10

It took them a cautious six hours to set up the descent.

Then they left.

For Salma, sitting side by side with Zaimu Oshima in the cramped cabin of the pod, both sealed up in heavy-duty environment suits – there could be radiation threats, Meriel had warned them bleakly – the journey to the surface of the new expanded Nine was surreal.

‘It’s so smooth it’s like a training sim,’ Zaimu reported at one point during the descent. ‘And a stripped-down sim at that. Flat plain below, nothing but stars outside … We do see your lights, Shadow.’

Looking back as they sailed away, Salma saw that the mother ship, with its gauzy sail and dim hull lights, was barely visible as a distortion of the stellar background. Its presence was a comfort even so.

And in fact the ship wouldn’t stray far. Hild had ordered it placed in an orbit about a hundred thousand kilometres out from the planet’s centre, around five radii of the new planet. Here, the ship was in a synchronous orbit above the landing site – where the ‘cocoon’ on the surface was – so as to track the site as the planet turned through its thirty-hour day. There ready in case the explorers needed a fast escape.

Meanwhile, Zaimu was guiding the little craft through its descent. ‘That smooth, geometric surface down below. Like a sim. You almost expect it to light up with marker lines to tell you your target landing vector …’

Salma said, ‘A smooth surface, and that.’ Leaning forward so her face visor almost touched the pod’s window, she pointed down to the one blemish on that abstract surface: the pod, the ‘cocoon’ that Boyd had seen from the ship. The smart window, helpfully following her gaze, picked out the blemish, lit it up with guide lines. To rendezvous with the blemish, all Zaimu had to do was hold his course as specified – and Salma knew he could switch over to fully automatic with a word.

About a hundred metres short of the blemish, Zaimu monitored the pod as the automatics took them down to a smooth landing. The thrusters, spewing out hydrogen propellant heated by the vehicle’s compact fission reactor, kicked up no dust, Salma saw, no debris – this anomaly was surely the smoothest large body in the Solar System, if such a strange object, so far out from the Sun, counted as being in the System at all.

And as the lander descended further, Nine’s size, or its current size, became evident, with the curved horizon flattening out, featureless, an exercise in perspective, on a sphere far larger than the Earth.

Salma barely felt the landing itself. Only a smooth, descending tone that told her the propulsion system was closing down.

They sat still, shared a look, took a few breaths.

And looked out at a flat, featureless landscape – featureless save for that one low mound-like form, the only bit of geography on this strange world. Beyond that, a sharp horizon. Was it visibly flatter than a similar scene on Earth itself? As if seen over an ocean, perhaps … But Salma, born aboard the Shadow, knew nothing of Earth save through simulations – and even Zaimu, an orphan, had been taken aboard the ship as a five-year-old child.

Zaimu gently elbow-bumped her. ‘It’s your show, kid.’

They didn’t debate the order. Salma was first to seal her pressure suit, first to the airlock, first to exit, first to climb down the short ladder.

It was another experience evocative of endless training exercises, Salma thought, where you suited up, climbed in and out of mock-up airlocks, trying to ignore the pull of gravity. But here the gravity felt Earth-normal, as predicted, expected – even though Salma herself could only compare it to the simulated Earth-normal gravity of the tiny centrifuges aboard the Shadow.

But this was real. Salma, first ever to set foot on Planet Nine.

She stepped away from the lander, cautiously. The texture of the flat surface wasn’t quite smooth, it seemed; she felt a grip under her booted feet.

Zaimu murmured, ‘Focus, Salma. Report.’

‘Right. I’m down. The gravity feels normal, Earth-normal. Or as normal as the centrifuges on the Shadow, I’m no expert … The surface feels – gritty. Rough. I can walk easily.’

‘And I’m recording this thrilling moment of history,’ Joe Normand, the comms guy, spoke dryly in her ear.

Zaimu was brisker. ‘Let’s get this done.’

Once Salma was out of the way, he jumped down the last few steps and onto the ground without ceremony. Then he made for the cargo pallet attached to the lander’s base. He pulled on a tab to release the pallet, which folded itself down to the ground, small wheels touching the flat surface of this odd not-world. The most significant piece of gear aboard the pallet was an airtight shelter, of fabric and cord. The rest was survival gear: emergency oxygen, medical stuff, radio packs, a little food, water.

