Last Plane to Heaven (11 page)

“Ready when you are, Ensign.”

“Good luck, sir.”

I could feel the air pumps throbbing through the feet of the hardsuit. We'd decided to drop the pressure in the lock before opening to the outside—we'd already commingled atmospheres, not to mention breaching the viewport, but there didn't seem any point in inviting in a whole new airlock-full of allergens and contaminants. I set an ultrabungee on one of the hardware cleats inside the lock chamber then clipped the other end to the equipment belt of my hardsuit.

The outer hatch slid open. I stepped out and became the first human to set foot on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II. Immediately thereafter I became the first human to lose his footing on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II as the wind took me airborne.

Thank God for the ultrabungee,
I thought as I sailed upward. I might make it back down to the surface. Then I remembered the buckywire connecting the ribbon-eel to our landing boat. If I sailed across it that stuff could slice my leg off like a scalpel. I grabbed the ultrabungee and spun myself, looking for the ribbon-eel.

I forgot my panic in the glory of the view.

From this altitude, perhaps two hundred meters up at the end of the ultrabungee, I could see our four neighboring land-reefs and a dozen more beyond. The ground was rippled like beach sand just beneath the lip of the tide. Clouds boiled above and around me, the planet's hurried energy given form. Everything below had a grayish-yellow cast as the dim light of Kesri-Sequoia filtered through the superrotating atmospheric layers, but the view itself took my breath away.

We'd never seen the sky properly from inside the lander. The racing clouds were evanescent, glowing with lavenders and pastel greens, the lightning arcing among them like the arguments of old lovers. Streaming between the banks were smears of brick red, deep violet, azure blue, and a dozen more colors for which I had no name. These were the airborne microbiota on which the land-reefs fed and that the ribbon-eels chased. It was like being inside a Van Gogh painting, the swirling bursts of colors brought to life.

I hung on to the ultrabungee and stared, bouncing in the sky like a yo-yo gone berserk.

“… sir … air…”

Mallory's voice was a faint echo. She was unable to punch a clear signal even the few hundred meters to my suit radio. We should have rigged a wireline with the ultrabungee, I realized. Using the hardsuit's enhanced exomusculature to fight the wind, I pulled myself down the ultrabungee hand over hand. I watched the ribbon-eel carefully to avoid crossing its buckywire tether.

*   *   *

By the time I reached the nose of the landing boat the wind buffeting was giving me a terrible headache. I felt as if I waded in a racing tide. The spell of the sky's beauty had worn off. At least this close to the ship I could hear Ensign Mallory over the radio. More or less.

“Feed down…'en meters … lock…”

“Do not copy,” I said. I bent down with one of the electrostatic grippies and picked up a buckywire end. I pulled it to my chest and secured it to my suit with buckybondo. Now I wouldn't immediately blow away again. I grabbed another buckywire with my grippy. “Reel the eel in close, I want to see its tail.”

“Copy … eel…'ail…”

The ribbon-eel loomed closer to me. I was able to study it objectively. The creature was about ten meters long, lemon colored with pale green spots along the side. Perhaps a meter tall, it had the same narrow vertical cross-section that the land-reefs boasted. I couldn't see any eyes, but there was a large, gummy mouth into which the buckywire vanished. Hopefully the buckybondo was helping it hold somewhere deep in the eel's gut. The animal thrashed against the line but I couldn't tell if that was the wind or an effort at struggle.

Now it was my turn to torture the ribbon-eel in person. I needed to hook the buckywire somewhere near the tail. Straining against my own buckywire with the ultrabungee whipping behind me, I reached for the green fringe along the bottom of the ribbon-eel.

It was like catching a noodle on the boil. Possible but difficult. Once I grabbed the damned thing I had to engage all the hardsuit's enhancements to hang on without either losing my grip or the ribbon-eel. I locked the hardsuit's systems and stood there sweating inside the shell. The ribbon-eel whipped above me like a banner, tugging at my hand.

