Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 222
Heaven hooks have come, to take your young apprentice.
Doubtless they will take you, too."
Axel stared at the sky. "Oh, shit," he whispered.
The biggest aerostat he had ever seen was hovering over
the manor house. They were a common enough sight in the
skies of Ventus, and very similar to the aerostat cities he had
seen on gas giants and dense-atmosphere planets. The thing
was just a hollow geodesic sphere about two kilometers in
diameter. It didn’t much matter what you built one with; at
that size it would remain airborne despite its mass because, due
to its high surface-to-volume ratio, sunlight would trap enough
heat inside to create buoyancy. On other worlds entire cities
lived in the bases of the things; here on Ventus, Axel had been
told, they served as bulk transport for minerals and other
terraforming supplies. No human had ever entered one and
come out again, of course--they were purely tools of the
Winds.
The belly of this aerostat had opened out like the petals
of a flower--or more ominously, like the beaked mouth of a
octopus. Hundreds of cables woven round with gantries and
buttresses tumbled into the high air from this opening. He
could see them spiralling down at him in glimpses highlit by
Diadem, the world’s one true moon.
"They will take you, Chan!" Turcaret shouted. "It was
going to happen, if you lived. Somehow you and yours have
offended the Winds. They have taken notice of you! My
killing you was an act of kindness, don’t you see? I would
have spared you this!"
"Shut up," Axel said distractedly. What the hell was the
thing doing here? This couldn’t be some random event; his
briefings on Ventus had never mentioned an attack like this.
But the Winds treated any technology not of their own creation