Above that, in the relatively thin — at a mere few thousand kilometres — but still vastly complicated layers reaching up towards space, were the regions where the Dwellers lived, in the contra-rotating belts and zones of rapidly spinning gases which — dotted with storms great and small, spattered with eddies, embellished with festoons, bars, rods, streaks, veils, columns, clumps, hollows, whirls, vortices, plume-heads, shear fronts and subduction flurries — girdled the planet. Where the Dwellers lived, where everything happened, there was no solid surface, and no features at all which lasted more than a few thousand years save for the bands of gas forever charging past each other, great spinning wheels of atmosphere whirling like the barely meshed cogs in some demented gearbox a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across.
The convention was that the equatorial satellites followed the averaged-out progress of the broad equatorial zone, establishing a sort of stationary parameter-set from which everything else could be worked out relatively. But it was still confusing. Nothing was fixed. The zones and belts were relatively stable, but they shot past each other at combined speeds of what humans were used to thinking of as the speed of sound, and the margins between them changed all the time, torn by furiously curling eddies writhing this way and that, or thrown out, compressed and disturbed by giant storms like the Great Red Spot of the Solar System’s Jupiter, riding between a zone travelling one way and a belt going the other like a vast squashed whirlpool caught in some mad clash of violently opposed currents, developing, raging and slowly dissipating over the centuries that humanity had been able to watch it. In a gas-giant, everything either evolved, revolved or just plain came and went, and the whole human mindset of surfaces, territory, land, sea and air was thrown into confusion.
Add the effects of a vastly powerful magnetic field, swathes of intense radiation and the sheer scale of the environment -you could drop the whole of a planet the size of Earth or Sepekte into a decent-sized gas-giant storm — and the human brain was left with a lot to cope with.
And all this before one took into account the — to be generous — playful attitude which the Dwellers themselves so often exhibited to general planetary orientation and the help, or otherwise, conventionally seen as being fit and proper to be extended to directionally challenged alien visitors.
· I thought we’d be in the midst of them, the colonel sent.
· Dwellers? Fassin asked, studying the complex schematic of who and what might be where at the moment.
· Yes, I imagined we would find ourselves in one of their cities.
They both looked around at the vast haze of slowly swirling gas, extending — depending on which frequency or sense one chose to experience it in — a few metres or a few hundred kilometres away on every side. It felt very still, even though they were part of the equatorial zone and so being spun around the planet at over a hundred metres a second, while swirling slowly around the upwelling and rising gradually with it too.
Fassin felt himself smiling in his wrapping of shock-gel.
— Well, there’s a lot of Dwellers, but it’s a big planet.
It seemed odd to be explaining this to a creature whose kind had evolved in planets like this and who surely ought to be familiar with the scale of a gas-giant, but then oerileithe, in Fassin’s admittedly limited experience of them, often did display a kind of half-resentful awe towards Dwellers, entirely consistent with a belief that the instant you dropped beneath the cloud tops you’d find yourself surrounded by massed ranks of magisterial Dwellers and their astoundingly awesome structures (a misapprehension it was hard to imagine any Dweller even considering correcting). The oerileithe were an ancient people by human standards and by those of the vast majority of species in the developed galaxy, but — with a civilisation going back about eight hundred thousand years — they were mere mayflies by Dweller standards.
A thought occurred to Fassin. — You ever been in a Dweller planet before, colonel?
— Indeed not. A privilege denied until now. Hatherence made a show of looking about. — Not unlike home, really.
Another thought occurred. — You did receive clearance? Didn’t you, colonel?
· Clearance, Seer Taak?
· To come down. To enter Nasq.
— Ah, the colonel sent. — Not as such, I do confess. It was thought that I would be remote delving with you and your colleagues, from the Shared Facility on the Third Fury moon. Braam Ganscerel himself took the time to assure me of this personally. No objection was raised regarding such a presence. I believe that permission was in the process of being sought for me to accompany you physically into the atmosphere if that became necessary — as indeed it now has — however, the last that I heard in that regard indicated that the relevant clearances had yet to materialise. Why? Do you envisage there being a problem?
Oh, shit.
· The Dwellers, Fassin told her, — can be… pernickety about that sort of thing. Pernickety, he thought. They were liable to declare the colonel an honorary child, give her a half-hour start and set off to hunt her. — They take their privacy quite seri-ously. Unauthorised entries are severely discouraged.
· Well, I’m aware of that.
· You are? Good.
· I shall throw myself upon their mercy.
· Right. I see.
You are either quite brave and possessed of a decent sense of humour, Fassin thought, or you really should have done more homework.
· So, Seer Fassin Taak, in which direction ought we to proceed?
· Should be a CloudTunnel about four hundred klicks… that way, Fassin sent, turning the gascraft to point more or less south and slightly down. — Unless it’s moved, obviously.
· Shall we? the colonel said, drifting in that direction.
· Going to ping one of our sats, let them know we’re alive,
Fassin told her.
· This is wise?
Was it wise? Fassin wondered. There had been some sort of attack on the Seer infrastructure around Nasqueron, but that didn’t mean the whole near-planet environment had been taken over. On the other hand…
· How fast can that esuit go? he asked the colonel.
· At this density, about four hundred metres per second.
About half that, on sustained cruise.
Fassin’s arrowcraft could just about keep pace with that. Disappointing. He was still hoping to give the colonel the slip at some point. It looked like he wasn’t going to be able to just outrun her.
— Ping sent, he told Hatherence. — Let’s go.
They went, quickly. They’d got about a hundred metres away when a flash of violet light ripped the cloud apart behind them and a stark, short-lived beam-cluster splayed through the volume of gas they’d been floating within a few seconds earlier. Further beams radiated out from the initial target point, pulsing through the atmosphere in slowly spreading semi-random stabs. One flicked into existence about fifty metres from them, booming and crackling. All the rest were much further away and after a minute or so they ceased altogether.
· Somebody would seem to be ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak, the colonel sent as they flew through the gas.
· So it would appear.
The flash and EMP came a couple of minutes after that. A low, rumbling concussion caught up with them some time later.
· Was that a nuke? Fassin sent. His instruments seemed to leave no other interpretation, but he still found it hard to believe.