A page jostled Venera and the photos fell out of her purse. She laid a backhanded slap across the boy's head and stooped to grab themto find that her servant had already picked them up.
He glanced at two that he held, apparently by accident, then did a double-take. Venera wondered whether he'd tripped the page behind her back just so he could do this.
"Give me those!" She snatched them back, noting as she did that it was the mysterious photos of the great, dim gray object that he'd looked at. She decided on the spot to have him arrested on some sort of trumped-up charge as soon as she reached the Fanning estate.
Blazing with anger, Venera elbowed her way through the crowd of couriers and minor functionaries, and took a side exit. Cold air wafted up from the stairs that led up to the cable cars connecting the other towns in this quartet. Fury and cold made her jaw flare with pain so that she wanted to turn and strike the insolent young man. with a great effort she restrained herself, and gradually calmed down. She was pleased at her own forbearance. I can be a good person, she reminded herself.
"Fifteen hundred feet," murmured the servant, almost inaudibly.
Venera whirled. He was trailing a few yards behind her, his expression distracted and wondering. "What did you say?" she hissed.
"That ship in the picture was fifteen hundred feet long," he said, looking apologetic.
"How do you know mat? Tell me!"
"By me contrails, ma'am."
She stared at him for a few seconds. He was young, certainly, and his high-cheeked face would have seemed innocent but for the weatherbeaten skin that reddened his brow and nose. He had a mop of black hair that fell like a raven's wing across his forehead and his eyes were framed with fine lines in an airman's perpetual squint.
He was either far more cunning than she'd given him credit for, or he was an idiot.
Or, she reluctantly admitted to herself, maybe he really had no idea that she'd met with someone in the lathes' room, and didn't expect a lady like herself to be carrying sensitive information. In which case the photos, to him, were just photos.
"Show me." She fished out the two shots of the behemoth and handed them to him.
Now he looked doubtful. "I can't be sure."
"Just show me how you reached that conclusion!"
He pointed to the first picture. "You see in the near space here, there's a bike passing.That's a standard Gray forty-five, and it's running at optimum speed, which is a hundred twenty-five knots. See the shape of its contrail? It only gets that feathered look under optimum burn. It's passing close by the docks so you can tell" he flipped to the second picture, "that here it's gone about six hundred feet, if that dock is the size it looks to be. It means the second picture was taken about two seconds after the first.
"Now look at the contrails around the big ship. Lady, I can't see any bikes that aren't Gray forty-fives in the picture. So if we assume that the ones in the distance are Grays too, and that they're going at optimum speed,
then these ones skimming the surface of the big ship have traveled a little less than half its length since the first picture. That makes it a bit over twelve hundred feet long."
"Mother of Virga." Venera stared at the picture, then at him. She noticed now that he was missing the tips of several fingers: frostbite?
She took back the pictures. "You're a flyer."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then what are you doing working as a body servant in my household?"
"Flying bikes is a dead-end career," he said with a shrug.
They resumed walking. Venera was mulling things over. As they reached the broad clattering galleries of the cable car station, she nodded sharply and said, "Don't tell anybody about these, if you value your job. They're sensitive."
"Yes, ma'am." He looked past her. "Uh-oh."
Venera followed his gaze, and frowned. The long cable car gallery was full of people, all of whom were crowding in a grumbling mass under the rusty cable stays and iron-work beams that formed the chamber's ceiling. Six green cable cars hung swaying and empty in the midst of the throng. "What's the holdup?" she demanded of a nearby naval officer.
"Cable snapped," he said with a sigh. "Wind shear pulled the towns apart and the springs couldn't compensate."
"Don't drown me in details, when will it be fixed?"
"You'd have to ask the cable monkeys, and they're all out there now."
"I have to get to the palace!"
"I'm sure the monkeys sympathize, ma'am."
She was about to erupt in a tirade against the man, when the servant touched her arm. "This way," he murmured.
With a furious hmmph, Venera followed him out of the crowd. He was heading for an innocuous side entrance. "What's down there?" she asked.
"Bike berths," he said as he opened the door to another windy gallery. This one was nearly empty. It curved up and out of sight, its right wall full of small offices with frosted-glass doors, its left wall opening out in a series of floor-to-ceiling arched windows. Beyond the windows was a braveway and then open turning air.