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hollowed-out husk of an immense fruit; it appeared to have no windows until
they climbed aboard, making the ship tip gently, but gauzy panels let in light
and made the smooth interior glow with a pastel-green light. It held them
comfortably. The tube of air dissipated behind them as the gondola's door
irised shut.
Eweirl popped his earplugs in and put on his visor, sitting back, seemingly
oblivious. Visquile sat with his silvery stave planted between his feet, the
round top under his chin, gazing ahead through one of the gauzy windows.
Quilan had only the vaguest idea where he was. He had seen the gigantic,
slowly revolving elongated 8-shaped object ahead of them for several hours
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before they'd rendezvoused. The privateer ship had closed very slowly,
seemingly on emergency thrust alone, and the thing - the world, as he was
now starting to think of it, having come to a rough estimate of its size - had
just kept getting bigger and bigger and rilling more and more of the view
ahead, yet without betraying any detail.
Finally one of the body's lobes had blotted out the view of the other, and it was
as though they were approaching an immense planet of glowing blue-green
water.
What looked like five small suns were visible revolving with the vast shape,
though they seemed too small to be stars. Their positioning implied there
would be another two, hidden behind the world. As they got very close,
matching rotational speed with the world and coming near enough to see the
forming indentation they were heading for, with the tiny purple dot
immediately behind it, Quilan saw what looked like layers of clouds, just
hinted at, inside.
'What is this place?' Quilan said, not trying to keep the wonder and awe out of
his voice.
'They call them airspheres,' Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not
especially impressed. 'This is a rotating twin-lobe example. Its name is the
Oskendari airsphere.'
The airship dipped, diving still deeper into the thick air. They passed through
one level of thin clouds like islands floating on an invisible sea. The airship
wobbled as it went through the layer. Quilan craned his neck to see the
clouds, lit from underneath by a sun far beneath them. He experienced a
sudden sense of disorientation.
Below, something appearing out of the haze caught his eye; a vast shape just
one shade darker than the blueness all around. As the airship approached he
saw the immense shadow the shape cast, stretching upwards into the haze.
Again, something like vertigo struck him.
He'd been given a visor too. He put it on and magnified the view. The blue
shape disappeared in a shimmer of heat; he took the visor off and used his
naked eyes.
'A dirigible behemothaur,' Visquile said. Eweirl, suddenly back with them,
took off his visor and shifted over to Quilan's side of the gondola to look,
imbalancing the airship for a moment. The shape below looked a little like a
flattened and more complicated version of the craft they were in. Smaller
shapes, some like other airships, some winged, flew lazily about it.
Quilan watched the smaller features of the creature emerge as they dropped
down towards it. The behemothaur's envelope skin was blue and purple, and
it too possessed long lines of pale yellow-green frills which rippled along its
length, seemingly propelling it. Giant fins protruded vertically and laterally,
topped with long bulbous protrusions, like the wing-tip fuel tanks of ancient
aircraft. Across its summit line and along its sides, great scalloped dark-red
ridges ran, like three enormous, encasing spines. Other protrusions, bulbs
and hummocks covered its top and sides, producing a generally symmetrical
effect that only broke down at a more detailed level.
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As they drew still closer, Quilan had to press himself against the frame of the
little airship's gondola window to see both ends of the giant below them. The
creature must be five kilometres long, perhaps more.
'This is one of their domains,' the Estodien went on. 'They have seven or eight
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