The cruisers slipped and tried to slide off cliffs. Would rain slow vampires the way it was slowing her? She should have camped earlier.
But they still had daylight when they reached her chosen position.
She set the cruisers back-to-back, not too close, cannon facing out. Those who must cook their food, cooked under an awning while they still had light. Warvia had shot some creature big enough to share with the Machine People. In the last light they washed, then piled their towels a distance from the cruisers.
The Gleaners retired. They didn’t like rain and they needed their sleep. The rest talked or slept or merely waited.
Vala would have welcomed the Ghouls’ advice. They were perched on a bare granite peak overlooking the Shadow Nest, talking in their own tongue, with their backs to the doused fire and the company. Valavirgillin saw two only, but she seemed to hear several voices.
The other hominids were letting the Machine People do most of the talking. So be it. Vala said, “Any vampires that get this far should be exhausted from the trek uphill. Our smell is all on the towels. It’ll distract them. They’ll be easy meat.”
Barok said, “Vampires would be coming back from where they hunt. They won’t expect to hunt this close to their nest. There’s no prey left.”
“We’ll see.”
Chit said, “When they come, they come in hordes.”
“Reminds me,” Kay said. “I scooped up three barrels of river gravel, Vala. Want some? We still have to use powder, but we can save our shot.”
“Good.”
“How’s Warvia?”
Warvia said, “Warvia hooki-Murf Thandarthal can speak for herself, Kaywerbrimmis. Warvia is in health. Have you seen sign of Tegger?”
Vala said, “I found some things missing. Survival stuff, enough to fill a backpack, all from Cruiser One. Tegger must be the quickest thief alive.” Her backpack had been disturbed too, but nothing seemed to be missing. That, she didn’t mention.
“Next question. What do we do tomorrow? Harpster? Grieving Tube?”
“Come and see,” said Grieving Tube.
Vala climbed the rock. It was nearly flat on top, and cold to the touch. She saw that Warvia had followed her; she reached down and pulled the Red woman after her.
Downstream, the Homeflow split and split again. Her gaze followed the main channel to where it dipped into shadow. The floating factory was ominously close, and huge.
Grieving Tube was almost scentless, smelling only of wet fur. She said, “Valavirgillin, can you see beneath the Floater? Do you see dangling loops, near side, right of center?”
It was as Tegger had described it, a disk that bulged upward in the middle. Beneath… beneath was shadow, and a sense of restless motion about the edges.
“No,” Vala said.
“Yes,” said Warvia. “I’ll sketch it, come day.”
The Ghoul said, “Warvia, that dangling helix is a ramp wide enough for heavy machinery. There are cogs along one edge, so that machines need not slip, and stairs along the other. No eyes have seen these things in many generations. The description you hear is more than twenty lifespans old, stored in a library far to spin, given me some days ago at the Thurl’s fort.”
Given how? But communication was a Ghoul’s secret, and what Vala cared about was—”You have maps of the floating thing?”
“Yes, from before the Fall of the Cities, before so many things stopped working. Details only reached me yesterday, while we were above the clouds.”
“That’s—”
“It doesn’t touch the ground,” Warvia said.
Grieving Tube said, “I was afraid of that.”
Harpster said, “None of us have been this close in a very long time. There was no point before Louis Wu boiled a sea, and after it was too dangerous—”
Vala broke in. “Warvia? The ramp doesn’t touch?”
“I’m having trouble with distances, Valavirgillin, but it’s hanging in midair. The bottom of the ramp straightens out flat like a shovel blade, but twice as high as those vampires around it.”
“We did not expect this,” Grieving Tube said. “Our chosen path would have been to force a way onto the Floater. Then vampires would have to come to us along a narrow way. They prefer to swarm. They might even have to face raw daylight, that high.”
Vala was holding tight to her temper. Long practice made that surprisingly easy. “I see. But we can’t reach it?”
“I see no way,” Harpster said, “but there are more minds here than ours. Let us set them thinking.”
Running through fog and mist, running from his life, his eyes always where his feet would fall, Tegger would not have seen any threat. But he smelled it, gasped it in, as if the memory of Warvia punched him in the face. He stopped, caught his balance, reached over his shoulder and was armed.
Fingers brushed his face. He slashed waist high, forward and back, before ears and eyes caught up.
Her song peaked in a squeak of agony. He poked out at throat level. The song ended. Tegger clapped his hands over his ears and ran.
And ran.
He knew that smell! She was behind him, dying, but with her scent in his nose he saw her more clearly than his pounding feet. The leather cloak she wore was too big for her, and in tatters, and she spread it like wings to show her nakedness. Her song was piercingly sweet. She was slender and very pate, perhaps adolescent, her hair thick and white, the points of her canine teeth visible past her red lips.
Vampire! Night after night they sang outside the Thurl’s wall. Tegger was stronger than their lures. He’d said so over and over. But that drifting scent was older yet, for it was Warvia’s scent during the friendliest part of her cycle; only stronger. His heaving breath was driving it out of his nose, out of his mind, and he ran-
— out of the mist, and slowed to a stop.
For most of a falan he’d studied the map, the relief map they’d shaped and fired outside the Thurl’s compound. Now it was as if he were an ant viewing it at eye level.
He crept uphill to put a boulder between himself and the creatures around the Floater, before he looked again.
An ant looking at an anthill. It was far away still, but a Red’s eyes are good. Those were human shapes interacting in what seemed human patterns. They moved as if at work or gathered in little social groups. Some carried burdens that their posture said were babies. They moved in and out of the black shadow that lay beneath a huge disk, a mass like a full-sized city floating above them.
The Ghouls had called it a factory complex, but Tegger couldn’t help but think of it as a City Builder city. A vampire city, now.
He could see no more than twenty vampires, even including the few down at the river, but there must be thousands in the shadow of the Floater. If it fell, it would crush most of them. Shrapnel spraying horizontally would take out most of the rest, Tegger thought.
He could see something hanging down, like an unsupported spiral staircase. He couldn’t see the bottom. Maybe he could climb that.
How to reach it? As best he could judge through the drifting fog, the floating city was twelve hundred paces downstream along a wide mud flat that the Homeflow had carved into multiple channels. The main channel flowed under the city, but many channels went around. Here and there along the river vampires had come into daylight to drink.
Too close to the Shadow Nest, channels flowed around both sides of some tremendous thing, a tilted square plate obtrusively artificial and half buried in the mud. Some relic from the Fall of the Cities, no doubt. Vampires nearby didn’t seem to be avoiding it.
