The liquid flux increased, foaming and rebounding from the ceiling and walls. A wave of it struck my face and stuck, covering my mouth. I exhaled explosively, expecting to choke, and began to breathe in. It chilled and numbed my nasal heat-exchange surfaces and gas reservoirs as I drew it down, but it wasn’t chokingly thick, and there was a reassuring abundance of oxygen dissolved in it: As there should be, for it was some sort of chlorofluorocarbon liquid. (I gather it is used mainly as a hydrostatic buffer during very-high-acceleration maneuvering.) Coldness invaded my nether regions, flooding my inner cavities. It has the strange property of being an electrorheological fluid, I’ve since been told, so that at the moment of splashdown, a brief electrical current turns it stiff as wax with us embedded in it.
Reentry vehicle departure in ten seconds. The whole of the front of the sarcophagus turned into a retina display, blinking status display icons at me. I marveled at the sight, for behind them was a panoramic view of the interior of the cargo tank, its front end open to the brilliant darkness of the sky. Wheeling across it a perfect turquoise hemisphere streaked with pale pink clouds—
A giant boot kicked me in the small of the back, ramming me into the acceleration couch. The cargo tank of the Five Zero vanished behind us. We were on our way to Nova Ploetsk, embedded in a tub of breathable blue jelly as our capsule screamed through the outer wisps of the atmosphere of Shin-Tethys.
Nine minutes to impact, said the screen.
I began to wonder (not for the first time, I will admit) whether finding the missing half of the Atlantis Carnet was really worth the fuss.
We hit the atmosphere at over twenty thousand kilometers per hour, flickering red and yellow bursts of plasma flashing off the heat shield on the base of our discus-shaped flying coffin: It was altogether too much excitement for my taste even though I was trussed up in shock absorbers and drenched in crash jelly. Our deceleration was abrupt, if not violent, peaking at an eyeball-warping fifty gees. Finally, the clouds of flame began to clear from the camera on the outside of our hull as we fell through the stratosphere. There wasn’t much to see, however. The vast floating continents of leviathan grass tended to congregate in the subtropical zones, away from the scorching solar zenith and the turbulent currents around the frozen ice caps: None of them were visible. The surface of Shin-Tethys, at least in these near-equatorial reaches, was water from horizon to horizon, a pale blue wall the size of the sky into which we were falling.
Impact in two minutes, said our craft’s display. With my vestigial electrosense, I could feel Rudi discussing something with Dent, as if from a great distance: But I lacked the specialized vacuum adaptations to join in their conversation. “What happens next?” I tried to ask, but only produced a gargling rumble that made my larynx sore, and I’m not sure the sound even made it out of my throat.
Impact in one minute. Impact in thirty seconds. Impact in ten seconds—I felt a moment of core-numbing terror, certain that I was about to die, as the horizon rose up and slammed into me. Then everything went dark.
I’d now like to share with you a few reminiscences about the niceties of arrival in a monarchy afloat in the upper waters of Shin-Tethys.
The pressure of the water column above one’s head—ten kilopascals per meter—forces significant metabolic adaptations if one is to travel up or down, for a variation of just a few megapascals is sufficient to wreck delicate nanostructures like proteins that rely on weak Van der Waals forces and disulfide bridges to maintain their shape. We post-Fragiles can adapt our mechanocytes by applying high-pressure firmware upgrades, but the process is not instantaneous. So the polities of Shin-Tethys are stratified not merely by lineage and natal nobility, and distinguished not merely by their geographical extent, but by their altitude. Hence their colloquial name: the laminar republics.
Despite this, very few of them are actual republics. Most of them were founded by individuals, early shareholders aboard the starship that first colonized Dojima System. They replicated themselves, spawning many bodies to house copies of their core identity, for life in Shin-Tethys during the early days was unimaginably hazardous. With the passage of time, many of the original rulers senesced and were replaced by new successor states, but even to this day some of the original founders survive, and the petty kings and queens jealously guard their demesnes and keep a close watch on visitors.
We came hurtling down from the zenith, decelerated at a Fragile-crunching rate, then crashed into the wave tops at over a hundred kilometers per hour. Parachutes, I learned later, found no favor with Rudi because he half expected us to be shot out of the sky by various disgruntled duty evaders; hanging around in the breeze might make for a more comfortable splashdown, but only if we lived to make it. And so our sturdy capsule survived its brusque arrival and subsequent ditching but promptly submerged. And sank, bubbling air from its remaining gas reserves, until it fell into Poseidon’s net at a depth of nearly fifty meters.
During this process, were I to have to pick a single word to describe my state of mind, “terror” would fit quite accurately. I recovered consciousness rapidly after the impact-induced shutdown and self-test—we sustained over two hundred gees momentarily as we splashed down—but took a couple of seconds to reorient myself and look at the retinal ceiling so close to my nose, and even longer to realize that what I was looking at was a cloud of rapidly dispersing bubbles and the mirror-rippling surface of the water receding slowly above us.
“Rudi, we’re sinking!” The crash and reboot seemed to have reset something in my laryngeal cavity, so that I could make my voice work again. It sounded deep and sonorous in the chlorofluorocarbon bath.
The count grinned, tongue lolling: “Ain’t it great?”
“We’re sinking!”
“Dive rate zero point six nine meters per second,” droned Dent. He was reading from a personal display: “Crush depth in, ahum, three hundred and nineteen seconds. Make that three hundred and twenty to three hundred and eighty, actually. If we were to go that deep.”
“We’re all going to die!” I wailed.
“No we’re not,” Rudi assured me. He reached out sideways and squeezed my hand. “Just lie back and enjoy the ride, Krina. Everything’s going entirely according to plan.”
“Ugh-ugh!” I wibbled incoherently. Something disturbingly flaccid and meaty shimmied vertically past the camera viewport on the outside of our hull. It had numerous suction cups lining its inner surface. The suckers surrounded viciously barbed hooks that pulsed in and out of the tentacle’s bulbous trunk. Half the ceiling fell into shadow as it lazily wrapped itself across our upper surface. The sarcophagus rocked alarmingly from toe to head, tilting me alarmingly downward, and our sink rate increased.
“Ah, we have a tug.” Rudi seemed inordinately pleased by this development.
“Docking in fifty seconds,” Dent informed us. He made it sound as routine as a tax return. Perhaps it was, to him: But this whole business of landing on a water world was wholly new to me, and more than a little overwhelming.
We lurched sideways just then. There was a grinding bump and shuffle, then a thud that rattled my teeth—and our descent stopped! I would have vented a sudden sigh of relief, but the viscosity of the carrier fluid filling my lungs made it hard to breathe other than regularly. A metallic clang followed. Then the hatch through which we had entered the flying coffin began to unlatch slowly, from the outside.