Ark

97

The layout of the little craft was simple. The cramped, tubular cabin was packed with rows of seats, improvised from Ark gear and jammed in among the original design’s twenty-five couches. Two seats sat proud of the rest, up in the nose before a rudimentary instrument console and scuffed panoramic windows. Wilson was already in the left-hand seat, running over systems checks, and Helen made her way to the right-hand seat. He handed her a Snoopy comms hat, and she pulled it on.

The shuttle was an automated glider, essentially, with the characteristics of Earth III’s atmosphere and gravity profiles programmed into its onboard computer. It was smart enough to avoid such obvious obstacles as oceans and rock fields and snowbanks, and indeed was capable of flying itself all the way down to the ground. But in the design offices back in vanished Denver it had been recognized that you’d likely need human control over the first unpowered landing on an entirely alien world. A few hundred meters up was the point where Wilson would come into his own; that was the reason this despised sixty-two-year-old was aboard the shuttle, while Helen’s own children were left back aboard the Ark. Helen was the nearest thing available to a copilot. But she had never even flown as a passenger in an atmosphere before, and she prayed the rudimentary skills she had picked up in her training, and from working with Wilson in HeadSpace sims in the last month, would not be called upon.

As she buckled in she glanced back over her shoulder. The kids were packed in, their orange pressure garments bright. The few older kids, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, were dotted around among the rest. The ten-year-olds looked scared, but the infants were mostly sleeping, in the shuttle’s warm humming atmosphere. Helen saw little Sapphire Murphy Baker, the youngest aboard at four years old, holding the hand of an eight-year-old. Jeb sat at the back, in theory watching over the kids and ready to intervene in case of any crisis. Seeing Helen looking, he waved. She tried to smile, but the desolation in his face was clear.

This was how they were going to colonize a new world, with a pack of children and three adults, and a hold containing a nuclear generator and seed stock and tools and a couple of blowup hab modules, and broken hearts.

“We must be insane,” Helen murmured.

“Those who sent us from Earth were insane.” Wilson glanced over at her. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

He flipped a switch, a heavy manual toggle. “Well, that’s it. I’ve initiated the automated program. Now this baby will fly itself all the way down, all but. Here comes the first mission event. Three, two, one-”

Latches rattled, and attitude thrusters banged around the shuttle’s exterior. Helen felt a pull in her stomach. Some of the sleeping children stirred and moaned.

“We cut away from the Ark. That’s it, we’re flying solo. Better get used to that acceleration, we’ll be facing a lot of that this morning.”

“Solo now and for the rest of our lives… wow.” She felt a slight dizziness, her inner ears telling her they were spinning on their long axis.

“That’s the inspection spin. Just giving Halivah a chance to check that the heat shield tiles haven’t fallen off in the last forty years.”

Venus Jenning’s voice crackled from a speaker. “Shuttle B, Halivah. Looking good for descent, Wilson.”

“Copy that. Thank you, Venus.”

The spinning stopped. Helen looked out of the window. They were somewhere over the night side of the planet. They were flying backward, with their heads to the stars and the new world unfolding beneath them, utterly black save for a purple flaring of storms and a sullen red glow that looked like a huge volcano caldera. The idea was that they would enter the atmosphere over the night hemisphere, and their entry trajectory would bring them swooping around the world’s curve to land on the side of permanent day.

Wilson glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody OK? Next it’s the retro rocket. It will feel like a kick in the back. Nothing to worry about. Three, two, one-”

The cabin was filled with noise, a guttural crackling roar like an immense fire. It was indeed a kick in the back. Helen felt it in her lower spine and neck and legs as she was pressed into the padded couch, and the shuttle seemed to swivel until it was as if it was standing on its tail, and she lying on her back. The retro system was a rocket pack bolted to the rear end of the shuttle, designed to shed the velocity that kept the ship in orbit alongside the Ark, and let it fall into the air of Earth III. Now, after lying dormant for forty years, it had fired up for its one and only burn.

Wilson called, “Three, two, one-”

The retro died as sharply as it had opened up, and Helen was thrown forward. More of the children were awake now; with the rocket’s roar gone she could hear them crying in the sudden silence.

Another clatter, and a snap as if something had slapped against the hull. Wilson called, “Retropack jettisoned. One of the straps caught us. Checking the burn. I got nine zeroes on three axes, perfect.” He was grinning, Helen saw, enjoying the ride for its own sake. “We’re no longer in orbit, baby, we are committed to Earth III.”

The shuttle was now unpowered save for small attitude rockets, and these fired in bursts, a series of pops and bangs. The shuttle swiveled around a vertical axis until it had its nose pointed in the direction of its descent. As it swept through this maneuver Helen glimpsed the Ark, just briefly, a battered pockmarked hull with the lashed-together warp assembly attached to its nose. It looked all but worn out. She twisted her neck to follow it as it crossed her window, but it was soon gone, swept out of sight by the shuttle’s rotation.