I'd run out of hands. One hand on the grippy of buckywire. One hand on the fringe of the ribbon-eel. How the hell was I going to handle the buckybondo? I couldn't just open the faceplate and grab it in my teeth.

“Release the brakes,” I yelled into the suit radio. “Let all the reels run loose.”

“… 'oger…”

The ribbon-eel shot into the sky with me still hanging on to it. I rocked myself against my right hand grabbing the fringe, trying to throw my left hand with grippy of buckywire up the side of the ribbon-eel. My feet kicked as I scrambled for purchase along the flank.

After a couple of moments, I was atop the ribbon-eel, riding it like a maintenance sled as I faced the tapering tail. With the ribbon-eel's body pressed between my knees I was able to free my right hand from the fringe. I worked the buckybondo out of my utility pocket and into my hand, globbed a big patch onto the flank, then used the grippy to plunge the free end of the buckywire into the mess.

I jumped away from the ribbon-eel and let the wind take me on my ultrabungee and my buckywire. “Reel me in, Mallory!” I screamed.

*   *   *

I couldn't figure out how to get back in the airlock with the buckywire on my chest. I couldn't figure that it mattered that much either. The ribbon-eel was already dragging the lander across the rippled surface. Mallory reeled me down to the nose of the boat, where I stood straddling the cracked viewport. I buckybondoed my boots to the heat shield just below the port, then buckybondoed the last reel of buckywire to my chest next to the other one. Finally I used the two grippies to grab and control the lines leading to the ribbon-eel.

Once I evened the lengths of the lines and got the ribbon-eel across the wind the landing boat began to scoot nose-first along the landscape with a purpose. I figured I could work the ribbon-eel like a kite as we rose, to tack us far enough into the wind for our airfoil to bite.

“Sir,” said Mallory, her voice unexpectedly clear in the hardsuit's radio. “You're going to die out there.”

“You're going to die in there,” I said. “Let's get high enough up to tell
Prospero
what happened. That's all we need to do.”

I stood on the nose and flew us up above the boiling, multicolored clouds where Ensign Mallory could report to our mother ship about what fate had befallen us. There seemed no reason not to stay in the high, clear air, surfing the beauty of the skies behind our ribbon-eel until something tore free, so I did that thing and smiled.

 

The Women Who Ate Stone Squid

I have no explanation for this story. I just wrote it. But there is something here to love. Maybe I cribbed from Tiptree, just a little bit.

I studied the virteo screen. The lander's sensors jibed with what we'd probed from orbit these last weeks. Partial pressure of O
2
a hair below 1.3 bars—perfectly breathable and not quite concentrated enough to induce oxygen toxicity. CO
2
just about absent, with about 79 percent inert gases. At least that last bit was Earth-normal, though the nitrogen component was slightly reduced in favor of helium (wherever
that
was coming from) and some NO
2
. The air was maybe not so good for human tissue over extended exposures, with humidity like an old bone stored in high orbit. This planet's seabeds were as dry as Joan Carter's Mars, but local conditions had held stable since I'd grounded, oh, fourteen hours ago.

Carter was on my mind a lot. The rest of the crew-monkeys back up there in orbit had always said I was crazy, reading stuff from the Years Before. Even my sweetie, Dr. Sheldon, thought it was a bit much. But when we got here—Malick's World—even though I was a mere enlisted-grade localspace pilot, I was the only woman on the ship who had the least idea about alien ruins.

Everything I knew about lost civilizations I learned from Edgar Rice Burroughs, but that was still far more than the rest of my shipmates.

The comm squawked. I had it routed to the boards instead of my mastoid implant for the feel of the thing, like one of those old-time astronauts—Hanna Reitsch or Laika the Sovcomm. “You all checked out yet, Ari?”

It was Captain Pellas, of course. On board the
Correct Thought Makes Correct Deed
her word was most literally law. As it should be. But procedure said that the commander of a vessel exploring an unsecured environment had final authority over her ship and crew, as officer on scene. Detached command, it was called. Well, though I didn't hold a commission in this sailor's navy—just a rating, me—I was commander and the entire crew of the
Sixth Virtue, Correct Thought
's number-two lander. And the only thing in space that trumped a captain's word-of-law was procedure.

