132: DROP

There is the slightest shake as the arms release us, and then the complete cessation of gravity. Nothing moves us. No sounds come from outside our pod. We can’t see anything out there. It’s just this small drop pod, and us, and nothing else.

The illusion is broken by Sam’s voice on the radio. “Release complete. Pod 1, what’s your status?”

Captain Klees’ response is a strangled squeak. “All fine! Everything’s fine, Courageous. We’re all doing great in here.”

“You can expect to hit wind resistance in approximately seven and a half minutes. Don’t panic when the pod shakes, it’s normal. First parachute will deploy in nineteen minutes and even with the impulse engines to assist, it’s going to be a bit of a jolt. We’ll warn you to brace when the time comes.”

I find myself stiffening already. Breaking my neck due to being jerked around by a giant parachute would be the stupidest possible way to die. We’d had some minimal training for this part back on Earth, on what to expect during the descent, but that had been so long ago. It hadn’t seemed so terrifying then.

I tell myself that it’s just like going to Luna. Luna doesn’t have space elevators for passenger transport, it’s all powered descent. This is just like Luna, but with less powered descent and more parachutes. And more atmosphere. And more gravity, so much more gravity. And in a much more cramped space with no emergency response ships in case of a problem and no way to abort the descent.

Yeah.

The atmosphere is rough, when we hit it, but not nearly as rough as I’d been expecting. There’s some rocking until the engines orient us correctly, but there are so many layers insulating us from what I’m sure is a roaring inferno of chaos outside that as soon as we’re properly positioned it’s no worse than kite gliding, or sheltering in a diving bell during a sudden storm. We sit in silence, trying not to panic, until Sam’s voice returns.

“Courageous to Pod 1, you’re on course. Primary parachute release in t minus fifteen seconds. Get ready to – ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. Brace.”

I brace, and one second later everything is yanked violently upward. We’re jerked in our supports; my forehead slams into the front of my helmet. I move my head experimentally; the whiplash doesn’t seem too bad.

“Status?” Sam asks, and we all report in that we’re fine. “Right. Good. Hylara, I’m moving to the secondary channel to talk landing trajectories without distracting the team. Confirm switch. Over.”

“Hylara to Courageous, received and understood. Switching now. Over.”

The radios go quiet again. Personally, I could do with some distraction, even if it’s boring math talk. The primary parachute doesn’t have the full drag of the secondary one that’ll deploy when we’re closer to the ground; the job of the primary parachute is to slow us some without getting us dragged about by the wind as much as the larger parachute will. That doesn’t mean no dragging at all, though. From inside the pod, being shunted about by random gusts feels more chaotic than the high-velocity fireball of entering the upper atmosphere. (It might still be flaming hot out there, for all I know. I didn’t pay much attention to the physics of the whole situation. There was a lot of talk about entry angles and superheated atmospheric bow waves and critical velocities. All I know is that if we sit in this pod for long enough and nothing goes wrong, there will eventually be ground.)

Some time later, Sam checks back in to warn us of the secondary parachute and confirms our status again. Apparently there’s some unexpected low-level wind that the impulse engines will have to compensate for if we want to land in the vicinity of the colony, and the other two groups are debating whether we should ditch the parachute as soon as we’re low enough that the impulse engines can finish a powered descent, or parachute all the way down like we’re supposed to. “It’s fine,” Sam assures us. “Everything’s going well.”

“Bad idea,” Tal interjects. “All the people trained to use these pods are dead and you want to do an emergency powered descent onto an uneven surface? We have emergency oxygen and stuff. I’d rather land way off course and take the time to figure out a rescue than crash into the planet and die.”

“The issue probably won’t come up anyway,” Sam says. “The Hylarans are claiming a frankly ridiculous retrieval radius. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a wind change and you’ll land in the radius with the parachute.”

The next ten minutes are the slowest of the drop, until finally, with audible relief, Sam reports that the winds will indeed bring us well inside the colony’s reported retrieval radius. I’m still giddy with relief when Sam warns us to brace for touchdown. The engines kick in to slow our angle and cushion the landing, and we hit sand hard enough to jolt us severely but not break any bones. The pod sits at a bit of an angle; we might be on the side of a crater or something. But it could be a lot worse.

“Status?” Sam asks.

We report that we’re fine. Tinera’s reply is thick and clumsy, and upon being pressed she admits that she bit through her tongue. Other than that, nobody seems to have anything worse than a bruise, although it’s not easy to tell in our space suits.

“You’re clear to get up,” Sam says. “Hylara’s sending two people to retrieve you right now. They should reach you in thirty or forty minutes. Courageous out.”

“Fucking finally,” Tinera grumbles, working at her buckles. “Can we take the helmets off?”

“Let me verify the atmosphere first,” Captain Klees says. He unbuckles himself and heads on stiff, clumsy legs over to the control panel. “We have full pressure, breathable atmosphere. You can take your helmets off, but don’t desuit. We’ll probably need to go outside to get to the retrieval vehicle.”

I pull my own helmet off as soon as we get the go-ahead. I’m sure I look terrible; I can feel the hair plastered to my face with sweat. After seeing that the Friend has two black eyes (must’ve hit its face against the helmet at the wrong angle when we were being jerked around) and the blood crusting in the corner of Tinera’s mouth, I amend my assessment. I probably look fine.

“So now we wait more, I guess?” Tal asks.

“We should’ve brought a pack of cards,” Tinera says.

