24

Stepping quickly, you reach Kattan the Younger as he and a controller try to hold onto some kind of attitude wheel. You pull him away as flames suddenly engulf the mechanism. The controller blackens, still clinging to the wheel. Kattan spins around, wild-eyed, then looks back at the burning console.

"Thank you, lad!" he says. "That was almost the death of—"

Then Kattan and a half dozen other scientists vanish in a flash of colorless lightning. You're hurled to the ground, dazed but unhurt.

When you can see again, Meto is dead or gone, as are most of the soldiers, scientists, and journalists. Cyril lies dead on the deck of the Specular, transfixed by a piece of machinery. Alexius and Stralchus still cling to the Specular's central pillar.

"Where are we?" Stralchus shouts over the roar of air. Tarps and blankets, perhaps intended for a picnic at the dawn of time, swirl all around.

"Too high up for comfort!" Alexius shouts back, casting a horrified glance down at the green-gray expanse below.

Most of the varied merchants and translators, who were closest to the center of the Specular, still cling on, but they're screaming, starting to panic. Stralchus forces himself upright and starts gesturing for them to be calm as the spinning dinner plate you're all on seems to be leveling out.

Suddenly the straps holding a trunk burst and the trunk falls off the side of the platform, taking a controller with it. A second trunk starts to break free, but Alexius pins it down despite the roaring flames.

"What are you doing?" Stralchus roars at the merchant.

"If we don't die in the next ten seconds," Alexius says, "I'd like to land with something to eat!"

"Stable," a badly damaged controller says. "Sta—" Then she droops and topples over; the wheel she was holding starts to spin. The next-closest controller looks at the spinning wheel with a surprisingly human expression of alarm, but that unit is too busy working its own console.