He slid in his legs, then eased in the rest of him, arms first, torso, and finally his head.
The back panel closed itself. In the darkness Benzamir waited, cocooned.
Two arterial shunts stabbed into his neck, and the gaps left in the cavity started to fill with warm syrupy liquid. It seeped into his form-fitting singlesuit and clung to his skin. It rose as far as his neck and paused.
Benzamir hated this part. His blood was getting all the oxygen it needed and more through the shunts, but it still felt like drowning.
The liquid reached his chin, covered his mouth, his nose, and up until the only air left in the chamber was in his lungs.
Slowly, calmly, he breathed out. He tried to make his mind blank out, thinking only of the vast void of space between the stars. Slowly, calmly, he breathed in.
‘Everyone panics their first time,’ said Ariadne. ‘This is not your first time. You will live. The sensation will come and go, and you will remain.’ Her soothing words were repeated over and over until every last bubble of air had gone.
‘Are you ready, Benzamir?’
Without speaking, he said: ‘Yes. I swear it gets worse, not better.’
‘Systems check good. Sensors good. Locomotion good. Weapons good. Power plant good, with a tendency to run a little hot, so watch out for that. Coms good. Halo good. You have control.’
Without seeing, he saw four concerned faces looking up at the head part of the armour. Wahir was reaching out to tap the chest with an inquisitive finger.
Benzamir thought light, and the markers on the skin of the armour – fingers, elbows, knees, shoulders, head and feet – glowed red.
Wahir yelped and hid behind Said.
‘This is normal,’ said Benzamir through the external speakers. ‘It’s so I don’t tread on you by accident.’ He selected his camouflage, dialling through a swatch of designs until he came to a mosaic of shades of yellow.
He moved, testing every joint, moving his head around in a complete circle and flexing his weapon pods. Spikes and stubby hollow tubes popped out of hatches and sneaked back in faster than the eye could follow.
‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘You’ll all have to leave now. Ariadne’s going to open the main doors and there’s no air-lock.’
Elenya took Said’s arm, which embarrassed him greatly, and Wahir’s, which pleased him inordinately, and took them away. Alessandra started to edge back, not wanting to go, not wanting to say anything that would betray her.
‘It has to be done this way, Alessandra. Perhaps they’ll see sense, and we can finish this without a firing a shot.’ Benzamir lifted up his hand and splayed his massive composite fingers. She recognized the salute from his tattoo, and tentatively returned it.
‘Come back to us,’ she blurted. ‘Come back to me.’ She turned and ran.
Benzamir was alone. After a moment he turned and stamped his way to the back of the hold. The lights dimmed, and Ariadne vented the air into space. The high-pitched whistle diminished until he stood in hard vacuum. Then she opened the doors, peeling them apart like flower petals, so he stood on the edge of a vertiginous drop.
The whole world was spread out before him and filled all his vision, from the azure blue of the curved horizon to the sulphurous yellow of the dunes beneath his feet. The ocean sparkled blue, and the forests to the west were rich and green. Clouds collected at the foot of mountains in streamers and over plains as towers of white.
It was then he realized that he loved it, all of it, from frozen north to sun-scorched south. For all the foreboding he felt, it was worth it just to be there at that moment, worth coming the vast distance and suffering the gnawing anxiety that he had in fact chosen the wrong side. Even if he was going to die today, he would go knowing that he had had one moment of transcendent joy.
A dispenser chugged a stream of silver remotes into the bay. They joined him as a shining cloud above his head.
Then he stepped forward, and out into the abyss.
To begin with, it didn’t even seem like he was falling. The remotes fell with him, hanging next to him like drops of water, but the numbers in the corner of his vision gave him the true picture: velocity, height above sea level, external pressure and temperature. When he looked back, Ariadne was all but lost against the stars.
The first wisps of air began to tear at him, initially as insubstantial as gossamer, then slowly building until it was thunder. He was roaring down. The battlesuit locked itself into the foetal position, and the vibrations reached their peak with a sharp snap of sound.
He was supersonic.
The remotes trailed away behind Benzamir, but he wasn’t concerned: as the air grew thicker, he would slow down faster, and they’d catch him up. The ground was huge, swallowing up all his vision. Unenhanced, he could see the patterns of sinuous dunes snaking their way across the desert, the subtle changes in colour of the land, the acid sharp lines of rock that cut through the sand sea, the pounding surf marking the edge of the ocean.
He stayed curled for another minute, then commanded his limbs to extend. It was time he went subsonic and started manoeuvring. He waited for the shuddering to damp down as he decelerated.
‘Give me tactical.’
His view changed, overlaid with terrain information, targeting graticules, marker flags, laser designators, life support stats, weapons status: it was almost too much to cope with, yet he was used to the flood of data, and welcomed it.
He painted his landing site with a laser, and the halo thrusters kicked in, turning him south and east towards a spot that lay just the other side of a dune from the main dome.
All the time, the ground was rising up to meet him. The thrusters jolted his frame as they guided him in. One minute to go. He hoped Ariadne was right about the air defence.
The domes were still invisible to the naked eye, even though his display told him where they should be. The skimmers on the shoreline were the only evidence anything was there.
Thirty seconds. Twenty . . . ten. The airbags inflated around him like a huge white cocoon. His vision disappeared: only the tactical display remained, a wire-frame representation of the world outside. The numbers counted down to zero. Time was up.
His insides shifted. Accelerometers registered a palpable hit, then he was tumbling over and over. The bags deflated as he rolled, and before he’d come to a halt, he ordered them to jettison.
The bags separated and blew away from him, turning into thick pancakes of ballistic cloth as they leaked their remaining air away. He was left standing, toes splayed on a bed of soft sand.
No one came to greet him. Nor did they try and kill him. He consulted his tactical display and called his remotes to him. As they dropped from the sky, they bobbed close to the ground, then rose again. They gathered behind him, a crowd of glittering spheres in the burning sun.
‘I’m down,’ he said.
‘I can’t see any movement at all,’ Ariadne told him.
‘They probably think you’re going to turn them to ash if they put their heads outside.’ He walked to the top of the dune with difficulty, the sand shifting under the immense weight of the battlesuit. The domes were obvious now, seen side on, the patterns of rock extending upwards in a perfect semicircle. ‘Hard substrate. Tunnels?’
‘There are no emissions, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t gone down. It’s an area notorious for being inhospitable to biological life.’
Benzamir slid down the lee side of the dune. Most of it seemed to slide down with him, and he flexed all his joints below his knees to shake off the sand. The rock shelf that angled down to the sea was far easier, even if it was shimmering with heat haze. The remotes followed him, and fanned out in a wide arc behind him.
The door to the main dome was facing north, and he had to trail around the circumference to get there. He felt himself scanned, acquired as a target by three pop-ups hidden in the encircling dunes. It was an automatic response, and he responded by automatically adding them to his tally of targets.