“They’ll be here in the morning,” he said, trying to project confidence. If Kali and Toran don’t start the War of Unification first.
Ai glanced at him apprehensively. “And if they don’t?”
“I’ll work something out.”
He reached up and tugged open the edge of her jacket. She let her hands fall to her sides and the jacket hang open, the embroidery on her midnight blue shirt catching the fading light. He saw the image of a creature with the wings of a hawk and the featherless neck, snake-like head, and sharp teeth of a plesiosaur. It stretched its wings across her chest until the tips of its feathers touched her arms, and it breathed fire from its mouth, the flames curling over her heart.
“What is it?” he asked.
Ai pulled the shirt at her waist to stretch out the design. “It’s—what’s the old word? It’s my ‘spirit.’”
“You breathe fire?”
She smiled shyly, looking up at him and biting her lip. “I can. If I have to.”
He studied the creature and its colored feathers. Wouldn’t it burn itself with its own fire? If it did, would it grow again and be the same?
Alon looked out to sea. There was something fiercer out there, on the other side of the horizon—something that ate only air and water but was more dangerous than any mythical animal: a storm raised in the dense atmosphere of a super-Earth, wound up by the Coriolis force of a twenty-hour day, and fed by three thousand kilometers of tropical sea. Neither Earth nor Athena had seen anything like it in a billion years, and this island wouldn’t slow it down.
Tonight the two of them would have to climb to a cave in the valley wall, one high enough to be above the storm surge. If the lava tunnel he’d seen in the morning wasn’t safe, or if Ai couldn’t rappel the cliff, they would have to anchor in a depression at the end of the valley. They would ride out the storm tied to each other and the bedrock. Without the safety of a cave, it was likely he and Ai would die slowly, drowning in the surge or blowing over volcanic rock in cyclonic winds. Even in the cave, they might not be safe from flooding and the wind. Either way, the two of them would be together as long as he could hold onto her.
His eyes had been blue when he fell from the sky three days ago, but the sea of Keto had turned them green, and now they were gray under the gathering clouds.
Asymptote of History
Year 5314
Mission Time: Day One, 06:00
Fuck.
Kali twisted the abort handle clockwise one stop. The mesh and diacom frame of her couch vibrated against her body from the distant hit of a shattered turbo-pump impeller. Forty meters below, a chaotic rush of oxygen and methane flushed the crystalline fragments out the lander’s tail into the oncoming mesosphere.
“Four out, startup on three!” she shouted into the helmet mike. “Surface abort—same target!”
The lander rocked under her back as its engines shifted fuel between power heads to stay on course. Three of the five engines were running at low throttle, aiming down the lander’s shallow flight path, shielding it from re-entry plasma. The concentric oxygen and methane tanks of the propulsion stage were almost empty, only full enough for a final burst at touchdown. The lander would reach Keto—the only question was where and how fast. Long and it would go into the volcano on the other side of the island; short and it would hit the water off the coast.
“Same speed?” Alon asked, from her right.
“Yeah, same speed!” She knew he was needling her. The lander had five engines; it could land on one, take off on three. It had a lot of redundancy—losing one engine wasn’t a problem. Her eyes caught the heart rate monitor on the instrument panel. Ai’s was pinned at a bird-like one-eighty; Alon’s had already fallen back to resting. She didn’t want to know what it would take to raise that bastard’s heart rate.
Kali’s eyes went to a mirror-sheet above the instrument panel. Lying with the planet over her head, her view cut off by her helmet, she could only see the surface in the sheet’s reflection of the overhead window. The water was streaked with red and green eddies that looked like some lousy painter’s abstract spatterings. It reminded her of a stagnant lake in the south-west of Senta—a stinking pot of misguided life otherwise known as the main water supply of Duth. An entire ocean gone rotten. Fuck it.
“Good trajectory,” she said. “Two minutes!”
