Scat’s first Pathfinder mission was meant to be a very quick
and simple one. He entered the brightly lit, over-sized chamber, alone and
suited up as for a Prebos belt-walk. From inside his suit he could hear the
roar of the extractor fans as they continuously re-circulated the chamber air.
Above him, the furnace was ready to ignite, should the wormhole fail to
maintain its positive pressure.
At the far end of the chamber stood the unopened and spinning
disc of transparent liquid-like elements.
Ratti was conducting operations from the cabin built into
the chamber, high up and to the left of the unopened hole.
‘Ready, Scat?’
‘As ever I will be, Carlo. Open her up.’
The outer-edges of the disc danced with light. Its inner
surfaces shone like highly polished tubular chrome, turning in on itself in a
smooth, continuous movement. As the eye opened up, the liquid-like elements
appeared to increase in depth, becoming more three dimensional, like a camera
lens. As it opened wider, the eye appeared to float, unthreateningly, inviting
investigation.
Beyond the eye lay the surface of a planet, still referred
to by its catalogue number, one of several orbiting the smaller of two stars, a
typical binary system. He had been told of its precise location and distance
from Runnymede but Scat couldn’t relate.
He was keeping his cool by focusing on the more tangible
things. Between him and the hole lay his designated bugbot and a couple of
drones; the bugbot fitted out with a range of sensors plus a PIKL and a neural disruptor.
He understood these things, so he focused on them. It helped to stop his
imagination from spinning out of control.
Previous drone surveys of the insertion area had recorded distant
footage of several ambulatory life forms. They already knew that the planet was
covered in a great many different forms of vegetation, some of it quite large;
analogous to Earth’s bushes and trees, and that the air was breathable. Several
drones had been pushed out into local orbit, storing data for transmission each
time the eye opened. They had shown there to be several different climate
zones.
Lynthax had chosen a temperate area, mid-way between the
planet’s equator and its northern pole, for the site of its first human visit.
Ground insertion was to be onto a secluded glade within a “wooded” area a
little way up a hill slope, the other side of which was a large
vegetation-covered plain. Despite the drone’s remote encounters with life
forms, he was advised that the likelihood of his encountering any of it whilst
he spent his planned 15 minutes on the surface was about the same as a summer’s
walk through the Yellowstone National park. Scat couldn’t give that comment any
context. He’d never been. In any case, he didn’t think anyone on Runnymede
could offer any kind of re-assurances about what he might meet.
As he approached the wormhole, he glanced up at the
marble-sized power source, mounted in a ring at the top of a tall rod to the
right of the hole. It appeared to be spinning within the ring but without
touching it. He pulled his eyes away: Dave had briefed the Pathfinders not to
look directly at it and never to touch it. Over a couple of cool and crisp
post-training beers the night before, the trainers had told stories of researchers
freaking out, security guards refusing to clock on, electrical equipment being
drained of power when in close proximity to it. Apparently, no one liked being
near the thing.
‘Just don’t get close and don’t be drawn to it,’ he recalled
Dave as saying.
But the urge to look at it again was strong so he checked
the bugbot for a second time. He then knelt beside the drone to punch in his
personal activation code, and willed the eye to open fully to allow him to step
through it. Still, the spinning marble drew him in, and again he had to work
hard to push it out of his mind. He stood, checked that his belted equipment
was buttoned and strapped down, trying hard not to look at the marble out of
the corner of his eye.
‘Any time you’re ready,’ Ratti said.
He could feel himself wavering, losing his concentration.
'Damn it, Scat! Focus.
Focus!' he told himself, taking
three steps through the hole.
The new world opened out around him. In an instant, air from
the chamber side of the wormhole rushed past him and onto the bushes ahead. He
swivelled around to get his bearings and to check how far he was from the tall
vegetation behind him, feeling as vulnerable and as disoriented as a dog dumped
at the roadside.
As expected, there was the wormhole, through which he could
now see the chamber, and around the other side of it, perhaps 50 metres away,
was a bank of thick foliage.
He fiddled nervously with his solida-graf and located the bugbot
that had followed him through the hole. He took local control of it and set it
to defensive, cranking it up to maximum sensitivity. He then turned back to the
view he had seen from Runnymede.
He was standing in a glade of flower-like life on solid, dry
ground. He knew he was in an area of rolling hills but couldn’t see further than
50 – 75 metres in any direction. The shallow valley was on his left, the
vegetation canopy at eye level, sunlight dappling the undergrowth in dark and
light patches that moved as the canopy swayed in the light wind. Ferns, bushes,
and the larger bushes, which could pass for trees, if one overlooked the
multiple trunks, rose up the hill towards him and covered most of the ground
surrounding the glade. Through the “trees”, he could just about make out some
rocky outcrops.
Directly above him the sky was blue but tinged with yellow
closer to the ground.
