So you seemed cruel. So people died and suffered and grew up hating you. So what? There was at least a chance that none of it was real.

And if it was all real, well, then life was struggle. It always had been and it always would be. You recognised this and lived, or fell for the lie that progress and society had made struggle unnecessary, and just existed, were exploited, became prey, mere fodder.

He wondered to what extent even the supposedly feral and lawless Beyonders understood this basic truth. They let women rise to the pinnacle of their military command structure; that didn’t bode particularly well. And the marshal didn’t seem to have realised that when he’d said he’d heard her request and would pay it all due heed, it meant nothing.

“Well, thank you, Archimandrite,” she said.

Still, he smiled. “You will stay? We shall have a banquet in your honour. We have had so little to celebrate out here, between the stars.”

“An honour indeed, Archimandrite.” The marshal gave that little head nod again.

And we shall try to pick each other’s brains over dinner, he thought. My, what highbrow fun. Give me a planet to plunder any day.

* * *

—  Do you have any idea where we are? the colonel signalled, using a spot-laser. They reckoned this was their most secure form of comms.

— Zone Zero, the equatorial, Fassin sent. — Somewhere ahead of the latest big storm, about ten or twenty kilo-klicks behind the Ear Festoon. I’m checking the latest update they loaded before the drop.

They were floating in a slow eddy around a gentle ammonia upwell the diameter of a small planet, about two hundred klicks down from the cloud tops. The temperature outside was rela-tively balmy by human standards. There were levels, places in almost all gas-giants where a human could, in theory, exist exposed to the elements without any protective clothing at all. Of course they would probably need to be prone and lying in a tub of shock-gel or something similar because weighing six times what their skeleton was used to coping with would make standing up or moving around problematic, their lungs would have to be full of gillfluid or the like, to let them breathe within a mix of gases which included oxygen only as a trace element, and also to let their ribs and chest muscles work under the pressure of that gravitational vice, plus they wouldn’t want to be exposed to a charged-particle shower, but all the same: by gas-giant great-outdoors standards, this was about as good as it humanly got.

Colonel Hatherence found it a bit hot, but then as an oerileithe she would be more at home closer to the cloud tops. She had already loudly pronounced her esuit undamaged and capable of protecting her anywhere from space-vacuum down to Nasqueron’s ten-kilo-klick level, where the pressure would be a million times what it was here and the temperature somewhat more than half what it was on the surface of Ulubis star. Fassin chose not to join in a mine’s-better-than-yours competition; his own gascraft was also space-capable in an emergency but untested at those depths.

He’d tried contacting Apsile in the drop ship but had come up with static. The passive positioning grid cast by the equatorial satellites was functioning but both scale-degraded and patchy, indicating there were some satellites gone or not working.

Knowing where you were in Nasqueron or any gas-giant was important, but still less than half the story. There was a solid rocky core to the planet, a spherical mass of about ten Earth-sized planets buried under seventy thousand vertical kilometres of hydrogen, helium and ice, and there were purists who would call the transition region between that stony kernel and the high-temperature, high-pressure water ice above it the planet’s surface. But you had to be a real nit-picker even to pretend to take that definition seriously. Beyond the water ice — technically ice because it was effectively clamped solid by the colossal pressure, but at over twenty thousand degrees, confusingly hot for the human image of what ice was supposed to be like — came over forty thousand vertical kilometres of metallic hydrogen, then a deep transition layer to the ten-kilo-klick layer of molecular hydrogen which, if you were of an especially imaginative turn of mind, you might term a sea.

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.