Патрик Томлинсон - Children of the Divide

“What do you need clarified? We need you to survey the anomaly.”

“But we don’t have any trained surveyors aboard. And we certainly don’t have the equipment.”

“You’ve got cameras, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah…”

“It’s not that complicated, Jian. This is just a preliminary survey. You’re the only ones there right now. We’re prepping another mission with the proper specialists and equipment, but it will be really helpful if they have some idea what they’re walking into. Just step outside, poke your head around, and take some pictures.”

“Actual,” Jian said. “Dad, I’m not qualified to survey some weird, probably alien artifact buried on a moon. I don’t have any experience with this.”

“Who the hell does?”

Kirkland snorted from the copilot’s seat. “He’s got a point, you know.”

“Not helping.” Jian keyed the com again. “Copy that, Actual. Starting our deorbital burn in five. Atlantis out.”

The shuttle had been orbiting Varr for the better part of a day now, first from its initial fifteen-kilometer orbit, then dropping down to less than five klicks to try and get higher resolution images of whatever was lying inside the cave underneath the crippled helium harvester. They had to wait several hours and many orbits until the system’s primary was directly overhead and poured light into the hole the harvester had punched through the cave’s ceiling.

It didn’t help much. Even bathed in light, the anomaly, as they’d taken to calling it, was covered with too much debris from the cave-in to reveal much information beyond its outline. Which was why they’d been ordered to land. That had been the plan all along, of course. The harvester techs needed a ride down to the surface to fix their broken Hoover. But the stakes had since been drastically raised.

Jian warmed up the mains for a fourth time, worrying about the additional stress he was putting on the five that were still working, but unable to do anything about it. It would be a quick, hard burn. They already orbited so close to the surface that they needed to bleed off almost all of their velocity in less than two minutes to hit their insertion window.

Complicating matters further, Varr was completely airless, so the shuttle’s airfoils and control surfaces were just dead weight. They’d be landing ass-first on a column of rocket exhaust, using only their thruster packs for terminal maneuvers.

It was like trying to balance an angry cat on top of a broom handle; a feat far beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced pilot, much less one commanding his first mission. Fortunately, that duty had been turned over to software centuries ago. All Jian had to do was punch in the coordinates of the landing site and a couple of other variables into the computer, take his hands off the stick, and relax.

He absolutely hated it.

“OK, kids, this one is going to be fast and rough. Deorbit burn in. Five. Four. Three. Two–” With the suddenness of a car accident, Jian was slammed back into his seat under seven gees, damned near the limit of the five engines they had left.

“One?” Kirkland asked through clenched teeth.

Jian tried to lift his head to see the readout, but his skull remained glued to the headrest. Not that it would’ve mattered as his vision was blurring on account of the high gee pressing his eyeballs into the backs of their sockets hard enough to deform their shape. Instead, he routed the flight computer data into his plant’s augmented reality display, which was unaffected. He spotted the problem immediately. he sent to Kirkland.

Jian grumbled. The LZ might be marginally safer for the shuttle, but the longer walk would leave his team exposed to the shooting gallery that was Varr’s surface. The Tau Ceti system was a notoriously dirty place to begin with, and without an atmosphere or the Ark’s nav lasers to burn them up, micrometeorites were an ever-present risk.

As suddenly as they had come on, the gees disappeared as the mains cut out. Jian felt a moment’s sensation of pure freefall before the shuttle’s flight computer fired the forward thrusters to reorient itself for a vertical landing.

With all its forward momentum bled away, the shuttle started falling straight and true towards Varr’s surface. The only indication of movement Jian could see as he looked out the cockpit windows was their altimeter readout dropping, glacially at first as the moon’s paltry three and a half percent standard gravity clawed meekly at the craft. But without any atmosphere to drag against the hull, their velocity built up until at a hundred meters the engines fired again, although less exuberantly. At only five meters above the regolith, the flight computer pitched the shuttle over again until it was level with the ground, then settled down into the billowing dust on thrusters alone.

The shuttle nestled into the ground on its belly. They didn’t dare open the landing gear doors; the statically-charged dust played merry hell on any moving parts it clung to and shorted out electronics like a bucket of salt water. Everyone unbelted and silently, solemnly started prepping their vacuum suits. Jian picked up on their dour moods.

“Hey, everyone.” He clapped to get their attention. “What’s with the faces? Is this a funeral?”

“Potentially,” technician Madeja muttered.

“Look.” Feng ignored her. “I know this isn’t what any of us were expecting to find out here. I certainly wasn’t. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t scaring the living fertilizer out of me…” A round of polite, if awkward laughter passed around the cabin. “But whatever it is has been buried here for God only knows how long. If it was going to hurt anybody, it probably would’ve done it a long time ago.

“So, instead of a boring maintenance assignment, we’re out here right on the knife’s edge of exploration and discovery. C’mon, that’s exciting, right? Let’s get buttoned up and get started. Last one into the hole is a reclamation chute.”

Kirkland hopped over and whispered in his ear. “Great speech, commander. Are you going to call them doody-heads next?”

“If it gets the job done,” Jian said. “Speaking of jobs, don’t bother getting dressed.”

Kirkland cocked her head. “Why not?”

“Because if I’m wrong and things do go sour down there, we’ll need a fast evac. So you’re going to stay here and keep Atlantis ’s engines warm and ready to dust off on a tripwire.”

“And if things go really wrong down there?”

“Then you may have to bug out and make the return trip alone.” Jian noticed Kirkland wasn’t exactly broken up by the prospect. “Which would be terrible. Right?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, just awful. Me, alone, commanding my own shuttle? A real tragedy. C’mon, let me help you get in your suit.”

“Only if someone else checks my seals.”

“So suspicious,” she said teasingly. “We’re a team, remember? Our trust is our foundation.”

“I’m doomed.”

Kirkland laughed. “Get in those jammies, commander. You’ve got work to do.”

Twenty minutes later, six of them walked across the dirt. Actually, “walked” was entirely the wrong verb. With the incredibly low gravity, they hopped across the surface in great, bounding leaps, like the ancient footage of the original Apollo astronauts bouncing across Luna’s terrain, only exaggerated.

But unlike Luna’s rocky, bone-dry surface, Varr was a dirty snowball. Layers of rock and water ice laid buried under meters of cosmic dust that had fallen over eons. Outcrops of ice protruded from the surface here and there, while deep fissures crisscrossed the surface, pulled and stretched by the tidal forces Gaia exerted on the moon with each orbit.