The ship rocked; the whole three-hundred-metre length of it wobbled visibly in the air as the corridor it had made for them through the rain just disappeared, letting the rain thunder down around them. The downpour was so heavy Yime saw Dvelner’s arm sink appreciably as the weight of water hit the umbrella she was carrying. Given that they were bouncing along in only a third of standard G, this implied a lot of water, or a very weak old lady, Yime supposed.
“Here,” Yime said, taking the umbrella protecting her from the drone’s maniple field. She inclined her head towards Dvelner and the drone moved smoothly through the torrent, gently taking the handle of the umbrella from the older woman.
“Thank you,” Dvelner said.
“Did I just see you move?” Yime asked the ship’s drone.
“You did.”
“So what was all that about?”
“Anywhere else, I’d treat that as an attack,” the ship said through the drone, casually. “You don’t interfere with a GCU’s fields, even if all they’re doing is keeping the rain off somebody.”
Beside her, Ms. Dvelner snorted. Yime glanced at her, then said to the drone, “It can do that?”
“It can try to,” the drone said, its voice pitched to affable reasonableness, “with the implicit threat that if I didn’t let it it would get upset and try harder, which, as I say, anywhere else I’d take as tantamount to a challenge. However. My own field enclosures were never put under threat, I am a Quietus ship after all, and this is a particularly sensitive and special Bulbitian, so I chose to let it have its way. This is its turf, after all, and I am the guest-cum-intruder.”
“Most ships stay outside the bubble,” Dvelner said, also raising her voice over the rain as they neared the entrance way and the sounds of the cataracts of water falling off the towering facade above increased in volume. The yellow lights inside shone through the thick, trembling bubbles of the rain as though through a rippled, transparent curtain.
“So I understand,” the ship said. “As I say, though; I am a Quietus ship. However, if the Bulbitian would rather I stayed beyond its atmospheric sphere, I will be happy to oblige.” The drone made a show of turning to Yime. “I’ll leave a shuttle.”
With a last crash of drumming rain straining the bowing material of the umbrellas, they walked into the wide entrance to be met by a tall young man dressed quite similarly to Yime, though much less smartly. He was struggling and failing to open another umbrella. He was swearing quietly, then looked up, saw them, stopped swearing, smiled instead and threw the umbrella aside.
“Ms. Dvelner, thank you,” he said, nodding to the older woman, who was frowning suspiciously at him. “Ms. Nsokyi,” he said, taking her hand in his; “welcome.”
“Mr. Nopri?” Yime said.
He sucked air through his teeth. “Well, yes and no.” He looked pained.
Yime looked at Dvelner, who had closed her eyes and might have been shaking her head. Yime looked back at Nopri. “What would constitute the grounds for the ‘no’ part?”
“Technically the person you were expecting — the me you were expecting — is dead.”
The television was old, its casing made of wood, its thick glass screen bulbous and the image displayed on it monochrome. It showed a half-dozen dark shapes like long, jagged spear points hurtling down from a black sky riven with lightning. He reached over and turned it off.
The doctor tapped her pen on the side of her clipboard. She was pale, had short brown hair, wore glasses; she looked half his age. She wore a dull grey suit and a white coat, like doctors were meant to. He wore standard army fatigues.
“You should really watch it to the end,” she said.
He looked at her, sighed, then reached over and turned the set back on again. The dark spearhead shapes fell, formation splitting up as they twisted and wove their way through what might have been air or not. The camera stayed with one of the spearheads in particular, remaining on it after the others had disappeared. It fell past wherever the camera was watching all this from and as the view tipped, following it. The screen filled with light.
It was a poor representation; the image was too small, too grainy and smeary to do justice to the sight, even if it had been in colour. In vaguely green-tinged black-and-white it was just a mess. You could hardly see the spearhead shape now; its presence was only revealed by its quickly shrinking shadow occluding some parts of the flares and pools and rivers of light beneath.
Then a point of light seemed to detach from the lights below and rise to meet the spearhead shape, which rolled and flicked and twisted ever more desperately until the rising point of light flashed past both the spearhead and the camera. A dozen more points of light rose from the lightscape, followed by another, bigger barrage, and another. Just visible at the distorted edge of the screen, more sets of sparks rose fanning out towards the other spearheads. The spearhead the camera was following dodged three of the incoming lights, then one of them winked out just behind it; a moment later the spearhead shape was silhouetted, caught three-quarters to side on in a flare of light bursting all around it, drowning out the view below.
The screen washed out with light. Even on the old, muddy looking screen the flash of brilliance somehow startled the eye.
The screen went dark.
“Satisfied?” Vatueil asked.
The young doctor said nothing, made a note.
They were in an anonymous office filled with anonymous furniture. They sat in two cheap chairs in front of a desk. The crude looking television was perched on the surface of the desk, between them; a power cable made S shapes across the desk and floor to a wall socket. A window with half-open vertical blinds looked out onto a white-tiled lightwell. The white tiles looked grimy; the lightwell let in little light. A buzzing fluorescent lamp was set diagonally across the ceiling, shedding a flat glare that gave the young doctor’s pale face an unhealthy pallor. Probably his too, though he had darker skin.
A faint rising and falling feeling, and a sensation that the whole room and lightwell were moving a little from side to side, clashed with the obvious impression that they were in a conventional building on land. There was a degree of regularity, a periodicity to the various oscillations, and Vatueil was trying to work out the intervals involved. There seemed to be at least two: a long one lasting about fifteen or sixteen heartbeats and a shorter one of about a third of that. He was using heartbeats because he had no watch or phone or terminal and there wasn’t a clock visible anywhere in the room either. The doctor wore a watch but it was too small for him to make out.
They must be on a ship or barge. Maybe some sort of floating city. He had no idea; he’d just woken up here, sitting in this cheap looking chair in this bland office room, being made to watch lo-fi video on an ancient screen device called a television. He’d already had a prowl round the space; the door was locked, the lightwell went down another four storeys to a small, leaf-litter-filled courtyard. The young doctor had just sat there, asking him to sit down and making notes on her clipboard while he’d looked round. The drawers in the room’s single desk — wood, battered-looking — were locked too, as was the single dented grey mild steel filing cabinet. No telephone, comms screen, terminal or sign that there was anything intelligent and helpful listening or present. There was even a switch for the ceiling light, for fate’s sake.
He’d looked over the doctor’s shoulder at the notes she was taking, but they were in a language he didn’t recognise. He wondered how long he was expected to give it before he tried threatening the doctor or shoulder-charging the flimsy-looking door.
He looked up at what was obviously a suspended ceiling. Maybe he could crawl his way out.