Béla floated in the air, some distance from the great ship. Looking down, she could see clouds moving across the landscape far beneath her. She traced a ribbon of blue from where it emptied into a glistening lake, back across little brown squares and dark green areas, back to its source, a large patch of white near the bright crystal sun. That was probably snow. The darker green areas were probably groves of trees. The little brown squares speckled with white and green were probably fields, waiting for the grain that was even now being unloaded from the great ship.

That brought her mind back to the ship, their new home, and her father. No one had ever named the great ship or the hollow moon she floated in. Béla realized that a telepathic race would have no need to name objects and things; they simply projected images to each other. She suspected that her father was simply patronizing her when he had allowed her to name their great venture.

Moving her wings slightly, she rolled and looked ‘down’ in another direction. There was a small town far below her. The concept of ‘up’ and ‘down’ was still slightly disorienting. From where she was right now, everywhere was ‘down’. Béla knew that when she got to the surface, everywhere would be ‘up’, or ‘over’, but not ‘down’.

She had flown out a small distance from the great ship, fuming that her father wouldn’t let her fly to the surface alongside one of the cargo carriers. She knew, of course, that the only safe passage was via the North or South poles, but she chaffed at having to ride in a cargo carrier like a ‘grounder’ to get there.

Her thoughts reminded her that she would be expected to show up in the cargo bay for transport to the surface, soon. She looked around for the great ship, suddenly realizing she’d drifted some distance from it. It was so tiny that she missed the little black dot against the landscape behind it, and had to search for it mentally. Once she knew where it was, she could see it and began to fly toward it.

Not realizing it, she was already falling toward the surface far below. Drifting with the gradually increasing wind, Béla was being carried away from the great ship faster than she could fly toward it. After several moments of flying as fast and as hard as she could, Béla realized she was in serious trouble.

‘Again? Shit and God Damn!’ she thought disgustedly.

The air around her was becoming more turbulent. Béla spread her wings wide, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t fly up. The wind pushed her sideways faster than she could climb, and sideways was another direction of DOWN! She realized with considerable nervousness and upset that she was going to have to match her speed to the growing landscape beneath her, or be smashed against the inner surface by the centrifical forces surrounding her.

In her flights around the inside of Deimos, Béla had encountered this problem a couple of times, but tiny Deimos was much smaller than New Eden and the air turbulence between the center of that moon and its inner surface was miniscule. The dangerous part about flying around inside Deimos had been the treacherously uneven landscape and the rapid, wobbly rotation.

Béla knew, from her studies, that there was a relatively calm cushion of air that rotated near the same speed as the surface below her. During a storm, that air cushion could extend up for several thousand feet, depending mainly on the temperatures and velocities of the air masses involved.

‘I’m flying the wrong way!’ Béla realized, as she fought against the increasing wind velocity. ‘I should be using the wind to help me speed up!’

She arched her back and flipped over, stalling out, and began diving even faster toward the surface, picking up speed with the wind behind her, now. That was good, because she needed a *lot* of speed. She also needed a towering cushion of air to dive into, so she could change her trajectory to skim the inner surface and not slam into it.

Now flying as fast as she could in the same direction the wind was carrying her, Béla desperately began searching below and behind her for a towering storm cloud she could dive into.