Cawl's split view lurched and the three-part image diversified. If he didn't concentrate, the conflicting input would make him nauseous. His charges were falling. Thruster bursts sent them hurtling after the falling scows. The crewed decks flashed past, he had the briefest glimpse of an armoured adept directing his underlings, then the scows were above his machines. The clouds raced up to greet him.

The robots were practically autonomous. Their programming took them down into the surging currents of the gas giant without much input, but such were the challenges of operating in Etrian's frigid methane atmosphere that each flight of three required human over sight. The robots' wetware were not up to the task alone.

Incredibly, there were things alive down there, and they did not like visitors.

Cawl's view shook as the automata encountered the upper layers of Trisolian A-2's atmosphere Flight smoothed out a little as they penetrated the upper cloud layers and plunged down deeper through counter-rotating strata of gas. As they reached their destination some hundred kilometres within, the feed smoothed further, finally settling into crisp sharpness as Cawl activated the system's delicate image stabilisers. Icons flicked on his displays. Minor tocsins rang. The environment stressed the machines. Such small shrieks of alarm were normal.

Thirty Vultarax stratos-automata spread out into a polyhedral protection configuration. Cawl, whose machines were in the uppermost part of the formation, jinked his flight aside. The scows dropped through the gap into the protective cordon, spread out, and made ready to begin resource gathering. Cawl swerved his automata back into position. His upgraded intelligence core gave him a seven per cent efficiency gain over his fellow cloud riders. He reined in his desire to show off. That sort of thing could get him caught.

The operation followed the pattern it did every day. The scows took up a formation designed to maximise resource extraction. The thick atmosphere glowed with ionisation as the collectors' magnetic arrays activated. Trailing coronal discharge from their static bleed fins, the scows began their work.

Cawl looked out over the boiling clouds. In some places vortexes carved wells several hundred kilometres deep, and he peered towards the planet's busy heart down throats of twisting gases lined with veins of lightning. His machines would bounce and judder violently as they passed over these holes, but their images remained eerily still, their automatic adjustment a blessing of man's technological wisdom. Every stratum of the atmosphere crackled with light conjured from friction. Wet snows of frozen ethane and methane slapped against the drones' armoured carapaces. Exotic lightning forms danced like live things upon the cloud tops. The display delighted Cawl. And yet the true glories were down in the gas giant's unobtainable centre, where massive pressure compressed methane into bizarre super ices, and the freezing temperatures of the upper levels escalated at a geometric rate to levels greater than those on the surfaces of stars.