Which meant that until I made orbit again my course of action was my own decision. What a strange feeling, in this woman's navy.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. Obedience was an old habit, that and the fact she was my ride home. “All checked out, Captain.”

“Then I suggest you get on with it.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Pellas had budgeted three ship-days to assess the first indisputable evidence of nonhuman intelligence ever encountered. I'd already used up most of one descending, and doing environmental assays on my immediate surroundings. Time to step outside and play Joan Carter. “Maintaining comm silence during my first recondo, ma'am.”

“We'll track you.”

With three-centimeter software-adjusted optical resolution on
Correct Thought
's main sensor suite, they certainly would track me. Combining that with my suit sensors, Pellas would know if I farted when I bent over.

*   *   *

I'd had the choice on descent of landing in the old seabed west of the developed shoreline, or atop the big pavers of the plaza that extended behind the docks into the middle of the city. There was no way to trust the stones of the plaza to take the lander's eighty-odd tons of mass, even accounting for the slightly sub-Terran gravity and the soft-load plates Engineering had refitted on footpads to reduce ground pressure. On the other hand, the seabed was no more reliable … what showed up on sensors as solid ground could easily be a heavy clay crust over a slurry or a dust bowl.

I chose the plaza. For one, it captured my imagination. Even better, touching down in the city proper spared me the two-kilometer hike from the nearest sufficiently large and level bit of seabed, along with a three-hundred-meter climb.

Now I was stepping out to a place where—perhaps—feet had once stepped that belonged to no human being at all.

First I sealed my helmet and toggled the mike and the cams. Then I locked
Sixth Virtue
's boards to
Correct Thought
's nav-comm signal in case I didn't make it back to the lander, recoded the hatch-access password in case someone else made it back instead of me, and slapped the open key.

A line of shadow slipped by me with the raising of the hatch, and the light of a new world flooded my face.

Orange. Maybe orange-maroon. Appropriate, somehow.

Still framed by the thick coaming of the hatch, I looked across the plaza. My breath caught hard in my throat. A
new
world.

New, but older than time itself.

Late afternoon flooded the scene with that oddly colored light, shadows falling at lazy angles. I could see an enormous building almost directly in front of me. Too-tall pillars rose from a curved row of bases to support a high-roofed portico. The front facing of the portico was carved with a dense frieze of figures, crowding in their dozens along each meter. Wide, shallow steps swept from porch to plaza, while the building extended wings to each side. Instead of windows, there were sort of vertical slits, almost the inverse of the pillars, every few meters in the facing. Large buildings of varying but similar architecture loomed to each side.

We'd mapped this from orbit. I knew to the meter how wide this plaza was. But seeing it …

I stepped lightly down
Sixth Virtue
's three-rung ladder. Set my foot on time itself. For some reason, I wished for a cutlass like Joan's.

“I can hear you breathing.” It was the captain, her voice nasty in my ears.

So much for comm silence. Lot of nerves up there in orbit. It was nice to know someone cared.

“Yes, ma'am.” I smiled inside my helmet. “The Barsoomian banths ain't got me yet.”

“Keep to the mission profile, Ari.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Mission profile said enter one of the buildings without breaching existing barriers. In other words, use an open door or window, nothing that could be shut behind me. Look around for portable artifacts, preferably something representing technology or information storage or, ideally, both. Then capture as many images as I reasonably could in a short amount of time, and head back out to the lander.

1.3 bars of O
2
. I could breathe here.

I pushed the traitor thought aside and concentrated on walking. Malick's World tugged at me with .91 standard gs. It was just enough to give me a sense of floating with each stride and make me have to watch my step. This was a nickel-iron rockball of a planet amazingly like Earth except for the absent hydrosphere. And how long had those oceans been gone, I wondered? After all, this world boasted the intact ruins of a seaport and a still-breathable atmosphere—even without oceans or jungles to maintain the oxygen cycle.

What did one do with a few trillion tons of missing seawater, anyway?