The engines were kicking her in the back now, and the flight path arcing down. Kali glanced at the flow indicators on the engine panel to see the pumps sucking down rising volumes of fuel and oxy. Speed was bleeding off at the correct rate. Too fast and the lander would crash into the surface; too slow and it would run out of fuel mid-air—and crash. But the right speed would put the lander over the target with enough fuel to touch down gently.
“Ninety seconds!” she said.
The paper-thin diacom shell of the lander transmitted every cycle of engine volume, ringing the capsule like a bell and filling her helmet with a roar. In the mirror-sheet, she could see waves on the ocean below—the heaving water, and the spray in the wind. Keto was close now.
They could have gone to Shinju and gotten a beer and a sandwich, or shots and a local lay. But, no, Alon had to come here for the ineffable science, and the anthropologist Toran, for the first time since launch, had agreed with him. That wouldn’t happen again; home star Apollo would fry Athena first. Fuck ’em both.
“Sixty!”
The lander tipped vertical and Kali’s seat rotated ninety degrees forward, taking her to a sitting position at the landing window in the side of the capsule. Her hands hovered over the rotational controllers. The window showed blue sky before the surface of Keto rotated in through the bottom. The lander glided forward rapidly over the dirty ocean, standing on its tail. She pictured it blasting up a nice rooster tail of steam behind.
The island was a black hole in a shit-stained sea. It looked like the hump of one of those ancient black and white sea monsters the Einstein zoo incubated now and again, frozen as it surfaced to suck up the air. Apparently, the last one had eaten more than one keeper and they still had it. Must not be edible. Fuck it, too.
She touched two fingers of her glove to her visor as if to kiss them and tapped the Global Astro-Dynamics logo under the window. GAD, don’t let me screw up now!
The lander aimed at a spot on the beast’s tail, its efforts to stay upright swinging the capsule back and forth under her. Alon had poured over multispectral charts for hours, digging into the island from orbit, to find the one piece of land that could hold the lander’s million-kilogram max takeoff weight—a volcanic plug on the south side. That was it: Keto spaceport. Zero facilities; no alternate destination.
She felt a change in the vibration under her elbows and saw a flash of yellow in the heads-up overlay. Tumbling spindle on number three high-pressure fuel pump. Another one down? She watched the indicator bounce off the edge of red. The lander had throttled the engine down—no shutdown, still intact. The next engine was ramping up in its place.
A layer of clouds was condensing on the top slope of the mountain. To the northwest, Kali could see craggy valleys on a rain-soaked coast. To the east, thick columns of steam and vog climbed from the shore where the lava hit the ocean.
The plain rose quickly, but the lander knew what to do. Kali felt it tilt as it steered—small changes of thrust balancing it in the air like a stick on a fingertip. It pitched sideways to neutralize the crosswind, then backward to slow to a hover over the target. Dust and gravel shot out from beneath as the engines brushed the surface clean. A moment before the engines cut out, the gear pyros fired like the final volley of a Seed-Day firework show. The lander sank in a gentle, slow-motion bounce.
Kali waited for any indication of ground fire or surface collapse, but the lander was still and all the indicators green.
The turbo-pumps whined distantly as they spun down from their ridiculous operating speeds, and the early morning sunlight streamed in the window onto the storage bins on her left
. She relaxed, punched in the safing commands, and hit her harness release with the bottom of her fist. Spinning around in her chair, she rose on one knee to look up at Ai and Alon.
“Nailed it!” she shouted, slamming one glove into the other. She twisted her helmet off and let it bang onto the deck. Her hair exploded in a wavy mess as she pulled off her cloth cap. “First match,” she said, grinning.
Alon pushed up on an elbow to look at her. “What’s an impeller or two?”
No fuck ups! The hardware could blow out all day long for all Kali cared, as long as she didn’t have to go down in history as the one who rode it into the ground. She felt like she’d hammered the ball from her hip to the ramp and over the goal line seconds from the end of the toughest ballgame of the season. It was the clean shot she’d hoped for, the opening win she’d needed; it was their first landing on another world.
She’d come a long way from flying Vertels, and a long, long way from Athena.
