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.
“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?”
98
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
