With each step I took towards it, it receded. I began to run. It continued to display dream logic and moved away.
Finally, gasping for breath, I stopped running. The red spot had gone. I felt the hunger again, but now it was inside me, clawing at my belly, filling my throat with craving. The roiling clouds overhead froze suddenly, motionless, even the lightning flares stilled and captured in jagged, phosphorescent lines.
A voice spoke my name. I thought it was Vibben, but when I turned, there was nothing to see except the suggestion of a presence drifting away like smoke.
I woke. From the clock, I had been asleep only a couple of hours. My throat was raw and my mouth dry. I drained two glasses of water from the side cabinet and then fell back on the bed.
My head ached but my mind would not stop spinning. After that, no sleep came at all.
The vox-link chimed about four hours later. It was Betancore. The Essene has just made orbit/ he told me. We can leave whenever you like.'
The Essene lay slantwise above the inverted bowl of Hubris, silhouetted against the stars.
We had left the radiance of the Sun-dome into a blizzard squall. The airframe of the cutter had vibrated wildly as Betancore lifted us out of the clutches of the ferocious, icy winds until we were riding clear over an ocean of frosty vapour.
The blizzard, a sculptural white continent, then dropped away below until we could see its tides and gusts and currents, the wide centrifugal patterns of its titanic force.
'There,' Betancore had said, with a nod to the raked front ports. Even at ninety kilometres, still rising through the thinning aeropause, he had made visual contact.
It had taken me a few more moments to find it. A bar of darkness distorting the pearly edge of the planesphere.
Another minute, and it had become a three-dimensional solid. A minute more, and I began to resolve the running lights glittering on its surface.
Yet another minute and it filled the ports. It resembled some colossal tower that had been ripped away from its earthly foundations and set adrift, tranquil, in the void.
'A beauty,' murmured Betancore, who appreciated such things. His inlaid hands flicked over the flight controls and we yawed to the correct approach vectors. The gun-cutter and the massive vessel exchanged automatic telemetry chatter. The flight deck pict-plates were alive with columns of rushing data.
'A bulk clipper, of the classic Isolde pattern, from the depot yards of Ur-Haven or Tancred. Majestic…' Aemos was muttering and annotating his idle observations into his wrist slate again.