Still on her back in her couch, Ai fumbled with her buckle but couldn’t unlatch it. She lay for a moment before pulling her gloves off and turning a pale hand over in front of her faceplate. Kali could see Ai’s fingers shake. Ai studied them carefully, as if measuring the full amplitude of her nerves.
Hey, Shortie—I’m gonna graph your heart rate for a laugh, Kali thought. But with Alon lying there, she cut off the urge say it. She didn’t want her name on his shit-list; that could be life-limiting. Bastard.
Kali turned and sank back into her seat. Out the window she could see a terrain of humps, cracks, faults, and vents—a twisted maze with no solution that went on for kilometers. It swept from the sea to the distant mountain without a tree or bush or blade of grass to get in the way. Its starkness gave her pause. It wasn’t the pretty little island she’d expected.
Damn, she thought, that’s empty.
∞
Ai rested her fingers on the handle of the capsule door and knew she couldn’t open it.
Opening the door might affect the lives of millions or it might affect almost no one—but it would certainly affect the crew in the lander and in the starship The Child of Ambition. In the history of Earth, when the continents met, millions had died from the exchange of microorganisms. How many more might die when the worlds of the Network came together?
She stared out the small, round window in the door, her fingers resting on the cold surface of the handle. The door—its locking pins removed—would open easily when the time came, the handle traveling through a slight detent and the door swinging inward. She only had to apply a little force; she knew that from training.
On the other side of the window, Ai could see the rugged surface climbing toward the mountain in the distance. The illuminated strip of paper above the door had good numbers for the air on the other side: high oxygen, low carbon dioxide, the temperature of a crisp morning. A dash of light brushed her wrist—the ethereal touch of the world outside.
The crew sat or stood around the T-shaped interior of the lander mid-deck. Alon rested a paper on the counter by the galley to the left, sniping at rocks with lasers for a quick-hit experiment that would be irrelevant as soon as Ai opened the door. The others were watching her: the partners Galia and Manus, climatologist and zoologist, standing in the corridor between the systems bay and equipment lockers; Toran, Academician of Anthropology and student of human history, sitting on the right at the comm station; and Kali, sprawled on a re-entry couch in the center. Ai felt their eyes, and the lenses of their glasses, on her. The glasses issued for the mission didn’t have the red light on the civilian ones, but they were recording, and so were a half-dozen optical wall-strips around the cabin. Everything she did would be replayed for a long time to come; it made her feel uncomfortably self-conscious.
The hair tucked behind her ear fell free. It formed a black curtain at the side of her face, blocking the view of the cabin out the corner of her eye. She let it hang, not feeling the need to brush it back.
The risk of infectious transfer had been argued over for years before their departure. Most Athenians had little fear of diseases—there’d been no reason to bring them from Earth and not enough time for new ones to evolve—but the dangers were understood by historians and biologists. Many of the biologists believed the problem was overwhelming—that it was better the worlds live alone than die together. Others had worked with the engineers and mission planners to develop a protocol: The crew would go through airlocks, quarantines, and decontamination procedures. Their equipment would be recycled, their clothes burned, and their skin swarm-scrubbed and flash-sterilized. They wouldn’t enter the biosphere of another world until proven free of species from the one before, even if that meant they could never go home to Athena. On every landing, a crew member would be assigned to assess the risk and break the seal between the lander and the world outside. That was Ai’s job.
The most important part of the protocol: they could never visit Earth. The risk was too great. In that sense, they could never go home, even if Eresh, the liquid metal morph that controlled The Child, was willing to take them. No one from a seed world could ever visit Earth and return to the Network.
Ai smiled to herself, turning her head so Kali couldn’t see the smirk on her face. She had once threatened to kill anyone who tried to go to Earth, and she hadn’t been exaggerating that much. If it was Kali or Alon, it would be a short fight—three grappling sessions a week with Zansai wouldn’t help—but it would be the right thing to fight for. It was her own little secret mission—fun in a way, but serious. Ai: Defender of Worlds, Protector of Seed-Kind.
