“Be our guest,” Nuern told her. “Anything else? Diamond-based works like that will burn up in a few decades when the house has dropped further into the heat. Take all you want.”
“Over-kind. This alone is most sufficient.”
“The GasClipper regatta?” Captain Slyne said. He scratched his mantle. “I thought you wanted to go back to Munueyn?”
“There was no reason to let our hosts know where we were really heading,” Fassin told Slyne.
“You are suspicious of them?” Y’sul asked.
“Just no reason to trust them,” Fassin said.
“The regatta takes place around the Storm Ultra-Violet 3667, between Zone C and Belt 2,” the colonel said. “Starting in sixteen days. Have we time to get there, captain?”
They were in Slyne’s cabin, a fairly grand affair of flickering wall-screens and antique furniture, the ceiling hung with ancient ordnance: guns, blaster tubes and crossbows all swaying gently as the Poaflias powered away at half-throttle from Valseir’s old house. So far Fassin had told Hatherence where they were really going, though not why.
Slyne let himself tilt, looking as though he was about to fall over. He did some more mantle scratching. “Ithink so. I’d better change course, then.”
“Leave the course change for a little longer, would you?” Fassin asked. They were only a half-hour away from the bubble house. “Though you might go to full speed.”
“Have to anyway, if we’re to get to that Storm in time,” Slyne said, turning and manipulating a holo cube floating over his halo-shaped desk. The largest screen, just in front of him, lit up with a chart of the volume and quickly became covered in gently curved lines and scrolling figure boxes. Slyne peered at this display for a few moments, then announced: “Full speed, we can be there in eighteen days. Best I can do.” Slyne gripped a large, polished-looking handle sitting prominently on his desk and pushed it, with a degree of obvious relish, if also a little embarrassment, to its limit. The tone of the ship’s engines altered and the vessel began to accelerate gradually.
“We might contact Munueyn and hire a faster ship,” Y’sul suggested. “Have it rendezvous with the Poaflias en route and transfer to it.”
Slyne rocked back, staring at the older Dweller with patterns of betrayal and horror (non-mild) spreading across his signal skin.
“Eighteen days will have to do, captain,” Fassin told Slyne. “I don’t think we need be there for the very start of the tournament.”
“How long do these competitions last, in generality?” Hatherence asked.
Slyne tore his gaze from an unconcerned-looking Y’sul and said, “Ten or twelve days, usually. They might cut this one a little short because of the War. We’ll be there in time for most of it.”
“Good,” Fassin said. “Stay on your current course for another half-hour, if you please, captain. Turn for the Storm then.” Slyne looked happier. “Consider it done.”
Slyne took advantage of a WindRiver, a brief-lived ribbon of still faster current within the vast, wide jet stream of the whole rotating Zone, and they made good time. They were challenged twice by war craft but allowed to continue on their way, and slipped through a mine net, a wall of dark lace thrown across the sky, dotted with warheads. Dreadnought-catcher, nothing to worry them, Slyne assured them. They had, oh, tens of metres to spare on almost every side.
The screwburster Poaflias got to very near the bottom of the Storm called Ultra-Violet 3667 within sixteen days, arriving more or less as the regatta began.
“Keep clipped on! Could get a bit rough!” Y’sul yelled, then repeated the warning as a signal, in case they hadn’t heard.
Fassin and Hatherence had come up on deck when the Poaflias had started bucking and heaving even more than usual. The gas around them, darker even than it had been at Valseir’s house, though less dense and hot, was fairly shrieking through the ship’s vestigial rigging. Ribbons and streaks, just seen coiling briefly round the whole vessel, were then torn away again as the ship plunged into another great boiling mass of cloud.
The human and the oerileithe, still within the relative calmness of the companionway shelter, exchanged glances, then quickly put the crude-looking harnesses on. The colonel’s fitted well over her esuit. Fassin’s-tied tight enough but looked messy, not designed forhis alien shape. Slyne had insisted that everybody should wear the things whenever they went on deck while the Poaflias was at full speed, even though both Hatherence and Fassin — in the unlikely event that they were somehow blown off the deck — could easily have caught up with the ship under their own power.
“What’s going on?” Hatherence shouted as they neared Y’sul, clinging to the rails near the bow harpoon gun. “Going to shoot the storm!” Y’sul bellowed back. “That sounds dangerous!” Hatherence yelled. “Oh, assuredly!”
“So, what does it entail, exactly?”
“Punching through the storm wall,” Y’sul shouted. “Tackling the rim winds. Should be spectacular!” Ahead, a great dark wall of tearing, whirling cloud could be glimpsed beyond the tatters and scraps of gas that the ship was stabbing its way through. Jagged lines of lightning pulsed across this vast cliff like veins of quicksilver.
They were still making maximum speed towards the wall, which seemed to stretch as far to each side as they could see, and up for ever. Downwards was a more swirling mass of even darker gas, boiling like something cooking in a cauldron. The wind picked up, thrumming the rails and rigging and aerials like an enormous instrument. The Poaflias shuddered and buzzed. “Time to get below, suspect,” Hatherence shouted. A julmicker bladder blew off a nearby railing — it looked like it had been the last one left — smacked Y’sul across his starboard side and was instantly lost to the shrieking gale. “Could be,” Y’sul agreed. “After you.”
They watched from the ship’s armoured storm deck, crowded in with Slyne beneath a blister of thick diamond set at midships, looking out across the deck and watching the Poaflias’s nose plunge into the storm like a torpedo thrown at ahorizontal waterfall of ink. The ship groaned, started to spin, and they were all thrown against each other. They disappeared into the wall of darkness. The Poaflias shook and leapt like a Dweller child on the end of a harpoon line.
Slyne whooped, pulling on levers and whirling wheels. Stuck in the far reaches of the ovaloid space, Slyne’s pet-children whimpered.
“This entirely necessary?” Fassin asked Y’sul. “Doubt it!” the Dweller said. A big flat board covered in studs above Slyne started to light up. In the darkness, it was quite bright…
Hatherence pointed at it as dozens more of the studs lit. “What’s that?”
“Damage-control indicators!” Slyne said, still working levers and spinning wheels. They all rose to the ceiling as the ship dropped sharply, then crashed back down again.
“Thought it might be,” Hatherence said. She was thrown hard against Fassin in a violent turn, and apologised.
When the glare started to get too distracting, Slyne turned the damage-control board off.
In the worst of the turbulence, one of Slyne’s pet-children threw itself at its master and had to be torn off and smacked unconscious before being thrown into a locker. It was unclear whether it had been desperately seeking comfort or attacking. Y’sul was sick. Fassin had never seen a Dweller be sick. Stuck to the ceiling again, coated in a greasy film of vomit, Slyne cursing as he tried to keep hold of the controls, his pet-children keening from all sides, somebody mumbled, “Fuck, we’re going to die.” They all denied responsibility afterwards. The Poaflias burst out of the torrent of storm cloud into a vast and hazy calm and started to drop like a lump of iron. Slyne drew in gas to whoop but caught some of Y’sul’s earlier output and just spluttered. Coughing and retching and cursing Y’sul’s lineage to some point only shortly after the Big Bang, he got the ship level and under control, contacted Regatta Control and limped — the ship had lost all its rigging, railings and four of its six engines — to the Lower Marina and a berth in a Storm Repair Facility.