WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(26)
An air-cushion vehicle drove off one of the concrete floats, hit the waves, and howled shoreward at a high rate of speed. The cloud of its drifting spray enveloped Daniel's boat. The family shrieked curses at their wealthy fellows. One of the ACV crewmen thumbed her nose in response, but the neatly uniformed merchant officers being ferried to shore in comfort paid no attention.
The ACV was a proper water taxi. The boat in whose bow Daniel sat was loaded with fruit and bottles till the gunwales were within a hand's breadth of the water. The younger members of the family, two girls and a handsome boy wearing earrings and a silver-bordered tunic, probably sold more than merchandise to the starship personnel.
Riding as extra cargo on a bumboat was a lot cheaper than a real taxi, though Daniel had to remind himself of his reasoning whenever the motor coughed for what could be the last time. He would have money again, as soon as he'd seen the duty officer.
It was hard to appreciate the vastness of the Floating Harbor while approaching it at virtually the surface of the water. When the boat nosed down the back side of a swell, nothing was visible but the next rise of the water. Even at the peak of a wave where scud blew off the curl, one saw only the wet gray masses of the floats and the lighter, even greater, masses of the dozen or so nearest starships.
On a normal day there were at least thirty ships in the Floating Harbor. Today there were forty-seven: Daniel had surveyed the layout from the quay and memorized it. If the boat landed him in the wrong location, he wanted to be able to find his way to the Aglaia without depending on the help of other vessels. Several of the latter were transports registered on Alliance worlds, and even the crewmen of a Cinnabar ship might think it funny to send a naval officer the wrong way around a harbor miles in circumference.
Daniel grinned. He'd have thought it was funny himself back when he was a midshipman. Not so very long ago.
The Aglaia was in the first rank, easily visible, but Daniel's boat was angling to the north. If they reached the harbor at the point they were aiming at, he'd have a dozen pontoons to cross and the wire-mesh catwalks swinging between them besides. Daniel turned, rose to a high crouch that let him keep a hand on the gunwale—it was at best an even chance whether the boat would come back for him if he fell overboard—and cried, "This way!"
His free arm stabbed in the direction of the Aglaia. "The navy ship! The Aglaia!"
The boy at the tiller of the outboard motor looked to be eight years old or a little less. He stared at Daniel with worried eyes. The old woman beside him waggled the embroidery she was working on at Daniel. She screamed, "The harbor! The harbor! You walk!"
"The Aglaia!" Daniel repeated. He took out the hundred-florin piece. Multilevel diffraction gratings within the transparent coin turned it into a rainbow between his thumb and forefinger. He dropped the coin back into his purse.
The family argued shrilly among itself, the eight grown members shouting while the infant added its wordless cries. The boatmen of Kostroma harbor spoke their own patois. It was based on Universal, but Daniel caught no more than a third of the words. Some of the vocabulary no doubt came from local Kostroman dialects, but the languages of many other planets played a part as well.
A middle-aged man stepped in front of the old woman and snarled an order to the steersman. The boy adjusted the tiller, pointing the bow toward the Aglaia after all.
The old woman screamed at the man; the man slapped her, knocking her against the stern transom. She picked up her embroidery hoop and resumed work, muttering to herself.
A sphere was the best shape for a vessel operating in the Matrix, but spherical ships were dangerously unstable on water unless they had long outriggers. Besides, though a sphere was the most efficient volume to enclose, it presented severe problems for loading and unloading on the surface of a planet. The only spherical ships were small ones and vessels purpose-built for exploration.
All the ships in the Floating Harbor today were shaped like fat cigars. They floated a little above midpoint, and the hull proper was paralleled by an outrigger on either side. The antennae that drove the vessels through sponge space were either folded along the hull or extended for maintenance like the legs of a crushed insect.
The Aglaia looked very similar to most of the transports docked nearby. She was 613 feet long with a 65-foot beam. The nominal weight of her hull and fittings was 10,000 tons, though the in-service weight including crew, consumables, and reaction mass was a good 4,000 tons more.
She was built of steel. There were stronger metals and lighter metals, but none that really matched the corrosion and fatigue resistance of steel and its relative ease of machining and welding during repair. Weight was of no significance in sponge space and not very important even when the ship was using High Drive or her plasma motors.