Ian McDonald - Ares Express

With a wan, early mist clinging to the roof panels, Sweetness first thought of ice mornings on the winter transpolar runs, when the temperatures high high north dropped so low the carbon dioxide smoked out of the atmosphere into a thin rime. Then, as the sun gained in strength and the mist burned off, she imagined that she was flying over the board of a titanic children’s game, a thing she had once hallucinated when she went down with one of those necessary childhood diseases and her temperature hit the high thirties. Vast playing pieces should be moving from hexagon to hexagon, manoeuvring and threatening. Shading her eyes, she could discern distant dark shapes standing out above the fields of hexes, stalky and angular: mooring towers for Skywheel ground-to-orbit shuttles, communications masts, but her imagination made them Peons and Palisers and Prelates investing and humiliating Princes and Palaces. She reminded herself she had had very little sleep last night, and she had witnessed a fragment of Armageddon, so powers and dominions were lodged in her head. The light was still low and glancing enough to render the glass opaque, a golden highway over which the flying cathedral drifted. Half a degree of altitude, and on an instant, the ground beneath her feet went transparent. She thought of clouds lifting or some inky solution in a School of the Air chemistry demonstration clearing with a drop of reagent. Sweetness’s was not a seafaring family—she had never set foot on a water-borne craft—but her childhood bedtimes had been filled with stories from the shallow oceans, of pirates and shipwrecks and drowned cities of the wicked, down there, where the people still went about their business in the watery streets and on clear, fearful nights, their bells could be heard, tolling from the submerged campaniles. The small, manicured farms, the geometric roads, the tightly packed villages and towns beneath her feet were the stuff of such stories. The cathedral passed over the support branch of one of the roof-trees. At its tip, it split into finer and finer branchings, suggesting a new image to Sweetness; blood vessels, capillaries: a city beneath the skin, if such a thing could be. Peering down between her feet, she saw that the upper levels of pier were encrusted with orioles and turrets and perilous balconies. Grand Valley was as familiar to her as any other piece of the planet’s terrain; the vertical cities that clung to the bottom couple of kilometres of the roof-trees held no wonder for her any more, but the view from above revealed details previously hidden by perspective. On one of the very highest terraces, tiny figures celebrated some dawn party: as the airship’s shadow fell over them, Sweetness thought they looked up, and that one waved. She waved back. Now she crossed the junction of two roofplates; a perfect black fault line across the outer burbs of one of the valley cities, like a knife cut in reality. A couple of minutes onward, dark scurrying machines worked doggedly at a hole punched through the tough glass: some bolide snuck through while the anti-meteor defences had been otherwise occupied in the night. They fused over the cracks, wove silica from their mandibles like spiders walling themselves up in egg-cocoons of silk. Sweetness noticed that they were working on both sides of the wound; the ones beneath clung nonchalantly with suckered feet.

A loop of river identified the city unreeling below as Melucene, an elegant, university town of high-gabled gritstone colleges strung along the river bluffs of the muddy Meluce. Castle Melucene, the venerable seat of the Provosts, hove into view, a fantastical confection of towers and spires and buttresses carved from a primeval ventolith mesa by orbital construction lasers. Sweetness had never liked Melucene: she detested the boyish, mannered jinks of the students on the term runs when they flocked back to their dormitories. She hated their high, affected, nasal singing, and determinedly kept herself on the working side of the tender. It took the Stuards a week to sluice out the beer and vomit. As she watched the steeply pitched roofs of the colleges slip beneath her feet, a niggling feeling came over her that perhaps they were a little closer to her boot soles than they had been. That the fields looked a little larger, that the details of the college badges worked out in coloured roof-tiles were more sharply focused. That the labouring airship was losing height.

In confirmation, the cathedral lurched and dropped. Sweetness grabbed for something solid to hold on to. The glass hexagons were coming up hard and fast beneath her. Ahead, an entire roofpanel was slowly tilting open. Squinting through the glare, Sweetness could make out the silhouettes of gantry work rising above the surface, beneath, the indistinct but massive torpedoes of lighter-than-aircraft nuzzled at roof-branches like great fish feeding from coral. Some repair facility, but Harx was coming in too fast, too low…What was the pilot doing? Ballast gushed from vents, shedding across the roofplates in a flash flood but the basilica was still losing height. Air gusted warm in Sweetness’s face and she had her answer. As the sun warmed the morning air, the airship lost in the battle of competing densities. Sweetness tried to clamber away from the closing ground. Nowhere to go, remember? This is as far as you got. She had to do something. At this speed, with this mass, if Harx hit, his little freeloader would be spread like cashewbutter. The access panel was fully open now, but the bottom rungs of the rope ladder, her salvation, were brushing the glass. Coming in, too low! Too low! Sweetness wrestled in her cocoon, untangling legs and arms. She freed three metres of cable, screwed up her courage, screwed it tighter. She grasped hold of the cable, wrapped it firmly around her wrists and with a cry, swung herself free. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th dangled beneath the dome of the cathedral. The airframe lurched again. She let out a little shriek. Don’t look down.

You have to look down.

She looked down.

Five kilometres below her, a lazy river lost itself in meanders and braided sandbars while great coloured riverboats the size of small towns cruised the backwaters. Sweetness shifted focus. Closer—very much closer—the glass rushed up at her. The portal was close…The airship sagged lower. Aerials snapped, booms bent. Not close enough.

“Yaaah!” Sweetness Asiim Engineer shouted, and jumped.

Glass, she had forgotten, is smooth, slick and hard. Very hard. The impact knocked the wind from her: she rolled five times, the world a blur of airship canyons land sky, and into a slide. Flickering between sense and unconsciousness, she saw the cathedral hit the edge of the portal, bounce clear and drop through. That edge, toward which she was helplessly sliding…She tried to find an anchor for her fingers, something to kick against. Nothing, slick, smooth glass. With the last of her strength and will, Sweetness heaved herself into another roll. Ribs protested, she tried to pull her arms over her head. If she missed, if she got it wrong, best not to see the moment she shot over the edge on to five kilometres of clear morning air. Over and over and over, and to rest. She peeked out between her arms. She could have spat a gobber over the lip of the big drop. Sweetness laughed deeply, painfully and then everything went wonderfully black.

One eye opened, some time later. In front of it was a boy’s face, cocked at the angle of curiosity. Sweetness opened her other eye. The boy tilted his head the other way. Sweetness guessed him to be four, maybe five, and so incongruous was the sight that she forgot for a moment the grating pain down her left side. While she puzzled, another child’s face looked over the boy’s shoulder, a girl, a couple of years older.