‘Of course,’ he said mildly. ‘What do you think I am, suicidal?’ Vuilleumier plotted an approach. The impact point was moving at thirty kilometres per second relative to Roc’s atmosphere, its pace determined by the orbital motion of the moon that was extruding the tube. They came in from the rear, shadowing the impact point, increasing their speed. The hull contorted itself again, dealing with the increasing Mach numbers; all the while the smudge on the passive radar lingered behind them, shifting in and out of clarity, sometimes vanishing entirely, but never moving relative to their own position. ‘I feel lighter,’ Thorn said. ‘You will. We’re nearly orbiting again. If we went much faster I’d have to apply thrust to hold us down.’ In the wake of the impact the atmosphere was curdled and turbulent, rare chemistries staining cloud layers with sooty reds and vermilions. Lightning flickered from horizon to horizon, arcing across the sky in stuttering silver bridges as transient charge differentials were smoothed out. Furious eddies whirled like dervishes. The ship’s manifold passive sensors probed ahead, groping for a trajectory between the worst of the storms. ‘I don’t see the tube yet,’ Thorn said. ‘You won’t, not until we’re much closer. It’s only thirteen kilometres across, and I doubt that we could see more than a hundred kilometres in any direction even without the storm.’ ‘Do you have any idea what they’re doing?’ ‘I wish I did.’ ‘Planetary engineering, obviously. They ripped apart three worlds for this, Ana. They must mean business.’ They continued their approach, the ride becoming rougher. Vuilleumier dipped them up and down by tens of kilometres, until she decided not to risk any further use of the Doppler radar. Thereafter she held a steady altitude, the ship bucking and shaking as it slammed through vortices and shear walls. Alarms went off every other minute, and now and again Vuilleumier would swear and tap a rapid sequence of commands into the control panel. The air around them was growing pitch-dark. Mighty black clouds billowed and surged, contorted into looming visceral shapes. Thunderheads larger than cities whipped past in an instant. Ahead, the air pulsed and blazed with constant electrical discharges: blinding forked white branches and twisting sheets of baby blue. They were flying into a small pocket of hell. ‘Doesn’t seem like quite such a good idea now, does it?’ Vuilleumier commented. ‘Never mind,’ Thorn said. ‘Just keep us on this heading. The bogey hasn’t come any closer, has it? Maybe it was just a reflection from our wake.’ As he spoke, something else snared Vuilleumier’s attention on the console. An alarm started whooping, a chorus of multilingual voices shouting incomprehensible warning messages. ‘Mass sensor says there’s something up ahead, seventy-odd kilometres distant,’ she said. ‘Elongated, I think — the field geometry’s cylindrical, with an inverse “r” attenuation. That’s got to be our baby.’ ‘How long until we see it?’ ‘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?‘
