concentrated on the familiar routine of checks and analyses. He felt a tension tight within him. Soon, in a matter of minutes, he would be experiencing for the first time the light of another sun.
Ten Lee nodded. “That’s it, Joshua. Phase-out in two minutes and counting…”
Bennett looked up from the control console and through the viewscreen, ready for the first sight of the star system.
“One minute…”
The void seemed to coagulate around the ship, the stars no longer streaming in towards them. The scene stilled, became a static slab of grey marble.
“Three… two… one…”
They phased out.
The void was replaced by a regular spacescape: a scatter of distant stars, the sun in the mid-ground and the orbiting planets diminishing in perspective. They were coming in on a ten-degree angle to the plane of the ecliptic, the sound of the ion-drive like an explosion after the relative quiet of trans-c flight.
He transferred the Cobra to the program system Mackendrick had written for the approach to Penumbra, and the ship accelerated through space.
“Estimated arrival time, four minutes and twenty seconds,” Ten Lee said.
Bennett concentrated on the read-outs scrolling down his visor screen, only occasionally looking through them to admire the view. The gas giant, which shielded Penumbra from the direct light of the sun, swelled alarmingly, a vast rolling orb of pastel green and ochre gas bands. Bennett made out the coin-like disc of Penumbra against the upper hemisphere of the giant, minuscule by comparison. The Cobra swooped ever closer and Penumbra grew, took on definition as a separate planet.
Ten Lee said, “Entry into planetary atmosphere in ten seconds… eight…”
From his position on the engineer’s couch, Mackendrick said, “My God, it’s beautiful…”
The planet became a broad, curved bow that spanned the width of the viewscreen, purple land showing through swirls of mauve cloud. The Cobra bucked as they hit the troposphere. Bennett slowed their descent, trimmed the angle of entry. Rags of cloud beat against the viewscreen. The ship rumbled like a toboggan, Bennett and Ten Lee swaying in their couches. In a split second they dropped through the floor of the cloud, from a realm of muffling opacity to a brighter scene of rearing purple mountains and vein-like rivers. They hit another stratum of cloud, this one the periphery of a storm front. Bennett disengaged from the pre-programmed flight-plan and took control of the Cobra, trying to veer around the edge of the storm pattern.
“We’re three degrees off course if we want to come down in the vicinity of the geographical features,” Ten Lee reported with calm efficiency. “Three-and-a-half degrees and increasing…”
“There’s nothing I can do about that,” Bennett said. “I’m not taking us through the storm, Ten. This is bad enough.”
Even as he spoke the Cobra was batted about the sky like a storm-tossed leaf. Bennett accelerated, trying to outrun the storm front. The vibration increased as the storm chased them and caught up, rattling Bennett and Ten Lee in their couches. He had no time to check how Mackendrick was coping. He fought with the controls, feeling the weight of the craft responding sluggishly.
At one point he gave a manic laugh, and earned a quick glance from Ten Lee. “What, Joshua?”
“It’s like… it’s like the craziest roller-coaster ride in all creation!” he yelled.
“This is nothing compared to Bhao Khet,” she responded.
Cloud ripped against the screen as the Cobra dived through the storm. Ten Lee called out a constant string of co-ordinates, her anticipation lightning quick. If anything, the storm seemed to be getting worse. To get this far, he thought with increasing dread, only to crash-land and… He grunted as he wrestled with the controls, the ship responding like a reluctant animal.
At one point, as if sensing that he was losing control, Ten Lee took over. Something seemed to side-swipe at the Cobra, and Bennett yelled in sudden fear as he felt himself losing control.
“It’s okay, Josh!” Ten Lee shouted.
She sequenced a flight-pattern through the high-pressure area and took them through. Then, without a word, she disengaged and handed the ship back.
Bennett smiled to himself. “Thanks, Ten. Where’d you learn to sequence like that?”
She just smiled to herself and stared at the figures scrolling down her visor screen.
The Cobra screamed low over violet snow-capped peaks and planed down towards a spreading purple plain.
“We’re heading ever further from our destination,” Ten Lee said.
“So I’ll bring us down here. Mackendrick?”
“How far from the features?” the tycoon asked.
Ten Lee consulted her screen. “Two hundred and ten kilometres and counting.”
“Then land,” Mackendrick ordered. “We’ll ride the transporter back to them.”
They came down blind, the land obscured by driving rain and cloud. Bennett burned the vertical jets and the Cobra hovered, buffeted by the wind, and then came down slowly. Landfall arrived with a gentle bump and Bennett cut the jets. The Cobra ticked and clicked in the silent aftermath of descent.
“Well done, Bennett, Ten Lee,” Mackendrick said. “How does it feel to know you’ve come further than any crewed expedition before?”
Bennett sat in his couch and considered the fact. It was, he thought, hard to believe.
Ten Lee was going through the post-flight checks, having given the scene outside the ship barely a glance.
As Bennett stared, the storm abated and sunlight—no, not sunlight, Bennett reminded himself; the light from the gas giant—illuminated the land with an aqueous glow.
Mackendrick stepped between the couches and stared through the viewscreen. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “How beautiful.”
They had come down on a plain of short purple grassland between two long mountain ranges. Ahead, the serrated peaks of the northern range stretched off to left and right like massed scimitar blades. Beyond, dominating the landscape with its vast and brooding presence, the banded upper hemisphere of the gas giant—what had Mackendrick called it? Tenebrae?—swelled to fill half the sky.
Bennett reached over and touched Ten Lee’s arm. She looked up, and he was pleased to see an expression of wonder cross her face.
10
One month had passed since the last murder, and Vishwanath, Rana and the rest of the homicide team on the eighth floor were making little headway on the case of the crucifix killings.
After all the progress she had made on the night of the last murder, she had expected some breakthrough before now. She had checked all the leads she and Vishwanath had made on the case, but had drawn a blank with each. For the past two weeks she had spent every shift tracking down the friends and acquaintances of the dead men. She could have contacted these people via her com-screen, but she had wanted to get away from the confines of the eighth floor, where Naz had initiated a hate campaign against her.
She suspected it had something to do with the fact that Investigator Vishwanath consulted her on most cases now, valuing her opinion. Naz had had his nose put out in a big way, and hated her in consequence. He made jokes at her expense—the old one about her lack of boyfriends, which she could handle—and other hateful jibes about her lowly origins. “Is it true you were a street-kid, Rana?” he had asked in the staff canteen, surrounded by friends. “But you look too fair to be a Dullit.”
“I am not ashamed of where I come from, Naz,” she had replied with civility. “And if I were a Dullit I would be proud of the fact.”
“But that fair skin,” Naz had persisted. “I’ve seen no street-kid so pale! Perhaps you’re a half-caste? Is that it, Rana? Was your mother a whore and your father a European tourist?”
She’d considered telling him the truth, but knew that he would only ridicule her.
