Redemption Ark

‘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?‘

‘No.’

‘If you want me to help you, I want to know what I’m getting myself into.’

‘The ship can’t take it.’

Thorn smiled. ‘It just took more crap than you said it would ever be able to take. Stop being such a pessimist.’

The Demarchist representative entered the white holding room and looked at him. Behind her stood three Ferrisville police, the ones he had surrendered to in the departure terminal, and four Demarchist soldiers. The latter had surrendered their firearms but still managed to look foreboding in their fiery red power-armour. Clavain felt old and fragile, knowing that he was completely at the mercy of his new hosts.

I am Sandra Voi,‘ the woman said. ’You must be Nevil Clavain. Why did you have me come here, Clavain?‘

‘I’m in the process of defecting.’

That’s not what I mean. I mean why me in particular? According to the Convention officials you specifically asked for me.‘

I thought you’d give me a fair hearing, Sandra. I used to know one of your relatives, you see. Who would she have been, your great-grandmother? I can never get the hang of generations these days.‘

The woman pulled up the other white chair and stationed herself in it, opposite Clavain. Demarchists pretended that their political system made rank an outmoded concept. Instead of captains they had shipmasters; instead of generals they had strategic planning specialists. Naturally, such specialisations required visual signifiers, but Voi would have frowned at any suggestion that the many bars and bands of colour across the breast of her tunic indicated anything as outmoded as military status.

‘There hasn’t been another Sandra Voi for four hundred years,’ she said.

I know. The last one died on Mars, during an attempt to negotiate peace with the Conjoiners.‘

‘You’re talking ancient history now.’