Neptune

An expedition came to Neptune for black diamonds: deep down, the pressure squeezes carbon into stones, and they fall as rain. The station was moored in the upper cloud deck to gather the rain. Then a ballast sphere burst. The station rolled onto its side and began to sink into the cloud: four decks under the dock — airlocks and holds, the engine room, the listing decks, the chart room and cabins. Lanterns drifted in through the breaches, gale eels nested in the racks, and the fastest wind in the Solar System broke the windows of the bridge and stayed there, alive. The vault is still full.

A twisted spire of indigo cloud grown through with diamond, leaning the way the wind blows. Everywhere else in the sky diamond is clear; here, under the clouds of the Dark Spot, it comes out black as the night it grew in. There is a crack at the foot, and someone has been inside.

Eight stelae of cobalt cloud around a slab of black stone, each with an eye of black diamond on top. The streaks of the wind bend around this circle and the cloud inside it lies smooth: the fastest wind in the system goes out of its way to avoid the place. The journal does not say why.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

A probe kite that was flown into the wind to measure it. The wind here tears everything that flies: the tether parted, one wing broke off, and the kite came down on the cloud with its camera still pointing forward. The instrument bay is open at the back.

An anchor of station trim standing on its flukes in the cloud, with a chain that goes up twelve links, leans east with the wind and ends in nothing. It was dragged here from the west; the furrow is still there. There is no record of a ship that could have dropped it.

A habitat module that was set down on the cloud and has been going under ever since: the windows are at cloud level, the east side is already covered, the tanks lashed to the roof did not help. The cloud holds, but not for long. The hatch in the roof is open.

A sphere of white cloud and superionic ice, sunk to its waist in the cloud. The ice inside is hotter than fire: it has boiled the cloud around it down to dark haze and sends a plume of steam downwind. The shell has cracked, and the light of the core comes out through the crack.

A mast, a slanted neck and seven chains strung between them across the wind, each shorter than the last. Nobody tunes it: the wind plays it day and night, and on Neptune the wind never stops. Before a storm the note goes up.