He needed to focus on his own mission, not on Alon’s.
∞
Has he no fear?
Toran sat pressed into the charcoal webbing of his seat as the helicopter—AHV-201, the Hummingbird—banked over the plain and headed for the coast. On his left, Alon sat in the open door, leaning half out of his seat, his hand on the center pillar, as if about to jump for the surface a thousand meters below. As the geologist stuck his head into the slipstream, Toran could see the multispectral overlays flickering inside his glasses.
“The ancients called it Apalhraun,” Alon said on the intercom, his voice as flat as ever. “Or `A`a. If you think what we landed on was bad, try walking on that slag—you’ll learn why they called it that.”
As the ocean filled the view ahead, Kali leveled the helicopter. The vibration of the seat against Toran’s back and the blustering of the wind in the open doors was hypnotic, but he forced himself to maintain awareness. He scanned the dusty red rubble below for signs of what he was searching for, but didn’t find them. The noon sun streamed in the overhead windows and warmed the back of his head.
Walls, domes, platforms, antennae, a reactor building, the concrete stanchions of windmills, roads, perhaps even runways or landing pads. Rectilinear features. The glint of diacom in the rocks. That’s what he wanted to find. The ruins were so old they had melded into the landscape—they were made of the local rock and had been weathered by many, many storms. Studying every valley on the island in orbital observations, he’d found nothing. But he was sure the ruins existed, and perhaps he could find them now, from the air.
In the morning, he’d helped Kali roll the helicopter from its container at the foot of the lander, then watched as she unfolded it, following her checklist step-by-step. Packed in the container, it was only about two meters by five, but with the pins and locks in place, its tail extended another five and its rotors ten meters across. Working on the other side of the lander, Manus and Galia had deployed the more aptly named Dragonfly, AHV-202, stocky Manus doing the work while Galia hovered nearby, checking every step.
Toran turned and leaned toward the center of the helicopter for a better view over the instrument panel. His left hand rested on the back of Kali’s seat, and he reached out a long finger to touch her shoulder. Without looking back, she thumbed the microphone switch on the cyclic in a click of acknowledgment. Beyond the bubble of the cockpit, a line of white surf broke on the jagged black rock at the edge of the land.
“How are you navigating without the satellites?” Toran asked. Setona, the captain, had vetoed deployment of the positioning and communications array before The Child of Ambition entered orbit—it would take too long for the ion engines on the satellites to drift them into precise enough orbits. Out of earshot of Global Astrodynamics and its political supporters, Setona had questioned whether the overhead of the array would ever make it worth deploying, but it certainly wasn’t over Keto.
“Can you see the sea?” Kali leveled the helicopter in a moment of turbulence.
“Sure,” he said.
“So can I.”
Toran sank back, his eyes coming to rest unfocused on the chrome frame of the seat in front and the back of Ai’s head. He’d flown in aircars many times on Athena, but the experience was anemic compared to the helicopter. The doors and windows of the aircars never opened in flight, and the only sound the cars made was a hiss—none of this noise of blades and drive shafts. The maintenance needs of the cars had led Global Astrodynamics to propose helicopters instead. Molecular fan-tops clogged too quickly with dust and had to be regularly scrubbed at a ground station. The helicopters were more robust; they could haul a larger loads in a dirtier environment without ground facilities.
Toran felt himself relax as the novelty of the flight wore off and it seemed like nothing would immediately go wrong. Over the headrest directly in front of him, Ai’s shiny black hair curled around her ear. He brushed her right shoulder gently with his fingers and she looked back at him, startled.
“Rectilinear features,” he said. “Anything that catches the light.”
She smiled back at him, raised a thumb, and twisted in her seat to look out the window. Toran turned to study the ground with her. The prayer-visualization in the morning had told him what to say, not how she would react. It was another point of data on her—frightened by a touch, excited by a shared task. He still wasn’t sure what to make of her. Superficially, she seemed bright and enthusiastic, but she sometimes did unexpected things. He wasn’t sure why and he didn’t trust her completely.
