Or maybe it was the ship jerking all of them around. They were puppets, dancing off a single string. ... Deep in the tunnel of her vision, a Rider grabbed at the tumbling figure of Pham Nuwen. Ravna wasn't aware of losing consciousness, but the next she knew she was breathing air and choking on vomit -- and was inside the airlock. Solid green walls closed in comfortingly on all sides. Pham Nuwen lay on the far wall, strapped into a first aid canister. His face had a bluish cast. She pushed awkwardly across the lock toward Pham Nuwen's wall. The place was a confused jumble,
复件 (38) air max2, 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,
复件 air max," 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,
复件 (28) air max1, rasping sound that ended with a bang, and the room turned slowly around her. "Brrap! Just lost an ultradrive spine,
复件 (70) air max2," 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,
复件 (6) air max, 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,
Dre beats Studio (Blue) Special Edition High Definition Powered Isolation Headphones, 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.
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