Strata

fragrant, smooth plank had been extruded from the hatch the colony worked like robots. Great drifts of seaweed, washed up by the pounding sea, helped swell the heap by the input hopper. Today the sea moved like liquid mountains.
    Kin took the others aside while the colony was carting planks.
    ‘We fly,’ she said. ‘Over land as much as possible, but we fly. If the belt power looks like running out before we get to the hub, then we’ll charge up one belt from the others and Marco or I will go on alone. That means Silver can stay with the ’waiter.’
    ‘I am inclined to agree,’ said Silver. ‘There can be nothing to lose. Marco should be the one to go on, of course. I am big enough to scare predators, and you can survive by engaging any male humans in sexual congress if necessary. Marco is best equipped to reach the hub.’
    It was an elephantine attempt at diplomacy, but Marco turned his head away.
    ‘I am equipped for nothing,’ he said distantly. ‘I allowed myself to be provoked by humans. I am shamed.’
    ‘The blame is not wholly yours,’ said Silver generously.
    ‘But Silver,
I outnumbered them one to thirty
!’
    Spray flew like sleet over the village. A respectable pile of planks had grown round the dumbwaiter. Kin switched it off and adjusted its lift belt.
    The two Christos priests were standing apart from the crowd, chanting in Latin.
    ‘What’re they saying?’ said Kin.
    Silver listened for a moment. ‘It’s an invitation to Christos to allow us to repair his planets andsun or alternately to strike us down if, as they suspect, we’re servants of Saitan.’
    ‘Nice of them. Say goodbye for us, will you?’
    They rose quickly. The huts and then the beach were lost against the background of snow and foam-topped sea.
    The sea had gone mad. Waves piled on top of one another and burst and roared, sending spray almost as high as the flyers.
    On the disc east couldn’t be a direction, it had to be a point of the circumference. There were four directions on the disc: circle right, circle left, in, out. They headed
in.
    They circled the thing in the water carefully: was it alive, Kin wondered, or was it just that the waves made it appear so? Once, a flipper broke water and slapped down again.
    She decided to go lower. She waited for warnings from Marco, but he had been subdued all day. Silver said nothing, but took advantage of the mid-air stop to reel in the ’waiter on its towline.
    Kin thought she could feel the cold air through the suit’s twenty-five layers as she dived. The sky was pure blue, ice-clean.
    The creature was floating belly upwards. Most of it was tail, which snaked back until it was lost in surf. When a particularly heavy swell moved the body, Kin glimpsed a long equine head and one empty eye socket.
    It must have been old. No creature could grow that big fast. And the white belly was pitted with seaworm holes and studded with shellfish.
    She flew back up. It would be nice to get it on a dissecting table – with a winch.
    ‘It’s dead,’ she announced. ‘There’s a gash in it you could sail a boat through. Fresh, too. It’s the same sort of creature as the one we saw this morning, I think.’
    It had been far to the right, looping through the water like a scaly-backed sine wave.
    ‘It’s very definitely dead,’ she said reassuringly, seeing Silver’s face.
    ‘What is currently occupying my mind is what killed it,’ said the shand. ‘I will be happy to get my feet on terra firma.’
    The more firmer the less terror, thought Kin. She found she preferred the sky. There was something reassuring about lift belts, far more so than the disc. She knew belts didn’t fail. The disc might break up at any moment, but she would remain safely hanging in space.
    ‘There is an island a few miles off,’ said Silver. ‘Just a dome of rock. I can see the marks of fires. Shall we land?’
    Kin peered ahead. There was a smudge, a long way off. The sea seemed to be calm, too. The idea of a short stop had merit. The flying suits had never been designed for extended use in gravity. Her legs had been trailing uselesslybelow her since they left the settlement, and felt like lead. It would be nice to stamp some new blood into them.
    ‘Marco?’ she said. He was hovering some way off, still wrapped in self-recrimination.
    There was a sigh in her ear. ‘I can hold no useful opinions,’ he said, ‘but I see no obvious dangers.’
    The island was small and obviously tidal.