As the helicopter reached the coast, Kali rolled it into a thirty-degree bank. Out the side door, Toran could see the ragged edge of the coast below, and the spattering foam line of surf at its base. He imagined the roar of the ocean as the waves destroyed themselves on the brittle sea walls, but he couldn’t hear it over the drone of the rotor.
“See the layers,” Alon said, swiveling the other direction in his seat and pointing at the coast on Toran’s side. “It’s a big pile of junk.” The geological overlay in his glasses reflected a rainbow of colors in his eyes. “In the cliffs—you can see the flows piled up on each other. Ash then lava, ash then lava. That gap—that’s the end of a lava tunnel. This plain is riddled with tunnels. If the lava is hot enough when it comes out, it goes underground. It can tunnel all the way to the sea.”
Alon had his cover down—Toran had to give him that. A Shinigami would always deploy with an identity and a story.
Kali leveled the helicopter and aimed it up the coastline. Ahead the cliffs rose, cut by a series of increasingly deep valleys. Far to the north, the clouds near the coast were sweeping the ocean with gray sheets of rain. To the east, the top of the mountain was hidden under a smooth blanket of cloud. But above the helicopter, the sky was blue, and the light of the sun streamed in the top windows and glowed on the chrome of the seats. The first valley passed below. Pools of still water strewn along the otherwise dry river channel caught the light here and there, forming a shimmering trail that led to the mountain.
“The cliffs ahead are from landslides,” Alon continued. “As flows accumulate from the center, the island slumps away at the edges. The valleys follow major faults, cutting through its weak points.” Alon leaned toward Kali and pointed, his arm between the seats, at the view out the front. “The big one is farther up. We want to land partway down it.”
“Got it,” she replied. She guided the helicopter away from the sea, putting the coast on the left. Toran looked inland, taking up the search again for traces of the seed or its base. The land beneath rose as the next valley wall approached; Kali increased the power and pushed the stick forward to climb over the ridge.
As the land fell away into the next valley, she looked west to the sea. “Got a beach on this one,” she said. “I don’t think I can land, though.” The bottom was forbidding, the steep sides of the valley meeting in a “V” with little space between.
“No?” Ai said, straining for a view past Kali. “It would be too perfect.”
“You bring your skin-suit and your parasol?” Alon asked. On Athena, the UV was fierce and there wasn’t much bare skin at the beach.
Kali laughed. “I got all the protection I need right here, cancer man.” She held up a bronze hand.
“Ha! You’ll burn my eyes out.”
“I’ll scrape the tumors off your ass, right after I take a swim.”
Alon laughed and slapped the back of Kali’s headrest.
Toran glanced forward. A yellow rectangle had started blinking on the instrument panel below the glare shield.
“Something up?” he asked.
Kali touched the indicator, but it relit a moment later. She tapped it a second time. The space stayed dark for ten long seconds while the helicopter cruised on. Then it lit again in solid red.
“Oh, crap,” Kali said.
“Not good…?” Toran asked.
“Chip detect. Hold on—going to cut this short. Might see that beach
after all.”
Kali pointed the helicopter inland toward the next valley, letting it glide over the sharp rise of the valley wall. Toran straightened up in his seat, his mood cooling instantly and his body tensing.
The intercom was silent for a few seconds before Ai asked, “What’s chipping?”
“Power-train,” Kali replied tersely.
Toran sank back in his seat and pulled his straps tighter. He didn’t have to be a pilot to know they were too low for the blade separation system—the parachute on the roof by the mast would never open in time. He watched the top of the ridge glide by two hundred meters below. His eyes caught on a boulder the size of the helicopter balancing on the edge of the cliff; it hung there just shy of a thousand meter fall to the bottom.
The ridge gave way to the next valley. Kali cut the power to idle. She lowered the tail and let the helicopter drop steeply toward the valley floor, its rotor windmilling. This valley had more surface area than the last—a low plateau and a twisting riverbed with pools in its meanders. The helicopter was falling to a point between the talus slope and the river.
