already have myths." She twitches one hand to the chasm before us. "Isn't that why we named Atlas and Pyrrha and Hades and all the others?"
"But myth is tied to place as much as people." My breath grows ragged in my exuberance. "We're a superstitious creature, wearing a blanket of reason over proto-human nightmares. Underneath, we still want our world to have a soul, not an echo."
Anna leans against me. "No engineer should ever talk like that. You sound like a philosophy student."
"Hey, I'm a psychologist too, remember." I try to shape the words for the feeling. "Mytyr and the others, they give me hope. That this place can be ours, that one day we won't be interlopers, we'll be a part of it."
She pulls her feet towards her and eases up into a crouch. "If you're going to keep talking like that, I'm going back inside." Her voice is too weak to deliver the joke, but at least she's moving. I catch her elbow and help her to her feet. We turn back to the colony, but I hesitate.
That canopy - my place - is two klicks west, more walking time than I have oxygen, and Anna won't get back alone. But it whispers to me. I want to brush my ungloved fingers over the lichen, bury it against my skin. Is it hard and crystalline as it looks, or soft like a moss? Anna's right; if it needs the acidic atmosphere, it probably won't survive the terraform. I'll never know.
My O2 monitor hits red.
I breathe a soft farewell to the lichen and the spires and guide Anna back to the colony doors.
We're confined to quarters before the pod's descent under the rock. Seris brooks no argument. I chew through the battery of my console reading and countersigning the fourteen-odd psych reports of our skeleton crew, and eat my dinner meal portion two hours early just for something to do.
With a shriek of metal that rings in my ears, the gears fire up. The pod shudders and groans, drilling down underneath and depositing a crumple zone of rock over the top. I try to drown it out with the sound of my breath. I can see our fragile shell swallowed into the belly of the planet, a speck within its gut, and my own gut churns, shooting sweat to my temples and palms. I override it, calling up Mozart on a disembodied piano, one key at a time.
A buzz of comms interrupts me mid-note. I flip up my wall display. Justin's face stares back, sweating and sickly pale, wide pupils all but hiding the blue of his eyes. Internal comms are restricted while we descend in case of emergencies. He must've hacked the protocols.
"What are you doing?" I use a stage whisper, like it makes any difference.
"I have to get out of here," he whispers back. "We're going to die."
"Breathe, Jus'. Deep breaths. Where would you go?"
"Five years, it's supposed to take. Spread it out, so things don't go critical. You can't change a whole planet in ten months." He grips the screen, pressing his face so close the camera can't focus.
"We've got it covered. We'll be miles underground before it starts."
"Even worse. With the reaction compressed like this, temperatures'll go haywire, you'll get earthquakes, cataclysmic storms. The pod's not built to take it, you know that."
"We can't risk the meteors in orbit, and we don't have the oxygen to wait. We'll sit it out and tunnel back up when the coast is clear. It's out of your control, Jus'." I try to keep my voice even against the image of the planet's maw grinding us to dust.
"I can't breathe in here."
"You have plenty of air. Have you eaten? Food will help."
Justin makes a face. "I hate the hydroponics grain Anna added. It's like eating dust."
"She said there was a fungus, it chews up the cell proteins. Try it as oatmeal."
Justin's face blanches even further. "It's mouldy?" he squeaks.
"It's fine, it doesn't affect people." I aim for soothing sing-song tones. "It's a symbiotic of the apple trees we brought. We just don't know how it's getting into the grain."
"Why don't they just replace the seed stock?"
"They have, twice. And the substrate.
"But myth is tied to place as much as people." My breath grows ragged in my exuberance. "We're a superstitious creature, wearing a blanket of reason over proto-human nightmares. Underneath, we still want our world to have a soul, not an echo."
Anna leans against me. "No engineer should ever talk like that. You sound like a philosophy student."
"Hey, I'm a psychologist too, remember." I try to shape the words for the feeling. "Mytyr and the others, they give me hope. That this place can be ours, that one day we won't be interlopers, we'll be a part of it."
She pulls her feet towards her and eases up into a crouch. "If you're going to keep talking like that, I'm going back inside." Her voice is too weak to deliver the joke, but at least she's moving. I catch her elbow and help her to her feet. We turn back to the colony, but I hesitate.
That canopy - my place - is two klicks west, more walking time than I have oxygen, and Anna won't get back alone. But it whispers to me. I want to brush my ungloved fingers over the lichen, bury it against my skin. Is it hard and crystalline as it looks, or soft like a moss? Anna's right; if it needs the acidic atmosphere, it probably won't survive the terraform. I'll never know.
My O2 monitor hits red.
I breathe a soft farewell to the lichen and the spires and guide Anna back to the colony doors.
We're confined to quarters before the pod's descent under the rock. Seris brooks no argument. I chew through the battery of my console reading and countersigning the fourteen-odd psych reports of our skeleton crew, and eat my dinner meal portion two hours early just for something to do.
With a shriek of metal that rings in my ears, the gears fire up. The pod shudders and groans, drilling down underneath and depositing a crumple zone of rock over the top. I try to drown it out with the sound of my breath. I can see our fragile shell swallowed into the belly of the planet, a speck within its gut, and my own gut churns, shooting sweat to my temples and palms. I override it, calling up Mozart on a disembodied piano, one key at a time.
A buzz of comms interrupts me mid-note. I flip up my wall display. Justin's face stares back, sweating and sickly pale, wide pupils all but hiding the blue of his eyes. Internal comms are restricted while we descend in case of emergencies. He must've hacked the protocols.
"What are you doing?" I use a stage whisper, like it makes any difference.
"I have to get out of here," he whispers back. "We're going to die."
"Breathe, Jus'. Deep breaths. Where would you go?"
"Five years, it's supposed to take. Spread it out, so things don't go critical. You can't change a whole planet in ten months." He grips the screen, pressing his face so close the camera can't focus.
"We've got it covered. We'll be miles underground before it starts."
"Even worse. With the reaction compressed like this, temperatures'll go haywire, you'll get earthquakes, cataclysmic storms. The pod's not built to take it, you know that."
"We can't risk the meteors in orbit, and we don't have the oxygen to wait. We'll sit it out and tunnel back up when the coast is clear. It's out of your control, Jus'." I try to keep my voice even against the image of the planet's maw grinding us to dust.
"I can't breathe in here."
"You have plenty of air. Have you eaten? Food will help."
Justin makes a face. "I hate the hydroponics grain Anna added. It's like eating dust."
"She said there was a fungus, it chews up the cell proteins. Try it as oatmeal."
Justin's face blanches even further. "It's mouldy?" he squeaks.
"It's fine, it doesn't affect people." I aim for soothing sing-song tones. "It's a symbiotic of the apple trees we brought. We just don't know how it's getting into the grain."
"Why don't they just replace the seed stock?"
"They have, twice. And the substrate.
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