He thought of the Mothergraves. He thought of his rich cargo, the price of acceptance.
He clenched his gills and fired his engines to cross the path of the crash.
Its flat spiral path aided him. He did not need to intercept on this pass, though there would not be too many more opportunities. It was a fortunate thing that the object had a long way to fall. All he had to do was get under it, in front of it, and let the computer and the telescope and the cannon do the rest.
There. Now. Even as he thought it, the skiff’s machines made their own decision. The sail-cannon boomed; the first sail itself was a bright streamer climbing the stratosphere. Stormchases checked his restrains with his manipulators and one eye, aware that he’d left it too late. The other three eyes stayed on the alien object, and the ballistic arc of the rising sail.
It snapped to the end of its line—low, too low, so much lower than such things should be deployed. It seemed enormous as it spread. It was enormous, but Stormchases was not used to seeing a sail so close.
He braced himself, one manipulator hovering over the control to depressurize the cargo capsules strung behind him in a long, jostling tail.
The object fell into the sail. Stormchases had a long moment to watch the bright sail—dappled in vermilion and violet—stretch into a trailing comet-tail as it caught and wrapped the projectile. He watched the streamers of the shroud lines buck at impact; the wave travelling their length.
The stretch and yank snapped Stormchases back against his restraints. He felt the shiver through the frame of the skiff as the shroud-motors released, letting the falling object haul line as if it were a flyer running away with the bait. The object’s spiralling descent became an elongating pendulum arc, and Stormchases hoped it or they had the sense not to struggle. The shroudlines and the sail stretched, twanged—
—Held. The Mothergraves wove the sails from her own silk; they were the same stuff as her canopies. There was no stronger fibre.
Then the object swung down into the tropopause and splashed through the sea of ammonia clouds, and kept falling.
The sealed skiff jerked after. Stormchases felt the heavy crack through the hull as the pontoons broke. He lost light-sight of the sky above as the clouds closed over. He felt as if he floated against his restraints, though he knew it was just the acceleration of the fall defying gravity.
He struggled to bring his manipulator down. The deeper the object pulled him, the hotter and more pressurized—and more toxic—the atmosphere became. And he wouldn’t trust the skiff’s seals after the jar of that impact.
He depressurized and helium-flushed the first cargo capsule.
When it blew, the skiff shuddered again. That capsule was now a balloon filled with gaseous helium, and it snapped upward, slowing Stormchases’ descent—and the descent of the sail-wrapped alien object. They were still plunging, but now dragging a buoyant makeshift pontoon.
The cables connecting the capsule twanged and plinked ominously. It had been the flaw in his plan; he hadn’t been sure they would hold.
For now, at least, they did.
The pressure outside the hull was growing; not dangerous yet, but creeping upward. Eyes on the display, Stormchases triggered a second capsule. He felt a lighter shudder this time, as the skiff shed a little more velocity. The next question would be if he had enough capsules to stop the fall—and to lift his skiff, and the netted object, back to the tropopause.
His talker babbled at him, his colleagues issuing calls and organising a party for a rescue to follow his descent. “No rescue,” he said. “This is my risk.”
Another capsule. Another, slighter shiver through the lines. Another incremental slowing.
By the Mothergraves, he thought. This is actually going to work.
When his skiff bobbed back to the tropopause, dangling helplessly beneath a dozen empty, depressurized capsules, Stormchases was unprepared for the cheer that rang over his talker. Or the bigger one that followed, when he winched the sail containing the netted object up through the cloud-sea, into clear air.
Stormchases had no pontoons; his main sail was fouled. The empty capsules would support him, but he could not manoeuvre—and, in fact, his skiff swung beneath them hull-to-the-side, needle-tipped nose pointing down. Stormchases dangled, bruised and aching, in his restraints, trying to figure out how to loose the straps and start work on freeing himself.
He still wasn’t sure how he’d survived. Or that he’d survived. Maybe this was the last fantasy of a dying mind—
The talker bleated at him.
He jerked against the harness, and moaned. The talker bleated again.
It wasn’t words, and whatever it was, it drowned out the voices of the other miners, who were currently arguing over whether his skiff was salvage, and whether they should come to his assistance if it was. He’d been trying to organise his addled thoughts enough to warn them off. Now he vibrated his membranes and managed a croak that sounded fragile even to his own hearing. “Who is it? What do you want?”
That bleat again, or a modestly different one.
“Are you the alien? I can’t understand you.”
With pained manipulators, Stormchases managed to unfasten his restraints. He dropped from them harder than he had intended; it seemed he couldn’t hold onto the rack. As his carapace struck the forward bulkhead, he made a disgruntled noise.
“Speak Language!” he snarled to the talker as he picked himself up. “I can’t understand you.”
It was mostly an expression of frustration. If they knew Language, they wouldn’t be aliens. But he could not hide his sigh of relief when a deep, coveted voice emerged from the talker instead.
“Be strong, Stormchases,” the Mothergraves said. “All will soon be well.”
He pressed two eyes to the viewport. The clouds around his skiff were bright in the sunlight; he watched the encroaching shadow fall across them like the umbra of an eclipse.
It was the great, welcome shade of the Mothergraves as she drifted out of the sky.
She was coming for them. Coming for him.
It was no small thing, for a Drift-World to drop so much altitude. For a Drift-World the size of the Mothergraves, it was a major undertaking, and not one speedily accomplished. Still, she dropped, flanked by her attendant squadrons of flyers and younger Mothers, tiny shapes flitting between her backs. Any of them could have come for Stormchases more easily, but when they would have moved forward, the Mothergraves gestured them back with her trailing, elegant gestures.
Stormchases occupied the time winching in the sail-net containing the alien object. It was heavy, not buoyant at all. He imagined it must skim through the atmosphere like a dart or a flyer—simply by moving so fast that the aerodynamics of its passage bore it up. He would have liked to disentangle the object from the shroud, but if he did, it would sink like a punctured skiff.
Instead, he amused himself by assessing the damage to his skiff (catastrophic) and answering the alien’s bleats on the talker somewhat at random, though he had not given up on trying to understand what it might be saying. Obviously, it had technology—quite possibly it was technology, and the hard carapace might indeed be the equivalent of his own skiff—a craft, meant for entering a hostile environment.
Had it been sampling the storm for useful chemicals and consumables, as well?