“Llless thththan a mmminute,” said Lazlo, presumably from reference to a retinal time display. “Lllet’s hope Oishii’ssss ppplugged well in.”

The hoverloader awoke. First the deep thrum as the antigrav system shifted from buoyancy to drive, then the shrill whining of the air intakes and the frrr-frump along the hull as the skirts filled. I felt the sideways tug of water swirling around the vessel. Spray exploded from the stern and showered me. Lazlo offered me one more wide-eyed grin and pointed.

“Up there,” he yelled over the engine noise.

I followed the direction of his arm and saw a battery of three circular vents, hatches sliding out of the way in spiral petals. Maintenance lights showed inside the chutes, a chainlink inspection ladder up the loader’s skirt to the lip of the first opening.

The note of the engines deepened, settling down.

Lazlo went first, up the rungs of the ladder and onto the scant, down curving ledge offered by the top of the skirt. Braced against the hull above, he gestured down at me. I shoved Sylvie towards the ladder, yelled in her ear to climb and saw with relief that she wasn’t too far gone to do it. Lazlo grabbed her as soon as she got to the top and after some maneuvering the two of them disappeared inside the shaft. I went up the ladder as fast as my numbed hands would pull me, ducked inside the chute and out of the noise.

A couple of metres above me, I saw Sylvie and Lazlo, limbs splayed between protrusions on the inside of the launch tube. I remembered the wincefish’s casual boast the first time I met him—a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it. It was a relief to see that, like a lot of Lazlo’s talk, this had been an exaggeration. The tube was far from polished smooth, and there were numerous handholds built into the metal. I gripped experimentally at a scooped-out rung over my head and found

I could haul myself up the incline without too much effort. Higher up I found smoothly rounded bumps in the metal where my feet could take some of my body’s weight. I rested against the faintly shuddering surface of the tube for a moment, recalled Oishii’s five-minute maximum and got moving again.

At the top of the chute, I found a bedraggled Sylvie and Lazlo braced on a finger-thin rim below an open hatchway filled with sagging orange canvasynth. The wincefish gave me a weary look.

“This is it.” He thumped the yielding surface above his head. “This is the bottom-level raft. First to drop. You squeeze in here, get on top of the raft and you’ll find an inspection hatch that leads to the crawlspace between levels. Just pop the nearest access, panel and you’re out in a corridor somewhere. Sylvie, you’d better go first.”