She pushed awkwardly across the lock toward Pham Nuwen's wall. The place was a confused jumble, unlike the passenger and sporting ships she'd been on before. Besides, this was a Rider design. Stickem patches were scattered around the walls; Greenstalk had mounted her skrode on one cluster.
They were accelerating, maybe a twentieth of a gee. "We're still going down?"
"Yes. If we hover or rise, we'll crash," into all the junk that still rains from above. "Blueshell is trying to fly us out." They were falling with the rest, but trying to drift out from under — before they hit Groundside. There was an occasional rattle/ping against the hull. Sometimes the acceleration ceased, or shifted in a new direction. Blueshell was actively avoiding the big pieces.
… Not with complete success. There was long, rasping sound that ended with a bang, and the room turned slowly around her. "Brrap! Just lost an ultradrive spine," came Blueshell's voice. "Two others already damaged. Please strap down, my lady."
They touched atmosphere a hundred seconds later. The sound was a barely perceptible humming beyond the hull. It was the sound of death for a ship like this. It could no more aerobrake than a dog could jump over the moon. The noise came louder. Blueshell was actually diving, trying to get deep enough to shed the junk that surrounded the ship. Two more spines broke. Then came a long surge of main axis acceleration. Out of Band II arced out of the Docks' death shadow, drove out and out, into inertial orbit.
Ravna looked over Blueshell's fronds at the outside windows. They had just passed Groundside's terminator, and were flying an inertial orbit. They were in free fall again, but this trajectory curved back on itself without whacking into big hard things — like Groundside.
Ravna didn't know much more about space travel than you'd expect of a frequent passenger and an adventure fan. But it was obvious that Blueshell had pulled off a near miracle. When she tried to thank him, the Rider rolled back and forth across the stick-patches, buzzing faintly to himself. Embarrassed? or just Riderly inattentive?
Greenstalk spoke, sounding a little shy, a little proud: "Far trading is our life, you know. If we are cautious, life will be mostly safe and placid, but there will be close passages. Blueshell practices all the time, programming his skrode with every wit he can imagine. He is a master." In everyday life, indecision seemed to dominate the Riders. But in a crunch, they didn't hesitate to bet everything. She wondered how of that was the skrode overriding its rider?
"Grump," said Blueshell. "I have simply postponed the close passage. I broke several of our drive spines. What if they do not self-repair? What do we do then? Everything around Groundside is destroyed. There is junk everywhere out to a hundred radii. Not dense like around the Docks, but of much higher velocity." You can't inject billions of tonnes of wreckage into buckshot orbits and expect safe navigation. "And any second, the Perversion's creatures will be here, eating whoever survives."
"Urk." Greenstalk's tendrils froze in comical disarray. She chittered to herself for a second. "You're right… I forgot. I thought we had found an open space, but…"
Open space all right, but in a shooting gallery. Ravna looked back at the command deck windows. They were on the dayside now, perhaps five hundred kilometers above Groundside's principal ocean. The space above the hazy blue horizon was free of flash and glow. "I don't see any fighting," Ravna said hopefully.
"Sorry." Blueshell switched the windows to a more significant view. Most of it was navigation and ultratrace information, meaningless to Ravna. Her eye caught on a medstat: Pham Nuwen was breathing again. The ship's surgeon thought it could save him. But there was also a communication status window; on it, the attack was dreadfully clear. The local net had broken into hundreds of screaming fragments. There were only automatic voices from the planetary surface, and they were calling for medical aid. Grondr had been down there. Somehow she suspected that not even his Marketing ops people had survived. Whatever hit Groundside was even deadlier than the failures at the Docks. In near planetary space, there were a few survivors in ships and fragments of habitats, most on doomed trajectories. Without massive and coordinated help, they would be dead in minutes — hours at the outside. The directors of Vrinimi Org were gone, destroyed before they ever figured out quite what had happened.
Go, Grondr had said, go.
Out-system, there was fighting. Ravna saw message traffic from Vrinimi defense units. Even without control or coordination, some still opposed the Perversion's fleet. The light from their battles would arrive well after the defeat, well after the enemy arrived here in person. How long do we have? Minutes?
"Brrap. Look at those traces," said Blueshell. "The Perversion has almost four thousand vessels. They are bypassing the defenders."
