Strata

If they weren’t to start with they would be now.
    ‘No,’ she said out loud. ‘They couldn’t have built something like this if they were mad.’
    ‘It looks like Earth, and Earthmen are mad,’Silver pointed out. ‘I suppose humans haven’t been doing a little secret world building?’
    ‘No …’ began Kin, and saw they were both looking at her slyly. ‘I don’t know,’ she finished lamely. ‘It certainly looks like it, I’ll admit.’
    ‘It certainly does,’ said Marco.
    ‘It does too,’ agreed Silver.
    ‘Don’t breathe,’ said Marco. ‘There’s just enough room. We’re going in.’
    The ship dropped through with a few metres to spare, and the proximity detectors shrilling. They were still going mad when Kin looked up and saw a ship speeding towards them.
    It hit in one of the holds, buckling the hull and sending the sky wheeling crazily. Damage doors crashed into place and then the control room lurched again as it fell away from the ship under its own power, a self-contained emergency craft.
    The damage to the ship was nothing to what happened to the attacker. It disintegrated.
    Blue-green shards were spreading across the sky and, as Kin pulled herself up from the cabin floor, the screens were sparkling like glitter dust.
    The inner door of the emergency airlock opened and Marco loped in, tugging at his helmet with two hands. Another one held a laser rifle, salvaged from the other half of the ship. The fourth held a long sliver of glass, gingerly.
    ‘Looks like someone threw a bottle at us,’ said Kin.
    ‘Their aim was remarkable,’ said Marco coldly.‘I can take us back to the rest of the ship, but it is hardly worth it. We’ve got no Elsewhere capability. I can’t build a pinch field. Most of the contents of the hold are floating out there somewhere, and they were our weapons. The auxiliary systems are all working. I could probably fly us home on the ringrim motor alone.’
    ‘Then all is not lost,’ rumbled Silver.
    ‘No, except that it would take about two thousand years. Even this bloody gun is useless. Someone thought it a safe idea to pack the main coil in a separate box.’
    ‘So we land on the disc,’ said Kin flatly.
    ‘I was wondering when someone was going to say that,’ said Marco. ‘It’ll be a one-way trip. This craft won’t lift off again.’
    ‘What hit us?’ said Silver. ‘I thought I saw a ball about ten metres across …’
    ‘I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what it was,’ murmured Kin.
    ‘Yes. It was a weapon,’ said Marco. ‘I admit I find its complete destruction difficult to understand, but the fact remains that we had a stargoing ship. Now we have not. I intend to make one orbit before landing.’
    Silver coughed gently. ‘What’, she said, ‘will we eat?’
    It took several hours to ferry the dumbwaiter across from the lazily spinning ship. At Kin’s insistence they also brought the sargo with Jaloin it, and linked it into the emergency system. The waiter had its own internal power supply – as laid down by regulations. No one wanted to spend their last hours in a blacked-out ship with any hungry shand that might be aboard.
    The new orbit took them past the disc’s moon, no longer shining and obviously invisible in the disc’s day sky. They saw that one hemisphere was black.
    ‘Phases,’ said Kin. ‘Wobble the moon on its axis and you get phases.’
    ‘Who does the wobbling?’ asked Marco.
    ‘I don’t know. Whoever wanted this thing to look like Earth, from the surface. And don’t look at me like that – I’ll swear this wasn’t built by humans.’
    She spoke to them about artificial worlds – rings, discs, Dyson spheres and solar tunnels.
    ‘They don’t work,’ she said. ‘That is, they’re vulnerable. Too dependent on civilization. And there’s too many things to go wrong. Why do you think the Company terraforms worlds when there are cheaper alternatives? Because planets last, that’s why. Through anything.
    ‘And I’m certain this wasn’t built by Spindles. Planets were important to them. They had to feel the strata below and the unlimited space above. Somehow they could sense it. Living on something like this could drive them out of their skulls. Anyway, they died out four million years ago at least, and I’m positive that this thing isn’tthat old. It must be all machinery just to keep going, and machines wear out.’
    ‘There’s cities down there,’ said Marco, ‘in the right place, too. If