‘Ah,’ Hegazi said. ‘We have a fix. You want to hear what the bastard has to say?’
‘Put him on.’
The man’s voice burst in on them again, as it had done six hours previously, but there was a difference now, very obviously. Every word Sylveste spoke was backgrounded — almost drowned out — by the continuous howl of the razorstorm.
‘I’m here, where are you? Volyova, are you listening to me? I said are you listening to me? I want an answer! Here are my coordinates relative to Cuvier — you’d better be listening.’ And then he recited — several times, for safety — a string of numbers which would pinpoint him to within one hundred metres; redundant information, given the triangulation which had now been performed. ‘Now get down here! We can’t wait for ever — we’re in the middle of a razorstorm, we’re going to die out here if you don’t hurry.’
‘Mmm,’ Hegazi said. ‘I think at some point it might not be a bad idea to answer the poor fellow.’
Volyova took out and lit a cigarette. She savoured a long intake before replying. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘In fact, maybe not for an hour or two. I think I’ll let him get really worried first.’
Khouri heard only the faintest of scuffling sounds as the open suit shuffled towards her. She felt its gently insistent pressure against her spine and the backs of her legs, arms and head. In her peripheral vision she observed the wet-looking side-parts of the head fold around her, and then felt the legs and arms of the suit meld around her limbs. The chest cavity sealed, with a sound like someone taking the last slurp from a pudding bowl.
Her vision was restricted now, but she could see enough to watch the suit’s limbs closing up along their dissection-lines. The seals lingered for a second or so before becoming invisible, lost in the bland whiteness of the rest of the suit’s hide. Then the head formed over her own, and for a moment there was darkness before a transparent oval appeared ahead of her. Smoothly, the darkness around the oval lit up with numerous readouts and status displays. Later the suit would flood itself with gel-air, to protect its occupant against the gee-loads of flight, but for now Khouri was breathing mintily fresh oxygen/nitrogen air at shipboard pressure.
‘I have now run through my safety and functionality tests,’ the suit informed her. ‘Please confirm that you wish to accept full control of this unit.’
‘Yes, I’m ready,’ Khouri said.
‘I have now disabled the majority of my autonomous control routines. This persona will remain online in an advisory capacity, unless you request otherwise. Full suit-autonomous control can be reinstated by—’
‘I get the deal, thanks. How are the others doing?’
‘All other units report readiness.’
Volyova’s voice cut in: ‘We’re set, Khouri. I’ll lead the team; triangular descent formation. I shout, you jump. And don’t make a move unless I authorise it.’
‘Don’t worry; I had no plans to.’
‘I see you have her well under your thumb,’ Sudjic said, on the open channel. ‘Does she shit to order as well?’
‘Shut it, Sudjic. You’re only along because you know worlds. One step out of line…’ Volyova paused. ‘Well, put it this way; Sajaki won’t be around to intercede if I lose my temper, and I’ve got a lot of firepower with which to lose it.’
‘Talking of firepower,’ Khouri said, ‘I’m not seeing any weapons data on my readout.’
‘That’s because you’re not authorised,’ Sudjic said. ‘Ilia doesn’t trust you not to shoot at the first thing that moves. Do you, Ilia?’
‘If we run into trouble,’ Ilia said, ‘I’ll let you have weps usage, trust me.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Because you don’t need it now, that’s why. You’re along for the ride; to assist if things deviate from the plan. Which of course they won’t…’ She drew breath audibly. ‘But if they do, you get your precious weapons. Just try and be discreet if you have to use them, that’s all.’
Once outside, the shipboard air was purged and replaced by gel-air: breathable fluid. For a moment it felt like drowning, but Khouri had made the transition enough times on Sky’s Edge not to feel much discomfort. Normal speech was impossible now, but the suit helmets contained trawls which were able to interpret subvocal commands. Speakers in the helmets shifted incoming sounds by the appropriate frequency to compensate for the gel-air-induced distortions, which ensured that the voices she heard sounded perfectly normal. Although it was a harder and heavier descent than any shuttle insertion, it felt easier, apart from an occasional pressure above Khouri’s eyeballs. It was only by reference to the suit’s readouts that she knew they were routinely exceeding six gees of acceleration, impelled by the tiny antilithium-fed thrusters buried in the suit’s spine and heels. With Volyova leading the descent, the suits formed a deltoid pattern, the two inhabited suits following her and the three slaved empty suits trailing behind. For the first part of the descent, the suits remained in the configuration they had assumed aboard the lighthugger, making a rough concession to human anatomy. But by the time the first traces of Resurgam’s upper atmosphere began to glow around them, the suits had silently transformed their exteriors. Now — although none of this was obvious from within — the membrane linking the arms to the body had thickened, until the arms and body were no longer easily divisible. The angle of the arms had altered as well; now they were held rigid but slightly bent, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the body. Since the head had retracted and flattened, there was now a smooth arc running from the tip of each arm, over the head and down again. The columnar legs had fused into a single flared tail, and any transparent patches defined by the user had been forcibly re-opaqued, to protect against the glare of reentry. The suits met the atmosphere chest-on, with the tail hanging slightly lower than the head: complex shockwave patterns being tamed and exploited by the morphing geometry of the suit hide. While direct vision was no longer possible, the suits were continuing to perceive their surroundings in other EM bands, and were perfectly capable of adapting this data for human senses. Looking around and below, Khouri saw the other suits, each seemingly immersed in a radiant teardrop of pinkish plasma.
At twenty kilometres’ altitude the suits used their thrusters to drop to merely supersonic speeds. Now they remoulded themselves to adapt to the thickening atmosphere, transforming into human-sized aircraft. The suits grew stabilising fins along their backs, and the face parts again returned to transparency. Snug in the suit’s embrace, Khouri barely felt these changes, only a slight pressure from the surrounding suit material which nudged her limbs from one position to another.
At fifteen kilometres, the sixth suit broke formation and went hypersonic, configuring itself into an aerodynamically optimum shape into which no human could have fitted without drastic surgery. It disappeared over the horizon in a few seconds, probably moving faster than any artificial object which had ever entered Resurgam’s atmosphere, exerting upward thrust to keep itself from escaping from the planet entirely. Khouri knew that the suit was heading to pick up Sajaki — it would meet with him near the designated site where he had last communicated with the ship, now that his work on Resurgam was complete.
At ten kilometres — maintaining silence, even though the comlaser links between the suits were totally secure — they hit the first traces of the razorstorm Volyova had stirred to life. From space it had looked black and impenetrable, like a plateau of ash. Inside, there was more illumination than Khouri had expected. The light was gritty and sepia, like a bad afternoon in Chasm City. A muddyish rainbow haloed the sun, and then that too vanished as they sank deeper into the storm. Now light did not so much stream down to them as stumble haphazardly, navigating layer upon layer of elevated dust like a drunkard descending stairs. Since there was no feeling of weight in the gel-air, Khouri rapidly lost all sensation of up and down, but she instinctively trusted the suit’s own inertial systems to figure things out. Now and again — even though the thrusters were trying to smooth out the ride — she felt lurches as the suit hit a pressure cell. As the speed of the ensemble dropped below that of sound, the suits reconfigured again, becoming more statuesque. The ground was only a few kilometres below, and the highest peaks of the mesa system were only hundreds of metres under them, though they remained unseen. It was increasingly hard now to make out the other four suits in the formation; they kept fading in and out of the dust.