The energy hull did what it was designed to do, shunting heat away from the planetward edges of the craft, but it simply couldn't do so rapidly enough. The shield reacted to the mounting thermal load of the raging heat by drawing more power, overdriving its propagation arrays and diminishing its ability to protect the craft. Selene watched the numbers coming from the hull as they ticked rapidly down. The degraded system went into a failure cascade, its protection levels falling from 100% to 0 in 27 seconds.
After that, it was the voidhull's bare metal against the thermal shock of their entry into the atmosphere. They'd had no time to enhance the lander's physical structure in any way. It was designed to withstand hot entries, steep insertion corridors, but they were flying well beyond its operational capabilities.
Fortunately, the extreme violence of Coronade's high atmosphere came to their aid. They hit supersonic winds, denser and denser as they fell, and the rapidly-moving air streamed the heat away far more effectively than the energy hull had been able to. They reached a point where the hull's temperature peaked, then began to slide back towards the outer edges of its ideal safety levels.
Once again, they were made to pay for it, this time by the increasing violence of the turbulent atmosphere. As they dropped through the raging air streams, they were hurled around like dried peas in an empty box, rattling Selene's brain until it hurt.
They left a trail of free-floating sensors behind them, in the hope that they could triangulate off them and maintain an approximate navigational lock on the circular oceanic islands they were aiming for. Their trajectory was going to be vague as the sensors were blasted in every direction and they lost lock with those higher up in the air. At least she and Ondo were cut off from outside surveillance. Sunlight faded rapidly as they sank, until it was utterly dark across the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Twice she saw a sunburst of blinding yellow light flare in the atmosphere some way in the distance and far above them – an atmospheric nuke detonation, she guessed – but none exploded nearby.
Ondo said, “They may not even attempt to enter the atmosphere. They can just wait in orbit for us to emerge.”
“Or wait for these winds to do their work for them,” she replied.
“Or that,” agreed Ondo.
The small size of the lander was an advantage as they fell: they were swept along with the screaming wind-currents rather than being pulverized by them. Selene, piloting, put all her effort into simply staying upright as they were thrown around like a leaf in a hurricane. The main risk would be as they neared the ground; the last thing she wanted was to come so far only to be dashed into the side of a mountain or flung at the ground the wrong way up. She peered downwards using the lander's sensors, mainly in the radio wave spectrum, desperate for any indistinct detail. Atmospheric pressures suggested they were within ten kilometres of the surface, but the margin of error was wide given the air's extreme turbulence.
In the end it was a faint warble from a nanosensor dropped on her previous visit that gave her the ghost of the reading she needed. She caught a glimpse of a coastline beneath the sensor. She calculated her approximate distance from the device based on its signal strength, while pattern-matching the line of the landmass with what they knew of the geography of Coronade.
The approximate fix was encouraging: they were over the western edge of the ocean containing the circular islands, around a hundred kilometres from where they needed to be. Pretty good. She glanced across at Ondo as he saw the calculations. The look of anticipation in his eyes was bright. He was so near the answers he craved.
Battling the bucking lander, she pulled the nose up to some semblance of level and eased on the undercarriage thrusters to slow their descent. The winds were less extreme at the surface, but they were still violent, scouring the rugged terrain three hundred metres below. Going down any lower was dangerous: a sudden sidewind could flip them over and dash them to the rocks before she had chance to react. She turned the lander's nose south and edged on the thrusters. They passed in and out of the base of the streaming cloud layers, enough to give her an occasional radar glimpse of the surface terrain. She picked out structures that were clearly the ruins of buildings, lining the coast for hundreds of kilometres. There were, seemingly, the outlines of many different architectural styles: the embassies and enclaves of a thousand different cultures. They passed over the ruins of a city, arranged around three wide, spiralling roads running from its centre to its edges.
Two minutes later, she picked up the radial line of the oceanic structure that would lead them across the water to the gateway island corresponding to the Warden's metakey. On their images it had been a delicate spiderweb line, but on the ground the true scale of it was apparent: it was a thirty-metre-wide bridge, joining the continental landmass to the circular islands strung out through the ocean. Its foundations had to be firmly embedded in the ocean floor bedrock, even out in the depths: a pontoon would have been swept away long ago. She turned the lander onto a vector to follow it.
Another light flared in the high atmosphere, hundreds of kilometres away. In a way it was good. Their escape plan involved lurking in the atmosphere for as long as they could stand it – Ondo had suggested a week – then bursting out at a random spot to hook up with the Radiant Dragon. The more nukes Concordance dropped, the more they might speculate that she and Ondo were dead.
She slowed the lander to
