No one had spoken a word since Vinny’s order to the spiders and slush makers. To someone who had never experienced a scramjet plunging out of all rational control toward the Pacific, the quiet resignation of the Gaius crew would have come as a surprise; but Vinny was learning that spectacular dangers were sometimes not nearly so frightening when one was in their midst as one expected when only imagining them.

This isn’t so bad, Vinny thought. And the thought surprised him, then fascinated him; and fascination brought with it a momentary regret that no one on the outside would ever know how the final plunge had actually felt. No one would have believed him if he had told them it was … almost fun.

At twelve thousand atmospheres, the water found a defect at the juncture between two Bardo cones and began to squeeze through, causing them to jam. This set up a ripple effect that resounded through the entire system, causing the shield to respond more slowly to pressures that were already building faster than its ability to adapt. The membrane retained its integrity all the way to thirteen thousand atmospheres, whereupon six additional cone junctions began to fail.

Six hundred atmospheres deeper, a series of loud cracking noises reverberated through the hull. All eyes turned toward the ceiling. No one spoke or even gasped. The Bardo shield quieted before the inevitable cave-in. Vinny took Sharon’s hand in his own, and in the stillness he heard Lenny whisper: “It is finished.”

In the next instant the sea hammered through Gaius’ roof with a force of overkill equivalent—as Sharon would have put it—to cracking a walnut by dropping a mountain two and a half times as tall as Everest on it from a height of five meters. The mountain shot through the cabin floor and burst the lower hemisphere of Bardo cones from the inside. The only items not pounded smaller than sand grains were the trailing ropes and balloons. The shockwave merely shredded them to pieces, kicking the slush free of the wreckage and letting it ascend. The remainder of Gaius formed a cloud of what had, during its brief life, ranked among the most advanced composite of materials ever invented, and these materials, as they fluttered down, began to separate according to size, shape, and density.

Microdiamonds fell out of the cloud, little industrial grade needles of compressed carbon. They were all that remained of Vinny, Sharon, Lenny, and Robyn. They expanded over a wide area during the long fall through volcanic upwellings and downwellings. Many settled like dust upon an inner, planetary shell of Ice Six. Here the ice melted at a searing seventy-five degrees centigrade, but the seafloor was riddled with volcanic hot spots, and in places the ice was actually warmer than the water above. In those places, frigid downwellings brought a condensing snow of clays, sulfides, and other life-sustaining ingredients— which mingled impartially with the Gaius microdiamonds. After a time, some of the diamonds either drifted to or were sucked down vents, where they passed through the Ice Six shell and, as a very rarefied snow, began drifting down toward yet another ocean floor.