There wasn't a fight going on, it was a brawl. Most of the men were simply hacking blindly at everything.

She managed to get to her feet, almost slipping on the curiously muddy floor. Through a gap in the figures she saw Marco dodging like a demon in the torchlight, a sword in all four hands. The dumbwaiter hummed behind him, a sticky, sweet smell in the air.

There was a bellow from the door and Eirick hobbled in, his face contorted with rage. He was flailing about with his crutch.

Then the roof fell in. One of the fighters backed into Kin, and she felled him with a backhanded chop as dawn-pale light flooded the hall. Part of the nearest wall bowed inward and crumbled away. There was a brief glimpse of a wide, white-haired foot.

Silver appeared at the roof hole, black against the gold sky. There was silence, broken only by the whimpers of the wounded and a background trickle.

Silver roared again. There was a brief moment of pandemonium as those who could rushed for the doorway.

Kin looked down. She was standing ankle deep in a sticky, frothy puddle.

She looked at the dumbwaiter. A yellow-brown waterfall was spilling out of the food hatch, filling a deepening puddle. Marco looked at her, trying to focus. Then he sighed contentedly, and fell backwards.

Resignedly, knowing what to expect, Kin held her cupped hand under the stream and tasted it. It was sweet and potent, a super-beer. Here and there in the pool, darker stains were spreading from the wounded and dying.

Kin stopped the flow and set the machine to producing an antidote. When it delivered a bowl of foul blue liquid she dragged the kung up by his comb, tipped the bowl into his mouth in one motion, and let him fall back into the mire.

After Silver dropped through the ruined roof she and Kin toured the hall. The 'waiter was instructed to produce the various seal-and-heal ointments in its repertoire, and after some thought Kin dialled for limb-replacement stimulants. Usually such sophisticated medicine was frowned on for its cultural shock effects, but hell, the disc was one big cultural shock. With some of the wounded she plastered the stuff on like mud, and hoped.

After a while Marco groaned and sat up. He looked at them hazily. Kin ignored him.

'Leiv's men told them about the 'waiter producing alcohol,' he said thickly. 'Then when I gave them a demonstration they began acting irrationally and demanding more. And then they started fighting.'

'A fucking Valhalla machine,' muttered Kin, and turned back to her work.

There was a hoarse chuckle from the darkness under the roof, and a black feather floated down.

They left at noon. The colony gathered to see them off.

Many of the men had new white scars. Some displayed tiny limbs already growing from healed stumps. But several had died in the hall; the Valhalla machine had been too efficient.

Eirick made a long speech in Latin and produced rare furs and two white hunting birds as farewell gifts.

'Say we can't accept,' said Kin. "Say anything. We can't afford to carry the weight. Say we can't go and repair the sun if we carry too much weight. It's almost true.'

Eirick listened to Silver's careful reply, and nodded graciously.

'I'd like to give him something, though,' said Kin.

'Why?' snapped Marco.

'Because she's still afraid the Company might be behind the disc, and she wants to apologize. Isn't that right?' said Silver. Kin ignored her.

'Ask him for some timber,' she said. 'Scraps. And grass or hay. Old bones. Anything that was living. What I have in mind'lI mean the 'waiter will want feeding.'

They set the dumbwaiter up as a timber mill. After the first metre of fragrant, smooth plank had been extruded from the hatch the colony worked like robots. Great drifts of seaweed, washed up by the pounding sea, helped swell the heap by the input hopper. Today the sea moved like liquid mountains.

Kin took the others aside while the colony was carting planks.

'We fly,' she said. 'Over land as much as possible, but we fly. If the belt power looks like running out before we get to the hub, then we'll charge up one belt from the others and Marco or I will go on alone. That means Silver can stay with the 'waiter.'

'I am inclined to agree,' said Silver. There can be nothing to lose. Marco should be the one to go on, of course. I am big enough to scare predators, and you can survive by engaging any male humans in sexual congress if necessary. Marco is best equipped to reach the hub.'

It was an elephantine attempt at diplomacy, but Marco turned his head away.

'I am equipped for nothing,' he said distantly. 'I allowed myself to be provoked by humans. I am shamed.'

'The blame is not wholly yours,' said Silver generously.

'But Silver, I outnumbered them one to thirty!'

Spray flew like sleet over the village. A respectable pile of planks had grown round the dumbwaiter. Kin switched it off and adjusted its lift belt.

The two Christos priests were standing apart from the crowd, chanting in Latin.

'What're they saying?' said Kin.

Silver listened for a moment. 'It's an invitation to Christos to allow us to repair his planets and sun or alternately to strike us down if, as they suspect, we're servants of Saitan.'

'Nice of them. Say goodbye for us, will you?'

They rose quickly. The huts and then the beach were lost against the background of snow and foam-topped sea.

The sea had gone mad. Waves piled on top of one another and burst and roared, sending spray almost as high as the flyers.

On the disc east couldn't be a direction, it had to be a point of the circumference. There were four directions on the disc: circle right, circle left, in, out. They headed in.

They circled the thing in the water carefully: was it alive, Kin wondered, or was it just that the waves made it appear so? Once, a flipper broke water and slapped down again.

She decided to go lower. She waited for warnings from Marco, but he had been subdued all day. Silver said nothing, but took advantage of the mid-air stop to reel in the 'waiter on its towline.

Kin thought she could feel the cold air through the suit's twenty-five layers as she dived. The sky was pure blue, ice-clean.

The creature was floating belly upwards. Most of it was tail, which snaked back until it was lost in surf. When a particularly heavy swell moved the body, Kin glimpsed a long equine head and one empty eye socket.

It must have been old. No creature could grow that big fast. And the white belly was pitted with seaworm holes and studded with shellfish.

She flew back up. It would be nice to get it on a dissecting table -- with a winch.

'It's dead,' she announced. 'There's a gash in it you could sail a boat through. Fresh, too. It's the same sort of creature as the one we saw this morning, I think.'

It had been far to the right, looping through the water like a scaly-backed sine wave.

'It's very definitely dead,' she said reassuringly, seeing Silver's face.

'What is currently occupying my mind is what killed it,' said the shand. 'I will be happy to get my feet on terra firma.'

The more firmer the less terror, thought Kin. She found she preferred the sky. There was something reassuring about lift belts, far more so than the disc. She knew belts didn't fail. The disc might break up at any moment, but she would remain safely hanging in space.

'There is an island a few miles off,' said Silver. 'Just a dome of rock. I can see the marks of fires. Shall we land?'

Kin peered ahead. There was a smudge, a long way off. The sea seemed to be calm, too. The idea of a short stop had merit. The flying suits had never been designed for extended use in gravity. Her legs had been trailing uselessly below her since they left the settlement, and felt like lead. It would be nice to stamp some new blood into them.