The Arrows of Time

‘Look at all that land!’ Ramiro marvelled. If every field of wheat in the Peerless were laid out here side by side, they would pass by in a flicker, lost in the vastness. The sagas were full of journeys on foot that had crossed ancient empires and lasted for years, but nothing he’d read or imagined had prepared him for the scale of the world below. ‘How could the first travellers ever give up so much freedom?’

‘I think the Hurtlers might have helped,’ Tarquinia suggested.

‘Yes, but I still wouldn’t have been able to do it. We never belonged cooped up in a mountain; it’s a wonder we didn’t all lose our minds generations ago.’

‘So you’re set on making this your home?’ Tarquinia asked. ‘Esilio’s won you over already?’

Ramiro buzzed softly. ‘Esilio’s one thing, but twelve more years of travelling will probably finish me off.’ He would have relished defying Greta and staying behind when the Surveyor departed – and it would not have undermined the purpose of the mission if the rest of the crew returned to the Peerless with the news that a colony had already been established. But he couldn’t do it alone.

Tarquinia said, ‘And wide-open spaces are one thing, but you can’t eat dirt. Before you start picturing the flowers on your grave, let’s see if anything can take root here at all.’

The probe parted from the Surveyor, separated by a burst of air before it fired its engines to start the descent from orbit. Ramiro peered over Tarquinia’s shoulder to watch the instrumentation feed. Azelio looked on from Tarquinia’s right, and even Agata had left her calculations for a while to cling to the rope beside him.

As the probe slowed to let gravity bring it down, it didn’t take long to fall back behind the Surveyor’s horizon, cutting the link. ‘Do you want to sleep for the next few chimes?’ Agata teased Ramiro. ‘I promise to wake you when all the results are in.’

‘No thanks.’ Ramiro asked Tarquinia to replay the recorded data; something unsettling had caught his eye. ‘Look at how hot it was, just before we lost contact!’

Azelio said, ‘We were expecting some frictional heating, weren’t we?’

‘Not so soon. Not at that altitude.’

Tarquinia frowned. ‘We’re not suffering any unexplained drag ourselves, so I don’t see how we could have the density profile that wrong.’

Ramiro didn’t want to argue about the cause; the fact remained that the heating was unexpected. ‘If this thing burns up out of sight, we’re never going to know what happened – or what we need to change when we try again. If we make the wrong guess we could lose the second probe the same way.’

Tarquinia contemplated this gloomy scenario. ‘Then we’d better move quickly,’ she said.

Ramiro was already strapped to his couch, but Agata and Azelio had to clamber into place as the Surveyor tilted then ascended rapidly. The cabin window faced the stars, but on the navigation console the land could be seen falling away as Tarquinia widened their horizon to reestablish a line of sight to the probe.

When the link was restored she cut the engines, letting them continue the upwards arc from momentum alone. Ramiro was dizzy after the unaccustomed weight, but when his head cleared he focused on the data feed. The probe’s temperature was still high, but it was less than before.

‘It must have been a false reading,’ he decided.

The image feed was growing shaky, as if the probe was being buffeted by high winds. Greta had only provided the expedition with a single time-reversed camera, and the probe’s sunless view of the landscape below was almost impossible to read. The temperature was dropping steadily now. Maybe there was something going on with the cooling air: a valve had jammed when the flow had been needed to dispose of the engine’s heat, but now it had simply snapped open and was overcompensating.

As the juddering machine rushed towards the surface, Ramiro felt equal parts fear and exultation. In the history of the Peerless, no one had ever performed a manoeuvre that deserved to be described as a landing. But if this small, robust scout couldn’t survive the process, what chance would there be for the Surveyor?

The image turned black. Tarquinia said, ‘Side camera might be more informative now.’ She sent an instruction from her corset, and the feed changed to a slanted view of an expanse of sandy ground. In the middle distance a few small grey rocks broke the flatness.

‘It’s down! It’s safe!’ Azelio chirped ecstatically, then turned to the instrument feed. ‘And the temperature’s fine. It’s already close to Tarquinia’s estimate for the surface.’

Agata said, ‘In Esilio’s terms, it’s been there for days. What other temperature should it be?’