They would both be on a leash, but everyone on the big ship and the scout understood that, once down, they were pretty much on their own.
Robey settled into the right-hand chair, Toloway the left. They buckled up, then went through the flight checklist like experienced pilots, and finally the last seals hissed into place and Robey said, “Angel One to Father—ready when you are.”
“Very well, Angel One. Stand by. Counting down.”
In front of them a digital clock started backing down from sixty seconds. When it reached zero, there was a sudden lurch and a feeling of falling as the solidity of the big ship fell away and they were in space.
Robey looked over at his companion. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I’m excited. I’ve never been on a real planet except in the simulators before.”
“Well, I hope you’re prepared for it. It’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Stand by. Angel One to Father.”
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s go on in, assuming we’re not fired on. I think we’ll start where they did, and see what’s left of the first colony.”
“Very well. Agreed. Check and insure that your watches are in synch with the scout and us. You’ll be coming in about an hour after sunup, and at that latitude you’ll have about eleven hours of daylight from right now. I’ll bring you in near the donut-shaped central administrative structure. Planetfall in… seventeen minutes.”
They could feel the craft twist and turn and adjust, but inside there was only silence and the sudden sight of the planet in their forward screen. It was night below, but the terminator was fast approaching.
“No lights at all below,” Robey noted. “I have a feeling that what’s left of this colony is entirely around where we’re headed. I sure pray that they’re better off than they seemed.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, if they’re on the decline and dying out and we can’t stabilize things, then it’s going to be a real dead world down there. We could never absorb a fraction of a population that big.”
She hadn’t thought of that, but there was only one way to approach it and stay sane. “God’s will,” she breathed.
The terrain was a bit more diverse than it had seemed from the pictures aboard the ship; the central continent was quite green, with dense trees, lots of rivers and creeks, and it had a kind of rolling topography, flattening out to a great plain only around the original landing spot.
Every time anybody saw colonial buildings they wondered what in the world people were thinking of when they built them. Although most were quite massive, they looked like giant clay or dough structures extruded from gigantic toothpaste or paint tubes and then built up one pasty layer at a time. In fact, they were the products of pragmatism; it would have been far too expensive to take such buildings with a colony; that bulk and weight was best utilized for carrying seed and core machinery and initial survival supplies and equipment. From the earliest days of space exploration, though, it was recognized that worlds where people could set themselves up were made of the same stuff, basically, as all the worlds they’d come from. Several building machines were developed that actually could grind up and transform rocks and silicates into a substance that could be used to literally form buildings to need. Those machines were a lot easier to bring to a new colony and a lot less bulky than prefabricated dwellings. They also had computerized models preprogrammed in case nobody was really architecturally inclined, and most had used them.
The effect was a sameness of puffy-looking structures from world to world and culture to culture, just like the ones here. The thing was, though, that the stuff did wear well; although obviously not in regular use, and probably abandoned if the power was gone, these looked in remarkably good shape.
The scout put down in what would have been the central “square” of the initial colonial headquarters after checking and finding nobody obviously very close to the landing site. That didn’t mean that natives weren’t around, but they certainly didn’t seem to be in evidence.
The buildings all had the typical rough, rounded, unfinished exterior look to them, and as they took much of their color from the materials they’d transformed, this batch was a collection of dull pinks and sickly moss greens.
The hatch hissed, and then swung up and away, and then Robey, followed by his smaller companion, emerged, hoods up over their heads to protect against the unfamiliar hot sun. The hatch automatically closed behind them when they cleared the landing site, and the small scout continued to vibrate, ready to take off at a moment’s threat or to protect the two passengers.
It was hot, certainly over thirty, perhaps thirty-five, and surprisingly humid for being so far from an ocean. The sky was filled with puffy white clouds, and the air was still, almost leaden, and smelled of decay.
Robey gestured to his companion, and they started walking to opposite sides of the square, then around it, taking a look at anything they could see.
There were signs of the original project. Pieces of the initial setup machines lay strewn all over the square, and there were parts of one thing or another here and there. Many of them looked dismantled or cannibalized, but some of them just sat there, as they probably had for a century and a half or more, since the power ran down.
The power wasn’t supposed to run down for a century or two, though, which only confirmed their first impression. Nothing they saw had been brought here new; most of it was as much the product of junkyard reconstruction as a lot of the technology in The Mountain. It was almost as if this place hadn’t been cut off by the Great Silence but rather established after it occurred.
They crossed back to the center near the scout and compared notes.
“What do you think, Brother John? A pirate den that didn’t work out?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I doubt it, Sister, but this is definitely not anybody’s grand design. Refugees, maybe, from other places. That would explain the crindin and some of the insects I’ve seen here, which are definitely not native to any one planet. Let’s take a look inside the main building over there. It had to be Administration.”
The door had long since vanished, but it was a dark hole inside, and he reached into a pocket in his robe and pulled out a strong directional flashlight. With that, they both entered, stepping over all sorts of rubble.
It didn’t take long to know that they were going to learn little from inside the place. What had been useful to others had been carried away, even if it had to have been dug out of the walls and floor. Areas where there would have been computer screens and command consoles looked wrecked as well; even if they couldn’t run computers remotely, somebody thought that the interface chairs probably would be comfortable, or that the screens might make good temporary walls.