Philyra screamed. Before Bellona knew what to expect, the lift dropped through the floor of the station and moments later they were hurtling down the rocky cliff towards the bottom of the ravine six kilometres below.
The subterranean landscape of the Eden Ravines was unlike anything Bellona and Philyra had ever seen before. It was an eerie jungle of purple and black; a twisted confusion of trees and plants so strange to the human eye that their first reaction was one of fear. Tall black spires sheathed in velvet-like scales forced their way between fat stems sprouting huge circular leaves of indigo. Spiny fronds of purple erupted from the myriad of bushes and shrubs that clung to every available piece of ground and rocky ledge, the dark foliage punctuated with blobs of yellow and white which were tiny flowers and fruits. The cliff itself was covered in what looked like dark green moss but which was probably nothing of the kind. A thin cool mist hung in the air, glowing faintly pink in the sunlight filtering down into the ravine, adding a further sense of unreality to the scene. The weird vista was all the proof needed that Ascension was indeed an alien world.
The lift had travelled down the side of the cliff and come to a halt out in the open on the floor of the ravine. Seeing that there was nothing but open air on the other side of the doors, Bellona and Philyra instinctively put on their emergency life-support masks, their nervousness compounded when Endymion and Miss Clymene did not follow suit.
The lift doors opened. Bellona watched anxiously as her brother stepped out of the lift onto the floor of the ravine. Endymion took a few bounding paces, then stopped and slowly turned to face the occupants of the lift, his face twisted in terror. Suddenly, with a terrible choking cry, he fell to his knees, his hands up around his neck.
“Help me!” he cried, wheezing painfully. “I can’t breath!”
Bellona shrieked. Philyra looked on in horror, her hands clasped to her face mask.
Miss Clymene walked calmly out of the lift and approached Endymion, who was now writhing around the floor in convulsions. She too was not wearing her face mask, but contrary to Bellona’s and Philyra’s expectations she did not keel over to join Endymion on the ground.
“Get up, Endymion,” she said wearily. “You’re not fooling anyone. I can see now why you never get picked for the school’s theatre group. I’ve never seen such bad acting.”
Endymion stopped moving and sheepishly climbed to his feet.
“Sorry miss,” he mumbled.
“Endymion!” snapped Bellona. “You pig!”
Her brother grinned. “The air’s fine,” he admitted. “Honest!”
Philyra looked far from convinced. Bellona slowly stepped through the open lift doors and walked to where Miss Clymene and Endymion were waiting. Cautiously, she lifted her own face mask and took an experimental sniff. Much to her relief, her subsequent gasp of surprise was exactly that and not a desperate wheeze of asphyxiation. Behind her, Philyra took off her own mask.
“Amazing,” Bellona murmured. “I can breath!”
“Yuck,” muttered Philyra. “It smells like the school toilets.”
Bellona smiled. The air was damp and had an odd coppery smell. Yet it was still an incredible sensation to be in the open on Ascension and not need an oxygen mask.
“The Eden Ravines are truly amazing,” declared Miss Clymene. “But you’ll learn more about this wonder of nature later on, when we get to the scientific research station. It’s a couple of kilometres walk from here, so… What do you want, Endymion?”
Looking guilty, Endymion held his hand in the air.
“I left my lunch on the skybus,” he confessed.
“You’re an idiot,” Miss Clymene told him. “It looks like you’ll have to starve. Please don’t eat anything growing in the Ravines. Alien biology makes your bowels do the most unpleasant things! Death by vomiting and diarrhoea is not a good way to go.”
Without waiting for a response, she started down a narrow track leading away from the lift, off into the dark moist jungle. Bellona wasted no time in falling into step behind her, Philyra somewhat reluctantly following behind. Endymion paused to hungrily examine a large purple fruit hanging from a nearby black stem. Bellona glanced back just in time to see the fruit split open to reveal what looked like teeth.
“Weird,” Endymion muttered.
Bellona frowned. Eating poisonous plants was one thing, but it was rather more worrying to think that some of the plants were not so worried about eating them.
The research station was a small habitation module roughly five metres by ten that judging by appearances had been in the Eden Ravines some years. It was owned by a large pharmaceutical company based at Bradbury Heights that was looking into interesting alien compounds for possible use in new medical treatments; a company that was more interested in making nice profits for its directors than in providing pleasant living arrangements for its field staff. The metal skin of the module, once pale grey, was badly discoloured by a strange purple fungus that covered much of the outside surface.
Inside, the laboratory and scientists’ living quarters were a picture of organised chaos, with no real separation of the two. Half-eaten meals rested on work benches next to test tubes of biological samples, along with trays of blue slime, holovid scanning microscopes and a glass tank containing an insect-like creature that looked like a cross between a grasshopper and a small dachshund.
A scientist in shabby white overalls stood at a hologram projection bench, on the other side of which stood Miss Clymene, Endymion, Bellona and Philyra. The scientist was pointing to the football-sized image hovering above the bench, which was a scale projection of a nondescript brown planet turning slowly anticlockwise upon its axis. As they watched, a smaller planetoid appeared next to it on a collision course.
“This occurred more than a billion years ago,” the scientist was saying. “However, the Barnard’s Star system is at least ten billion years old so the planets, including Ascension, had long ago formed and cooled from molten rock. It is thought this planetoid may have been a moon of one of the outer gas planets that had broken free from an unstable orbit.”
The visitors watched as the holographic planetoid smashed into the side of the larger world. The projection shimmered as the impact sent ripples across the surface and a blanket of virtual dust into the atmosphere. Moments later, the animated debris settled and now the planet looked more like the Ascension they knew. The impact had left its mark not only in the vast equatorial depression that became the Tatrill Sea, but also in the gargantuan network of canyons and cracks through the planet’s crust that gradually metamorphosed into the Eden Ravines. What was more, Ascension had come out of the collision rotating clockwise. Endymion stared at the hologram, his mouth hanging open in a most unattractive fashion.
“Are you on egg?” the scientist asked, frowning at Endymion’s expression.
“No!” retorted Endymion, offended.
“Apparently, he’s always like this,” Miss Clymene added.
Endymion gestured towards the hologram. “That is so cool.”
“In a way,” the scientist agreed. “The planetoid impact threw up a lot of dust and triggered large-scale volcanic activity, blocking out the sun.”