Control cabs nestled between the shoulder blades of each crane. Vandals or weather had long since knocked out most of the windows. Clarke and Lubin took cover there and waited. A faint whistle of rising wind sang through the framework above them.

It came down from the sky like a bloated dragon, vented gas roaring from its trim bladders. The whirlwind heralded its coming; a nor'easter had built throughout the day, and now it whistled across the waterfront with strength enough to drown voices. Sliding sheet-metal doors caught the wind and tugged clanging against their rollers; thin stretched wires and massive cables rang and thrummed like Hell's own string section. The lifter groaned and sparked down through the blow. It settled above the water, in front of the warehouse, and rotated to bring all its guns to bear.

Lubin put his head next to Clarke's. "Go."

She followed him from the gutted cab. Within seconds he was meters above her, sliding up through the crane like an arboreal python. She gritted her teeth and climbed after. It wasn't as bad as she'd feared; a narrow ladder ran up the inside of the structure like a trachea, sprouting safety hoops at one-meter intervals. But the wind buffeted on all sides, and surrounding girders sliced it into quarrelsome and unpredictable vortices. They pushed her against the ladder, twisted her sideways, slipped under her backpack and tried to yank it from her body.

A sharp thunderclap from her left. She turned, and froze, and clung to the ladder for dear life; she'd hadn't realized how high she'd already climbed. The waterfront shuddered behind and beneath her, not quite a tabletop model yet but close enough, too close. Far below, the harbor churned green and white.

Another thunderclap. Not weather, though. The wind, for all its strength, howled beneath a blue and cloudless sky. That sound had come from the lifter. Seen from above the vehicle looked like a great gunmetal jewel, faceted into concave triangles: skin sucked against geodesic ribs by the buoyant vacuum inside. It roared briefly above the wind, a hissing bellow of gaseous ballast. Its belly nearly touched the water; its back curved higher than the warehouse roof, several stories above.

Tame lightning, she remembered. For buoyancy control. High-voltage arcs, superheating trapped gases in the trim tanks.

And Ken's going to ride this monster.

Better him than me.

She looked up. Lubin had reached his departure point and was untying one end of the rope, his legs wrapped around ambient scaffolding. He gestured impatiently at her— then staggered, knocked briefly off-balance by a gust of wind. His hand shot out to steady himself on a nearby cable.