His altitude grew gradually toward apogee, giving Ari plenty of time to stare at the living world below. His eyes traced the arc of a coastline, vivid blue overlaid on shades of tan and green, until he lost it in swirled white clouds. He tried to imagine what it would be like to stand on that beach, to feel the moist wind in his face. What sounds would there be? What did it smell like?
“Um, Ari?” Maura’s voice, tight with stress, startled him. “I’m defying orders by contacting you, so I’ll have to make this quick.”
He glanced up at the curved horizon line. The Gardien was a bright light shimmering through the upper edge of atmosphere. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re planning to land.”
“Who? The people from Earth? Nonsense. They sent us to preserve the ecosystem. They wouldn’t risk contaminating it.”
Atmospheric distortion crackled in his ear. Their ancestors sent our mothers; we were frozen embryos when that decision was made. Attitudes back on Earth may have changed.
How dare they risk destroying a lifetime of study? How dare they touch the world, experience it up close, achieve his dream?
And what the hell was Ari supposed to do about it?
Somehow, solitude had lost its charm. He busied himself by fiddling with the radio. Maybe the director hadn’t shut down his emergency channel. His heart thumped in his chest when he found the radio wouldn’t respond to his command. His oxygen-use indicator briefly flashed yellow—he was using oxygen faster than the bioscrubber was producing it.
He forced his breathing into a practiced rhythm, slow and steady. No sense depleting the oh-two tanks unnecessarily. He eyeballed the radio diagnostic software. Red error messages scrolled up his faceplate. The radio was fried.
Wait. The content of the error messages belatedly registered. The radio was fine; it was the software that was fried. And how exactly did that happen?
The director’s data packet must’ve contained more than orbital data. She really doesn’t want me contacting anyone. What else did she sabotage?
Hell with her. He looked up along the skimmer’s carbon fiber frame. The magsail’s superconducting loops doubled as his radio antenna. The kilometer-long nanofiber filaments that made the loops were invisibly thin, and even if he could see them he wouldn’t have been able to manipulate them by hand. Not without risking a coil collapse. Without those superconducting coils pushing against Nouvelle Terre’s magnetosphere, he would have no way to maneuver.
That left the backup transceiver, a small dish mounted on the bottom of the skimmer’s frame. The software for that was scrambled too, but it should be easy enough to write a few lines of code to keep it aimed at the nearest geosynchronous relay satellite. If he remembered its longitude correctly.
He activated the faceplate keyboard. Writing code by eyeball was frustratingly slow. His temples throbbed with stress by the time he was ready to test it.
“…unidentified craft…”
Was that a voice in the static? He tweaked the longitude value by a fraction of a degree.
“Shuttle Feynman to unidentified craft. Can you respond?”
Ari’s heart tried to claw its way out of his chest. I’m a skimmer jockey, not a diplomat. He blew out a few deep breaths and eyeballed the transmit icon. “Are you really from Earth?” His voice wavered, rising in pitch as he spoke. Stupid first words.
“That we are. We’ve come to join the colony. Only we can’t seem to find any of your settlements.”
“Settlements? On the surface, you mean? We study the surface remotely, from orbit.”
“You’re kidding.”
Ari hesitated, his mouth open, unsure what to say. He wished he could talk to Maura.
“You got a name, son?”
“My name’s Ari.”
“Well, Ari, you might want to give your orbit a nudge. You’re going to pass dangerously close to us.”
He pulled down the graphics overlay on his HUD. The skimmer’s nanoprocessor had located the Earth shuttle and showed its projected orbit as a bright green curve. Sure enough, his orbit intersected it near perigee.
“Sorry about that, Earth ship.”
“Aw, hell. Call me Bill.”
Ari eyeballed the nav dropdown, nudged the magsail’s current.
OVERRIDE.
What the hell? He tried again, with the same result.
“Um, Bill? I’m having a bit of a problem here. You’ll have to clear a path for me.”
“Understood.” There was a long pause while Bill attended to whatever details he had to take care of. “I’ll fire a quick burn, push myself above and behind you. There’s gonna be hell to pay, though. It’ll delay my landing by at least two orbits.”
“You can’t land.”
“And why would that be, son?”
“That’s a unique ecology down there, something new and alien.” He repeated the words almost verbatim from the schoolvids. “It needs to be preserved. Introducing Earth life before we understand it could be disastrous.”
“You came all this way just to hang in orbit and watch?”
“Observe, study, report. Our mothers have been sending yearly data bursts back to Earth since they got here.”
“Records from before the war are sketchy. The receiver stations must’ve been lost.”
War? A queasy feeling rose in his stomach. After a long moment, he managed to say, “The Earthborn taught us that Earth was unified.”
“What? Oh, you mean the UN? Broke up years ago when the Chinese seceded.”
“You didn’t get any of our data bursts?”
“All we knew is that there was a colony at Alpha Centauri. We came prepared to conquer the wilderness, not for life in orbit. Hell, our anti-rad meds are almost gone.”
“Meds? Why not use gene therapy? My adrenal cortex produces all the androstenediol I need to keep me safe from radiation.”
“You’re genetically engineered?”
“No, we use gene therapy. We’re hoping to engineer the genes directly into the next generation. Save them the booster shots.”
There was a long pause. “We have laws against that.”
“Earth has laws. They’re four light years away.”
“Humph. Maybe. Attitudes are harder to change than laws. There’s a lot of people who would die before they pollute their bodies with foreign genes.”
Ari shook his head behind his faceplate, even though he had an audio-only connection. “I guess I just don’t understand Earth people.”
“Goes both ways, son. I couldn’t imagine living my whole life in a tin can.”
Not a tin can, but surely cramped quarters compared to an entire planet. How can we even begin to relate to them? Unsure what to say, he let the silence drag on. His eyes drifted back to the HUD. The shuttle’s projected orbit shifted slowly, sluggishly. Yet the orbits still intersected. His skimmer was adjusting the magsail current automatically, maintaining a collision course. He manually cranked the pitch loop’s current.
OVERRIDE.
Panic rising up in his throat, he desperately scanned the horizon line for the Earth shuttle. Not a chance—even if it were naked-eye visible, it would still be below the horizon.
Incoming message. He nearly jumped out of his skinsuit when the light came on. He eyeballed the receive icon.
The director’s skeletal image appeared on his faceplate, her eyes stern, her jaw set. “Break off communication with the Earth shuttle at once.”
He almost welcomed the familiarity of her emotionless tone, her lifeless face. “I’m just trying to understand them, ma’am.” He felt like a child standing before her judgment.
“Unacceptable. You will communicate with no one.”
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to keep me quiet. What are you trying to hide?”