Now that two dozen ropes had been ejected and were streaming behind his ship, producing drag forces that would keep it from attaining too high a terminal velocity; now that everything was proceeding according to plan and his future was becoming ever so slightly more secure, Lenny began to relax, even as deceleration brought with it the return of gravity and his cyberpants activated, slowly squeezing blood from his legs to his torso. Fortunately, such adaptations to hypergravity were only a temporary requirement. If all he knew about the gas giant—about this smallest of all known brown dwarfs—held true, in a day’s time there would be almost as much mass above Gaius as below, and at most he’d have to stand against only two or three times his normal Earth weight, or as Sharon would have put it, the gee forces every child gets used to on an ordinary swing.

“Ninety atmospheres,” Sharon called out. “Denser than water now. We’ve just crossed the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus.”

All the larger, hull-based spiders were imploding and becoming useful only as sources of future building materials. The survivors were smaller than mice. They moved by aid of hairlike filaments, and in the greater depths of Neptune they would buoy themselves up, on those hair-thin “legs,” with tanks of slush. Their spherical shells were arrays of Bardo cones built on a microscopic scale, and as the air around them intensified from 150 atmospheres (“the pressure inside a late twentieth-century power plant boiler,” Sharon announced) to 200 atmospheres (“the pressure inside a charged scuba tank”), Lenny ordered the last of the spiders to turn on their floodlamps and eight million-ASA cameras.

Now he could see clearly for many kilometers, and there were faint hints of swirls within the atmosphere, the first signs of suspended particles— hydrocarbon sleet, mostly. His pad, which was becoming increasingly heavy in his hands, told him that the temperature was rising perceptibly. Like Triton, Neptune was radiating more heat from its interior than it received from the Sun.

At 600 atmospheres, Sharon announced that they had just crossed the threshold of a phonograph nee-die pressing down on a late twentieth-century vinyl record, which was more than sufficient to collapse a fully charged scuba tank. Two hundred atmospheres deeper, she began comparing the forces trying to get inside Gaius with the peak pressure of a fist against a skull during a karate strike, except that Neptune’s fists were multiple millions trying to smash through every square millimeter of the ship’s Bardo membrane.

At this point, Vinny told her to shut up or he would confine her to her sleeping closet.

“He means it,” Robyn added, “and I’ll help him. It can be a very lonely ship when three people hate you.”

Lenny said nothing.

At 900 atmospheres, Gaius crossed through a zone of pressure comparable to the greatest depth of an Earthly ocean, and was now literally falling through an ocean. In one moment they were reclining in their pressure beds, dropping through a cloud of compressed liquid hydrogen and helium laced with methane, acetylene, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia ices; in the next moment they had splashed down upon a world-encircling seascape of ethane and methane. Under a gravitational pull exerted by seventeen Earth masses, the ship did not even bob up and down but sank like a slug of uranium toward some unknown abyssal plain. The splash was barely noticeable on the speedometer, but even in the comfort of a pressure bed, in a high-gravity environment the smallest jolt bore a sting. Sharon likened it in her mind to being in a minor train wreck, but held her tongue.