We were skimming under high, thin, icy clouds. The world had become a landscape of burning mountains and rivers of rock that fled beneath me. All this in an eerie silence, broken only by the shallow breaths of the marines.

The ship lurched up and to the right. To our left now was a mountain; we had come so low already that its peak was above us. According to the centuries-old survey maps the locals had called it Mount Perfect, and, yes, once it must have been a classic cone shape, I thought, a nice landmark for an earthworm’s horizon. But now its profile was spoiled by bulges and gouges, ash had splashed around it, and deeper mud-filled channels had been cut into the landscape, splayed like the fingers of a hand.

Somewhere down there, amid the bleating locals, there was an Academician called Tilo, dropped by the Navy a couple of standard months earlier, part of a global network who had been gathering data on the causes of the volcanism. Tilo’s job, bluntly, had been to prove that this was all the Xeelee’s fault. The Academician had somehow got himself cut off from his uplink gear. Our mission, along with helping with the evacuation of the locals, was to find and retrieve Tilo and his data. No wonder Xera had been so hostile, I thought; the Commissaries, paranoid about their own power, were famously suspicious of the alliances between the Navy and the Academies.

Green lights marked out the hatch in the transparent wall. Show time.

The loadmaster came along the line. ‘Stand up! Stand up!’ The marines complied clumsily. ‘Thirty seconds,’ the loadmaster told me. He was a burly, scarred veteran, attached to a rail by an umbilical as thick as my arm. ‘Winds look good.’

‘Thank you.’

‘All clear aft. Ten seconds. Five.’

The green lights began to blink. We pulled our flexible visors across our faces.

‘Three, two—’

The hatch dilated, and the sudden roar of the wind made all this real. The loadmaster stood by the hatch, screaming, ‘Go, go, go!’

As the marines passed I checked each static line one last time with a sharp tug, before they jumped into blackness. The kid, Lian, was the second last to go - and I was the last of all.

So there I was, falling into the air of a new world.

My static line went taut and ripped free, turning on my suit’s Yukawa-force gravity nullifier. That first shock of no-gravity can be a jolt to the stomach, but to me, after maybe fifty drops in anger, it came as a relief.