FORTY-FIVE

Cliff crouched with the others and watched the big blimp skyfish wallow on the mountaintop. Scampering crews had secured the huge thing at both ends and now were lashing the sides down with big cables. A heavy rain ate most of the light from the skyfish itself, dim glows of ivory that got drowned in the brilliant lightning flashes. Hammering raindrops scattered even the crashes of lightning into a blurred white murk.

“Where’d the Folk go?” Irma shouted against the wind.

“Into that big entrance!” Aybe pointed. “They had that thing they put Tananareve into with them.”

Terry said, “Remember what threw us around, back in the skyfish? To make a shock like that, and blow sheets of rock off this mountain—that takes a lot of quake energy. But there aren’t quakes here—no plate tectonics.”

Aybe swept rain from his eyes and jutted his chin out. “Look, the Bowl has a light, elastic underpinning, with not much simple mass loading. So an impact, from something thrown down here, that has a lot of energy. Real quick it moves through the support structure. It came here, to this big slab of rock, a whole mountain—and knocked the bejeezus out of it.”

“Just as we landed. What luck.” Irma huddled down. Cliff read her body language: the rain was warm, at least. It smacked down hard.

Terry sniffed and said, “I’d like to get out of this damned rain.”

As if on cue, white specks began smacking down on the flat rock plain around them. “Hail!” Aybe said.

A dirty white ball the size of his fist hit Cliff in the side. He thought he felt a rib crack. The weather here was bigger and harder than he could deal with. Plus the darkness of the storm kept making him feel like sleeping.

“Let’s get inside, out of this storm,” Cliff said. “Not the skyfish—who knows what’ll happen in there?”

To his surprise, the others just nodded. They looked tired, and that made them compliant. He turned to Quert. “How can we get into their station?”

Quert had been dealing with his Sil, who were doing what they usually did at a delay—resting. They were squatting and eating something they had gotten on the skyfish. The more anxious humans just milled around. “Let us lead,” Quert said.

The Sil set off at an angle to the crack that had formed in the slab rock. In the confusion of abandoning the skyfish, they had all managed to slip away from the Folk and their many, panicked attendants. The darkness from huge black clouds that slid endlessly across their sky had sent the crew into jittery, nervous states, their legs jerking as they moved, eyes cast fearfully skyward. They had never known night, and this vast storm could not be common here.

The crack finally ended several hundred meters away from the skyfish. The Sil simply walked around the end of it with complete confidence, and headed back toward a raised bump near the larger mound of the Folk station. As they all cautiously approached, the lightning came less often. Cliff looked back in the darkness and saw the skyfish dimly lit from inside, like some enormous orange Halloween lantern on its side. There was no one in the tube passageway that led downward. “Why?” Cliff asked Quert.

“All fear,” Quert said. “Folk, others, all hide inside.”

And so it was. They padded carefully down corridors and across large rooms bristling with gear whose function Cliff could not even guess. It seemed to be working, there were some small lights on the faces, but no clue as to what they did.

“Folk not know how to work when big change comes,” Quert said laconically. He relayed this to the Sil and they all made the yawning, hacking sound of Sil laughter.

They came into a large room that looked down on an even larger area. Quietly they crept up to the edge of a parapet and saw below a milling crowd. The attendants and servants, a throng including alien shapes Cliff had never seen before, and robotic ones as well, held back toward the walls. At the center were the three large Folk and the machine holding Tananareve. The far walls were large oval screens showing views of the Knothole region. One smaller screen was a view from far above, where a long tear in the atmospheric envelope had drawn clouds streaming in, moisture condensing and lightning forking along the flanks of immense purple storms.

“That’s the top of the typhoon we’re under,” Terry said. “Judging the scale, I’d say those cloud banks are the size of Earthside continents—and look at that lightning flash! You can see it coiling around. As big as the Mississippi, easy.”

“Look,” Irma said, pointing at the shifting view as it tilted toward the Knothole. “There’s the jet—and my God!—SunSeeker.”

The screens showed swift small motes dodging and banking in the center of the luminous swirling plasma jet. A quick close-up of their own starship showed it plowing through knots of turbulence and making a tight helix, aiming its pencil exhaust in a tight hot luminous finger at the—

“Damn, they hit it!” Aybe said, eyes jumping. “Blew that flier to pieces.”

“Damn right!” Terry said, pumping his fist.

They didn’t know what was going on, but excitement rippled through humans and Sil alike as they watched something like a dogfight going on. Cliff watched the ballet of ships moving at many hundreds of kilometers a second, seen on scales that had to be zoomed six or seven orders of magnitudes. Nothing but machines could handle this, and even they seemed strained from the sudden turns and swerves they saw.

The crowd below gazed upward at the screens, and the Folk were at the center, managing machines. The odd curved box that held Tananareve was with them. He wondered what they were making of this confusing mess. He grasped Irma and held her close. They kissed, not caring if anyone saw. Then the guards arrived.