Planesrunner by Ian McDonald

Author:Ian McDonald [McDonald, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781616145415
Amazon: 1616145412
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2011-12-06T08:00:00+00:00

Everett rode the lift line up through the inner organs of Everness. Beneath him, the loading deck where Sharkey was in careful negotiations with a stevedore over a consignment of containers bound for St. Petersburg. Above him, like clouds, the ranks of gas cells, and Sen, a body-length above him, riding the line high with the grace and ease of an angel. She grinned down at him. Thinking in three dimensions was easy—he had had to think in seven dimensions to fold Tejendra's random Heisenberg jump addresses into the Infundibulum. Living in three dimensions—effectively on the inside of a huger, hollow object—that was much less easy. But he was getting the feel of it, learning the timings and the orientations and to think that the shortest distance between two points was often across, not around. He thought of it as minding a goal the size of an ocean liner. Sen swung in over the central catwalk and dropped lightly to the mesh. Everett was right behind her.

Sen wanted to give him a tour of the ship before the weigh-in—the second time he had heard that faintly ominous phrase that day. She took him round the crew quarters first—galley you know, captain's ready room you know; showed him his own little cabin—latty was the Airish-speak; helped him sling his hammock and showed him how to use it without rolling straight out again. She had even graced him with a glimpse into her own latty. Everett got an impression of tubes of cosmetics crowding every surface, strewn underwear (rather small, it seemed to Everett) and posters of rugby players with their shirts off. The bridge: the heart of the ship. It was smaller than Everett had thought; with all the crew at their stations it would have been crowded. But the view from the floor-to-ceiling window was compelling: a winter afternoon in Hackney Great Port, airships drifting across the purple-and-gold December skyline, plumes of steam and smoke rising from along the edge of the world. Everett barely noticed the instruments and tools of airship command; the steering yokes, the lift levers, ballast pumps, the joysticks that trimmed the attitude, the binnacle, the computer displays glowing behind their magnifying monocles, the banks of closed-circuit monitors keeping eyes on all of Everness's huge body, inside and out. Then down a spiral staircase, bent double in the crawlspaces beneath the cargo deck, among the batteries; banks and banks of them wedged so close Everett could hardly squeeze between them. They were warm and humming and filled the claustrophobic crawl-ways with the thrilling, spicy smell of electricity. Everness, like all airships of her class, ran on electricity. In dock at Hackney Great Port she was recharging from the port grid, but she was configured to charge up from any available electrical source.

“Worst comes to it, we could even hook up to a thunderstorm,” Sen said. “Bit dodgy, though. If you gets that wrong…” She left the sentence unfinished. She looked uncomfortable, as if she had said too much.

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