"The sea is falling!" shouted Greenstalk. Water's edge had pulled back a hundred meters, two hundred. The green-limned horizon was dipping.
"Ship's still fifty seconds out. We'll fly to meet it. Come, Ravna!"
Ravna's own courage died cold that second. Grondr had said the Docks would fall! The near sky was crowded now as dozens of people raced for safety. A hundred meters away the sand itself was shifting, an avalanche tilting toward the abyss. She remembered something Old One had said, and suddenly she knew the fliers were making a terrible mistake. The thought cut through her terror. "No! Just head for higher ground."
The night was silent no more. A bell-like moaning came from the sea. The sound spread. The sunset breeze grew to a gale that twisted the trees toward the water, sending branches and sand sweeping past them.
Ravna was still on her knees, her hands pressing down on Pham's limp arms. No breath, no pulse. The eyes stared sightlessly. Old One's gift to her. Damn all the Powers! She grabbed Pham Nuwen under the shoulders and rolled him onto her back.
She gagged, almost lost her grip. Underneath his shirt she felt cavities where there should be solid flesh. Something wet and rank dripped around her sides. She struggled up from her knees, half-carrying and half-dragging the body.
Blueshell was shouting, "— take hours to roll anywhere." He drifted off the ground, driving his agrav against the wind. Skrode and Rider twisted drunkenly for an instant… and then he was slammed back to the ground, tumbled willy-nilly toward the wind's destination, the moaning hole that had been the sea. Greenstalk raced to his seaward side, blocking his progress toward destruction. Blueshell righted himself and the two rolled back toward Ravna. The Rider's voice was faint in the wind: "… agrav… failing!" And with it the very structure of the Docks.
They walked and wheeled their way back from the sucking sea. "Find a place to land the OOB."
The tree line was a jagged range of hills now. The landscape changed before their eyes and under her feet. The groaning sound was everywhere, some places so loud it buzzed through Ravna's shoes. They avoided sagging terrain, the sink holes that opened on all sides. The night was dark no more. Whether it was emergency lighting or a side-effect of the agrav failure, blue glowed along the holes. Through those holes they saw the cloud-decked night of Groundside a thousand kilometers below. The space between was not empty. There were shimmering phantoms: billions of tonnes of water and earth… and hundreds of dying fliers. Vrinimi Org was paying the price for building their Docks on agrav instead of inertial orbit.
Somehow the three were making progress. Pham Nuwen was almost too heavy to carry/drag; she staggered left and right almost as much as she moved forward. Yet he was lighter that she would have guessed. And that was terrifying in its own way: was even the high ground failing?
Most of the agravs died by failure, but some suffered destructive runaway: clumps of trees and earth ripped free from the tops of hillocks and accelerated upwards. The wind shifted back and forth, up and down… but it was thinner now, the noise remote. The artificial atmosphere that clothed the Docks would soon be gone. Ravna's pocket pressure suit worked for a few minutes, but now it was fading. In a few minutes it would be as dead as her agravs… as dead as she would be. She wondered vaguely how the Blight had managed this. Like the Old One, she would likely die without ever knowing.
She saw torch flares; there were ships. Most had boosted for inertial orbits or gone directly into ultradrive, but a few hung over the disintegrating landscape. Blueshell and Greenstalk led the way. The two used their third axles in ways Ravna had never guessed at, lifting and pushing to clamber up slopes that she could scarcely negotiate with Pham's weight dragging from her back.
They were on a hilltop, but not for long. This had been part of the office forest. Now the trees stuck out in different directions, like hair on a mangy dog. She felt the ground throbbing beneath her feet. What next? The Skroderiders rolled from one side of the peak to another. They would be rescued here or nowhere. She went to her knees, resting most of Pham's weight on the ground. From here you could see a long ways. The Docks looked like a slowly flapping flag, and every immense whip of the fabric broke fragments loose. As long as some consensus remained among the agrav units, it still had planar aspect. That was disappearing. There were sink holes all around their little knob of forest. On the horizon, Ravna saw the far edge of the Docks detach itself and turn slowly sideways: a hundred kilometers long, ten wide, it swept down on would-be rescue ships.