When he saw individual boulders on the plateau, Toran stopped breathing.
“Belts, buckles, doors!” Kali ordered. At the last moment, she turned the helicopter into the wind to kill its forward speed and pulled on the cyclic to stop its descent. The touchdown was firm but not hard, the skids flexing and grinding into the gravel.
Kali breathed out in a burst of static on the intercom, then stabbed at the center console with her finger. “Engine, avionics, power…” she muttered as she went through the checklist.
Toran could see individual blades passing overhead as the rotor spun quickly to a stop.
“I hope you all like this valley,” Kali said over the descending whir, “’cause we’re going to be here for a little while.”
Breakage Factor
The helicopter sat on the edge of the plateau looking like a stranded housefly. Specifically, it looked like the thousand-scale giant housefly outside the Temple of Science in Curie. Kali remembered running in and out of its legs as a child, swinging from its mandibles and kicking it in the tail. Its feet had been rooted in concrete, and the Hummingbird’s skids might as well be planted the same way. Kali stood with her hands on her hips and sighed. The thing was junked already, and the only upside was that she wasn’t the one that screwed it up.
The Hummingbird’s engine was built into the rotor shaft—a series of concentric cylinders driven around each other by the armatures of billions of molecular-scale electric motors. The outer-most cylinder was bolted to the keel and the inner-most to the rotor; the whole engine only weighed about fifteen kilograms. It was extruded as a single piece from top to bottom, nanoscale motors in place; there was no way to take it apart and nothing on a human scale to fix inside.
Atoms being what they are, motors would fail from time to time, and the debris could cause adjacent motors to fail. To prevent this, the motors were built in strips with channels in between to capture dislodged elements. But if enough motors failed, the accumulated debris would overflow the channels. Once that happened, the engine would go into cascading failure, one strip annihilating another. The chip-detect warning on the instrument panel indicated approaching channel overflow.
Kali had pushed the limits keeping the helicopter in the air long enough to get to the next valley. Cascade could lead to engine seizure. The operating rules said, “Land now; argue with the laws of physics later.”
But cascade was a low probability event; these engines almost never failed on Athena—the mean time between failures was measured in kiloannums. It was a puzzle. Why would the engine fail now? There was no good reason for it.
Alon stood at the nose of the helicopter and drew an upward curving sad-mouth on it with a finger. “It’s a spice grinder now,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Kali replied, incensed. The whole damn thing was frustrating. Alon just laughed and walked to the edge of the plateau to look at the pool in the oxbow of the meander below. “Take a dive!” she shouted after him.
Those credits better be in the account. She’d flown two minimally powered, one-shot, do-or-die, first time, unsimulated vertical landings in one day, on an alien world, and aced both. The first had mostly been the lander’s computer, but that hadn’t stopped her putting it in her log; the second was all her own. Not that she would see the money for a few years, but she’d earned it.
Ai pulled a big, yellow box from the storage pod under the helicopter—her biomolecular field sequencer. Kali watched her drag it away, struggling to lift it. It wasn’t heavy, just bulky, and it banged against Ai’s leg as she walked. Kali leaned into the helicopter, set a two hundred meter altitude for the antenna balloon, and pulled the release. The balloon flopped out of its container on the top of the mast and immediately started to inflate. It would take ten or fifteen minutes to extract enough hydrogen from the water in the atmosphere, but then it would hoist the antenna high enough for line-of-sight contact with the lander.
Toran hovered beside her.
“Been living in a tube too long,” Kali said. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Here we are—by the grace of God.”
The way he said it, looking at her with a subtle one sided smile, told her he was needling her for some purpose of his own. “God or GAD?” she replied.
“GAD—not so graceful.”
“You didn’t like my landing?” He’d walked away from it, so he had no right to criticize her.
Toran shrugged and smiled. “I’ve no complaints about that.”
