The dinghy lands nice and stable on the flattest piece of concrete Kieran can find within a klick of the cache. The rumble of the nuclear engine fades, and I’m left with that buzzing phantom feeling I’ve gotta shake out of my limbs as I stand. I give Kieran the thumbs-up. The hatch opens, lifting out and upward into the alien air of Planet 357. A chilly draft bursts in, and Pumpkin and I are revivified. Even under his little fishbowl space helmet, his majestic orange fur lifts with impressive volume. Could have been a model, but here he is. Little explorer.
I click the external audio for my own helmet. Some explorers of the cosmos use neural interfaces, which allow for what is essentially telepathy. But we’re archeologists for a nonprofit organization, not the kleptocrats who run our worlds. We’re poor, is what I’m trying to say.
“Give me just a minute for the thing.”
“Again?” Kieran asks, but he takes one sad look at me and walks outside. Pumpkin follows dutifully after, little booties making footprints in the dust.
I have a bit of a new ritual I do planet-side when there’s time for it, and so far there almost always is. There’s no head archeologist to snap at me for holding up the procession across alien ground, no one to bark about breaking the law or, generally, futility.
I get futility. I really do.
I unzip my backpack carefully, but nothing floats out this time or threatens to fly away at a touch. Gravity is always weird in the graveyard. Sometimes there’s none at all—almost zero—like the planet, at having lost all life upon it, gave up on its own too. Sometimes, it pulls me down so hard my knees buckle. Here, it’s almost home-standard.
Extracting a palm-sized, bulky, dull red pouch, I zip my pack back up and follow after my brother, closing the hatch behind me.
It takes a little while to find an easily accessible patch of dirt. It’s mostly urban where we’ve landed, all paved over and fortified except for the massive empty crater we’re walking around. The almost perfectly circular path outlines the dried lake, with other, narrower walkways shooting away from the center like starbursts, toward other crumbled buildings, other crumbled city blocks. Standing like a decaying beacon against the gray sky to our north is a great shorn spire where our ultimate target is waiting. Its piercing upper half is cut off, collapsed to the side of the spire’s base into a bed of smaller buildings destroyed by the fall. We got a good look at the carnage on the way in. Even partly destroyed, the once-spire stands ten times higher than any other building here that we’ve seen, drawing the eye.
We’re halfway across the detritus-littered walkway when I spot it: a section of road so deteriorated that a dusty patch of earth shows underneath. “Found some,” I announce.
Ahead of me by several paces, Kieran and Pumpkin stop. My brother leans over the railing to get a better look at the crater, and Pumpkin flops over onto his side to rest. I crouch beside the lifeless dirt and clear the patch of concrete chips with my hands.
Given that this planet once included an atmosphere similar to our own home’s, I’m tempted to remove my gloves. This is difficult work with the dexterity-limiting puffiness of my suit, but obviously it’s too risky to pull a stunt like that. Kieran would tackle me. The air is far from breathable, it’s freezing, and some of the chemical compounds we picked up with the Crescent’s scanners could cause irritation or possibly a much more dangerous allergic reaction. Taking off my gloves would make this next part easier, but the consequences would be worse for me than the work. Plus, I don’t want to get tackled.
So, gloves on, I go to task.
I uncinch the ties of my dull red bag and pluck out a generous pinch of the seeds inside. It’s an amalgam of species, a mix of several desperate pouches I purchased back home when I learned Kieran and I had been given clearance from Archivist HQ to set out. Technically, our government has declared it illegal to intervene in the development of the local flora and fauna of any exoplanet, but this planet is dead. All the planets are dead. I wouldn’t consider myself a lawbreaking individual, but I’m overlooking this one rule. Because this planet is dead, yes, but maybe it doesn’t have to be forever.
We’ve terraformed planets back home. We’ve made gas giants into cosmic-filtration plants. We’ve invented the cure for the common cold—even if it is behind a ridiculous paywall. I’m millions of light-years away from home in a suit that lets me breathe on an alien world. All this, and you’re telling me this world is dead forever?