Once the pallet was down and assembled and had got its own orientation, it rolled smoothly and silently across the surface of Nine towards the blemish – as Salma kept calling the anomaly on the surface, in her head.

As Salma and Zaimu followed, another small drone rolled across the surface behind them, capturing every movement – a wheeled, rocket-equipped drone prepared to go into emergency mode at any moment, on the ground or above, laden with cameras and first aid.

‘Speak to us,’ whispered Hild, in their ears.

‘Huh? Saying what?’ Salma snapped back as she walked.

‘It’s what explorers do when they achieve their goals. Be – historic.’

Salma and Zaimu exchanged a look. Shrugged. Old-folk stuff.

Salma said, ‘OK. Hello, Shadow. We’re fine, as you can see. The gravity feels Earth-normal – as our suit instruments tell us too. The suits are fine too, flexible, comfortable.’

‘We commend the manufacturer,’ Zaimu said.

‘Skip the gags,’ Hild murmured. ‘Keep your focus.’

Salma said, ‘It’s just like a virtual training exercise, though not with this gravity.’

Meriel said, ‘The suits have exoskeletal support if you need it—’

‘We know,’ Zaimu said. ‘The ground – actually, as Salma said, it feels slightly rough, useful for walking over. The temperature—’

Salma glanced at a display inside her helmet. ‘The ground is a balmy fifteen degrees or so, as predicted. Doesn’t make much difference to us hikers, but I imagine it would if we pitched camp in some way.’

Meriel said now, ‘It really is like Earth without the atmosphere.’

‘So where does the heat come from?’ Zaimu asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Boyd put in. ‘Obviously not sunlight. Not from ordinary planetary sources. Earth has left over heat from its formation, and heat from the decay of radioisotopes in its interior – this has a far higher intensity. Here, the ground heat is basically emulating the influx of energy from sunlight on the Earth. As if this is a night hemisphere, giving up the heat of the day.’

Zaimu laughed, perhaps a little hysterically. ‘So they heated up the whole planet just for us!’

‘Whoever they are,’ Hild muttered.

‘So it seems,’ Boyd said calmly. ‘As with the gravity. But it’s not magic. With the right technology, it isn’t so much. Just playing with the numbers here. I figure that with matter-antimatter technology, for example, you could heat this whole planet’s surface to the same intensity with a cost of about twenty kilograms a second …’

‘We are approaching the surface object,’ said Zaimu.

So they were. But as they approached they could see it wasn’t a simple cylinder.

Something else, then.

Salma and Zaimu stood side by side looking down at what, for all the world, close up, looked like a coffin to Salma, roughly shaped to fit the profile of a human body.

She felt oddly reluctant to move, to approach closer, let alone touch this thing.

‘Like the pharaohs,’ Boyd said in their ears. ‘They had coffins like this, body-shaped, though they had their features painted on … Has to be more than that, though. Who would ship a corpse between universes?’

Hild murmured, ‘And why a coffin that could fit a human?’

A brief silence.

‘Come on,’ Salma said. ‘Let’s do this thing, before we lose our nerve.’

‘Pallet,’ Zaimu said with an air of command. ‘Shelter. Contain us and this – feature.’ He pointed at the coffin.

Now the pallet rolled a little closer, and broke open, like some tremendous pale beetle opening its carapace, Salma thought.

Salma and Zaimu stepped back.

Out billowed a cloth-like material, pure white.

The cloth, like an unfurling sail, stiffened by internal ribs, swept up and over the two of them, over the coffin, descended to the ground on the far side.

Once the perimeter was settled, internal lights in the ribbing lit up, and Salma found herself enclosed in abstract whiteness. Just her, Zaimu – and a coffin from another reality. She shivered, and forgave herself for doing so.

There was a hiss of air.

‘OK,’ came Hild’s voice. ‘Can you see in there?’

‘Like being in a white-out,’ Zaimu said. ‘But we see fine.’

‘And – ah, we see you.’

There were button cameras everywhere: on their suits, in the shelter’s inner surfaces, on the pallet.

Zaimu said, ‘We can hear the nitrogen pumping in.’

‘Good. Nice inert buffer, and expensive. Don’t waste it. But you need to check your oxygen supplies before opening your suits. In fact, don’t open your suits unless you need to.’

