Stephen Baxter: Ark

“Right on the nose,” Wilson said. “That lake’s the nearest thing to a natural landing strip we spotted. I hope everybody’s still strapped in.”

Helen glanced over her shoulder. The low sun shone straight into the cabin, bathing the children’s faces with its eerie pinkish light-eerie now, but maybe in a couple of years they’d get used to it. The children sat slumped in the gravity, though they mostly seemed awake. Some were crying, and others looked as if they had soiled themselves, or been sick. Helen forced a smile. “Not long now. Just hold on-”

The shuttle dropped sharply. She gasped, fearing she was falling.

“Sorry,” Wilson muttered. “Air pocket. This damn air is just as thick as we thought, but lumpier, more turbulent. A real stew. Here we go, initiating final descent sequence.” He tapped a switch, and gripped his controls hard. Now he and the autopilot were sharing the flying of the shuttle between them, though Wilson always had the casting vote.

There was a clatter from beneath her feet, and a roar of air.

Alarmed, she asked, “What the hell’s that? Has a pump broken?”

Wilson just laughed, without taking his eyes off the scene outside the window. “The landing gear just dropped. And that’s no busted pump, that’s the wind, baby. Here we go. Coming down fast now…” He fell silent, watching the fleeing landscape, tracking monitors that showed his speed and altitude and rate of descent. The shuttle shuddered again as its aerosurfaces bit into the thick air.

They passed a last chain of hills. They were already beneath the summits of the highest of them, Helen saw. Then the shoreline of the frozen lake fled beneath their prow, its edge marked by parallel bands in the ice, as if the lake had melted and refrozen repeatedly. Evidence of volcano summers; every so often, Venus had advised her, a big enough eruption would inject so much carbon dioxide into the air that the temperature globally would climb, maybe for years. She wished Venus were here, talking her through this, holding her hand.

The shuttle shook again and dropped some more. Now they were flying very low over the lake. In the light of the sun Helen could see detail, rocks and scraps of ice scattered over the surface, fleeing beneath the prow.

Wilson muttered, “Nothing’s ever so smooth as it looks from space. As long as we miss those itty-bitty rocks with our skids, we’ll be fine. Coming down easy now. A hundred meters up. Eighty. Sixty. Woah-” He hauled on the translational control and the shuttle banked sharply right. Helen saw a field of ice boulders that had been right in their path. When he had the shuttle pointed toward a clearer track, Wilson released the control, and let the automated systems level the bird up again. “That was close.”

Helen pointed dead ahead. “We’re kind of near the shore.” Beyond which more hilly ground rose up, looking rough and rock-strewn, and mottled with that strange black color.

Wilson grinned. “Maybe, but we only get one pass at this, girl. Let’s hope we got enough room.” A monitor chimed; the radar altimeter showed they were only ten meters up. “Here we go…” He pressed the handle forward gently. The lake lifted up to meet them.

The skids hit the ice. The shuttle rattled and skipped back up into the air, and Helen clung on to her couch. The shuttle dropped again, and bounced, and then she heard a squeal of metal as the skids scraped along the ice sheet. There was another bang, and Helen was thrown forward against her restraints, as if some great hand had grabbed the rear of the craft.

“Chutes deployed!” Wilson called. “Wow, what a ride this is.”

With the parachutes dragging at the thick air, the shuttle soon slowed. The last few meters, as the skids bumped over every rock and ice block in their path, were jarring. Then the shuttle swiveled through a few degrees, and slid sideways for another dozen meters, before coming to a halt.

Wilson punched a button. “Chutes jettisoned. First job is to collect the silk, we’re going to need it later…” He looked stunned. He tapped his microphone. “Halivah, shuttle B. We’re down, down in one piece. Yeah! We’re down,” he repeated more quietly, and he looked over at Helen. “Now what?”

The shuttle’s exit ramp was simple, a section of the hull that would fold down to the ground, lined with a corrugated surface for traction.

Helen, Jeb and Wilson stood by the closed door. They wore thick-lined bright green overcoats, and gloves and hats, and face masks connected to filter bottles. A few of the older children were with them, all in coats and masks, while the rest waited in the main cabin. Jeb, awkward and panting, was carrying little Sapphire Murphy Baker in his arms. The girl’s face was almost entirely hidden by her mask. They were all hanging on to rails, supporting their unaccustomed weight. Jeb and Wilson had at least grown up in Earth gravity; Helen had only known the hull’s fractional gravity and that not for thirty years since the Split, and the one and a quarter G felt crushingly heavy. But she stood, determined.

“So,” Wilson said, his voice muffled by his mask. “Everybody set?”

“Do it,” Helen murmured.

Wilson pulled a lever. With a hiss of hydraulics the hatch gracefully yawned down to the ground. Cold, sharp air washed into the shuttle, and a pale pink light drowned out the glow of the artificial lamps.

Wilson glanced around. “Nobody dead yet? Ready for the EVA?”

Helen snorted. “An EVA which is never going to end, Wilson.”

“I guess not.” He led the way out of the hatch.

They all walked cautiously down the ramp-cautiously as they encountered the new world, and cautiously because Helen wasn’t sure she even remembered how to walk. Jeb carried little Sapphire, who looked around wide-eyed.

They were looking straight toward the sun, which hung huge in a pink-brown sky. It was maybe forty times as wide as the sun’s disc as seen from Earth, but you could look directly at its pale glow without blinking. The hills at the edge of the lake rose up, coated with streaks of black, their shadowed faces thick with frost. Shapes like stocky trees, squat and dark, pushed up from the hills’ flanks.

Helen felt a deep, gut-wrenching fear to be walking out of the shelter of the shuttle like this, to enter openness, infinity, to be for the first time in her whole life not contained within a hull. This was not like the HeadSpace sims, she thought; in the end they had been no real preparation. And yet she kept walking, one foot in front of the other, down the ramp after Wilson. She was evolved for this, she told herself. The kids were young; they would adapt.

They paused before they got to the base of the ramp.

“I think I see open water over there,” Jeb said, pointing. “See, in the valley between those hills? Like a river, feeding the lake.”

“I can’t see,” Helen said. She had trouble focusing on the middle distance. But then she’d only ever had to look at things within the hull, or at infinity, nothing in between. Maybe her eyes would adjust.

“We can always move closer to the subsolar point if we want,” Wilson said. “The shuttle is designed to break down to build habitats, sleds. We might try to get to the ocean. It’s not far, fifty klicks.”

Helen, new to planets, didn’t want to sound foolish. “You think those tall things are trees?”

“If they are, their leaves are jet black,” Jeb said. “And so’s that grassy stuff at their feet.”

“Well, that makes sense,” Helen said. “The M-sun’s light isn’t like Earth’s. It peaks in the infrared. Photosynthesis here needs to be efficient, absorbing as much of the spectrum as it can consume. Hence it looks black.”