If nothing else, it means we’re on schedule.
***
We’ve got so little to go on. We don’t know how far we are from the ceiling: it keeps ablating away above us. We don’t know how close we are to the core: it keeps swelling beneath the easing weight of all this shedding atmosphere. All we know is that temperature rises overhead and we descend; pressure rises from beneath and we climb. We’re specks in the belly of some fish in empty mid-ocean, surface and seabed equally hypothetical. None of our reference points are any more fixed than we are. The Chimp presents estimates based on gravity and inertia, but even those are little more than guesses thanks to wormhole corruption of the local spacetime. We’re stretched across the probability wave, waiting for the box to open so the universe can observe whether we’re dead or alive.
Hakim eyes me from across the tank, his face flickering in the light of a hundred cam feeds. “Something’s wrong. We should be through by now.”
He’s been saying that for the past hour.
“There’s bound to be variability,” I remind him. “The model—”
“The model.” He manages a short, bitter laugh. “Based on all those zettabytes we collected the other times we hitched a ride through a red giant. The model’s shit. One hiccup in the magnetic field and we could be going down instead of out.”
“We’re still here.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
“It’s still dark.” The atmosphere’s still thick enough to keep Surtr’s blinding interior at bay.
“Always darkest before the dawn,” Hakim says grimly, and points to that brightening smudge of infrared overhead.
The Chimp can’t explain it, for all the fresh realtime data he stuffs into his equations. All we know is that whatever it is, it hasn’t budged from our displacement vector and it’s getting hotter. Or maybe closer. It’s hard to tell; our senses are hazy that far out, and we’re not about to stick our heads above the clouds for a better view.
Whatever it is, the Chimp doesn’t think it’s worth worrying about. He says we’re almost through.
***
The storm no longer freezes on impact. It spits and hisses, turns instantly to steam. Incessant lightning strobes the sky, stop-animates towering jigsaw monsters of methane and acetylene.
God’s mind might look like this, if He were an epileptic.
We get in the way sometimes, block some deific synapse in mid-discharge: a million volts spike the hull and a patch of basalt turns to slag, or Eri goes blind in another eye. I’ve lost count of the cameras and antennae and radar dishes we’ve already lost. I just add it to the tally when another facet flares and goes dark at the edge of the collage.
Hakim doesn’t. “Play that again,” he tells the Chimp. “That feed. Just before it fratzed.”
The last moments of the latest casualty: Eri’s cratered skin, outcroppings of half-buried machinery. Lightning flickers in from Stage Left, stabs a radiator fin halfway to our lumpy horizon. A flash. A banal and overfamiliar phrase:
No Signal.
“Again,” Hakim says. “The strike in the middle distance. Freeze on that.”
Three bolts, caught in the act—and Hakim’s onto something, I see now. There’s something different about them, something less—random—than the fractal bifurcations of more distant lightning. Different color, too—more of a bluish edge—and smaller. The bolts in the distance are massive. These things arcing across the crust don’t look much thicker than my own arm.
They converge towards some bright mass just barely out of camera range.
“Static discharge of some kind,” I suggest.
“Yeah? What kind, exactly?”
I can’t see anything similar in the current mosaic, but the bridge bulkheads only hold so many windows and our surface cams still number in the thousands. Even my link can’t handle that many feeds at once. “Chimp: any other phenomena like that on the surface?”
“Yes,” says the Chimp, and high-grades the display:
Bright meshes swarming over stone and steel. Formations of ball lightning, walking on jagged stilts of electricity. Some kind of flat flickering plasma, sliding along Eri’s crust like a stingray.
“Shittttt...” Hakim hisses. “Where did they come from?”
Our compound eye loses another facet.
“They’re targeting the sensors.” Hakim’s face is ashen.
“They?” Could just be electricity arcing to alloy.
“They’re blinding us. Oh Jesus fuck being trapped inside a star isn’t bad enough there’s gotta be hostile aliens in the bargain.”
My eyes flicker to the ceiling pickup. “Chimp, what are those things?”
“I don’t know. They could be something like Saint Elmo’s Fire, or a buoyant plasma. I can’t rule out some sort of maser effect either, but I’m not detecting any significant microwave emissions.”
Another camera goes down. “Lightning bugs,” Hakim says, and emits a hysterical giggle.
“Are they alive?” I wonder.
“Not organically,” the Chimp tells me. “I don’t know if they’d meet definitions based on entropy restriction.”
No conventional morphology there. Those aren’t legs exactly, they’re—transient voltage arcs of some kind. And body shape—if body even applies—seems to be optional and fluid. Auroras bunch up into sparking balls; balls sprout loops or limbs or just blow away at Mach 2, vanishing into the storm.
I call up a tactical composite. Huh: clustered distribution. A flock gathered at the skeletal remains of a long-dead thruster nozzle; another flickering across an evagineering hutch halfway down the starboard lateral line. A whole party in Eri’s crater-mouth, swarming around our invisible bootstrap like water circling a drain.
“Holes,” Hakim says softly. “Depressions. Hatches.”
But something’s caught my eye that doesn’t involve any of those things, something unfolding overhead while our other eyes are fixed on the ground—
“They’re trying to get in. That’s what they’re doing.”
A sudden bright smudge in the sky. Then a tear; a hole; the dilating pupil of some great demonic eye. Dim bloody light floods down across the battered landscape as a cyclone opens over our heads, wreathed in an inflammation of lightning.
Surtr’s finger stretches down from Hades, visible at last to naked eyes.
“Holy shit...” Hakim whispers.
It’s an incandescent tornado, a pillar of fire. It’s outside reaching in, and if anything short of magic can explain its existence it’s not known to me or the Chimp or the accumulated wisdom of all the astrophysicists nesting in our archives. It reaches down and touches our wormhole, just so. It bulges, as if inflamed by an embedded splinter; the swollen tip wobbles absurdly for a moment, then bursts—
—and fire gushes down from the heavens in a liquid cascade. The things beneath scatter fast as forked lightning can carry them; here in the bridge, the view sparks and dies. From a dozen other viewpoints I see tongues of soft red plasma splashing across Eriophora’s crust.
Some rough alarm whispers fuck fuck fuck fuck at my side while Eri feeds me intelligence: something happening back at that lateral hutch. All those cams are down but there’s a pressure surge at the outer hatch and a rhythmic hissing sound crackles in along the intercom.