He still couldn't believe where he was, and what was about to happen. All these months, he'd believed Rue wanted him to abandon the chase, settle down on Oculus as she appeared to be doing. He'd thought she must not be the person he'd thought she was, since she had seemed to ask him to follow her, forgetting his obligations to his own people. Michael had been angry at her, and hurt that she never called after their rescue from the depths of Oculus's ocean.
And then to find out that she had been unable to call, prevented by her own obligations! To discover what secret she had been sworn to protect: a secret that dovetailed perfectly with Michael's own needs, had he only known. Every time he thought about the months of time he'd wasted in anger and solitary work on Oculus, he felt sick. He still blamed Rue for all of that, however he might know intellectually that it wasn't her fault.
He reached out to touch the solid hull of the interceptor. But he was really here! And, miraculously, they were on their way to the Twins to preempt Crisler. No matter how confused Michael's feelings, he couldn't suppress the excitement he felt at what was to come.
Rue was in another ship, which was something of a relief. Each of these interceptors could hold six people, no more. Michael and Dr. Herat were together again, ironically. It had not been by his or Rue's choice; Rue rode with Barendts as well as a master tactician from the Compact's military academy, a man whose weapons and systems were at her command. Michael and Professor Herat had to play escort to a member of the expedition that was Michael's proud addition: a thing from the autotrophs.
Michael's plan to communicate with the autotrophs had been simple: He talked with the bees he'd stolen from the abandoned settlement, repeating over and over the message he wanted them to take back. Then he'd returned to the subsurface caves, located some of the autotroph garbage-dropping things, and simply let his bees go. They had joined the existing swarm seamlessly, and after that all they had to do was wait.
The answer— delivered with reluctance by the green men— was too alien to communicate with directly, but Michael nonetheless thought of it as an ally.
Every now and then he turned to check the high-heat bubble at the back of the cabin. Inside, visible through a small square window, was a strange coiling thing and a swarm of autotroph bees. This little swarm, though dull in most respects, seemed able to translate Lasa and Chicxulub, and that was all he really cared about right now. It had come with a message, of sorts, from the autotrophs: Humanity threatened to unleash the Chicxulub weapon. Humanity must stop that weapon from being unleashed.
He couldn't see Herat through the cabin's liquid and impeding buttresses, but he could hear him in inscape, humming. The professor was delighted to be traveling again— and delighted to have Michael along as well. Although Herat had also kept silent about the secret of the interceptors all these months, Michael found it impossible to feel anger at his former employer. He wasn't sure why that was; but his loyalty to Herat had survived through everything that happened over the years.
"You're strangely silent, Bequith," the professor said.
"Can't you hear my teeth gritting?" he shot back. He had no illusions about the sanity of what they were about to do.
"These things are well tested, man," said the professor. "Besides, you know what they say, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing."
"Very funny." Brown dwarfs had no solid surface, Dr. Herat had reminded him earlier. Michael had not made the obvious reply then, but he thought it now: In twenty gravities, anything you hit was like a solid surface, even air.
They were plummeting like darts at the dwarf's atmosphere: sixteen sleek, aerodynamic interceptors. They couldn't hope to simply fall into the dense, incandescent atmosphere of Colossus and this fact had stymied earlier attempts to get faster-than-light ships deep enough into a dwarf's gravity well to activate. The first ships that tried had splatted like bugs against the dwarf's upper atmosphere.
The Compact's eventual solution was brutally simple, but they had proven it to work, at least most of the time. Each of the interceptors would begin firing a powerful antiproton beam ahead of itself as it fell into the atmosphere. The explosive shock would open a rarefied channel, through which the ship would fall. There would still be enough atmosphere to slow the ship, but not so quickly as to reduce its passengers to jelly.
"Relax, Bequith," continued Herat. "We've been in some pretty exotic places before. This one's just a bit more… extreme, than most."
He barked a laugh. "And are we going to get out and take a walk when we get down there?"
Herat sighed. "If I could, I would."
The curve of Colossus's horizon was becoming a flat line. Beyond that horizon, a giant plasma flare made an arch like a gateway to heaven. Herat was still speaking, but Michael was too mesmerized by the sight to listen.
Colossus was young, by the standards of brown dwarfs. Its heat was generated by its slow gravitational contraction, just like the planet Jupiter. But at eighty times Jupiter's mass and only twice its radius, Colossus was still flaming hot after a billion years of existence; and it would continue to glow like a fading ember for another billion. Its surface was banded, like a gas giant's, but under its gravity the clouds were flat, more like oil slicks or impurities in liquid metal. They glowed various shades of orange and red and gigantic lightning flashes shot through them randomly.
As the horizon flattened, Michael saw the world's edge fade slowly purple, then blue; the distant arch of fire lost its dimensionality, becoming like something painted onto the sky rather than in it. His interceptor was in free fall, but he felt no movement. Rather it seemed like the brown dwarf was uncoiling somehow, from a giant ball into a flat net spread to catch him. It began to seem as if the horizon were curving above, like a closing mouth: orange flame below, a crimson ocean of fire to all sides and in the unimaginable distance, where the incandescent thunderheads became small as specks, that royal purple began and climbed the sky and ate away the stars.
"Engaging beam," said the pilot crisply. Michael saw and felt nothing of that— but an instant later they struck the atmosphere.
The first jolt knocked the wind out of him. It felt like a giant mallet had struck the interceptor and was impelling it back into space. Michael struggled to breathe through his mask; his limbs were forced to his sides and he heard his neck crick. Something had gone wrong. Surely they were being shot upward at some ferocious acceleration. He blinked away spots and focused on the inscape window.
The blue was still rising and the clouds below were getting bigger. The window showed the interceptor to be standing on a pillar of solar fire that stretched down to puncture the cloud banks. That must be the particle beam, he thought in terrified amazement.
"Systems normal," said the calm voice of the ship's computer.
Normal? This was normal?
The pilot's voice came over. He was using a subvocal through inscape and so his voice sounded normal, though Michael had no doubt he was having as hard a time breathing. "We're trying to maintain as close to free fall as we can," said the pilot. "We're currently experiencing only eleven gees, which means we're still gaining speed as we fall. Well within tolerances."
An object dropped here would pass the speed of sound in the first second of its fall. This is insane, Michael thought again.
And that cloudscape… never, even on Dis, had he seen a more hostile, inhuman place. Maybe stars were worse, but you couldn't even imagine the surface of a star. He could more than imagine Colossus; he was here.