“We’re here,” Djan Seriy said.
Ferbin had fallen asleep. The suit seemed to have reduced the volume of the music it had been playing; it swelled again now as he woke up. He told it to stop. They were still surrounded by the horrible purple glow.
“Good navigating,” Hippinse said.
“Thank you,” Djan Seriy replied.
“A drop, then?”
“So it would appear,” Anaplian agreed. “Brother, Mr Holse; we were unable to make the landfall we wanted to. Too many Aultridian scendships trying to block us and too many doors closed off.” She glanced at Hippinse, who had a blank expression on his face and seemed to have lost his earlier good humour. “Plus something alarmingly capable of procedural corruption and instruction manipulation appears to be loose in the data systems of this part of the world,” she added. She grinned in what was probably meant to be an encouraging manner. “So instead we’ve transited to another Tower, ascended it and then made off into its Filigree and come to a dead end; we’re in an Oversquare level so there’s no onward connections.”
“A dead end?” Ferbin said. Were they never to be released from this cloying purple filth?
“Yes. So we have to drop.”
“Drop?”
“Walk this way,” Djan Seriy said, turning. The scendship’s door rolled up, revealing darkness. They all got to their feet, pushed through the thick-feeling curtain at the entrance and were suddenly free of the glutinous purple stuff filling the scendship’s interior. Ferbin looked down at his arms, chest and legs, expecting to see some of the ghastly material still adhering to him but there was, happily, no trace. He doubted they’d shrugged off the notorious smell so easily.
They were standing on a narrow platform lit only by the purple glare from behind; the wall above curved up and over them, following the shape of the scendship’s hull. Djan Seriy looked at the bulge on her thigh. The drone Turminder Xuss detached itself and floated up to the dark line where the door had buried itself in the ship’s hull.
It twisted itself slowly into the material as though it was no more substantial than the glowing purple mass beneath. Long hanging strands of hull and other material worked their way out along the little machine’s body and drooped down, swaying. The drone — rosily glowing folds of light pulsing about its body — finished by stationing itself midway between the scendship’s hull and the wall of the chamber and floating there for a moment. There was an alarming groaning noise and the hull of the ship around the hole bulged inwards by about a hand’s span, exactly as though an invisible sphere a metre across was being pressed into it. The wall directly opposite made creaking, popping noises too.
“Try closing that,” Turminder Xuss said, with what sounded like relish.
Djan Seriy nodded. “This way.”
They passed through a small door into the closed-off end of the channel the scendship travelled within; a twenty-metre-diameter concavity at whose centre, up some complicated steps that were more like handrails, another small round door was set. They entered it and found themselves inside a spherical space three metres or so across, struggling to stand up all at once on its bowled floor. Djan Seriy closed the door they’d come through and pointed to a similar one set straight across from it.
“That one leads to the outside. That’s where we drop from. One at a time. Me first; Hippinse last.”
“This ‘drop’, ma’am…” Holse said.
“We’re fourteen hundred kilometres above the Deldeyn province of Sull,” Anaplian told him. “We ambient-drop, not using AG, through nearly a thousand klicks of near-vacuum and then hit the atmosphere. Then it’s an assisted glide to the Hyeng-zhar, again leaving suit antigravity off; it could show.” She looked at Ferbin and Holse. “You don’t have to do a thing; your suits will take care of everything. Just enjoy the view. We’re still in comms blackout, but don’t forget you can always talk to your suit if you need to ask any questions about what’s going on. Okay? Let’s go.”
There had not — Ferbin reflected as his sister swung open the circular door — really been enough time between the “Okay?” and the “Let’s go” bits of that last sentence for anybody to say very much at all.
Outside, it was dark until you looked down, then the landscape shone in great stripes separated by a central band of grey near-dark. No stars were visible, hidden by vanes and ceiling structures. Djan Seriy squatted on the sill, one hand holding on to the top edge of the inward-opening door. She turned to Ferbin and touched him with her other hand. “You come straight out after me, all right, brother? Don’t delay.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. His heart was hammering.
Djan Seriy looked at him for a moment longer. “Or you could just go limp and the suit will do it all for you; climbing up and out, I mean. With your eyes closed—”
“I shall do it myself, never fear,” Ferbin said, trying to sound braver and more certain than he felt.
She squeezed his shoulder. “See you down there.”
Then she threw herself out of the doorway.
Ferbin pulled himself up to squat where his sister had, feeling Holse’s hands helping to steady him, then he swallowed as he looked down at the impossible drop below him. He closed his eyes after all, but he flexed legs and arms and threw himself out, curling into a ball.
The view was tumbling about him when he opened his eyes again; light/dark, light/dark, light… then the flickering sequence started to slow as the suit whirred, gently teasing his limbs out. His breath sounded terribly loud in his head. After a few moments he was falling in an X shape, feeling almost relaxed as he lay looking back up at the shady mass of Filigree and vaning hanging from the ceiling above. He tried to see where he had thrown himself from, but couldn’t. He thought he caught a glimpse of another tiny dark dot far above, also falling, but could not be sure.
“Can I turn over and look down?” he asked the suit.
“Yes. It will be advisable to return to this orientation for entry into the atmosphere,” the suit told him in its crisp, asexual voice. “Or it is possible to transmit the view downward to your eyes in your present orientation.”
“Is that better?”
“Yes.”
“Do that, then.”
Suddenly it was as though he was dropping down into the distant landscape beneath rather than falling away from the view above. He felt disoriented and dizzy for a moment, but soon adapted. He looked in vain for Djan Seriy, falling somewhere below, but could see no sign of her. “Can you see my sister?” he asked.
“She is probably within this area,” the suit said, creating a thin red circle over part of the view. “She is camouflaged,” it explained.
“How far have we fallen so far?”
“Six kilometres.”
“Oh. How long did that take?”
“Fifty seconds. Over the next fifty seconds we shall descend another twenty kilometres. We are still accelerating and will continue to do so until we encounter the atmosphere.”
“When does that happen?”
“In about ten minutes from now.”
Ferbin settled back and enjoyed the topsy-turvy view, trying to spot the Hyeng-zhar cataract, then attempting to trace the course of the Sulpitine river and finally settling for working out where the Upper and Lower Sulpine Seas might be. He wondered if it was all still frozen. They’d been told it would be, though he found that hard to believe.
The view expanded slowly in front of him. There; was that one of the seas? It looked too small. Was that the other? Too small and too close to the other one. It was so hard to tell. The gloom beneath was gradually filling more and more of his field of vision, leaving the bright, sunlit lands on the edges of the view.