Starborne

So the word goes forth to the ship’s community that it has been determined that a landing is desirable — no details aboutwhy that might be felt to be a good idea — and therefore a landing will be made, and that Huw and the year-captain will be the landing party, and Huw sets about once more readying one of the probes for a manned voyage. And if anyone aboard the Wotan thinks that the year-captain is needlessly exposing two of the most valuable members of the expedition to great risk, that person does not share those thoughts with anyone else.

Huw winks broadly and does a thumbs-up as he and the year-captain secure themselves in their acceleration chairs. It’s a long time since these two have undertaken a mission of exploration together.

“Well, old brother, shall we shove off?” Huw asks.

“Whenever you’re ready, Huw. You’re the captain aboard this ship, you know. You make the decisions.”

“Right. Right.” Huw puts the little vessel under the control of the Wotan’s drive intelligence and the mother ship’s main computer takes charge, easing the drone out of the bay. When they are a safe distance from the Wotan the drone goes into powered flight and begins its descent from orbit.

The spider-armed lopsided awkwardness of the Wotan quickly gets smaller behind them. The cloud-swaddled face of Planet B expands with breathtaking swiftness.

Then they are inside the cloud layer, which the probe has previously determined to be nothing at all like the ghastly sulfuric-acid wrapper that covers Venus, but just a lot of plain H₂O and some CO₂, your basic veil of ordinary clouds, very, very dense but chemically harmless. They drop down through it and find themselves in the mother of all rainstorms, a planetary deluge of extraordinary intensity. It falls in green loops all around them, thick, viscous-looking rain. Now they understand where this world’s oceans are. They are in constant transit through the atmosphere, going up in the form of evaporation and coming down in the form of rain, and never once pausing to accumulate on the ground.

“It is a bitch of a place for certain, old brother,” Huw declares, as he takes over from the drive intelligence and begins to seek a decent landing place.

They are close enough to the ground now to see, even through the driving rain, that their guesses from on high were correct, that this planet is completely engulfed by an enormous webwork of gigantic woody vines, seemingly endless vines whose trunks have a diameter of at least ten meters and probably more, vines like horizontal trees that crisscross and overlap and entangle, leaving no free spaces between them anywhere.

Sonar shows the underground tunnels they had noticed from above, weaving through the vines beginning at a depth of perhaps forty meters and running both laterally and downward, in some places descending for a kilometer or more. Below the tunnel zone lies something that appears to be one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick, out of which all the vines seem to be sprouting. It is the mother substance, apparently, the living substructure of the entire giant organism — for it is rapidly becoming clear to them now that Planet B is occupied by one immense vegetable entity, which is this spongy subterranean mass, from which all else springs. And beneath that is the stone understructure of the planet, the hidden basalt core.

Where to land? There are no open places, no meadows, no plains.

Huw expends a little reaction mass to create one, tipping the probe up on end and flaming the upper edges of a few vines until there is a satisfactorily flat landing zone below them. There is no reaction from the vines adjacent. They do not writhe, nor do they even stir; they give no indication of any sort that Huw’s assault on this very small sector of the planetary flora has caused the slightest resentment, let alone set in motion some kind of retaliatory action.

He sets the probe down nicely. Waits a moment for it to finish rocking. The landing zone he has improvised is a little on the uneven side.

“Tests, now,” Huw tells the year-captain, unnecessarily.

They run through all the prescribed extravehicular testing routines, checking this thing and that, the acid content of the rain and the possibility of atmospheric toxins and such. Not that they have any intention of exposing themselves to direct unshielded intake of the atmosphere out there, not on an alien world that they are already almost certain will be of no avail as a place where human beings might settle happily. But they are aware that extraterrestrial chemistries might provide nasty surprises even for explorers protected by spacesuits. So they take the proper precautions.

The rain is unrelenting. It works the skin of the little spaceship over like a trillion tiny hammers.

“At this point on the last planet,” Huw says, “I was already beginning to feel strange. The queasies had started to strike before I was even out of the probe.”

“And now?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Nothing at all.”