Then they wished her safe travels and the video ended. The last frame hung before her, her dad frozen mid-wave, her mom’s face at an odd angle as she finished saying, “—love you.”
“Love you,” Kira murmured. She sighed. When had she last managed to visit them? Two years ago? Three? At least that. Too long by far. The distances and the travel times didn’t make it easy.
She missed home. Which didn’t mean she would have been content to just stay on Weyland. She’d needed to push herself, to reach beyond the normal and the mundane. And she had. For seven years she had traveled the far reaches of space. But she was sick of being alone and sick of being cooped up on one spaceship after another. She was ready for a new challenge, one that balanced the familiar with the alien, the safe with the outlandish.
There on Adra, with Alan, she thought perhaps she would find just such a balance.
2.
Halfway through reentry, the turbulence began to subside and the EM interference vanished along with the sheets of plasma. Lines of yellow text appeared in the top corner of Kira’s vision as the comm link to HQ went live again.
She scrolled through the messages, catching up with the rest of the survey team. Fizel, their doctor, was being his usual annoying self, but other than that, nothing interesting.
A new window popped up:
<How’s the flight, babe? – Alan>
Kira was unprepared for the sudden tenderness his concern evoked in her. She smiled again as she subvocalized her response:
<No problems here. You? – Kira>
<Just doing a last bit of pickup. Thrilling stuff. Want me to clear out your cabin for you? – Alan>
She smiled. <Thanks, but I’ll take care of it when I’m back. – Kira>
<’K … Listen, we didn’t really get a chance to talk this morning, and I wanted to check: You still okay with everything from last night? – Alan>
<You mean, do I still want to marry you and settle here on Adra? – Kira> She followed up before he could reply: <Yes. My answer is still yes. – Kira>
<Good. – Alan>
<What about you? Are you still okay? – Kira> Her breath caught a little as she sent the text.
His answer was swift: <Absolutely. I just wanted to make sure you were doing alright. – Alan>
She felt herself soften. <More than alright. And I appreciate that you bothered to check. – Kira>
<Always, babe. Or should I say … fiancée? – Alan>
Kira made a delighted sound. It came out more choked than intended.
“All good?” Neghar asked, and Kira could feel the pilot’s eyes on her.
“More than good.”
She and Alan continued to talk until the retrorockets kicked in, jolting her back to full awareness of her surroundings.
<Gotta go. We’re about to land. Touch base later. – Kira>
<’K. Have fun.;-) – Alan>
<Riiight. – Kira>
Then Geiger spoke in her ear: “Touchdown in ten … nine … eight … seven…”
His voice was calm and emotionless, with a hint of a cultured Magellan accent. She thought of him as a Heinlein. He sounded as if he would be named Heinlein, if he were a person. Flesh and blood, that is. With a body.
They landed with a short drop that caused her stomach to lurch and her heart to race. The shuttle listed a few degrees to the left as it sank into the dirt.
“Don’t take too long, you hear?” said Neghar, unclipping her harness. Everything about her was neat and compact, from her finely carved features to the folds in her jumpsuit to the thin lines of braids that formed a wide strip across her head. On her lapel she wore an ever-present gold pin: a memorial to co-workers lost on the job. “Yugo said he’s cooking a fresh batch of cinnamon rolls as a special treat before blastoff. ’Less we hurry, they’ll all be gone by the time we get back.”
Kira pulled off her own harness. “I won’t be a minute.”
“Better not, honey. I’d kill for those rolls.”
The stale smell of reprocessed air hit Kira’s nose as she slipped on her helmet. Adrasteia’s atmosphere was thick enough to breathe, but it would kill you if you tried. Not enough oxygen. Not yet, and changing that would take decades. The lack of oxygen also meant that Adra didn’t have an ozone layer. Everyone who ventured outside had to be fully shielded against UV and other forms of radiation. Otherwise, you were liable to get the worst sunburn of your life.
At least the temperature’s bearable, thought Kira. She wouldn’t even have to turn on the heater in her skinsuit.
She climbed into the narrow airlock and pulled the inner hatch shut behind her. It closed with a metallic boom.
“Atmosphere exchange initialized; please stand by,” said Geiger in her ear.
The indicator turned green. Kira spun the wheel in the center of the outer hatch and then pushed. The seal broke with a sticky, tearing sound, and the reddish light of Adrasteia’s sky flooded the airlock.
The island was an unlovely heap of rocks and rust-colored soil, large enough that she couldn’t see the far side, only the near coast. Beyond the edge of land spread an expanse of grey water, like a sheet of hammered lead, the tips of the waves highlighted with the ruddy light from the cloudless sky. A poison ocean, heavy with cadmium, mercury, and copper.
Kira jumped down from the airlock and closed it behind her. She frowned as she studied the telemetry from the downed drone. The organic material it had detected wasn’t by the water, as she’d expected, but rather at the top of a wide hill a few hundred meters to the south.
Okay then. She made her way across the fractured ground, picking her steps with care. As she walked, blocks of text popped up in front of her, providing info on the chemical composition, local temperature, density, likely age, and radioactivity of different parts of the landscape. The scanner on her belt fed the readings into her overlays while simultaneously transmitting them back to the shuttle.
Kira dutifully reviewed the text but saw nothing new. The few times she felt compelled to take a soil sample, the results were as boring as ever: minerals, traces of organic and pre-organic compounds, and a scattering of anaerobic bacteria.
At the top of the hill, she found a flat spread of rock scored with deep grooves from the last planetary glaciation. A patch of orange, lichen-like bacteria covered much of the rock. Kira recognized the species at first glance—B. loomisii—but she took a scraping just to confirm.
Biologically, there wasn’t much of interest on Adrasteia. Her most notable find had been a species of methane-eating bacteria beneath the arctic ice sheet—bacteria that had a somewhat unusual lipid structure in their cellular walls. But that was it. She’d write up an overview of Adrasteia’s biome, of course, and if she was lucky, she might get it published in a couple of the more obscure journals, but it wasn’t much to crow about.
Still, the absence of more developed forms of life was a plus when it came to terraforming: it left the moon a lump of raw clay, suitable for remolding however the company, and the settlers, saw fit. Unlike on Eidolon—beautiful, deadly Eidolon—they wouldn’t have to be constantly fighting the native flora and fauna.