In the Mouth of the Whale Read Online Free PDF Page B

wavefront of the quake to hit.
    Ori clambered back on to the flatbed car and clung to the edge of the cradle, so that she had a good view up and down the length of the Whale. For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Then the cable humped and buckled at the point where it pierced the cloud deck, and sprites suddenly stood on every sharp edge of the flatbed cars and the equipment scattered around them. Crackling coronal discharges that danced and swayed like flames, blue at their cores, shelled in pale yellows and greens that spat spiky fractal sparks.
    One burned so close to Ori that her optical sensors whited out for a moment. When they came back on line the sprite was gone, but tens of others were dancing all around, jumping from point to point with no seeming transition. Several swayed at the nose of the probe like a crowd of curious ghosts, flattening now in the hard wind pushed ahead of the oncoming shock wave.
    It travelled up the cable with relentless speed. A subtle sinuous flexing of the tremendously strong structure, moving inside a silvery envelope of warped air. Little jets of vapour, mostly visible in infrared, spat in every direction as attitude motors on ballonet spars tried to maintain the cable’s rigidity. Ori flattened her bot against the cradle and felt a brief moment of bilocation. She was riding her bot, extended into every part of it, splayed flat against the cradle, and she was sitting in her immersion chair, hands cramped inside control gloves, blocks of data floating before her eyes and in the midpoint of the bot’s wrap-around vision.
    Then, directly below the blunt point of the end cap, sections of track buckled and sheared away from the cable and the Whale hummed with subsonic vibrations as the cable flexed in the collars that held it fast inside the great structure’s spine.
    Ori’s entire attention snapped back inside the bot. She saw a rainbow shimmer of intricate stress patterns race across the cone of the end cap, and then a black fog of superheated atomic carbon, stripped from the cap’s cladding of fullerene-diamond polymer, rolled upslope. Ori closed down her external sensors, felt the staging post judder and heave, rattling the probe’s flatbed car sideways and up and down against its tracks, rattling her bot against the cradle, twisting it, plucking at it. Everything went white and Ori was back in her body, breathing hard, feeling the floor shudder under her chair, and then the connection rebooted and she was back, and the shaking was still bad but it wasn’t as bad as it had been, gentling now, everything suddenly still and quiet.
    The hot fog had blinded most of the sensors on the bot’s right side, cutting a wide swathe out of its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, but Ori glimpsed movement high above and swivelled and focused as best she could and saw that the magrail above the staging post was disintegrating. Broken sections fell like a shower of spears as the magrail unzipped towards the string of freight cars at the exit of the marshalling yard. The leading car tipped forward and fell away, and the string whipped out above it, snapping apart one by one. The car at the end of the whip dropped straight down, tumbling free in clear air, gone, but the rest struck the Whale’s skin as they fell, bouncing off and spinning away in every direction.
    One dropped straight towards the staging post. Ori saw it in the brief instant before it slammed end on into the post’s outer edge. Its sheath buckled and shattered and its load of carbon nanotubes flew out, a black cloud that completely enveloped the flatbed car and Ori’s bot, and then there was a tremendous jolt and everything swung sideways.
    The cloud thinned and blew away and Ori discovered that she was hanging upside down with nothing between her and the cloud deck far below. It took her a moment to work out what had happened: part of the staging post’s skin and the track attached to it had been ripped open and peeled