'Spare me the self-righteousness, Merlin. It's not as though you're any different.' Then he sighed, looking out to sea. 'I'll demonstrate my commitment to the cause, if that's what you want. You know that Pauraque's still exploring the possibility of establishing a camouflaged base inside Ghost's atmosphere?'
'Of course.'
'What you probably don't know is that our automated drones don't work well at those depths. So we're going in with an exploration team next month. It'll be dangerous, but we have the Council's say-so. We know there's something down there, something we don't understand. We have to find out what it is.'
Merlin had heard nothing about anything unexpected inside Ghost, but he feigned knowledge all the same.
'Why are you telling me this?'
'Because I'm accompanying Pauraque. We've equipped a two-person cutter for the expedition, armoured to take thousands of atmospheres of pressure.' Gallinule paused and clicked his fingers out to sea, making the blueprints of the ship loom large in the sky, sharp against the dark-blue zenith. The blueprint rotated dizzyingly. 'It's nothing too technical. Another ship could be adapted before we go down there. I'd be happy to disclose the mods.'
Merlin studied the schematic, committing the salient points to memory.
'This is a goad, isn't it?'
'Call it what you will. I'm just saying that my commitment to the greater cause shouldn't be in any doubt.' Another finger click and the phantom ship vanished from the sky. 'Where yours fits in is another thing entirely.'
PART THREE
For days Ghost had loomed ahead: a fat sphere banded by delicate equatorial clouds, encircled by moons and rings. Now it swallowed half the sky, cloud decks reaching up towards him; castellations of cream and ochre stacked hundreds of kilometres high. His approach was queried by the orbiting stations, but they must have known what the purpose of his visit was. His brother and Pauraque were already down there in the clouds. He had a faint fix on their ship as it steered itself into the depths.
The seniors around Cinder had been eager to get him out of their hair, so it had not taken much to persuade them to give him a ship of his own. He had customised it according to Gallinule's specifications and added a few cautious refinements of his own . . . and then named it Tyrant.
The hull creaked and sang as it reshaped itself for transatmospheric travel. The navigational fix grew stronger. With Merlin inside, the ship fell, knifing down through cloud layers. The planet had no sharply defined surface, but there came a point where the atmospheric pressure was exactly equivalent to the air pressure inside Tyrant. Below that datum, pressure and temperature climbed steadily. Gravity was an uncomfortable two gees, more or less tolerable if he remained in his seat.
The metasapphire hull creaked again, reshaping itself. Merlin had descended more than a hundred kilometres below the one-atmosphere datum, and the pressure outside was now ten times higher. Above fifty atmospheres, the hull would rely on internal power sources to prevent itself from buckling. Merlin did his best not to think about the pressure, but there was no ignoring the way the light outside had dimmed, veiled by the masses of atmosphere suspended above his head. Down below it was oppressively dark, like the sooty heart of a thunderstorm wrapped around half his vision. Only now and then was there a stammer of lightning, which briefly lit the cathedrals of cloud below for hundreds of kilometres, down to vertiginous depths.
If there'd been more time, he thought, we'd have come with submarines, not spacecraft ...
It was a dismal place to even think about spending any time in. But in that respect it made perfect sense. The thick atmosphere would make it easy to hide a modestly sized floating base, smothering infrared emissions. They would probably have to sleep during the hideaway period, but that was no great hardship. Better than spending decades awake, always knowing that beyond the walls was that crushing force constantly trying to squash you out of existence.
But there was something down here, Gallinule had said. Something that might count against using Ghost as a hideaway.
They had to know what it was.
'Warning,' said Tyrant. 'External pressure now thirty bars. Probability of hull collapse in five minutes is now five per cent.'
Merlin killed the warning system. It did not know about the augmentations he had made to the hull armouring, but it was still unnerving. But Pauraque and Gallinule were lower yet, and their navigational transponder was still working.
If they were daring him to go deeper, he would accept.
'Merlin?' said his brother's voice, trebly with echoes from the atmospheric interference. 'So you decided to join us after all. Did you bring Sayaca with you?'
'I'm alone. I didn't see any point in endangering two of us.'
'Shame. Well, I hope you implemented those hull mods, or this is going to be a brief conversation.'
'Just tell me what it is we're expecting to see down here. You mentioned something unexpected.'
Pauraque's voice now. 'There's a periodic pressure phenomenon moving through the atmosphere, like a very fast storm. What it is, we don't know. Until we understand it, we can't be certain that hiding inside Ghost will work.'
Merlin nodded, suddenly seeing Gallinule's angle. His brother would want the phenomenon to prove hazardous just so that his plan could triumph over Pauraque's. It was an odd attitude, especially as Pauraque and Gallinule were now said to be lovers, but it was nothing unusual as far as his brother was concerned.
'I take it you have a rough idea when we can expect to see this thing?'
'Reasonably good,' Pauraque said. 'Approach us and follow our vector. We're going deeper, so watch those integrity readings.'
As if to underline her words, the hull chose that moment to creak - a dozen alerts sounding. Merlin grimaced, silencing the alarms, and gunned Tyrant towards the other ship.
Ghost was a classic gas giant, three hundred times more massive than Cinder. Most of the planet was hydrogen in its metallic state, overlaid by a deep ocean of merely liquid hydrogen. The cloud layers, which seemed so immense - and which gave the world its subtle bands of colour - were compressed into only a few hundred kilometres of depth. Less than a hundredth of the planet's radius, yet those frigid, layered clouds of ammonia, hydrogen and water were as deep as humans could go. Pauraque wanted to hide at the lowest layer above the transition zone where the atmosphere thickened into a liquid-hydrogen sea, under a crystal veil of ammonium hydro-sulphide and water-ice.
Ahead, he could now see the glint of the other ship's thrusters, illuminating sullen cloud formations as it passed through them. Only a few kilometres ahead.
'You mentioned that the phenomenon was periodic,' Merlin said. 'What exactly did you mean by that?'
'Exactly what I said,' came Pauraque's reply, much clearer now. 'The pressure wave - or focus - moves around Ghost once every three hours.'
'That's much faster than any cyclone.'
'Yes.' The icy distaste in Pauraque's voice was obvious. She did not enjoy having a civil conversation with him. 'Which is why we consider the phenomenon sufficiently--'
'It could be in orbit.'
'What?'
Merlin checked the hull readouts again, watching as pressure hotspots flowed liquidly from point to point. Rendered in subtle colours, they looked like diffraction patterns on the scales of a sleek, tropical fish.
'I said it could be in orbit. If one of Ghost's moons was in orbit just above the top of the cloud layer, three hours is how long it would take to go around. The time would only be slightly less for a moon orbiting just below the cloud layer, where we are.'