Stephen Baxter: Ark

Another clatter, and a snap as if something had slapped against the hull. Wilson called, “Retropack jettisoned. One of the straps caught us. Checking the burn. I got nine zeroes on three axes, perfect.” He was grinning, Helen saw, enjoying the ride for its own sake. “We’re no longer in orbit, baby, we are committed to Earth III.”

The shuttle was now unpowered save for small attitude rockets, and these fired in bursts, a series of pops and bangs. The shuttle swiveled around a vertical axis until it had its nose pointed in the direction of its descent. As it swept through this maneuver Helen glimpsed the Ark, just briefly, a battered pockmarked hull with the lashed-together warp assembly attached to its nose. It looked all but worn out. She twisted her neck to follow it as it crossed her window, but it was soon gone, swept out of sight by the shuttle’s rotation.

Now the shuttle tipped up so it was flying in belly first. Its design was based on the old NASA space shuttle; the fat heat shield on its belly would hit the atmosphere first.

“Enjoy the zero G,” Wilson murmured. “Not much of that left now.”

“Or the stars,” Helen said. “Astronomy will be tough down there.”

“We’ll find a way… Bingo.” A new panel lit up on the console before him, bright red, labeled “0.05 G.” “Here comes the deceleration. Damn, we’re high up compared to an Earth entry. This air is thick. ”

She felt the first tugging of deceleration in her gut, a kind of shuddering as the first wisps of atmosphere grabbed at the hull, and then a more steady drag that pulled her down into her seat. There was a faint glow beyond the window now, like the first flickering of Halivah’s arc lamps in the ship’s morning. It was the air of Earth III, the first direct human contact with the planet, air blasted to plasma, its very atoms smashed apart by their passage. The glow quickly built up into a kind of tunnel of colors, lavenders, blue-greens, violet, rising up above the shuttle. Sparks flew up around the ship, burning, flickering as they died.

“Insulation blanket.” Wilson had to shout; the shuttle was starting to shudder, the fittings rattling. “Burning up and taking away our heat with it. It’s supposed to happen. I think.” He grinned coldly. “Pretty lights.”

Helen didn’t try to reply. The glow outside built up further and the weight piled on her in jerks, in sudden loads, surely already exceeding a full Earth gravity. She could hear the children crying. It will get better, she told herself, it will be easier than this. But the weight would never lift off her shoulders, not ever again. She was committed to the descent, bound to the planet with no way to return, ever. She would never see the hull, never hold her children, maybe never even see the stars again. Her eyes blurred, the tears coming for the first time that morning. But still the weight built up, and the light outside intensified, the colors merging into a white sheet that filled the cabin with a brilliant silver-gray glow. The experience was utterly unreal. She could see nothing but that celestial glow, and had no sense of falling, nothing but this monstrous, shuddering weight.

Wilson whooped. “This is what I call flying! We must be lighting up this fucking planet like a comet.”

Then, quite abruptly, it eased. The weight load on her shoulders, though still heavy, was steady now. The plasma glow faded, the last wisps of it dissipating like glowing smoke, to reveal a pale pink sky littered with brownish clouds.

The clouds were above her, Helen realized.

The shuttle shuddered. Wilson worked a joystick before him, experimentally. “Aerosurfaces are biting. This thing actually flies. Jesus, I’m beginning to think we might live through this.” He glanced at Helen. “You understand we’re inside the atmosphere. We’re not falling, we’re gliding, flying. And that pull you feel isn’t deceleration-”

“Gravity.”

He grinned. “Authentic planetary gravity, pulling on your bones for the first time since you were in the womb.”

It wasn’t as bad as the peak deceleration, but she was still so heavy she felt she could barely breathe.

A speaker crackled. “… Halivah. Shuttle B, Halivah. Can you hear me? Shuttle B, this is Halivah-”

Wilson snapped a switch. “We’re out of the plasma sheath. My God, Venus, what a ride!”

“We saw you. We still see you, in fact. I’ll let you fly your bird. Let us know when your skids are down on the ground. Halivah out.”

“Copy that. Let’s see what we got.” Wilson pressed his joystick forward, and the shuttle’s nose dipped.

The world tipped up, revealing itself to Helen for the first time. The land below was dark. They were still so high the horizon showed a curve. The sky was a deep, somber shade of red, but it brightened as she looked ahead toward the horizon. And there she saw an arc of fire, a vast sun lifting above the curve of the world, the M-sun that illuminated this super-Earth. Now, near the horizon, she saw a chain of mountains whose peaks caught the light, shining like a string of lanterns in the dark. She remembered what Venus had said, about the possibility of organisms like trees straining up out of the shadow of the twilight band to catch the fugitive light.

The shuttle dipped sharply into the thickening air. This world’s dense, stormy atmosphere was turbulent.

The events of the descent unfolded rapidly now. The world steadily flattened out to become a landscape. That sun hauled its bulk wearily above the horizon, huge and distorted into a flattened ellipse by some atmospheric effect. It was white, tinged faintly pink, scarcely red at all. The little ship crossed the mountains with their brightly lit summits, and they flew over the terminator, the unmoving boundary of night.

As they fled over sunlit ground a panel on the console lit up with an animated map, based on observations from the orbiting Ark. Helen peered down. The ground was rocky, a continental shield, wrinkled with mountains and cracked by huge crevasses. Much of it was coated with old, dirty ice that gleamed pinkly in the sun’s low light. She had studied sims of Earth landscapes from the air, recordings made before the flood; this was something like flying low over the Canadian Shield. She made a mental note to report that impression back to Venus.

“Shit,” Wilson said. He grabbed his controls, left hand for translational control and the right for attitude, and hauled, overriding the automated systems. The shuttle obediently banked right.

Helen looked ahead. A vast volcano, almost like Olympus on Earth II but more compact and clearly active, sprawled ahead of them. She could see wisps of some dark gas escaping from the complicated multiple calderas at its summit.

Wilson said, “We don’t want to fly through a pillar of lumpy hot air, or into the volcano’s side, though I trust the shuttle not to do that.”

The shuttle sped past the flank of the volcano. Looking down Helen saw patches of black, sheer darkness like blankets of plastic, clinging to old lava flows.

“More mountains up ahead,” Wilson muttered, eyes fixed, the flaws in his stubbly flesh picked out by the glow of the low sun.

The approaching mountains were a multiple sawtooth chain, dead ahead, a geological system hundreds of kilometers deep. They were silhouetted from Helen’s point of view. She compared the view with the animated map on the console, which showed a dotted red line and a cartoon shuttle swooping over a jagged mass. “They’re right where they should be, Wilson.”

“Good. And so are we. In which case we should come on our landing site soon.”

The mountains swept beneath their prow. Their flanks were gouged by glaciers, ice glowing pink-white on the rock. The parallel ranges fell away, dissolving into foothills, themselves young and sharp-edged. Now ahead of them lay a plain, barren and strewn with rock, with a sheet of ice beyond it, the surface of a frozen lake. The shuttle dipped sharply, heading for the lake, its destination obvious.