I flex my hands. “You want to play cards wearing space suit gloves? Good luck.”

“Everyone attempting to handle the cards could be entertaining in its own right,” the Friend says.

“I can’t help but think that this day has been much more exciting for everyone else trying to keep us alive than it has been for us.”

“Oh, I’ve had plenty of excitement,” Captain Klees says. “That descent was terrifying!”

“And we’re not dead!” Tinera cheers. “Hooray!”

The captain nods. “And we never have to do that again.”

We wait. We clean up as best we can with towels from the personal kits we brought down, and I check on my refrigerated eyeball (it looks fine).

A message comes through the space suit radios. “Pod 1, this is Hive. Max and I are here. You can come out.”

“You cane yourself?” Captain Klees asks, not even pretending to observe radio protocol any more. “Aren’t you on the radio with the ship?”

“Not any more. Drop’s done. Come on, let’s get you to the colony.”

We don our helmets, and clamber out of the drop pod. And nothing is what I expect.

Well, the planet is essentially what I expect. Yellow sand and muddy puddles under a cloud-covered sky. Miserable-looking. There’s no sand immediately around the pod, just rock blackened and cracked by the engines. It looks like we landed right at the edge of a crater full of water; the pod doesn’t flood as we open it, but we do have to step out into said water. It’d be pretty gross if I wasn’t in a space suit.

Okay, look, call me an… ecology prude, or whatever, but vast expanses like this shouldn’t exist without life in them. There’s no bugs in the mud, no plants on the dunes. Yes, there are areas on Earth that stretch for miles of salt or bare stone without a plant in sight, but they also don’t have water. This place is full of water and, despite apparently being pretty close to a colony, nothing grows here. There’s probably bacteria or something, there’s always bacteria. But still.

No visible native life; the native life might be somewhere else, or might just be microscopic. No visible Earth life either, even though there are plenty of Earth plants that can live in low oxygen that anyone setting up life outside Earth should bring with them, and low nitrogen, while a more serious problem, isn’t insurmountable. Either the colony hasn’t experimented with trying to seed the planet outside their living domes (they’re probably concerned about said plants becoming invasive to the native ecology), or the water or ground are toxic.

Which is absolutely possible. Likely, even.

The pod’s angled so that we have to traipse through the water and around it to see Hive and Max, and that’s the unexpected part. Communication with the colony has been restricted to short text and audio messages containing as little information as they can get away with sending; we hadn’t actually seen any of the colonists until this moment. I stop and stare. We all do.

“Aliens!” Tal whispers excitedly on our private channel. (Well, ‘private’ is a stretch – it’s not encrypted in any way. It’s just a reserved frequency for us so that everyone else doesn’t have to listen to our random conversation over their radios. It’d be very easy for anyone to listen in if they wanted.)

“They’re not aliens,” I say for the hundredth time, but with less conviction than usual. Hive and Max are definitely human, but they’re… well, look. I know it’s not really done to say that someone looks engineered. Most genetic modifications are generations old, so it’s a misnomer in the first place – I wasn’t engineered to have the DIVR-32 geneset, one of my ancestors was, for example. And most engineered genesets, including DIVR-32, are invisible. So ‘looks engineered’ doesn’t really make any sense.

But I have never seen anyone look as engineered as these two.

They’re small, almost a full head shorter than the average human, with wiry muscles visible under very little body fat. They both look to probably be in their twenties, although it’s difficult to be sure. Their eyes look unusually large, although that might just be because of their small heads; they have very long toes and large ears like the Khemin, although Hive and Max’s aren’t pierced for jewellery. They are… well, it would be wrong to call them bald, exactly, because a fine down seems to cover their entire bodies, thicker than normal body hair, thick enough to be clearly visible without obscuring the skin beneath. The hair on top of their heads is no thicker or longer than the hair anywhere else. Tal’s right; they do look kind of like aliens from some pre-Neocambrian story with a very limited special effects budget.

But their appearance isn’t the most shocking part. I’ve hung out with art house genepunks in university; these Hylarans look boring by comparison. No, the really shocking thing is that I know what they look like.

The pair aren’t wearing space suits.

I suppose they really meant what they said about believing the air to be non-toxic, because they’re just walking around in it. Their clothes consist of long silvery tunics with an odd iridescent sheen that must have Tal’s little zeelite heart all aflutter, and their feet are bare. They’re not even wearing eye protection. They are each shouldering what looks like an oxygen tank, and carrying them with the clear experience of people used to doing so. They’re each wearing a breathing mask, but not the airtight kind; they’re more like Captain Kae Jin’s mask, which is designed to give her extra oxygen without muffling her voice too much. Aside from a thick plastic-looking ring on their right ring fingers and a small pouch in their belt, they’re not carrying anything else.

The pair eye us with some apprehension, and for a moment I wonder what we look like to them, these people whose entire lives are fou rhundred-ish other people; a bunch of strangers crashing out of the sky and towering over them facelessly in bulky space suits. (They’re walking around the planet unprotected, so do they even wear space suits? They must own them, they would’ve brought them from Earth to a new, hostile planet, but if all the initial colonists are dead, do we look like museum displays to these people?) One of them lifts their right hand to their mouth and speaks, and Hive’s familiar voice comes through our suit radios.

“Good, you can all walk. I’m Hive, as you know; this is Max. They’ll be your liaison on-planet. The colony’s not far; we’ll take you to Doctor Kim for a check-up and then… get to work, I guess.

“Welcome to Hylara.”