"So what do you think, Mom?" He turned so I could see the back. More stripes. "Aren’t I like the king’s sarcophagus?"
"You are."
Festina came to the door of the cockpit and gave Tut a long cool look. "I like it," she said. "There’s something refreshingly efficient about an Explorer already wearing a coffin."
We took off without ceremony — nothing but the usual "permission requesteds" and "permission granteds" that always mark a shuttle departure. No one came to watch us leave… not even Ubatu, who I thought might show up to give me some words of Ifa-Vodun wisdom. ("Don’t endanger the spores. We haven’t had a chance yet to kill something in their honor.") Festina noticed the absence of well-wishers too; just before takeoff, she murmured, "Li must have decided he couldn’t bear to see his baby go."
I said, "He and Ubatu are probably up on the bridge getting in the captain’s way."
"Probably," Festina agreed. "If the three of us don’t come back, everybody will want to say they had a front-row seat when Festina Ramos met her doom."
"Fame’s a bitch, isn’t it?" Tut said. "Bugs the crap out of me." We both looked at him, wondering what he thought he was famous for. I could have looked into his aura, but decided I didn’t want to know.
Li might have been a bullying, self-absorbed man, but he had excellent taste in shuttles. He’d chosen a model whose cockpit was almost entirely transparent: a clear plastic bubble bulging from the front of the craft and providing a panoramic view of our surroundings. Overhead was Pistachio, a long white baton surrounded with its milky Sperm-field, set against deep starry black. Beneath us lay the sunlit blue of Muta, streaked with clouds and shining hospitably in the emptiness of space. Festina was in the pilot’s seat, Tut in the copilot’s, me in the pull-out chair behind… and the bubble around us was so close to invisible, I felt we were sitting on some outer-space patio, casually open to vacuum.
"Starting descent now," Festina said into her comm.
"Acknowledging your descent," Cohen answered. "Good luck, Admiral." His voice came through my tightsuit’s radio as well as my comm implant; then it was replaced by a faint regular beep produced by Pistachio’s ship-soul. Festina had asked for the beep as a way of detecting EMPs: if the beep went silent, we’d know we’d been pulsed. Of course, we probably wouldn’t need outside confirmation — when the shuttle’s lights died and its steering yoke went sludgy, we’d have a good clue what had happened — but Festina liked redundant backups.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
As we angled down toward Muta, Pistachio began to turn from horizontal to vertical. Soon it would be straight up and down, nose toward the stars and stern pointing directly at Camp Esteem. The long swishing Sperm-tail would dangle like an unruly fishing line, down through the many layers of atmosphere until it reached the ground below. Once we landed, we’d catch that line with an anchor and secure an EMP-proof escape from Muta’s dangers.
Or so we hoped.
Pistachio was soon out of sight: lost in the distant dark. Our descent path would circle Muta once, easing gently, down, down, down. None of us spoke as the sun (or should I say GoL?) disappeared behind the rounded edge of the planet. The dark half of the world, rolling far beneath us, showed no lights at all. In the age of Las Fuentes, that blackness must have been punctuated by the illumination of cities… but now there was only seamless night.
"What do you think is really down there?" Tut asked.
Festina said, "I’m afraid we’ll soon find out."
Down and down. A digital display on the shuttle’s console showed our altitude in kilometers: 900… 850… 800… descending through the ionosphere, a constantly surging bath of electrically charged particles. Cumulatively, the electric fury outside had much more energy than the EMPs we worried about; but it was thinned over time and distance, rather than striking the shuttle in a single disruptive pulse. Our shielding could protect us without difficulty. I hoped.
500… 450… 400… 350…
We rounded back into sunlight and my helmet visor darkened to protect my eyes. I wanted to ask the others when they thought we’d get EMP’d, but they didn’t know any more than I did; perhaps the Balrog had better information, but I avoided asking, for fear the spores might actually answer. As for my newly acquired sixth sense, its range was far too limited to tell me anything — it didn’t even reach to the back of the shuttle’s passenger cabin, let alone several hundred kilometers to the ground. My alien awareness could feel the hypersonic rush of thin atmosphere just outside the cockpit, but my perception stopped well short of the shuttle’s own galley.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Our comms were still alive. Beep. Beep. The computerized signal was soft but unnerving in the otherwise silent cockpit. To break the tension, I opened my mouth to make some inane remark… but Festina must have heard me getting ready to speak because she quickly cut in. "Nobody say anything. Not a word."
Tut looked at her in surprise, obviously wondering what she was worried about. I had the advantage of being able to read her life force: Festina exuded a superstitious dread that if anyone said, "So far so good," the words themselves would make all hell break loose.
She was probably right.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
300… 250… 200… things would get bumpy soon. The shuttle’s wings were set to full extension; as the atmosphere thickened, they’d drag against the air, leading to random skips and flutters. Festina had said our course would pass directly over Camp Esteem, but that was only the computer’s best-guess scenario. If we got EMP’d and lost control while bumping/jumping/thumping high in the atmosphere, we might veer hundreds of kilometers off course. The shuttle allowed for manual steering — wrestling the yoke without powered assistance — but it wouldn’t be enough to get us back on track if we deviated too far too early.
Beep.
150… 100… 80… then a Brahma-bull buck as we hit the mesopause, the line of demarcation between the outer atmosphere and the lower layers. Festina kept her grip on the yoke, pressing our nose into the dive. We could see nothing but planet now: a great wide plain filled our view, grasslands veined with wandering rivers that occasionally wandered too far and diffused into Mesozoic bogs. Those bogs would be full of reptiles and amphibians… not exactly like terrestrial species, but with points of similarity. Evolution was like weather — chaotic in specific details, but falling into large-scale patterns with a limited repertoire of effects. Muta’s development would approximately echo Earth’s. Its swamps would have quasi-crocodilian predators dining on quasi-frog amphibians and quasi-minnow fish…
Another bump — 50 klicks on the altimeter. We’d entered the stratosphere. Within seconds, the cockpit bubble was surrounded by heat glow as we rammed into air particles and crushed them together. My sixth sense could feel the hull temperature soaring — still within safety limits, but higher than a normal entry. Festina had based our course on the possibility we’d get EMP’d much earlier than this; though the shuttle still had power, we were following the same path as if we’d been in an uncontrolled dive.
Fast and hot. Blazing through the sky.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
"You know," Tut said, "I thought-"
"Shut up!" Festina and I yelled in unison.
40… 30… going through Muta’s ozone layer, and still no EMP. I was sure that’s what Tut had intended to say: I thought we’d be pulsed by now. I’d thought the same. But EMPs take a lot of energy — especially at long range. It would be more efficient to shoot us close to the ground.