The hatch above their heads was slammed down with finality. And that, Yuri thought, was the last he was going to see of the Ad Astra.
With all aboard and tied down tightly, the two Peacekeepers settled in couches at the rear of the cabin. Lex McGregor came floating back from the forward cockpit, as usual immaculate in his uniform. Beyond him, in the pilots’ cabin, Yuri glimpsed Mardina Jones pulling on a pressure suit.
McGregor faced the passengers. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the prosaically named Ad Astra shuttle number two. In this brave little ship we will soon be descending to the planet of another star . . .’
The passenger cabin had no windows. But now, over McGregor’s shoulder, through that pilots’ window, as the shuttle drifted, Yuri could see more of the planet: the grey shield of what looked like an ocean, floating masses of ice, a terminator separating night from day, a diorama shifting by.
‘Our descent will be straightforward. We will be landing at a predesignated site in the north-east quadrant of the planet’s substellar face. We’ll come down on what looks like a dry lake bed, just like the salt flats at Edwards Air Force Base in California where I completed my own flight training some years ago. Perfectly safe, a natural runway.
‘Our landing routine will take two hours. I’m afraid you won’t be able to leave your chairs until we’re safely down and the wheels have stopped rolling. If you have any biological requirements during the flight just let yourself go, you’ll notice you are wearing underwear adapted for the purpose. You will hardly be comfortable but it won’t be for long. Also there are sick bags. I do hope there will be no monkey business from any of you during the flight,’ he said, sadly, gravely. ‘Obviously it would be futile; you could achieve nothing but damage the craft and endanger yourself and your colleagues. We, the crew, incidentally, will be wearing pressure suits and parachutes, so you need not fear for our safety, whatever you do.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Soon we’ll decouple, and then the deorbit burn will follow a few minutes later. Any questions? No? Enjoy the flight. After all,’ he mused, as if an interesting thought had just struck him, ‘it will, I suppose, be the last flight any of you ever take.’ He retreated to his cabin.
Soon there were more bangs and jolts, a sound that Yuri had come to recognise as the firing of small attitude rockets. As the shuttle swung about, turning on its axis to the right, he could sense that he was in a much less massive vessel than the reassuring bulk of the starship. There was silence in the passenger cabin, save for ragged, nervous breathing, and the usual space-travel hiss of pumps and fans, a noise that had followed Yuri all the way from Mars – and, incredibly, the drone of somebody snoring. Yuri glanced around to see; it was Harry Thorne, from a Canadian UNSA state, once an urban farmer, a heavy-set, imperturbable man.
Beyond the pilots’ window a second planet hung in the black now, more distant, a perfect sphere of silver-grey.
Lemmy leaned forward again. ‘Yuri. Listen. Watch everything. Observe. Remember. I mean, are they going to give us maps? Remember everything you can of this new world we’re heading for—’
Yuri heard rather than saw Mattock’s fist hitting Lemmy’s jaw. ‘One more word, shithead, and I’ll lay you out for the duration.’
Now there was a roar, a gentle shove that pressed Yuri back into his seat.
It was a strange thing that Yuri had crossed interplanetary space, and then interstellar space, but he knew nothing about the mechanics of space flight. In his day the whole business of flying in space had seemed unethical, just another sin committed in a previous energy-bloated age, and nobody even talked about it. He could only guess at what was going on.
The burn was soon over. Now the attitude rockets slammed again, once more the ship swivelled – he glimpsed that ocean, half-submerged in night, slide past the pilots’ window – and then, nothing.
The seconds piled up into minutes. To Yuri it felt as if he was still in freefall. Behind him he heard somebody humming – it was the other Peacekeeper, not Mattock – and the rustle of a paper bag. Those guys had done this run several times before, he guessed; they knew the routine. There was a fumble. ‘Damn.’ A couple of candy fragments came sailing over Yuri’s head, from behind. Yuri stared, fascinated; he’d seen no candy since he’d gone into cryo on Earth. But the bright blue capsules were falling, he saw, a long slow curving glide down to the floor. Acceleration building up.
There was a glow outside that forward window now, a dull crimson, then orange, and then, suddenly a dazzling white, like he was flying down some huge fluorescent tube. Yet there was no noise, no shuddering or buffeting, no great sense of weight, not yet.
The glow quickly cleared to reveal a seascape, white ice floes on a steely ocean that faded into night. Then this panorama tilted up, sideways. No, of course, it was the shuttle that was tipped up, almost standing on its right wing. And then, Yuri could feel it in his gut, the craft tipped the other way, and the landscape slid out of his view.
‘Holy shit,’ murmured someone else now, a woman ahead of Yuri, another businessperson called Martha Pearson, staring out of the forward window.
‘We’re gliding,’ Lemmy muttered through gritted teeth. ‘That’s all. No power now we’ve deorbited. Gliding down into the atmosphere of this world. Shedding our speed in friction against the upper air in these big rolls and banks . . .’
Mattock growled a warning, but indistinctly; maybe he was distracted himself.
Suddenly they flew into night. Now there was only darkness below, that landscape hidden. Yuri could feel the gravity mounting up, and he lay back on his couch. Still the pressure piled on until it felt like some enormous Peacekeeper was sitting on his chest, and there was blackness around the edge of his vision, closing in. But now there was a pressure in his legs, around his waist; his undergarment was clamping him hard, pressing back his belly button.
‘Clench!’ shouted Lemmy. ‘Clench your gut! It will help stop you blacking out . . .’
Yuri tried it, crunching down hard. It felt like his whole waist was being constricted by some terrifically tight belt. But it worked, his vision cleared.
Now he could hear a rush of air, of wind – this spaceship really had become an airplane – and they flew suddenly into daylight once more, from day to night in an instant. Raising his head, he glimpsed through the pilots’ window a big watery sun that dazzled him, and a twilit land below, then more ice floes, more ocean, all bathed in a ruddy glow.
‘Your last sunrise!’ Lemmy yelled.
Yuri didn’t know what he meant.
There was a shudder, a bang, and the ride abruptly got a lot more bumpy. The shuttle glided on down through air that felt lumpy, full of turbulence, like they were flying through a field of invisible rocks. But now, Yuri saw, looking forward, he was flying towards land again. A coast-line fled beneath, fringed by white-capped waves, and then what looked like a belt of forest, a furry fringe of a dismal drab green, and then more arid country, it seemed, dust and sand and dunes.
Remember it all, Lemmy had said. Yuri tried. But he didn’t even know which way he was flying. West to east? Did directions like that even make any sense on this world?
They flew over cloud now, a great curdled bank of it, grey-white, twisted like a tremendous tornado, he thought. Through breaks in the cloud he glimpsed another clump of strange dark forest. Then they were back over the open country, with only scattered cloud below, and Yuri saw a river snaking away from that stormy region, a silver ribbon laid across the rust-coloured land.