Vehicle, swooping into vacuum and star-washed darkness at last. Behind it, a force field slammed across the hole its passage had created in the doors of the General bay. Horza felt the plasma motors stutter as their supply of outside air disappeared, then the internal tanks took up the slack. He was about to cut them and slide gently into the start-up procedure for the craft’s warp engines when the speakers in his headrest crackled.