“No birds? It ought to be easier for them to fly here, in the lower gravity.”

“But the air is less dense. Wings would have less lift than on Earth. The bird would require more muscle power, respiration… We may see gliders, and flightless birds. But we cannot expect the diversity we see on Earth.”

A pity, Malenfant thought.

Malenfant donned T-shirt, shorts, a thin sweater, and a bright blue coverall, and then pulled his boots back on. He was glad of the warmth of the clothes; the air here was damp and cold, though the sun’s heat was sharp. Nemoto dressed the same way. They tucked their heavy Gore-Tex escape suits back into the lander, against the time when they would be needed during the return to Earth — an eventuality Malenfant was finding increasingly hard to visualize.

Malenfant settled his comms pack on his shoulder. This was a specialized piece of gear manufactured for them by technicians at the Johnson Space Center. On top of a small but powerful transceiver package sat a tiny, jewel-like camera. Antennae were built into their coveralls, and the signals were relayed by small comsats orbiting low around the Red Moon The deal was that save for emergency the controllers would keep their mouths shut during the surface stay (which they insisted on calling an extra-vehicular activity, with, to Malenfant’s mind, an absurd emphasis on the vehicle they had arrived in, as opposed to the place they had come to). But in return the ground had control of the cameras.

Soon the little camera on Malenfant’s shoulder was swivelling back and forth with a minute whirring noise. “Good grief,” he said. “I feel like Long John Silver.”

Nemoto laughed, as she usually did when she detected one of his jokes. He wasn’t sure whether she understood the reference or not.

With her own camera working, she walked across the flattened clearing. She began to load small sample bags with fast, random selections of the vegetation and the underlying crimson soil; these were contingency samples, to be lodged in the loader against the event that they had to leave here in a hurry. She found a shallow puddle, covered with a greenish scum, and she pushed the probe of her sensor pack into it. “Water,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t recommend you drink it.”

Malenfant, his own camera peering here and there, turned to face the way the lander had come down, from the west. The route was somewhat easy to spot. The lander, suspended beneath its blue parafoil, had come bellying down out of the sky, crashing through the trees with abandon, and had left a clear trail of its glide-down in snapped trunks, crushed branches and ripped-up bits of parafoil. The trail terminated in this small clearing, where shattered tree trunks clustered close around the lander’s incongruous black and white carcass.

Malenfant stalked around the lander, inspecting the damage. The whole underside was scored, crushed and gouged. Heat-resistant tiles had been plucked away and scattered through the forest, and all the aerosurfaces were scarred and crumpled.

The only good thing you could say about that landing was that it wasn’t his fault.

After scouting out the Red Moon from orbit for a few days, the crew and the mission planners on the ground had settled on the largest settlement they had spotted as a suitable target for the landing. (Not that they could tell who or what had built that settlement…) It was close to the delta where the great continental river completed its long journey to the ocean. The plan had been to come down on a reasonably flat, open plain a few miles to the west of the Beltway, the thick belt of forest at the continent’s eastern coast, close enough to that big settlement for Malenfant and Nemoto to complete their journey on foot. Later, the follow-up rocket pack would rendezvous with the lander on the ground.

That was the plan. The Red Moon hadn’t proven quite so cooperative.

As soon as the lander had ducked into the thicker layers of this little world’s surprising deep atmosphere, strong winds had gripped it. The mission planners had expected the unexpected; there had been no time or resources to model the Red Moon’s meteorology in detail. But none of that had helped ease Malenfant’s mind as he lay helpless in his bucket seat, buffeted like a toy in the hands of a careless child, watching their landing ellipse whip away beneath the lander’s prow.

The lander’s autonomous systems had looked actively for an alternative site suitable for a safe and controlled landing. But another gust stranded the lander over the Beltway itself. When it realized that it was running out of altitude and that soon it would reach a line of cliffs, beyond which there was only ocean — the lander had taken a metaphorical deep breath and dumped itself in the forest.

“The trees appear to be predominantly spruce,” Nemoto said. “The growths are tall, somewhat spindly. If we had come down in a forest more typical of Earth—”

“I know,” Malenfant growled. “We’d have crumpled like a cardboard box. You know, that path we cut through the trees reminds me of Star City. Moscow. Yuri Gagarin’s jet trainer came down into forest, and cut its way through the trees just like that. Ever since, they have cropped the trees to preserve the path. Gagarin’s last walk from the sky.”

“But our landing was not so terminal,” Nemoto said dryly. “Not yet anyhow.”

The sturdy little craft could never make another descent — but that didn’t matter, for it didn’t need to. The plan for the return to Earth was that Malenfant and Nemoto would fit a rocket pack to the lander’s rear end, raise the assembly upright, and take off vertically. And since the lander’s shell, sheltering its crew, hadn’t crumpled or broken or otherwise lost its integrity, the return flight might still be possible. All Malenfant had to do to get home, then, was to find the rocket pack when it came floating down from the sky after its separate journey from Earth — completing its lunar surface rendezvous, as the mission planners had called it — fit it and launch.

Oh, and find Emma.

Malenfant turned away from the lander and walked tentatively towards the edge of the forest. The gravity was indeed eerie, and it was hard not to break into a run.

The trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with parasites. Here a single snake-like liana wound around a trunk; here a rough-barked tree was covered by mosses and lichens; a third tree was a not of ferns, orchids and other plants. From a bole in one aged trunk, an eye peered out at him. It was steady, unblinking, like an owl’s. He backed away, cautiously.

He found a tall, palm-like tree, with dead brown fronds piled at its base. He crouched down and rummaged in the litter until he had reached crimson dirt. It was dry and sandy, evidently poor in nutrients. When he touched it to his lips, it tasted sharply of blood, or iron. He spat out the grains. The dust seemed to drift slowly to the ground.

He picked out yellow fruit from the debris of fronds. With a sideways glance at his shoulder camera, he said, “Here’s some fruit that seems to have fallen from the tree up there. You can see it is shaped like a bent cylinder. It is yellow, and its skin is smooth and soft to the touch—”

A small brown ball unrolled from the middle of the nest of fronds. Malenfant yelped, stumbling back. The ball sprouted four stubby legs and shot out into the clearing. Malenfant had glimpsed beady black eyes, a spiky hide, for all the world like a hedgehog.

Nemoto walked up to him, her camera tracking the small creature.

“The double-domes said there would be no small animals here,” he grumbled. “Thin air, fast metabolism—”

“A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis, Malenfant. Perhaps our small friend evolved greater lung surfaces through a novel strategy like folding, or even a fractal design. Perhaps she conserves energy by spending periods dormant, like some reptiles. We are here to learn, after all.” She grabbed the fruit. “Your description of this banana was acute.” She peeled it briskly, exposing soft white flesh, and bit into it. “But it is a banana. A little stringy, the taste thin, but definitely Musa sapientum. And, of course, the thinness of the taste might be an artefact of the body fluid redistribution we have both suffered as a result of our spaceflight.”