‘We’ll be there in five minutes. I’m slowing our rate of approach. Hold on.’
Thorn pitched forwards in his seat restraints as Vuilleumier killed the speed. He counted out five minutes, then another five. The smudge on the passive radar display held its relative position, slowing as they did. Strangely, the ride became even smoother. The clouds began to thin out; the savage electrical activity became little more than a constant distant strobing on either side of them. There was a horrible sense of unreality about it.
‘Air pressure’s dropping,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘I think there must be a low-pressure wake behind the tube. It’s slicing through the atmosphere super-sonically, so that the air can’t immediately rush around and close the gap. We’re inside the Mach cone of the tube, as if we were flying right behind a supersonic aircraft.’
‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about — for an Inquisitor, anyway.’
‘I’ve had to learn, Thorn. And I’ve had a good teacher.’
Trina?‘ he asked, amusedly.
‘We make a pretty good team. But it wasn’t always the case.’ Then she looked ahead and pointed. ‘Look. I can see something, I think. Let’s try some magnification and then get the hell back out into space.’ On the main console display appeared an image of the tube. It plunged down into the atmosphere from above them, angled to the horizontal by forty or forty-five degrees. Against the slate background of the atmosphere it was a line of shining silver, like the funnel of a twister. They could see perhaps eighty kilometres of its length; above and below it vanished into haze or roiling clouds. There was no sense of motion along the tube, even though it was flowing into the depths at a rate of a kilometre every four seconds. It appeared to be suspended, even unmoving.
‘No sign of anything else,’ Thorn said. ‘I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but I thought there’d be something else. Deeper, maybe. Can you take us forwards?’
‘We’ll have to pass through the transonic boundary. It’ll be a lot rougher than anything we’ve gone through so far.’
‘Can we handle it?’
‘We can try.’ Vuilleumier grimaced and worked the controls again. The air in front of the tube was perfectly steady and calm, utterly unaware of the shock wave that was racing towards it. Even the last passage of the tube on the previous swing-round of the moon had been thousands of kilometres to one side of its present trajectory. Air immediately in front of the tube was compressed into a fluid layer only centimetres thick, forming a v-shaped shock wave at each point along the tube’s length. There was no way to get ahead of the tube without passing through that wing of savagely compressed and heated air; not unless Vuilleumier accepted a detour of many thousands of kilometres.
They passed to one side of the tube. It shone cherry-red along the leading edge, evidence of the frictional energies dissipated in its passage. But there was no sign of any harm being done to the alien machinery.
‘It’s being fed downwards,’ Thorn said. ‘But there isn’t anything down there. Just a lot of gas.’
‘Not all the way down,’ said Vuilleumier. ‘The gas turns into liquid hydrogen a few hundred kilometres down. Below that, there’s pure metallic hydrogen. And somewhere below that there’s a rocky core.’
‘Ana, if they wanted to take apart a planet like this to get at that rocky matter, have you any idea how they might go about it?’
I don’t know. Maybe we’re about to find out.‘
They hit the transonic boundary. For a moment Thorn thought the ship would break up; that they had finally asked too much of it. The hull had creaked before; now — for an instant — he heard it actively scream. The console flared red and flickered out. For a horrible moment all was silent. Then they were through, ghosting in still air. The console stuttered back into life and a chorus of warning voices began to shriek out of the walls.
‘We’re through,’ Vuilleumier said. Tn one piece, I think. But let’s not push our luck, Thorn…‘
I agree. But now that we’ve come all this way… well, it would be silly not to look a little deeper, wouldn’t it?‘
‘No.’
‘If you want me to help you, I want to know what I’m getting myself into.’
‘The ship can’t take it.’
Thorn smiled. ‘It just took more crap than you said it would ever be able to take. Stop being such a pessimist.’
The Demarchist representative entered the white holding room and looked at him. Behind her stood three Ferrisville police, the ones he had surrendered to in the departure terminal, and four Demarchist soldiers. The latter had surrendered their firearms but still managed to look foreboding in their fiery red power-armour. Clavain felt old and fragile, knowing that he was completely at the mercy of his new hosts.
I am Sandra Voi,‘ the woman said. ’You must be Nevil Clavain. Why did you have me come here, Clavain?‘
‘I’m in the process of defecting.’
That’s not what I mean. I mean why me in particular? According to the Convention officials you specifically asked for me.‘
I thought you’d give me a fair hearing, Sandra. I used to know one of your relatives, you see. Who would she have been, your great-grandmother? I can never get the hang of generations these days.‘
The woman pulled up the other white chair and stationed herself in it, opposite Clavain. Demarchists pretended that their political system made rank an outmoded concept. Instead of captains they had shipmasters; instead of generals they had strategic planning specialists. Naturally, such specialisations required visual signifiers, but Voi would have frowned at any suggestion that the many bars and bands of colour across the breast of her tunic indicated anything as outmoded as military status.
‘There hasn’t been another Sandra Voi for four hundred years,’ she said.
I know. The last one died on Mars, during an attempt to negotiate peace with the Conjoiners.‘
‘You’re talking ancient history now.’
‘Which doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Voi and I were part of the same peacekeeping mission. I defected to the Conjoiners shortly after she died, and I’ve been on their side ever since.’
The eyes of the younger Sandra Voi momentarily glazed over. Clavain’s implants sensed the scurry of data traffic in and out of her skull. He was impressed. Since the plague few Demarchists carried very much in the way of neural augmentation.
‘Our records don’t agree.’
Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘They don’t?’
‘No. Our intelligence indicates that Clavain did not live for more than a century and a half after his defection. You can’t possibly be him.’
I left human space on an interstellar expedition and only returned recently. That’s why there hasn’t been much record of me lately. Does it matter, though? The Convention’s already verified that I’m a Conjoiner.‘
‘You could be a trap. Why would you wish to defect?’
Again, she had surprised him. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Maybe you’ve been reading too many of our newspapers. If you have, I’ve got some real news for you: your side is about to win this war. A single spider defection won’t make any difference now.’
I never thought it would,‘ Clavain said.
‘And?’
‘That’s not why I’d like to defect.’
Down, down they went, always remaining ahead of the transonic shock wave of the Inhibitor machinery. The smudge on the passive radar display — the thing that shadowed them at a distance of thirty thousand kilometres — remained present, fading in and out of clarity but never leaving them completely. The daylight grew steadily darker, until the sky overhead was only fractionally lighter than the unmoving black depths below. Ana Khouri turned off the spacecraft’s cabin illumination, hoping that it would make the exterior brighter, but the improvement was marginal. The only real source of light was the cherry-red slash of the tube’s leading edge, and even that was duller than it had been before. The tube moved at only twenty-five kilometres per second now, relative to the atmosphere: it had steepened its descent, too, plunging nearly vertically towards the transition zones where the atmosphere thickened to liquid hydrogen.