Kali sprawled on the G-couch, half lying, half sitting, with her legs apart and her head on the shock strut. Her hair was no more organized than the moment after the landing. She had deep bronze skin, a straight nose, a wide mouth, and thin lips that curled when she grinned, and her amber eyes were flecked with gold. Her eyebrows, inherited from some more elegant ancestor, were arched brushstrokes over her eyes; but when she smiled, lines formed in her cheeks around her mouth, and her face took on a subtle asymmetry.
Kali was authentic—she had no designer. Natural born and unchanged, she was afraid of nothing, and didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. The Astrocorps flight suit, with its patches for her old Northern Armed Forces unit, combat ribbons, and gold-arrow emblem for the mission of The Child, gave her strutting rights she didn’t need. She’d been born with a full supply of confidence. Ai wished she could steal a vial of it for the day she needed a shot.
Kali pulled a meal packet from her thigh pocket—a half-eaten, dry, compressed fruit cake—and chewed off a mouthful. She glanced up, saw Ai looking back, and asked, “So?”
“Last chance for the full PPP,” Ai said.
“I went already.”
Ai snorted more than she laughed. “I meant the planetary protection thing…”
“You ran the remotes?”
Ai sighed and leaned down to peer through the small porthole at the empty plain below. “Not much there now, just some cyanobacteria…”
“What’s the chance some of those primal prokies could be infectious?”
“Toxic,” Ai countered. “They could be toxic.” To be infectious, an organism would need some degree of adaptation to human biology, but to be poisonous, it would just need to emit any of a wide array of simple molecules. Ai had analyzed the probe results and not found anything scary—low concentrations of some neuro- and hepatotoxins.
“Hard to do this trip in suits,” Kali said. “You’re going to smell like a bag of shit with a hat on.”
Ai didn’t respond. Out the window, the surface of Keto was empty of trees, bushes, birds, and even weeds and lizards. Nothing moved. The remotes in the sea had shown no signs of animal life either. Ai had hoped to find, against all available data, some larger aquatic species—a whale, a shark, or even a tuna. They were all banned on Athena to protect the local sea life—primitive arthropods and corals and the like. She knew the Earth species only from children’s storie
s, technical works, and the occasional zoo specimen. She’d never seen a real whale like a humpback or a blue whale. In her imagination, at least, Keto was the perfect place for them.
“You’re still worried about this?” Toran asked.
The anthropologist leaned forward in his chair, holding his hands out with thumbs and forefingers touching in a triangle. He was tall—the tallest of the crew, beyond the usual legal limits of engineered height. Like Kali, he was natural born, but all the Syncretists were, for centuries back. His face was tall and his chin prominent under his goatee, his mouth and nose straight, and his forehead furrowed in three distinct lines as he looked up. His hair was short, dark, and curly, and his skin tanned olive even after three months in interspace. He never had a shortage of things to say, but he rarely smiled, and he wasn’t smiling now. His voice was more that of a professional than a friend—like the voice of a therapist probing Ai to see what made her brain light up.
Toran wore black pants tucked into the top of his boots; a white shirt with loose sleeves, open at the neck; and—in a change from orbit—a black waistcoat. Ai thought he looked like some ancient poet or prince, mysteriously tortured by some unexplained crime or horror, who might become absorbed scribbling with a finger on a piece of paper. Or, with the addition of the waistcoat, like a man who had stepped off a large boat operating under a black flag, or from one of those old, colorless wallvids with a lot of shooting over an ungulate.
Some opportunities for needling came to mind, but it would be worth waiting for a slower day to fast-forward some of those vids. Her sense of ancient fashion was weak, and perhaps an allusion to some more sinister kind of zealot would be more appropriate. But Toran wasn’t a good target for her sense of humor—he wasn’t likely to respond with the kind of puzzled laugh or mild flash of anger she liked to provoke. He didn’t get it, or he chose not to. But it was fun to get so many centuries of analogy out of clothing that was so simple, at once austere and something of an affectation.
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