Now the shuttle tipped up so it was flying in belly first. Its design was based on the old NASA space shuttle; the fat heat shield on its belly would hit the atmosphere first.

“Enjoy the zero G,” Wilson murmured. “Not much of that left now.”

“Or the stars,” Helen said. “Astronomy will be tough down there.”

“We’ll find a way… Bingo.” A new panel lit up on the console before him, bright red, labeled “0.05 G.” “Here comes the deceleration. Damn, we’re high up compared to an Earth entry. This air is thick. ”

She felt the first tugging of deceleration in her gut, a kind of shuddering as the first wisps of atmosphere grabbed at the hull, and then a more steady drag that pulled her down into her seat. There was a faint glow beyond the window now, like the first flickering of Halivah’s arc lamps in the ship’s morning. It was the air of Earth III, the first direct human contact with the planet, air blasted to plasma, its very atoms smashed apart by their passage. The glow quickly built up into a kind of tunnel of colors, lavenders, blue-greens, violet, rising up above the shuttle. Sparks flew up around the ship, burning, flickering as they died.

“Insulation blanket.” Wilson had to shout; the shuttle was starting to shudder, the fittings rattling. “Burning up and taking away our heat with it. It’s supposed to happen. I think.” He grinned coldly. “Pretty lights.”

Helen didn’t try to reply. The glow outside built up further and the weight piled on her in jerks, in sudden loads, surely already exceeding a full Earth gravity. She could hear the children crying. It will get better, she told herself, it will be easier than this. But the weight would never lift off her shoulders, not ever again. She was committed to the descent, bound to the planet with no way to return, ever. She would never see the hull, never hold her children, maybe never even see the stars again. Her eyes blurred, the tears coming for the first time that morning. But still the weight built up, and the light outside intensified, the colors merging into a white sheet that filled the cabin with a brilliant silver-gray glow. The experience was utterly unreal. She could see nothing but that celestial glow, and had no sense of falling, nothing but this monstrous, shuddering weight.

Wilson whooped. “This is what I call flying! We must be lighting up this fucking planet like a comet.”

Then, quite abruptly, it eased. The weight load on her shoulders, though still heavy, was steady now. The plasma glow faded, the last wisps of it dissipating like glowing smoke, to reveal a pale pink sky littered with brownish clouds.

The clouds were above her, Helen realized.

The shuttle shuddered. Wilson worked a joystick before him, experimentally. “Aerosurfaces are biting. This thing actually flies. Jesus, I’m beginning to think we might live through this.” He glanced at Helen. “You understand we’re inside the atmosphere. We’re not falling, we’re gliding, flying. And that pull you feel isn’t deceleration-”

“Gravity.”

He grinned. “Authentic planetary gravity, pulling on your bones for the first time since you were in the womb.”

It wasn’t as bad as the peak deceleration, but she was still so heavy she felt she could barely breathe.

A speaker crackled. “… Halivah. Shuttle B, Halivah. Can you hear me? Shuttle B, this is Halivah-”

Wilson snapped a switch. “We’re out of the plasma sheath. My God, Venus, what a ride!”

“We saw you. We still see you, in fact. I’ll let you fly your bird. Let us know when your skids are down on the ground. Halivah out.”

“Copy that. Let’s see what we got.” Wilson pressed his joystick forward, and the shuttle’s nose dipped.

The world tipped up, revealing itself to Helen for the first time. The land below was dark. They were still so high the horizon showed a curve. The sky was a deep, somber shade of red, but it brightened as she looked ahead toward the horizon. And there she saw an arc of fire, a vast sun lifting above the curve of the world, the M-sun that illuminated this super-Earth. Now, near the horizon, she saw a chain of mountains whose peaks caught the light, shining like a string of lanterns in the dark. She remembered what Venus had said, about the possibility of organisms like trees straining up out of the shadow of the twilight band to catch the fugitive light.

The shuttle dipped sharply into the thickening air. This world’s dense, stormy atmosphere was turbulent.

The events of the descent unfolded rapidly now. The world steadily flattened out to become a landscape. That sun hauled its bulk wearily above the horizon, huge and distorted into a flattened ellipse by some atmospheric effect. It was white, tinged faintly pink, scarcely red at all. The little ship crossed the mountains with their brightly lit summits, and they flew over the terminator, the unmoving boundary of night.

As they fled over sunlit ground a panel on the console lit up with an animated map, based on observations from the orbiting Ark. Helen peered down. The ground was rocky, a continental shield, wrinkled with mountains and cracked by huge crevasses. Much of it was coated with old, dirty ice that gleamed pinkly in the sun’s low light. She had studied sims of Earth landscapes from the air, recordings made before the flood; this was something like flying low over the Canadian Shield. She made a mental note to report that impression back to Venus.

“Shit,” Wilson said. He grabbed his controls, left hand for translational control and the right for attitude, and hauled, overriding the automated systems. The shuttle obediently banked right.

Helen looked ahead. A vast volcano, almost like Olympus on Earth II but more compact and clearly active, sprawled ahead of them. She could see wisps of some dark gas escaping from the complicated multiple calderas at its summit.

