The thermal surge lasted forty-seven seconds, which was forty-seven seconds longer than any reasonable person would choose to spend inside a fifty-year-old pod being accelerated through a geothermal column at forces that the transit documentation described as significant and that Briar would have described, if she had been capable of forming words during the experience, as something considerably more emphatic.
The magma flow caught the pod like a hand closing around a seed, and the world became orange and roaring and the specific quality of heat that had no interest in the distinctions between living things and non-living things. The hull groaned with the sustained complaint of old metal being asked, again, to perform beyond its design tolerance. Loose rivets along the bow plate transmitted their distress through the frame in sharp percussion. The pressure gauge climbed past its recommended operational range and kept going, and the red indicator light that illuminated in response to this was, Briar reflected, a charming choice of color given the circumstances.
She compensated with the control handles, reading the shaft walls on the forward monitor, correcting drift with bursts of the lateral thrusters as the spin tried to reassert itself against the stabilizing fins. The pod wanted to tumble. The fins argued against this. Briar arbitrated between them with focused, constant input, the way she had been trained to, the way she had practiced in the simulation bays approximately two hundred times, the way that had nonetheless never quite prepared her for the specific reality of it.
A bow plate buckled inward with a sound like a struck bell, a sharp concave deformation appearing in the hull as external pressure found a structural vulnerability. The cabin pressure shifted. Briar sealed her helmet to its collar ring with one hand while keeping the other on the control handles, felt the system engage, and returned both hands to the controls.
Eighteen seconds remaining on the flare estimate.
Fifteen.
The heat was the worst of it. Not the pressure, not the noise, not the structural anxiety, but the sustained ambient temperature that the pod's thermal shielding was managing through the accumulated investment of fifty years of regular maintenance and that Briar was choosing to trust implicitly because the alternative to trusting it was not available.
Ten seconds.
Five.
And then the orange became grey-black and the roaring became a sustained whistle and the pod was riding the thermal column above the flare zone, the magma torrent dropping away below, the acceleration smoothing from punishing to merely significant, and Briar allowed herself a single complete breath before engaging the independent thrusters to supplement the upward current.
Above her on the navigation overlay, a circle of soft mana-light marked the surface vent's docking zone, the camouflaged exit point that sat inside what the surface-worlders had called, for centuries without understanding why, a sacred earthwork mound. The People had used these as actual dwellings once, before the retreat underground. Now they served as transit nodes, lightly equipped, minimally staffed, with a self-destruct sequence loaded in the event of discovery.
Briar had made this final approach forty-one times in her career and had never missed the dock. She was not going to make the forty-second time the occasion for establishing a new record. She swiveled the pod to horizontal, aligned the docking nodes with the light circle, and ran the last hundred meters on gentled thrusters, using the rudder pedals to walk the trajectory into precision.
The nodes found their grooves. The clamp engaged. The pod settled with a solidity that was, given what she had just ridden through, genuinely welcome.
Briar released the harness with a practiced strike to the central buckle and pushed the door open. The seal broke with a hiss, and the surface air came flooding in.
She breathed it in completely and without reservation, the way she always did on arrival, the way she suspected every field officer did even when they didn't admit to it. The air down here had the particular quality of somewhere that had been below the surface for too long, recycled and processed and clean in a technical sense and never quite satisfying in the way that this was satisfying. The air above ground was different. It had lived in. It had the coolness of an autumn night and beneath that something warm and resinous from the forest edge, pine and turned earth and something faintly floral from a late-season source she couldn't immediately identify.
She stood in the transit bay for four seconds and breathed it.
How had the People ever left this? The question came to her every arrival and she never had a completely satisfying answer to it. Necessity, obviously. The surface-worlders had multiplied with an efficiency that no other sentient species had matched, and numbers had done what numbers always did, which was render every other consideration secondary through sheer accumulated weight. The Deep People could cultivate, could shimmer, could work mana at a level that surface humanity had only mythologized, but the surface-worlders bred at a pace that made individual capability irrelevant at sufficient scale.
Still. The air.
Though she could taste, underneath the good of it, the residue of what surface-world industrial development had been doing to the atmosphere for the past century. A faint chemical undertone that hadn't been there in the records from a few hundred years ago. The surface-worlders had achieved remarkable things with their technology and had managed to accomplish most of them while simultaneously degrading the environment those technologies depended on, which was either ironic or straightforward, depending on one's view of how species tended to develop.
The transit bay's external monitors showed nothing. The surrounding woodland was clear of surface-world presence. The pneumatic entry doors at the mound's north face showed a deformation consistent with significant forced impact, the thornback's exit route confirmed, bent outward with the authority of something that had decided the doors were a temporary obstacle rather than a boundary.
Briar moved to the equipment bracket and surveyed what was available. The wing options presented themselves with the specific variety of disappointment that the LEPfield budget situation had been generating for the better part of a decade.
Dragonfly wings. The older model, petrol-driven, with a twin-oval configuration that was technically functional and practically cumbersome in the way that all legacy equipment was cumbersome: heavier than necessary, louder than desirable, requiring a manual start sequence that involved a pull-cord and the specific quality of optimism that came from hoping the third attempt would catch.
The Hummingbird configuration was what the situation called for. Silent operation, mana-solar hybrid drive, satellite-relay navigation, responsive enough to run a precision intercept on a moving target in woodland terrain. Half the private citizens in Haven Deep had Hummingbirds for their surface recreation permits. The LEPfield had not updated its field wing inventory in six years.
Briar strapped the Dragonflies on, checked the motor housing, and pulled the starter cord.
Nothing.
She pulled it again.
Nothing.
She considered the motor with the focused attention of a field officer who needed to be in the air in the next thirty seconds and was going to be, regardless of the motor's current opinion on the matter.
Third pull. The engine caught with the reluctant, smoky enthusiasm of a piece of equipment that had decided to cooperate under protest, coughing out a brief stream of exhaust that dissipated quickly in the night air.
Briar pushed the throttle to full and stepped through the mound's exit into the surface world.
The night opened around her, vast and immediate and real in the way that things were real when they were not mediated by screens or recycled air. The forest edge ran along the mound's north side, dark shapes of old trees against a sky that was doing something extraordinary overhead, the full spread of the surface's night sky visible between clouds, more stars than any underground dwelling permitted you to forget existed.
She gave herself one second for it. One genuine, undefended second of standing in the Italian night with pine resin in the air and the sound of small nocturnal creatures in the undergrowth and the distant, unidentifiable chorus of insects that the surface-world naturalists had documented extensively and that field officers encountered as pure ambient rightness, the sound of a world operating as intended.
Then the locator on her wrist pulsed. The thornback's signature was close. Significantly closer than the position estimate from fifteen minutes ago. Either the livestock encounter had been briefer than Torvin's assessment or the creature had resumed movement faster.
She checked the directional indicator. The signal was strong and pulling northeast, toward the settlement's outer agricultural boundary, and the pulse rate was the rapid, agitated reading of a target in active movement rather than settled feeding behavior.
Briar opened the Dragonfly throttle and lifted into the night, keeping low over the treeline, shimmer-field engaged and rendering her invisible to any surface-world eyes below.
She pushed the wings faster than their recommended operational speed, which the manual noted as inadvisable and which was, given the circumstances, the only available approach.
The lights of Crestwall appeared ahead, warm and clustered, the settled glow of a town full of surface-worlders who were, at this hour, entirely unaware of what was moving toward them from the forest's edge.
The locator pulse accelerated.
Briar flew toward it.