“Twelve minutes till the ship’s back?”
“Just under. Though how easy the Gzilt battleship will make it for me to do anything as delicate as targeting bits of 4D shielding in the first place is very much open to question.”
“Is there going to be a fight?”
“Yeah, could be,” Berdle said. “There goes our boy,” he added.
Cossont switched her wrist screen on again to see Ximenyr placing his white shift on a shelf and then walking into a vaginal-looking vertical aperture in one of the translucent spheres, a breather tube gripped in his mouth. He was quite naked. Only one penis, as far as Cossont could see. And he didn’t seem to have anything else with him that might have contained the pair of eyes.
Some sort of double liquid-lock had allowed Ximenyr to enter the sphere without any fluid spilling. There was a pause while he stood and fluid swirled up around him, then a sphincter valve at the top of the sphere opened and he rose quickly and easily up, out of the sphere and into the liquid-filled tank above.
“…And so,” the reporter arbite began to intone, gravely.
Cossont switched the sound off and just watched Ximenyr’s pale-looking body as he swam out at an angle into the darkness. The extra lights he’d asked for earlier, or the enhancement, had been switched off, so his shape disappeared into the watery shadows after barely half a minute; the vast tank was now an almost entirely dark megatonne presence hanging over the scene below. The view switched to the other party-goers taking off their own shifts and preparing to step naked into the translucent spheres to follow Ximenyr.
“The locker in the medical suite’s got nothing,” Berdle said quietly, shaking his head.
“Can I see?” she asked.
“Need a helmet to see properly,” the avatar told her. “Use the inner suit.” She brought the hood-helmet up. The view darkened, stabilised. A space like a small dark room, one wall edged all round with dim light; quilts on the floor, a small rug, rolled, and a couple of ancient-looking flat screens. “A pair of pants,” Berdle announced. “A single sock. The end of a roll of antiseptic splint-bandage patches. A tooth plectrum. A pair of time-to devices. That’s all.”
“Sure this isn’t art too?”
“Fairly certain.”
“We’re going to have to go up through that fucking tank, aren’t we?”
“Looking like it.”
Cossont redirected her attention to local reality in time to watch Berdle stand, and then saw what looked like his skin and flesh just falling away, under his clothes, exactly as if his flesh had turned to jelly. She felt her mouth open, had time to wonder if they were under attack from some sort of flesh-melting weapon, then noticed that the avatar was watching this whole process with nothing more than interest.
“Shedding excess weight,” Berdle said through her helmet.
He stood in a neatly circular pool of fleshy stuff, reduced to something not far off a skeleton, though one with what still looked like a covering of skin; clothes hanging off him, face like a skull, his knees the widest part of his legs and his elbows the widest part of his arms above his wire-thin wrists, wrinkled skin covering all exposed surfaces.
Then he filled slowly out again, as though his still-skin-covered bones — or what passed for bones — were themselves expanding. His skin became smooth again, his face filled out. Then his clothes fell away too, joining the thick puddle at his feet, all of which turned white and developed folds. The avatar — equipped with a perfectly respectable-looking penis, Cossont was pleased, in a general kind of way, to see — stooped and picked up the stuff that had recently been the equivalent of skin, flesh and muscle and which was now a convincing, if quite thick, white robe, which he let drop on from above. There was another one, still round his feet. He lifted it with one foot, handed it to her.
“Best I can do,” he said.
“No, no; bravo.”
“You’ll need to lose the outer suit; sorry.”
“That’s okay.” The suit split down the front and she stepped out of it. It collapsed and compressed into something that looked like a sort of flattened, elongated black crash helmet.
“We won’t have to go out the same way we came in, will we?” she asked.
Berdle shook his head. “Highly unlikely. Just the under-suit would keep you safe, anyway.”
The under-suit was changing too; expanding slightly, so that, in most places, its surface was about a centimetre or so out from her own skin. It was changing colour and texture too, coming to look convincingly like skin. A thin layer crept over her face, making her skin feel tight.
“That feels weird.”
“Yes, but you’re unrecognisable,” the avatar told her. Berdle’s face had changed too; he looked nothing like he had the last time they’d been here. Still good-looking, but less striking.
Cossont looked down at herself. “Weird,” she said. “I feel more naked now than I do when I’m naked.” She pulled the thick, heavy shift on over her head. It lay, weighty, on her shoulders. “There’s only one set of arm holes!”
Her lower arms had to hang down inside the pale shift.
“Those extra arms are the one thing about you it’s hard to disguise,” Berdle said.
“Hmm,” she said. “Yeah, I suppose it is better if we don’t advertise those.”
“Take the shift off as late as you can,” Berdle suggested.
“Okay. What about Mr Q?” Cossont asked, She recalled the avatar telling her while they’d still been on the Mistake Not… that QiRia’s mind-state had been put into the outer suit.
“I’ve already transferred him to the inner suit,” Berdle told her. “He’ll run slower but feel free to wake him up and talk to him if you want; he’s functional.”
“Maybe later.” Cossont used one foot, toeing the compacted outer suit. “This?”
“Stays here unless we need it, when it becomes a drone. Though it’ll blow its cover the instant it switches on its AG or a lift-field.” Berdle straightened, flexed, looked at her. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be. Let’s go.”
~We are quite certain there is no way they could already be aboard? Colonel Agansu asked the Churkun’s captain.
~We are reasonably certain, the captain replied. ~Not absolutely certain.
Agansu found this reply inadequate, but chose not to say anything. People were cheering all around him. He looked at the airship. The Equatorial 353 was displaying a countdown on its hull now; giant numbers three hundred metres high were clicking down the time to zero. There was half a minute to go.
Boarding gantries had swung out from various opened galleries and balconies dotted along the side of the airship, where crew could be seen opening doors and preparing to extend the gantries the last few metres that would let people use them to board. The gantries ended in complicated-looking up-and-over constructions that let them extend over the roadway parapet. Agansu watched the nearest one lower slowly towards the roadway surface, just ahead. A crew-person from the airship stood on the bottom step of the lowering gantry, holding a flimsy-looking gate closed, preparing to open it.
People were already jostling to get close to the steps. Agansu, simply massing much more than any human of his size, had no difficulty in shouldering people out of the way and making his way quickly to the front. He made suitably placatory gestures and muttered, “Excuse me,” several times, to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness, though he did hear some complaints. Soon he was walking at a slow stroll with the gated steps facing him and various people jostling him ineffectually at his sides and back.