Tarik said, “Huh.” Ratthi sent me a glyph of a Preservation party sparkler exploding.
I didn’t say anything. (I know I get pissed off when humans don’t acknowledge my work, but why is too much acknowledgment also upsetting? Sentience sucks.)
On our private feed connection, Ratthi said, How are you doing back there?
I am absolutely fine, I told him.
Tarik took the shuttle out of its holding pattern and brought it around for a better visual sweep of the target area. I restarted the visual search process and ART-drone narrowed our query to the area around the rocky hills near the landing pad. I eliminated more false positives as Ratthi and Iris studied the live camera view of the potential landing site. Tarik pointed out, “It’s about equidistant from the hills and the terraformer.”
Ratthi was biting his lip, which meant he was thinking. “If there was any kind of a road, we’d be able to see it from above. Of course, a very light ground vehicle wouldn’t make much impact.”
“They had to bring heavy supplies in here at some point.” Iris squinted and used her feed to magnify the images of the ground around the pad.
Tarik was frowning. “Digging equipment, because even if they had a tunnel network to start with, they must have had to modify it. And you can tell this place has been changed by intense weather patterns. A bad storm could have wiped out any aboveground equipment, roads, quarries, maybe even the whole colony site.” His eyebrows were doing things that made him look angry, but from his tone and the read that threat assessment was getting off his body language, he was just concentrating. I knew from media that humans sometimes had the same problem with lack of control of their faces that I did. Like, obviously it wasn’t my unique problem or a unique problem for constructs in general, and possibly paranoia made me worry about it a lot more than necessary. But it was still weird to see it in action. Tarik added, “Uh, why is there a drone in my face?”
“Ignore it,” Ratthi said. “There would be pitting and warping on the barrier around the terraforming engines if there had been a colony-eating storm here at any point, even with the structure’s heavy shielding. Also a close look at the weathering on the surrounding rock formations would tell us a lot if the sensors were operational.” He waved his hands. “This is very frustrating! And all our geological evaluation software is back at home in Preservation space on our survey vessel.”
“There should be some in our archive, but I doubt it would work without functioning scanners. We need to get down there and do some surface exploration.” Iris glanced back at ART-drone. “What do you say, Peri?”
I say without functioning sensors you can’t determine whether the ground is stable enough to land the shuttle, ART-drone said. Also, the flat area may not be a landing pad, but the roof of an underground habitat.
Ratthi winced at the thought. “Not the most diplomatic of introductions to this group, landing on their habitat without permission.”
“So we land on flat ground somewhere, the area looks stable,” Tarik said. He’s not stupid. I think he was trying to annoy ART-drone, but I poked Ratthi on our private feed connection with a video file.
“What?” Ratthi said aloud, distracted by the autoplay images. “Oh, SecUnit wants me to mention the time I was almost eaten by fauna that came up underneath our aircraft on an inadequately mapped ground survey.”
“Point taken,” Iris said, though she hadn’t given any sign that she had ever actually considered doing what Tarik suggested and I thought that might be her way of indicating that Tarik and Ratthi should both shut up while she was thinking. She rummaged in the equipment bag on the seat next to her. “A ground sensor might do it, if we can get it close to the surface so the interference won’t—”
“I’ll do it.” I released my safety restraint and stood up. My drone had caught Tarik and Ratthi both taking a breath to say something and I knew what it was going to be. They were going to volunteer to go down to the surface and check for landing stability. And right after I had made Ratthi talk about almost being eaten, too. Iris must have agreed because she handed me the portable ground sensor as I crossed the compartment. I stepped over to the main cabin hatch and said, “You can let me out now.”
Now Tarik looked alarmed. “Whoa, whoa, hold on! We’re still more than twenty meters above the ground. Let me get us just a little closer.”
On our private feed, ART-drone said, If you open that hatch now I will turn this thing around and go home.
I pulled archival footage from a recent documentary about a failed planetary survey from a non-corporate polity. (Back on Preservation Station, Pin-Lee and I had discovered a shared interest in disaster evaluation via watching “true life” documentaries where terrible shit happens, and she had sent me this clip.) In this sequence a subsurface hostile fauna takes down an aircraft at forty meters. I sent it into the team feed.
Tarik yelled, “What the— What the fuck was that?”
Raising his voice to talk over Tarik, Ratthi said, “I understand your concern, SecUnit, but you are not jumping out at this height!”
Iris yelled over both of them, “People! Calm down! We have soft-drop packs in the emergency locker. SecUnit can use one.” She had large yelling capacity for a human her size. I had the feeling it came in handy.
The locker was right next to the hatch. I opened it and ART-drone had already told the inventory system to rotate the soft-drop packs to the front. I pulled one out and said, “I knew that.”
I did not know that. But whatever, I was fine either way.
I pulled up the hood of my environmental suit and let it secure the face mask. The temperature and air quality outside were impossible for humans without environmental suits and it wouldn’t have been much fun for me, either. I ordered ScoutDrones 1 and 2 to get in my side pockets. The wind might be too high for them to be much use, but it would be stupid not to bring them just in case. Ratthi said, “Just be careful, all right? You can get eaten, too!”
I have guns in my arms, Ratthi, I said on our private connection. That is literally the whole point of me. Plus I still had the projectile weapon, clamped to my environmental suit’s harness in the back. It didn’t have the capacity to handle an ag-bot, but there shouldn’t be any large roaming alien-contaminated bots here. There really shouldn’t be. If there were … yeah, don’t think about that.
The soft-drop pack’s instructional feed told me how to fasten it to my environmental suit. I got it attached and ART-drone finally cycled the lock for me.
I stepped in and let the inner hatch close. Inside the cabin, Iris asked, “So what is it with worrying about humans getting eaten all the time?” While Ratthi tried to explain, the outer hatch slid open and I gripped the safety handle and leaned out for a look.
Tarik had put the shuttle into hover mode, activating an air barrier over the lock to protect against the high winds. (ART has such nice equipment; in a company shuttle I would probably have fallen out already.) The wind would interfere with the soft-drop a little but not enough to fling me into any rocks, and the terraforming engines were too far away to be a factor. I aimed for the pad and stepped out into the air.
The soft-drop controlled my fall and I landed lightly on my feet. I didn’t even have to mitigate the impact with a fall and roll. I set the ground sensor down on the pad. It detected natural terrain, switched out of dormant mode, and booted itself.
The cloud cover was thicker here, obscuring the sun and making the daylight gray. Dust blew across the site from the south, toward the line of rocky hills approximately two kilometers away. My scan was just as fucked as the shuttle’s and the pathfinders’, but visual was good, and the faceplate kept the fine dust from obscuring my vision. There was just nothing to see.