‘We know the drill,’ Zaimu said. He raised an eyebrow at Salma. That was Hild all over. ‘Needless to say we are relying on the automatics to do their stuff—’

A sharp crack.

Zaimu, startled, shut up.

‘Look.’ Salma grabbed his arm, pointed. ‘Look.’

The featureless coffin was featureless no more. Now a dark seam ran around the edge of the container, separating upper half from lower.

Nobody spoke, on the ship, on the ground. Salma and Zaimu just stood and stared.

After maybe a minute, Boyd Hart came on the line. ‘I think the next step is obvious, guys. I think you need to open that damn thing. But try to get a sample of whatever’s inside that box first. I mean the environment, any atmosphere—’

They exchanged glances.

Then they went to work, hastily improvising.

They wrapped the coffin in a lightweight plastic sheet that Salma shook out of one suit pocket, and added a backup air-quality sensor from a pocket of Zaimu’s. Soon they had the coffin entirely sealed by the sheeting, with button-sized sensors carefully placed inside the wrap.

Another exchange of glances.

Zaimu said, ‘Opening it is going to be tricky, through the wrap. But we ought to be able to push our gloved fingers into that crack in the coffin, under the lid, without breaking our seal.’

‘Right.’ Salma said. ‘We open the coffin, but we don’t break the wrap until the air sensor has given its report. Then when we’re sure it’s safe, we open it all the way.’

‘Safe for who?’ Boyd snapped.

Zaimu grinned. ‘Good point. But I don’t see any completely safe options here. Here goes nothing.’

‘Together,’ said Salma.

‘Together.’

They bent easily in their suits. Salma’s hands were clumsy in their gloves, but she managed to get the tips of her fingers under the lid on her side. When she saw that Zaimu too had got that far, she nodded. ‘One, two, three—’

The lid lifted silently, effortlessly.

And through the plastic wrap she caught a glimpse of what looked like flesh – a body, curled up like a foetus. Smeared with a transparent, faintly purple, viscous fluid. The skin hairy, perhaps – she couldn’t quite make out the texture.

‘I – there’s a body,’ she struggled to say.

‘Confirmed,’ Zaimu said in a small voice. ‘As far as I can see.’

A short silence. Then Meriel snapped, ‘The image capture is poor. What kind of body? Human?’

Zaimu seemed stunned, and didn’t reply.

Salma spoke up. ‘Human-like. Humanoid. Not human.’ ‘Zaimu, help me shift this lid.’

Working together, they managed to get the lid out of the way without breaking their improvised seal.

Boyd reported quickly, ‘Testing the air that was in there. Nitrogen, oxygen, some trace gases. Water vapour. Carbon dioxide. Nothing that will kill you immediately, or damage your suits. And the buffer supply in the lander is pure nitrogen. That surely won’t kill any occupant immediately. OK. We need to maintain a secure, continuous environment. I’ll have the equipment pump in trace gases into the shelter, to match what was in the coffin. You two keep your suits sealed. The – occupant – may be able to breathe that stuff; you won’t, and there’s a danger of contamination, one way or the other.’

‘Noted.’

‘Meanwhile I’ll get to synthesising coffin air back here on the ship, in case we need it.’

‘Good,’ Salma said. She found she was breathing hard, even though she wasn’t exerting herself particularly.

But Zaimu said, ‘You’re thinking a few steps ahead. A continuous environment. I take it that means we have to bring the – occupant – back.’

‘So long as it’s safe, at every step of the way,’ Hild said sternly.

They exchanged glances.

‘Of course we ought to bring it back,’ Salma said. ‘Whatever it is.’

‘Short of a bomb. In that case,’ Zaimu said, ‘before we move it, we ought to take a proper look at our visitor. Come on, Salma …’

They both braced beside the coffin. A small camera drone hovered over them. At a nod from Zaimu, they ripped aside the thin plastic sheeting.

To reveal the body.

‘Speak to us,’ Hild ordered.

‘I … it’s human-ish,’ Salma said. ‘Soaked in some kind of purple gel. I’ll get a sample of that.’

She reached in to do that. She tried to avoid touching the – occupant.

She saw arms folded across the chest, legs tucked up against the torso. Limbs very thin, Salma noticed. The ‘arms’ were spindly, leading to odd ‘hands’, three long bony fingers – or perhaps one was opposable, like a thumb. She repeated those observations aloud, for the record.

