Диана Дуэйн: Storm At Eldala

Ten years previously, the Alaundrin freighter Desert Wind had a navigational accident—the computer involved with calculating her path through drivespace dropped a decimal place in the coordinates due to a power fluctuation. When she made starrise, Desert Wind was no more than two million kilometers out of the little star's atmosphere. They were lucky to have come out no closer. When the ship's crew got their composure back, they had reason to lose it again. There, orbiting the star no further out than forty-five million kilometers, was a Class 1 planet that no one had ever noticed. As Sunshine made starrise in a down-sliding sleet of trickling white fire, Gabriel looked out on the little system and tried to imagine what that first crew's reactions must have been. No one looks for what they don't expect, and no one had ever expected a planet around a star so small and possibly so old. Argument was still raging as to whether the little world, eventually named Rivendale, was a capture or the remnant of a natural formation. In any case, the planet had suffered from tremendous tidal stresses and volcanism while it was forming. Its crust was unusually strong on the light elements and thoroughly faulted so that even the world's older mountain ranges were spectacularly shattered by time and tidal spasms. The younger ranges were labyrinths of splintered basalt needles and pinnacles, spearing upward over valleys torn deep between them, rearing above oxide-streaked canyons kilometers deep and cliffs kilometers high. All these features might have been expected of a low-gravity world, but in Rivendale's case, it was as if someone had attempted to produce a particularly extreme example of the class. There were other oddities, again due to tidal effects. Terivine's unusually powerful braking effect on so light a planet had left Rivendale with a rotation period nearly seven days long. Fierce heat and numbing cold alternated on a weekly basis and grew worse with the turning of the seasons. The initial surveyors had looked down at this dramatic and intimidating landscape and had been sure that, whatever future settlers might talk about on a regular basis, one topic would always be the weather. Nor did it take long before the settlers began to arrive. Rivendale's discovery attracted the inevitable attention from the nearest stellar nations. Alaundril, located in the Tendril system, and the Regency of Bluefall, based around Aegis, got in first and settled their claims in 2492, splitting the colonization rights 70-30. It was only a few years after the first colonization parties arrived that a completely unforeseen complication arose. Rivendale turned out to already be inhabited by intelligent life. Gabriel had checked this aspect of the planet with some care. His acquaintance with Enda had made him more curious about alien life than he had been during his marine years, and he had not been surprised to discover that it had been a fraal xenobiologist who stumbled on the truth. Riglia had been known since Alaundril and Bluefall's Regency conducted the first joint precolonization survey. Long, graceful, translucent creatures, gossamer-thin, like ribbons of shimmering air, they excited some brief interest. Though avian, they were very unlike other avian species so far discovered. They spent their whole lives in the air, subsisting on airborne algae and plankton native to the high mists of the Rivendale mountain chains. The fraal, who with various other scientists had come to study the unique Rivendale ecosystem, had looked up at a passing riglia, glinting and wreathing its rainbowy way past in the warming sun of early noon, and had thought, Cousin, you are fair. The fraal had not expected the chilly and pragmatic response, tentative but clear. You are no cousin of mine, but you are right.
The fraal, a mindwalker as well as a scientist, had gone to the authorities and explained that they had a problem. The riglia were fully aware that their planet was being colonized—or from their point of view, invaded—and were furious. The Alaundril and Regency authorities were annoyed but also sensible enough to be cautious. There was no chance of reversing their own plans and removing the colonies. That would have constituted an unacceptable loss of status for both nations, but they stopped further colonization, citing concern about the local ecology.
Gabriel, during his investigations, had reason to smile at that. It was not the Rivendale ecology that was in danger. Humans and fraal who lived on that world literally had to hang on by their nails, suspended more or less between heaven and earth in a realm where air pressures could range from near vacuum to nearly three bars down in the deepest canyons.
The one city, Sunbreak, perched precariously on a nine-kilometer high col between two fourteen-kilometer high mountains. There, two thousand people lived—breathing deeply, Gabriel thought, and being very careful where they put their feet. Some intrepid homesteaders had struck out into the surrounding mountain range to make themselves small farms, terracing some of the less intractable, lower reaches and collecting water from the warmweek mists with condensers. It was a dangerous life. The riglia regarded any damage to their environment, no matter how minimal, as damage to them and were likely enough to attack solitary humans simply out of pique. There were other creatures, like spidermist, that would strip the flesh off you right down to the bones without pique being involved. "Hey, Sunshine! Everything all right over there?" Helm's voice came over comms. "No problems at all," Gabriel said. "You two have a quiet time?"
Helm chuckled. "When Delde Sota is around, you wouldn't ever describe anything as 'quiet.' She reprogrammed my entertainment system somehow—"
"Correction: did no such thing," came a sharp voice from the background. "Augmented gamma correction for imagery player. Long overdue."
"All the colors of every thing are strange now," Helm muttered. "I liked my playback the way it was." "You have brought this on yourself, Helm," Enda said, unstrapping herself from her seat beside Gabriel. "It is a mechalus's business to seek perfection in the machinery around her, as well as the machinery which is her, unless you desire the doctor to reshape her personal ethics while riding with you." "Don't start with me," Helm said, though there was humor in his voice. "Got a hail from Terivine control down in Sunbreak. They've got a spot ready for us at the port."
"Good," Gabriel said and checked his coordinates. "Not a big place, that. Are they going to warehouse us somewhere else after we land? They can't have more than a few acres of active space down there." "I know. It's like landing on a dinner plate. No matter. You just follow me down." "Helm, have you been here before?" Enda said.
"No," said Helm, "but I'm here to ride shotgun, which means I go down first and impress everybody. Stay back a couple kilometers."
They rode their system drives in toward Terivine then let the planet's gravity well pull them in. This was one of the few parts of piloting that still made Gabriel nervous: waiting for the feel of the air to make a difference to Sunshine's flight characteristics. It was not that she was a tricky or difficult ship to manage in atmosphere, but the speed with which atmospheric densities varied sometimes made for a rocky ride until Gabriel could work out which attitude the ship preferred on the way in. Terivine, with a "sea level" pressure much higher than most worlds', could produce problems during landing if the sequence wasn't carefully managed.
The problems did not materialize, and Gabriel followed Helm down through the banks of mist—almost too thin to be thought of as cloud—which layered the upper atmosphere. After a few minutes, they broke out of these and into an intermediate layer of clear air above the highest mountains. Gabriel shook his head at the broad, jagged, green and cream streaked landscape below them, all warm-tinged from Terivine's orange-yellow light. On the milky, misty horizon lay wave after wave of fiercely jagged mountains, like a frozen sea. Fog lay far down between them in most of the valleys, hiding greater depths. "Forbidding" was one word that immediately occurred to Gabriel at the sight of the place. Too much vertical and not enough horizontal!
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