Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

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.

I studied the virteo screen. The lander’s sensors jibed with what we’d probed from orbit these last weeks. Partial pressure of O 2a hair below 1.3 bars—perfectly breathable and not quite concentrated enough to induce oxygen toxicity. CO 2just 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.