“Good day,” Berdle said to her, loudly, then held a hand out to Cossont. “Shall we?”
Cossont got to her feet. “What’s happ—?”
The whole fabric of the airship shuddered once more. Beneath, where the waters roared, fifty metres down, two explosions burst from the swirling waves.
“Time to run!” Berdle said, turning and sprinting off along the walkway for a distant patch of light. “Follow me!”
She raced off after him, vaulting the naked, coughing man and hammering down the walkway behind the avatar. Thin pillars of cerise light flicked into existence, splashing fire from the ceiling. One lanced through the walkway a metre behind Berdle’s flying feet; she jumped the resulting fist-sized hole.
“One right turn at the next junction, steps up dead ahead,” she heard his voice tell her. “I’ll join you momentarily.”
Then the avatar put out a hand, caught hold of one of the walkway’s supporting chains and was lifted off his feet and spun round, just as another pink bolt pierced the walkway immediately ahead of him. He dropped over the side of the walkway, at first falling, then curving away through the darkness and the everywhere roar of water. Light glittered again inside the tank as two shapes rose twisting though the air beneath, filling the space with hair-thin shining filaments.
She put her head down, pounded along the wildly swinging gantry, skidded round the corner at the junction and saw a short flight of steps leading up through the ceiling.
The storm of air howling down through the hole in the ceiling made it almost impossible to make any headway. She needed all four arms to pull herself upwards on the chain bannister rails, and all the strength in her own legs and the suit’s to force her way up the metal steps. Small pieces of debris came hurtling down from above and hit her shoulders or bounced off her head, hurting her even through the thin covering of suit-helmet.
“Ow! Fuck!” she said, though the scream of air tearing around her was so loud she couldn’t actually hear anything else.
She made the deck above, threw herself onto the soft, carpeted floor under subdued lighting and rolled away from the torrent of air being sucked howling into the emptying cavern beneath. Around her — in what looked like a very large, complicated, low-ceilinged room — terrified-looking people were staring wide-eyed at her over the top of luxuriously sculpted pieces of pale furniture. A man and a woman were sitting on a nearby couch, feet braced against the floor, causing rumples in the carpet, their fingers clawing into the soft material of the cushions they sat on. The couch itself was jerking and sliding across the floor, towards the hole. The woman closed her eyes. The man opened his mouth in what was probably a scream but there was too much other noise to tell.
Cossont used all four hands to claw her way across the floor. Something white came whirling towards her; she ducked instinctively as a fat square pillow bounced over her and disappeared into the maelstrom around the aperture in the floor. Where it had come from, twenty metres away, part of the floor gave way and a set of couches and chairs holding maybe a half dozen people disappeared, sucked downwards into the darkness.
“Berdle?” she yelled. But she didn’t even know if he’d be able to hear her — she couldn’t hear herself.
The first problem was getting all the bits and pieces out of the way, so there would be room for itself.
Actually, who was it kidding? The first problem was all about not blowing up the world, or at the very least not annihilating both itself, fifty horizontal kilometres of Girdlecity, who-knew-how-many lives locally and immediately, and then an additional who-knew-how-sizable number over a significant proportion of the rest of the planet with the resulting fireball, blast front, secondary debris impact events and all the resulting ancillary fire, tertiary impact and ground-shock effects.
Another fucking day at the office, the ship thought, putting all such thoughts to one side and cascade-checking all the available variables, before just doing it.
There were fourteen craft and over eighty individuals in the fifteen hundred metres of tunnel which started one hundred metres behind the stern of the Equatorial 353. The first task was Displacing them safely. Or at least quickly. The quickly mattered more than the safely, and one of the larger craft, containing nine or ten people, picked up rather more relative velocity at the far end of the Displace than the Mistake Not… would have liked, sending the flier flicking forward by a couple of extra metres per second as it bounced in. That might mean broken limbs if the occupants weren’t restrained, but that was the worst of it; everything else transitioned relatively smoothly.
The space was clear. The ship went for it, jumping across into real space in a single vast snap, as precisely aligned as possible in the circumstances and the time available, its enclosure fields shrunk, sucked, wrapped as tight as they would go about itself, leaving it with maybe fifty metres all around it between the outermost of those tightly compressed fields and the nearest bit of Girdlecity solidity. There was an important part of the whole process that depended on something called — only slightly misleadingly — the singularity-expansor transfer component. The ship finessed that as well as it could, but this time its own safety — not to mention the safety of the Girdlecity, millions of people, the planet, etc. — trumped technical perfection, so the expansion ended up being relatively rough and ready, and undeniably abrupt.
The ship blew into existence almost explosion-fast, creating a vast pulse of air that tore out through the fortunately dispersed structure of the open-work tunnel and the surrounding architecture of the Girdlecity, bowling people over, sending nearby aircraft tumbling, shattering antique windows and denting cladding panels for hundreds of metres about it.
Messy, the Mistake Not… would be entirely prepared to concede, but never mind. In the end it had worked and it was where it had wanted to be; in the same huge basket-weave tunnel as the airship Equatorial 353, just a hundred metres behind it.
~What idiocy is this? the captain of the Churkun sent.
~A fitting idiocy, the ship replied. ~I fit. You won’t. And if I need to I can put my enclosure right around the airship from here, so I suggest you leave me be. Out.
The blast of air seemed to have relented a little, if only because more floor panels had given way, providing additional routes for the air to escape through. The two people on the couch that had been slipping towards the hole in the floor had scrambled up and over the back of it, crawling away; the couch itself had stopped moving.
“Berdle!” Cossont screamed. No reply. It was still bedlam but at least now she could hear herself. She saw another stairway, spiralling upwards ten metres away, behind the nearest semi-circle of chairs. She got onto one knee, heaved herself upright and leaned into the still-furious gale, forcing herself forward, straining to see any more debris coming her way.
Another shudder ran through the whole airship, sending her flying. She heard herself yelp as she fell, being blown backwards, caught in the lacerating torrent of air; she dropped to the floor and held on again, cursing.
Agansu pushed himself up against the pummelling force of the water, finally getting to all fours. The android body was gauging, calibrating, allowing for the vast pressing weight surging across it. It could still function, and its AG should still be effective. Walls burst, the floor gave way in a variety of places nearby, letting in a little more light, allowing the surging fall of water to escape.