The untouchables among my suspects.
I felt that maddening tingle, familiar by now, of an impulse denied. Something I wanted to do but could not identify.
I dropped the hiss screen, prompting Lassiter to ask, “What’s next?”
I said, “Down.”
We descended. Soon the wormy surface of the Uppergrowth lost the rich detail revealed in closeup and became an undifferentiated field of gray, shining here and there wherever the suns caught concentrations of moisture on the vines. By comparison, the clouds looked fluffier, darker, extruding swirls of mist and heavy weather that from here looked like tentacles too blind to realize that we were still far out of their reach. Every few seconds a new dragon rose out of the muck, disturbed the clouds with a single beat of its wings, and then plunged back below the surface, as if content with being seen.
Lassiter said, “We should stop here. Much farther down and the air gets so choppy the skimmer might not be able to climb out again.”
I discovered I’d dug my fingers into the seat. “But where we are is safe?”
“Could we drop another thousand meters? Possibly. We could even enter the cloud cover. There’s no line of clear demarcation. But the farther down we go, the less safe we are, and this is as low as I feel comfortable.”
I said, “Then make yourself a little more uncomfortable.”
She looked doubtful, but told the skimmer to descend.
It was hard to gauge the rate of our descent. Little wisps of vapor passed us from time to time, but the clouds below didn’t seem to get any larger.
After a minute or two, Lassiter leveled off. “This is as low as I’ve ever gone.”
My fingers hurt. “Is this as low as anybody’s ever gone?”
“We’ve had some daredevils. Went down a thousand meters lower. One or two had trouble climbing out.”
“Any actual fatalities?”
“Not from skimmer failure, no.”
“What, then?”
“I should have said none at any point during our two years on-station, before Santiago. Considering our work conditions, we’ve been very lucky.”
“Or very capably led,” I said.
Lassiter’s lips went tight. “Yeah, well, Mr. Gibb’s very good at running the machine. He doesn’t let people take pointless risks.”
Another compliment damned by how much it galled the speaker. They seemed abundant, in conversations regarding Mr. Gibb. “Can you go as low as those daredevils did?”
“I didn’t sign up for that,” Godel said, the first time she’d opened her mouth since the Brachiator’s death.
“Neither did I,” said Lassiter.
I glanced at the Porrinyards. “And you?”
“For once,” they said, their shared voice rich with forced merriment, “I’m of two minds on a subject.”
I fought off a spasm of dizziness with multiple inner chants of Unseen Demons, gripped the seat tighter, and said, “Descend those thousand meters.”
“There’s no possible reason—”
“So I’m insane,” I said. “I issue dangerous orders for the most whimsical of reasons. Nevertheless, they are orders. Descend.”
Grumbling resentful odes to bureaucrats who think they know what they’re doing, Lassiter complied. The skimmer descended. Wisps of vapor fluttered past us like butterflies, rising toward an Uppergrowth now granted the indistinct texture of sky. Some irregularity in the local airflow shook our undercarriage. The skimmer’s local gravity prevented us from feeling any actual turbulence, but the nearest of the two suns seemed to shake, and a light in the instrument panel blinked red, assuring everybody who cared to heed it that Lassiter was right and the witch from New London was indeed putting everybody in danger.
“This is as far as anybody’s ever descended.”
My throat was so dry, by now, that I had to concentrate on making spit before attempting speech. “How are we doing?”
“The stabilization systems are working overtime, holding us against the winds here. We’re using about four times as much power, just idling, as we do up near the Uppergrowth. I wouldn’t want to stay here for long, but we’re handling it.”
“Can we handle more?”
Lassiter made a face. “I expected you to ask that.”
“Then you should have an answer ready. A few minutes ago you told me that we could, conceivably, descend as far as the clouds. You also said that it had never been attempted. I would like you to do so now. Can we handle it?”
“I’m not sure it’d be safe to get too close to those dragons.”
“Safety wasn’t part of the question.”
Godel thumped the back of my seat. “It sure as hell is part of my question!”
The Porrinyards spoke in a voice mostly Skye, deepened by only a little of Oscin’s masculine grit. “Are you sure about this, Counselor?”
“Yes.”
The Porrinyards didn’t sound happy. “All right.”
Lassiter was far from mollified. “I’m not going to kill us all, Counselor. I’ll descend, if you really think it’s so important, but I’ll also stop every hundred meters or so to assess local conditions, and our own—”
“No,” I said.
She stopped in mid-sentence. “What do you mean no?”
“I mean that I need to test something, and I can’t do that if you insist on taking baby steps. I need you to descend, regardless of local conditions or signs of vehicle failure, until I tell you to stop.”
Lassiter’s eyes had gone very wide and very round. “Then you can go back and get yourself some willing volunteers.”
“I don’t want volunteers. I want the crew I have here.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Counselor, but you don’t have them!”
“Are you refusing a direct order?”
“Tell me to die for no good reason and I’ll do more than refuse, I’ll shove the order up your ass.”
Godel said, “It’s not safe, Counselor.”
I turned to the Porrinyards. “Do you concur?”
They looked unwell. “I’ll take control if you need me to. If it’s important.”
“It is.”
They eyed Lassiter. “Descend or you’re relieved.”
She couldn’t believe them. “You’re crazy! She’s not competent to—”
“I’ve seen her file,” the Porrinyards said. “She’s competent to do whatever she wants. She has a reason. Do it.”
Lassiter accused me of a perversion unsuspected by even the most graphically imaginative minds who’d cursed me before. It made the charge Li-Tsan had flung at Gibb downright mild by comparison. But she obeyed, directing the skimmer to disregard all of its built-in safety monitors in favor of a crazy, suicidal descent farther into the lower regions.
The skimmer’s local grav still compensated for everything. But the view outside the world, outside the skimmer’s fields, became more and more chaotic, more blurred by violent motion as the vehicle bucked and rolled and lurched its way into a layer of enraged winds. The suns became not spheres but streaks of light, like comets dragging tails. The cloud layer that was supposed to be underneath us rose and crashed like an angry sea, one second filling the sky to our right and the next becoming a fortress wall to our immediate left. Once or twice we rolled over completely. The sight alone was going to make my sensitive stomach rebel again. I tasted bile and swallowed it back down, determined not to panic before anybody else did.
Godel said, “You’re out of your mind!”
I didn’t answer her.
Maybe I was.
The skimmer continued to descend.
The cloud layer now appeared to be only a couple of hundred meters below us. This close, it no longer seemed a vista of calm but a roiling, angry stormscape, bubbling with the forces at play. A dragon, flying by not far below, was not just giant but leviathan, taking several minutes of sheer hell to pass from nose to tail. We couldn’t quite tell because by then the skimmer bucked so violently that we caught the dragon only in glimpses as our perspective lurched from cloudscape to Uppergrowth to the distant, broiling suns. I noted that it was almost identical to the dragons of terrestrial myth, complete with long serpentine neck and leathery bat-wings; its tail even ended with a bone ridge that resembled a spade. Were it not as engineered as everything else around here, I would have said, Oh, give me a break.