Wilson said, “We don’t want to fly through a pillar of lumpy hot air, or into the volcano’s side, though I trust the shuttle not to do that.”

The shuttle sped past the flank of the volcano. Looking down Helen saw patches of black, sheer darkness like blankets of plastic, clinging to old lava flows.

“More mountains up ahead,” Wilson muttered, eyes fixed, the flaws in his stubbly flesh picked out by the glow of the low sun.

The approaching mountains were a multiple sawtooth chain, dead ahead, a geological system hundreds of kilometers deep. They were silhouetted from Helen’s point of view. She compared the view with the animated map on the console, which showed a dotted red line and a cartoon shuttle swooping over a jagged mass. “They’re right where they should be, Wilson.”

“Good. And so are we. In which case we should come on our landing site soon.”

The mountains swept beneath their prow. Their flanks were gouged by glaciers, ice glowing pink-white on the rock. The parallel ranges fell away, dissolving into foothills, themselves young and sharp-edged. Now ahead of them lay a plain, barren and strewn with rock, with a sheet of ice beyond it, the surface of a frozen lake. The shuttle dipped sharply, heading for the lake, its destination obvious.

“Right on the nose,” Wilson said. “That lake’s the nearest thing to a natural landing strip we spotted. I hope everybody’s still strapped in.”

Helen glanced over her shoulder. The low sun shone straight into the cabin, bathing the children’s faces with its eerie pinkish light-eerie now, but maybe in a couple of years they’d get used to it. The children sat slumped in the gravity, though they mostly seemed awake. Some were crying, and others looked as if they had soiled themselves, or been sick. Helen forced a smile. “Not long now. Just hold on-”

The shuttle dropped sharply. She gasped, fearing she was falling.

“Sorry,” Wilson muttered. “Air pocket. This damn air is just as thick as we thought, but lumpier, more turbulent. A real stew. Here we go, initiating final descent sequence.” He tapped a switch, and gripped his controls hard. Now he and the autopilot were sharing the flying of the shuttle between them, though Wilson always had the casting vote.

There was a clatter from beneath her feet, and a roar of air.

Alarmed, she asked, “What the hell’s that? Has a pump broken?”

Wilson just laughed, without taking his eyes off the scene outside the window. “The landing gear just dropped. And that’s no busted pump, that’s the wind, baby. Here we go. Coming down fast now…” He fell silent, watching the fleeing landscape, tracking monitors that showed his speed and altitude and rate of descent. The shuttle shuddered again as its aerosurfaces bit into the thick air.

They passed a last chain of hills. They were already beneath the summits of the highest of them, Helen saw. Then the shoreline of the frozen lake fled beneath their prow, its edge marked by parallel bands in the ice, as if the lake had melted and refrozen repeatedly. Evidence of volcano summers; every so often, Venus had advised her, a big enough eruption would inject so much carbon dioxide into the air that the temperature globally would climb, maybe for years. She wished Venus were here, talking her through this, holding her hand.

The shuttle shook again and dropped some more. Now they were flying very low over the lake. In the light of the sun Helen could see detail, rocks and scraps of ice scattered over the surface, fleeing beneath the prow.

Wilson muttered, “Nothing’s ever so smooth as it looks from space. As long as we miss those itty-bitty rocks with our skids, we’ll be fine. Coming down easy now. A hundred meters up. Eighty. Sixty. Woah-” He hauled on the translational control and the shuttle banked sharply right. Helen saw a field of ice boulders that had been right in their path. When he had the shuttle pointed toward a clearer track, Wilson released the control, and let the automated systems level the bird up again. “That was close.”

Helen pointed dead ahead. “We’re kind of near the shore.” Beyond which more hilly ground rose up, looking rough and rock-strewn, and mottled with that strange black color.

Wilson grinned. “Maybe, but we only get one pass at this, girl. Let’s hope we got enough room.” A monitor chimed; the radar altimeter showed they were only ten meters up. “Here we go…” He pressed the handle forward gently. The lake lifted up to meet them.

The skids hit the ice. The shuttle rattled and skipped back up into the air, and Helen clung on to her couch. The shuttle dropped again, and bounced, and then she heard a squeal of metal as the skids scraped along the ice sheet. There was another bang, and Helen was thrown forward against her restraints, as if some great hand had grabbed the rear of the craft.

“Chutes deployed!” Wilson called. “Wow, what a ride this is.”

With the parachutes dragging at the thick air, the shuttle soon slowed. The last few meters, as the skids bumped over every rock and ice block in their path, were jarring. Then the shuttle swiveled through a few degrees, and slid sideways for another dozen meters, before coming to a halt.

Wilson punched a button. “Chutes jettisoned. First job is to collect the silk, we’re going to need it later…” He looked stunned. He tapped his microphone. “Halivah, shuttle B. We’re down, down in one piece. Yeah! We’re down,” he repeated more quietly, and he looked over at Helen. “Now what?”