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The layout of the little craft was simple. The cramped, tubular cabin was packed with rows of seats, improvised from Ark gear and jammed in among the original design’s twenty-five couches. Two seats sat proud of the rest, up in the nose before a rudimentary instrument console and scuffed panoramic windows. Wilson was already in the left-hand seat, running over systems checks, and Helen made her way to the right-hand seat. He handed her a Snoopy comms hat, and she pulled it on.
The shuttle was an automated glider, essentially, with the characteristics of Earth III’s atmosphere and gravity profiles programmed into its onboard computer. It was smart enough to avoid such obvious obstacles as oceans and rock fields and snowbanks, and indeed was capable of flying itself all the way down to the ground. But in the design offices back in vanished Denver it had been recognized that you’d likely need human control over the first unpowered landing on an entirely alien world. A few hundred meters up was the point where Wilson would come into his own; that was the reason this despised sixty-two-year-old was aboard the shuttle, while Helen’s own children were left back aboard the Ark. Helen was the nearest thing available to a copilot. But she had never even flown as a passenger in an atmosphere before, and she prayed the rudimentary skills she had picked up in her training, and from working with Wilson in HeadSpace sims in the last month, would not be called upon.
As she buckled in she glanced back over her shoulder. The kids were packed in, their orange pressure garments bright. The few older kids, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, were dotted around among the rest. The ten-year-olds looked scared, but the infants were mostly sleeping, in the shuttle’s warm humming atmosphere. Helen saw little Sapphire Murphy Baker, the youngest aboard at four years old, holding the hand of an eight-year- old. Jeb sat at the back, in theory watching over the kids and ready to intervene in case of any crisis. Seeing Helen looking, he waved. She tried to smile, but the desolation in his face was clear.
This was how they were going to colonize a new world, with a pack of children and three adults, and a hold containing a nuclear generator and seed stock and tools and a couple of blowup hab modules, and broken hearts.
“We must be insane,” Helen murmured.
“Those who sent us from Earth were insane.” Wilson glanced over at her. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
He flipped a switch, a heavy manual toggle. “Well, that’s it. I’ve initiated the automated program. Now this baby will fly itself all the way down, all but. Here comes the first mission event. Three, two, one-”
Latches rattled, and attitude thrusters banged around the shuttle’s exterior. Helen felt a pull in her stomach. Some of the sleeping children stirred and moaned.
“We cut away from the Ark. That’s it, we’re flying solo. Better get used to that acceleration, we’ll be facing a lot of that this morning.”
“Solo now and for the rest of our lives… wow.” She felt a slight dizziness, her inner ears telling her they were spinning on their long axis.
“That’s the inspection spin. Just giving Halivah a chance to check that the heat shield tiles haven’t fallen off in the last forty years.”
Venus Jenning’s voice crackled from a speaker. “Shuttle B, Halivah. Looking good for descent, Wilson.”
“Copy that. Thank you, Venus.”
The spinning stopped. Helen looked out of the window. They were somewhere over the night side of the planet. They were flying backward, with their heads to the stars and the new world unfolding beneath them, utterly black save for a purple flaring of storms and a sullen red glow that looked like a huge volcano caldera. The idea was that they would enter the atmosphere over the night hemisphere, and their entry trajectory would bring them swooping around the world’s curve to land on the side of permanent day.
Wilson glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody OK? Next it’s the retro rocket. It will feel like a kick in the back. Nothing to worry about. Three, two, one-”
The cabin was filled with noise, a guttural crackling roar like an immense fire. It was indeed a kick in the back. Helen felt it in her lower spine and neck and legs as she was pressed into the padded couch, and the shuttle seemed to swivel until it was as if it was standing on its tail, and she lying on her back. The retro system was a rocket pack bolted to the rear end of the shuttle, designed to shed the velocity that kept the ship in orbit alongside the Ark, and let it fall into the air of Earth III. Now, after lying dormant for forty years, it had fired up for its one and only burn.
Wilson called, “Three, two, one-”
The retro died as sharply as it had opened up, and Helen was thrown forward. More of the children were awake now; with the rocket’s roar gone she could hear them crying in the sudden silence.
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
