The window of Horner’s bar detonated inwards with a terrifyingly violent explosion. Craggy shards of crystal blasted into the bar, scything through the furniture. Frozen, ice-cloaked tables and chairs disintegrated into billowing clouds of glossy silvery fragments. Then the entire maelstrom reversed its flow, and howled out through the shattered window. The badly shredded main door into the vestibule buckled and collapsed, allowing the air to rush through.

Emergency pressure locks all across the twenty-fifth storey started to slide shut. They were mechanical systems, self-powered, activated by simple failsafe pressure sensors. The majority of them were unaffected by the malaise inflicted by the dark continuum. Only a minority of the starscraper’s muscle membranes reacted to the potentially lethal development.

The personality concentrated hard, ensuring that the muscle membranes around the Djerba’s lobby were shut, then tried to reach the floors immediately below that. Its thought routines encountered a tide of exhaustion that grew worse the further it inserted itself into the starscraper. Only the vaguest images from the twenty-fifth floor were available.

The Orgathй gripped the rim of the bar’s window with several appendages, waiting until the gale subsided. Bottles detonated in mid flight as they were swept across the room, their exotic liquor solidifying in weird bulbous shapes the instant they broke free of the glass. Anything which struck the Orgathй simply bounced off, gyrating away into the void outside. As soon as the roar of air began to ebb, it moved into the starscraper. The wall around the empty door simply burst apart as it went through.