I plant the seeds a little apart from one another and then fuss with the valves and hoses on my suit until I can release some of the water inside onto the dirt. I give generously. This is the part Kieran has spoken up about. I can feel his eyes on me as I turn the dirt wet-black with my lifesaving stores.
“Scout,” he said when he first saw me do this several weeks ago, on the planet before the one where we picked up that Wingding-filled cache. “I know you’re still upset, but—”
“I’ve got more than enough left,” I told him.
He sighed. “Just don’t give too much.” He hasn’t pestered me about it since, but he watches me, every time.
Come back, I think, as I close up the external valve.
I stand beside the wishful garden. Normally, I’d activate my suit’s hindsight module, get a glimpse of what this world was and what it maybe could be again, try to suss out some clue as to what could have caused destruction on this scale. But after the water thing, I can tell I’m trying my comrades’ patience. It’s time to move. A cache awaits.
Pumpkin boops my leg with his helmet, and I pat his back since I can’t pat his head.
“Good to go?” Kieran asks.
“Yeah,” I say and put away my bag of seeds.
It takes a lot of time to maneuver into the destroyed spire. Its entrances are caved in, its windows are shattered, its sewer systems are plugged. After a few hours of fruitless exploring and another hour of dedicated terrain study, I decide an up-and-in approach is the most viable. It’s dangerous, but we’ve done it before. All planets are different, but most follow a pretty basic rule of gravity: wreckage falls down. This rule means that the higher up you go, the more likely you are to find an uncluttered entrance. That proves true this time, after a long, careful climb up the jagged, debris-covered side of the upper half of the fallen spire. We use it like a very steep bridge to reach the gap left by its shearing from the rest of the building.
We take lunch at the top, which—hooray—is calorie-loaded paste in a straw. It takes a few minutes to get Pumpkin to cooperate (this is always the tough part with him), but once the straw starts extruding paste onto his tongue, he laps it up gratefully. It’s a few more minutes to make him drink water too, but again: grateful.
While we eat, we examine the hole. It’s a long drop to the bottom. As it turns out, the spire held aesthetic rather than fortifying purposes. No floors were built into its long mast, and halfway up to where its length used to stand, we’ll be descending eight, maybe ten, stories.
“Forty-five point seven two meters.” Kieran’s looking down the hole with a distance calibrator. Originally military grade and meant for snipers and long-range artillery, it was cast aside for better tech and finally made available for consumer hands. I only know this because he talked excitedly about it for two hours after he got it. It was a birthday present last year, from me. “We’ve got more than enough cord for it,” he finishes, and puts the device back on his belt.
“You think anything up here’s sturdy enough for the anchor?” I ask.
He hums and leans over our half spire, observing so closely that he’s like a chicken pecking up bugs. Pumpkin waits at the edge of the hole, looking down like he’s considering a heroic jump. I scoop him up right away. Big boy is as dexterous as an elephant on ice. He’s going to have to go down anyway, so I attach him to the front of my suit early. The straps are meant for holding samples, tech, weapons, or the like, but they work just fine for Pumpkin, who lets his whole weight sag against my chest. It is an undignified position, but he’s fought and lost this battle many times.
“These are solid steel,” Kieran says, kicking one of the reinforcing bars revealed by the marble exterior’s collapse. “And this is a nice piece of flat space for the magnetic lock. It’ll do.”
“It’ll do,” I repeat slowly, doubtfully.
“We’ll be fine.”
“Fine is alive, right?”
“Yes.” He laughs. He goes behind me and digs the climbing gear out of my pack. “We’ll need to go down one at a time though, to be safe.”
I hum, worried. I do not like heights. You would think I’d be immune to a fear of them, living in a spaceship and looking down at planets from on high all the time, but there is something very different about being seated on plush leather, enjoying a view, and being two steps from teetering over the edge. You float in space, okay? You fall on planets.
Kieran gets me hooked up and ready to go, and I stand at the edge of the jagged hole. I turn my and Pumpkin’s headlights on in advance. It’s dark down there.
“Ready?” Kieran asks.
I take a shaky breath and nod, lowering myself over the edge. Pumpkin does not like this either. His little feet flail helplessly as he lets out a protesting meow.
“Same,” I say and let gravity take us.