Meriel came on the line. ‘Human or not? Can you confirm that?’

They shared a glance.

‘Human-ish.’ Zaimu shrugged. ‘Still hard to tell under all this purple crap. Humanoid, maybe.’

Salma heard Boyd grunt. ‘A human, or even a humanoid alien? What are the chances we’d find that? How did it get here? What’s going on here?’

‘Not now,’ snapped Meriel. ‘Analysis later. Just keep observing, working, you two. Is the … occupant … breathing?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Salma said. ‘As I said, the body is covered in some kind of – gunge. Purple. A nutrient? There seem to be clothes of some kind underneath that layer … or maybe not clothes. It’s hard to see—’

Abruptly the body jerked, thrashed, the legs straightening so the narrow feet kicked the bottom of the container, the arms tightening clumsily around the torso.

And the head turned, to disclose a little more of the face. The eyes opened, revealing wide pupils; a gaping mouth – no teeth, a bone-like carapace for lips. No hair on the head—

Salma discovered she was gabbling out observations.

Meriel broke in sternly. ‘Salma. Zaimu. Calm down. Damn it, I knew I should have gone down there myself. Is it breathing? Is it alive?’

Salma replied, ‘She’s thrashing, but – I think she’s choking. There’s some of that purple stuff blocking her mouth.’ She hesitated for one heartbeat. ‘I’m going to clear her mouth and throat.’ She reached down.

‘What’s with the “she”?’ Meriel asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Zaimu called. ‘But that feels right.’

‘Salma, for pity’s sake – OK, clear the airway, but use a spatula from the med kit, not your damn finger. That’s basic training.’

That made Salma pause. ‘She isn’t human. We trained on humans—’

‘I know she’s not. Never mind. Emergency medicine, Salma. All you can do is what you’ve been trained to do. Adapt to the circumstances. But do it properly, damn it.’

Salma did as ordered. She found a spatula, and pushed it carefully into what felt like a small, hard mouth – no, a beak – and down the narrow throat. She could feel nothing solid, but dug out a mass of viscous, purple gloop.

When it was done, Salma snatched the spatula out of the mouth.

A high-pitched cough shook the frail body.

Meriel called down, ‘Oxygen, damn it!’

‘Zaimu, help me. Sit her up.’ Salma scrambled for an oxygen pack, while Zaimu put a beefy suited arm around the frail body, helping it – her? – to sit up. More of the containing gloop ran away, revealing some of the garment beneath. If it was a garment; there were panels of white, brown, black.

Salma opened the oxygen pack, and pulled out a mask that was going to be too large for that face, she saw immediately. ‘Meriel! How do we know pure oxygen is the right thing to give her?’

‘As before! Because it’s all we’ve got! Just do it—’

Salma slammed the mask over the visitor’s mouth, trying to fix straps behind the head. The visitor thrashed, as if trying to reject the mask, but Salma held it in place, tried to stroke the visitor’s back with her free hand.

Slowly, the visitor seemed to settle.

‘I think it’s working,’ she reported. ‘She’s growing calmer.’

And she found she was staring into wide open eyes, huge pupils. Eye contact. Salma shivered. What was this?

Hild called down, ‘We’ll bring her back. Wrap her up again, seal her in as best you can. Get her to the lander.’

Zaimu broke in, ‘Think about quarantine. Once she’s calm, and in the lander, you’ll have to rig up some kind of isolation bubble. And when you return to Shadow we’ll need a chain of safe environments to get her from the airlock to some kind of reception bay—’

‘Leave that to us. Just get her up here. Now,’ Hild said.

‘But take a sample first,’ Meriel said hastily. ‘A blood sample, a bit of tissue, spittle – even one of those panels on her skin … Anything to let me get started on the biochemistry. Send up the results.’

Take a sample in case we lose her. Salma knew that was what she meant.

Bewildered, nervous, unwilling to harm the visitor, she took a tissue, wiped a little of what seemed like spittle from the rim of the beak, stuffed it into an assay unit. ‘Sample taken.’

And Zaimu whispered, ‘Hey, Salma. Take a look at this. Under the purple stuff.’

‘Her clothes? Oh. Not clothes?’

He picked at those brown and black panels.

Not panels, Salma saw now.

Feathers.