"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.
For a terrified moment he thought that his implants were going to kick in and expose him to the kami of Colossus. If the kami of Dis had whispered Michael's insignificance, those of this place would bellow it. They would snuff him out by sheer indifference.
But he didn't need the implants to feel time stretching out into a long, impossibly vivid moment. Michael felt balanced on the rim of eternity here, in the presence of vast forces it would have been presumptuous for him to capture and name as kami. The moment seemed overflowing with power and import, and he suddenly heard Rue's quiet voice saying, "How would you have to feel, to want it all again…?"
In seconds he might die, incinerated on Colossus— yet after infinite time maybe he would come round to exist again, and he would be here again, balanced on this moment. Even as he had in the fathomless past, an infinite number of times.
Everything— every instant— was infinitely significant. Even the most fleeting moment, he realized, was permanent.
And then a new voice spoke, calm as an angel.
"Prepare for transfer."
And an instant later the crushing pressure was gone and the swirling orange was replaced by the calm blackness of FTL travel. Michael floated freely in his straps.
Beside him Herat was laughing. Unsure of what he had just experienced, Michael started laughing too— and he was surprised to find as he laughed that a great weight had somehow lifted from his heart.
LEAVING FTL HAPPENED without drama. Suddenly the inscape window Rue had positioned by her g-bed showed stars. The pilot turned around in his seat, grinning, and gave a thumbs-up.
"Here come the others," he said. Rue looked, but could see nothing. She cloned the radar display he had in front of him and sure enough, one by one tiny needle shapes were popping into existence around them. One, two, five, eight, eleven… She held her breath while the call signs came in and let it out in a whoosh when Mike's ship signalled its presence.
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen… And no fifteenth. They waited tensely for almost half an hour, but the last ship didn't appear. Finally the pilot turned to her and said, "Ma'am, I don't think they made it."
She had been thinking this, but hearing him say it made Rue feel sick anyway. She let out a ragged sigh and said, "Bring everyone in. If we're secure, we'll inflate a balloon-hab and hold a ceremony honoring them."
Sola, the tactician, nodded. "Good idea."
"Meanwhile, unfurl the telescopes. We need to know where the hell we are. Passive sensors only— no radar yet, please."
She waited while the scopes came on line, then started them scanning. These instruments were infinitely better than the one Max had bought for their first trip to the Envy. Thinking this reminded her of him and his endearing fallibility. She felt a sharp pang of loss, which threatened to blossom into worry about what had happened to Rebecca and the others.