“Good,” she said. “Then find something else to do.” An anthropologist on a dead world was just so much live ballast as far as Kali was concerned. At least he could go consume someone else’s volatiles for a while instead of exhausting her short supply.
But he didn’t show any sign of leaving her alone. “Not fixable?” he asked.
“Not with anything down here,” Kali replied.
“‘Chip detect’?”
“Built-in failure sensor.”
“What’s the plan, then?”
“Relax,” she said. “We’ve got a comm pass in less than an hour.” The Child’s polar orbit took it directly over the island twice a day and Kali had scheduled the flight to end before it was overhead. “We’ll work something out.”
Plan A, of course, was to fly the second helicopter out on automatic, although that meant abandoning the Hummingbird. The thought didn’t make Kali happy, but it was nice to know the worst case would only mean an inconvenience for the rest of the mission.
The land around the helicopter was flat for a few meters between the drop-off to the river on one side and the foothills of the canyon wall on the other. Kali rolled out two black sheets from the underside pod and weighed the ends down with rocks. The surface area of the helicopter wasn’t enough to collect much sunlight, but the light-absorbing sheets would charge the heli’s fractal batteries to make up any loss from the radios.
The time for the pass arrived quickly; Kali climbed into the pilot’s seat to tune in. Alon sat sprawled in the back like he owned it, Ai slipped into the second front seat quietly, and Toran hovered in the shadow of the tail, still wearing that ridiculous black hat. For a minute, before The Child rose above the valley wall, there was no signal.
Kali explained the engine failure.
“Hetal is looking at your telemetry,” Setona said.
“Hey—Stiletto…?” Kali said.
“Yeah, shoot me.” Hetal’s voice was throaty, just shy of harsh—a classic accent from Sagan on the sub-arctic northeast coast of North Athena. Slightly taller than Ai, she had the body of a dancer and wasn’t afraid to show it. The other technicians had called her “Stiletto” when she entered the zero-g drive-head in high heels and a miniskirt, but she’d adopted the name enthusiastically. She’d infamously argued with Setona’s “no undeclared, non-pre-existing relationships” policy by making the case a “group
share” in the dojo would be better for crew cohesion. Setona had, just as infamously, settled the argument by throwing the squawk list up on the bridge wallpaper—row after row of maintenance tickets opened in the first two weeks of flight.
Stiletto was old, no matter what age she looked. She was on her fourth or fifth or sixth career, depending on whether you counted only the public ones, or included the ones buried in her file, and how you classified the ones without classification in the Occupational Term Limits Act. She had three advanced degrees, all in math and hard sciences, children and grandchildren, and a list of lovers she’d stopped updating because it took too long to find the end. She’d argued for a position on The Child by saying it didn’t matter at her age if she came back, and then had to prove she’d live longer than the mission. She’d filed an elaborate statistical estimate of the date of her own death, which she put, with 95% confidence, at least three to five cycles beyond the journey’s end, long enough for a publicity tour. But like most older Athenians, she looked a fraction of her age, and would until the day she started a rapid, terminal decline to death. The days she had left she was living at full burn.
Kali wanted to be like Hetal when she was old—living on the edge with a sense of style.
“What are the parameters on the chip detect?” she asked.
“By the time the light’s on, five percent chance of cascade in the next five minutes.”
“Can I get it back to the lander?”
“If it takes you twenty-five minutes to get back, you’ve got around a one in four chance of going down,” Stiletto said. “It’s a hard landing, Kali. Engine seizes, rotors won’t turn—no autorotate. On average, you lose one person.”
“I get to choose who?”
“No. That’s just a dumb average. Don’t do it.”
“I want to bring 202 in on auto.”
“What I think—we turned the engines over in orbit before we crated the HVs. I think the cold soak in the interspace got to them. Uneven heat transfer between cylinders. Sorry, Chief—we shredded your drive up here long before you got to play with it. Needed more of a warmup before going into action.”
White Seed Page 4