The figure appeared in the blackness of the removed hatchway. It looked human and yet could not be; one of them would have been no more able to survive in the vacuum without a suit than he was.
Quilan upped the magnification on the visor, zooming in as the creature began to walk down the slope of the hull’s interior. The biped had what looked like jet black skin and its clothing was shiny grey. It looked very thin but then they all did. Its feet met the flat surface he was already standing on and brought it closer. It swung its arms as it walked.
-~ They’d look like prey if there was just more eating on them.
He didn’t reply. The zoomed window in the visor kept the creature at the same magnification until the distinction between the window and the rest of the view disappeared. The thing’s face was narrow and pointed, its nose thin and sharp, and the eyes set in the night-black face were small and vividly blue surrounded by white.
Shit. They don’t look any more appetising closer up.
‘Major Quilan?’ the creature said. The skin above its eyes moved when it spoke to him, but not its mouth.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘How do you do. I am the avatar of the Rapid Offensive Unit Nuisance Value. Pleased to meet you. I’ve come to take you on the first leg of your trip to Masaq’ Orbital.’
‘I see.’
-~ Quick suggestion; ask how to address it.
‘Do you have a name, or rank? What should I call you?’
‘I am the ship,’ it said, raising and dropping its narrow shoulders. ‘Call me Nuisance, if you like.’ Its mouth twisted up at the edges. ‘Or Avatar, or just Ship.’
-~ Or just abomination.
‘Very well, Ship.’
‘Okay.’ It held up its hands. ‘I just wanted to say hello personally. We’ll be waiting for you. Let us know when you’re ready to go.’ It let its gaze arc up and around. ‘They said it was all right to come in here. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.’
‘I had finished in here. I was looking for something but I didn’t find it.’
‘I’m sorry.
-~ So you should be, you worm-fucker.
‘Yes. Shall we go?’ He started towards the circle of night in the bow of the ship. The avatar fell into step alongside. Its gaze took in the floor briefly. ‘What happened to this ship?’
‘We don’t know exactly,’ he told it. ‘It lost a battle. Something hit it very hard. The hull survived but everything else inside it was destroyed.’
The avatar nodded. ‘Compacted fused state,’ it stated. ‘And the crew?’
‘We are walking on them.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The creature immediately floated off the floor by half a metre. It stopped making the walking motion and posed itself as though sitting. It crossed its legs and arms. ‘This happened in the war, I take it.’
They came to the slope and started up it; he kept on walking. He turned briefly to the creature. ‘Yes, Ship, it happened during your war.
3
Infra Dawn
But you might die.’
‘That’s the whole point.’
‘Really. I see.’
‘No, I don’t think you do, do you?’
‘No.’
The woman laughed and continued to adjust the flying harness. All about them the landscape was the colour of drying blood.
Kabe stood on a rugged but still elegant platform made from wood and stone and perched on the edge of a long escarpment. He was talking with Feli Vitrouv, a woman with wild black hair and deep brown skin over hard-looking muscles. She wore a tight blue body suit with a small belly pack and was in the process of strapping herself into a wing harness, a complicated device full of compressed, slatted fins that covered most of her rear surfaces, from ankles to neck and down her arms. About sixty other people — half of them also wing-fliers — were distributed about the platform, which was surrounded by the blimp tree forest.
Dawn was just starting to break anti-spinwards, throwing long slanting rays across the cloud-whisped indigo sky. The fainter stars had long since been submerged in the slowly brightening vault; barely a handful still twinkled. The only other heavenly objects visible were the lobed shape of Dorteseli, the larger of the two ringed gas giants in the system, and the wavering white point that was the nova Portisia.
Kabe looked around the platform. The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital’s trailing plates, over the escarpment’s edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist. and sank onwards to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest’s nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.
The blimpers were dark domes scattered amongst the taller ground-hugging trees. They looked threatening to Kabe, especially in this ruddy glow. The giant black gas sacs loomed, shrivelled and deflated but still impressively rotund, over the bloated bulk of the banner reservoir, while their strangler roots snaked across the ground all around them like giant tentacles, establishing their territory and keeping ordinary trees at bay. A breeze stirred the branches of the ground trees and set their leaves rustling pleasantly. The blimpers at first appeared not to be affected by the wind, then moved slowly, creaking and crackling, adding to the effect of monstrousness.
The crimson sunlight was just starting to catch the tops of the more distant blimp trees, hundreds of metres away along the shallow side of the scarp; a handful of wing-fliers had already disappeared and headed down barely discernible paths into the forest. On the other side of the platform the view sank over cliffs, scree and forest into the shadows of the broad valley, where the meandering loops and oxbow lakes of Tulume River could be glimpsed through the slowly drifting patches of mist.
‘Kabe.’
‘Ah, Ziller.’
Ziller wore a close-fitting dark suit, with only his head, hands and feet showing. Where the suit’s material covered the pad of his midlimb it had been reinforced with hide. It had been the Chelgrian who’d wanted to come out here originally to see the wing-fliers. Kabe had already watched this particular sport, albeit from a distance, a few years earlier, shortly after he’d first arrived on Masaq’. Then he’d been on a long articulated river barge heading down the Tulume for the Ribbon Lakes, the Great River and the city of Aquime, and had observed the distant dots of the wing-fliers from the vessel’s deck.
This was the first time Kabe and Ziller had met since the gathering on the barge Soliton five days earlier. Kabe had completed or put on hold various articles and projects he had been working on and had just begun to study the material on Chel and the Chelgrians which the Contact drone E. H. Tersono had sent him. He had half expected Ziller not to contact him at all, and so had been surprised when the composer had left a message asking him to meet him at the wing-fliers’ platform at dawn.
‘Ah, Cr Ziller,’ Feli Vitrouv said as the Chelgrian loped up and folded himself to a crouch between her and Kabe. The woman flicked an arm out above her. A wing membrane snapped out for a few metres, translucent with a hint of blue-green, then flipped back. She clicked her mouth, seemingly satisfied. ‘We still haven’t succeeded in persuading you to have a go, no?’
‘No. What about Kabe?’
‘I’m too heavy.’
‘Fraid so,’ Feli said. ‘Too heavy to do it properly. You could fit him with a float harness, I suppose, but that would be cheating.’
‘I thought the whole point of this sort of exercise was to cheat.’
The woman looked up from tightening a strap round her thigh. She grinned at the crouched Chelgrian. ‘Did you?’
‘Cheating death.’
‘Oh, that. That’s just a form of words, isn’t it?’
‘It is?’
‘Yeah. It’s cheat as in.. . deprive. Not cheating in the technical sense of agreeing to follow certain rules and then secretly not, while everybody else does.’
The Chelgrian was silent for a moment, then said, ‘Uh-huh.’
The woman stood up straight, smiling. ‘When are we going to get to a statement of mine you agree with, Cr Ziller?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He glanced about the platform, where the remaining fliers were completing their preparations and the others were packing up breakfast picnics and transferring to the various small aircraft hovering silently nearby. ‘Isn’t all of this cheating?’
Feli exchanged shouts of good luck and last minute advice with a few of her fellow wing-fliers. Then she looked at Kabe and Ziller and nodded towards one of the aircraft. ‘Come on. We’ll cheat and take the easy way.