On the other side, to his right, bushes, or trees, nestling
in thicker undergrowth, obscured his view of the ground. As expected, the
canopy climbed the hill as it rose to its summit.
‘No dallying, Scat. Sightseeing is for later on. Just run
through the checks, get to the top of the rise, and come on back.’
‘Roger that. Just checking for Injuns, is all. Everything
working to spec,’ he replied, looking down at his solida-graf. ‘Comms good… Bugbot at 100%... Ground firm... Air pressure
at 98% Runnymede normal… Temperature and humidity as expected... Radiation
normal... I’ll call the drones through and send them out to the 3 km markers.’
On Runnymede, the dark brown, oval-shaped drones woke up,
drew power from their fuel cells, flipped open their rotor blades and lifted
their man-sized bodies into the air. In seconds they were both through the
hole, rising to an unfamiliar sky, relaying a stream of data back to Ratti and
his assistants.
Scat look up through the vegetation.
‘I’ll start moving up to the skyline. It looks thicker at
ground level than we thought. No paths or animal runs. I can’t see the second
sun; the atmospheric refraction is too intense.’
He felt odd wearing a suit in near normal gravity and in an
oxygen-normal atmosphere, but moving through the vegetation was cumbersome work
so he was grateful for its air-conditioning. Occasionally he would look down at
his solida-graf to check that it was still working. Of course it was. There
were no immediate threats. It was quiet because it had nothing to say. He was
just nervous.
After a few minutes of panting, he eventually reached the
top of the hill, wishing he’d stayed a little fitter than he was. The trees
still blocked his view, but he could see the wood thin out and the ground
brighten up some 20 metres further on, just over the crest. To his left a tree
rose from the ground, arched above him then plunged back into the ground on his
right, sprouting flowers of red and leaves of all colours.
He pushed on, down a slight incline, then arrived at the
wood’s edge to a view he could only describe to himself as stunning.
The sky above seemed huge and distant, and off to his left
was the second sun, a faraway star as bright by day as Venus is by early
morning when seen from Earth. The hillside slipped away to a wide expansive
savannah, dotted with low bulbous trees, a sea of thick ferns of red, brown,
green, yellow, and white flowers tinged with blue. The vastness of the plain
gave him a sense of freedom that he hadn’t experienced since his trips across
the Gap Plain on Trevon. It was as close to a National Geographic movie of the
Rift Valley as he would ever see in his lifetime. He felt right at home.
‘What’s the matter, Scat? Your heart rate and blood pressure
have become erratic.’
The question brought him back to mission.
‘Nothing. It’s just more beautiful than I expected.
Visibility now out to around 20-30 km.’
‘Well, it was bound to be an improvement over Trevon, Scat.
So, are you ready to breathe local air?’
‘I’m ready.’
‘OK, take it off.’
Runnymede had sampled the air and they knew it to be safe,
but only to the limits of human understanding. As with all new environments,
there were bound to be pathogens that had gone undetected, unfamiliar gases as
well. Despite numerous tests on animals on Runnymede, the only true test would
be for a man to take a deep lungful in situ, just as they had once done on
Trevon, Constitution, G-eo, Runnymede and all the other human habited planets
in the OR.
Scat took off his helmet and continued to breathe normally
as instructed, whilst Ratti monitored his blood gases. The smell of sap, pollen
and decaying vegetation, dung and damp, musty, fertile soil saturated the air. There
was none of the usual closed habitat smells of solvents, ozone, plastics.
‘Seems good, Scat. Nothing of note from your end?’
‘No. Nothing. All’s good. The air smells of shit.’
Ratti didn’t reply immediately. Data from a drone was
distracting him.
‘We have indications of a large moving mass, Scat. Off to
your right. One of the drones is flying intercept. Do you see anything?’
‘No. I’ll move around and see what I can see.’
Scat turned to contour around the hillside, keeping the wood
line to his right. More and more of the plain came into view. The colours of
the ground ferns seemed to change in waves, back and forth, as they bowed and
flickered in front of a gentle breeze. Then he saw them.
Around a kilometre away, and stretching from extreme left to
extreme right horizons, were several tens of thousands, if not hundreds of
thousands, of four legged life-forms whose mass formed a continuous slash of
brown against the colourful ferns. They were walking slowly, 20 and 30 abreast,
dipping their heads frequently in a manner that was repeated kilometre after
kilometre along its length. He kept walking, hoping to see more from where the
hill sloped away more sharply to the plain below.
His solida-graf began to bleep gently as it received data
from the drone. Scat instructed it to throw up the images. As the close-up
pulled into focus, he stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Do you see this, Carlo? Do you see this?’ he shouted
excitedly.
‘Not yet, Scat. We’re moving the hole over the hill to get
better reception. What do you see?’
‘A truly wonderful sight!’
‘What is it?’
‘Meat!’
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