Away from the elevators, the skies buzzed with atmos-capable vessels, transports barely able to carry more than three thousand people at a time, their size limited by the necessities of engineeringas they burned their way to and from the surface of the planet. Smaller shuttles swarmed constantly around high-orbit transports, lifting people with all the gross inefficiency the elevators had been designed to prevent, and the comms chatter was a roar of direction and command, impatient squawks for attention and requests for a clear run to another obscure landing pad on some far-flung tundra, hundreds of kils below.
“They should have come sooner,” Rencki tutted. “This is a display of sentiment, not practicality.”
I didn’t reply, my attention drifting to thepingof an automated tug dragging a comms satellite off its drifting course and towards orbital burnout, flashing a keep-clear alert to all vessels nearby. Rencki followed my gaze, murmured: “Radiation. Wind before the storm. It is already bad, will get worse in the coming days.”
“Will theEmnibe all right?”
“It will be safest to get within the magnetosphere sooner rather than later.”
Rencki handled the final descent. The landing pad qe requested was full of high-priority evacuation ships, far more important than our little vessel. Qe replied that we were on a mission with both Accord and Assembly sanction, and theEmnididn’t require a conventional landing pad; a wide-open field would do.
“A field?” someone blurted. “How do you expect to keep order in afield?”
“What do they mean by ‘order’?” I asked, as Rencki tweaked our course.
“I predict,” qe murmured, “that they mean precisely what you think they do.”
From above, the skies of Adjumir flickered with lightning, great whorls of cloud moving across her surface, continent-straddling, as if we descended upon a gas giant rather than the familiar gem of a planet I’d come to know. Above the storm clouds, shimmering auroras played across the skies, silken spinnings of green and redthousands of kils long. They should have been confined to the magnetic poles, but had spread towards the equator like purple snakes twining around the planet, squeezing it whole, smothering it. There was a thing here, a fascinating, delicious thing, a thing that tasted of—
“Maw!” Rencki’s bark was a command, mingling somewhere with a hint of concern, a whisper of a threat.
I jerked back from the screen, counted backwards from ten while qe watched, muttered: “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Are we good?” qe asked, tails raised and fur standing on end. “Are we safe?”
“Yes. We’re good. We’re good.”
I turned off the screen for the rest of the descent.
In the end, we landed in a lake, some fifteen kils from our preferred destination.
No one planet-side seemed to have the time or power to authorise this, and as we nuzzled the edge of Adjumir’s atmosphere, comms began to crackle and break, the great wall of too much noise, too much chatter giving way to a sudden, breath-halting silence.
… prepare for…
… ready for…
… do not approach…
We are at capacity, we are at capacity, we cannot take any more, there are people here holding onto the hull, I repeat, do not approach…
And then nothing. I wondered if we should wait for clearance, but we were already on our final descent, and theEmnihissed and ticked, the interior gravitational fields struggling to maintain stability. I breathed from my stomach, waited for the hiss of plasma to pass and the comms to reopen with the chatter of a dying world. We hit our first storm just as the gravitational systems began to settle down, black cloud obscuring the difference between night and day, the lightning bright enough to white-out theEmni’ssensors with every strike, violent enough to toss us up in stomach-wrenching hurls, drop us down in sudden slides of atmospheric churn. Very few ships are optimal for both interstellar and inter-atmospheric travel; grudging compromises are made to achieve both, and so like a ball tossed between hysterical, screaming children we were bounced through the raging skies. For a moment, calm, a break in the clouds; then another punch of spinning winds and lashing rain juddered through the hull, stomach flip-flopping as the ship failed to compensate for the pickings-up and droppings-down of the tempest skies, before a moment of clarity as we finally broke through, followed by a great, sodden splat in a lake already so disturbed by hail that the arrival of a ship from another star felt like an anticlimax.
In the bobbing, hissing, ticking, steaming aftershock of our descent, I could hear theEmni’s hull creak, his engines vent heat into the water in a sudden stream of bubbles that bounced us a little back and forth as the lake stirred about us. Rencki detached carefully from the ship, tendrils coiling into paws, tails uncurling from around qis legs, tutted: “We’ll have to wait another hour for the storm to pass. You prepare the boat; I’m going to go on charge.”
Chapter 16
The storm cleared a little before sunset.
I hadn’t checked local time when we landed – it had been unclear where on the day/night side of the world our descent was going to take us. Now I clipped a torch to my exoskeleton and charged a floatlamp for emergencies, while Rencki fussed and tutted around our little inflatable as we eased it out of theEmni’s upper access hatch.
The air of Adjumir as it hit my face – at once familiar and unknown, that slightly breathless atmosphere, that weight pressing down on neck, shoulder, knee and spine. Hotter than I remembered; were we in the right hemisphere for summer? Even the still-drizzling rain felt warm to the touch. A buzz of insects, loud and merry around the edge of the water – the evacuation of the planet seemed to have served the wildlife well, flocks of birds in their thousands dancing before the setting sun, casting moving shadows across the land in their eclipse, as if every evening were spent in play.
“No one nearby,” Rencki mused, as I shoved the boat down into the water, moving slow and clumsy in the weight of this world. “That is probably for the best.”
Qe bounded from the side of the floating ship with an easy lunge, pinged theEmnito seal himself and power down, whileI pushed us gently away from his side. As we drifted across the water, theEmniseemed to transform from ship to hulking monster to mere ragged stone, a little island perhaps of mud and basalt, risen with great geological implausibility from the depths of the lake. Only the odd steaming of still-venting surfaces hinted at his interstellar origin.
“Navcomm down,” Rencki grumbled as we moored up on the far shore. “Pinging for nearest network. There’s a tower nearby. Orientating.”
