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Authors: Patrick S Tomlinson
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no real windows, aside from those in the cockpit put there in the extremely unlikely event the pilots lost instrumentation and had to make a dead-reckoning landing. Instead, the inside walls of the cabin were coated top to bottom with displays so hi-def, it wasnât like looking out a window, it was like there was no window at all.
Benson had enough trouble dealing with the mere existence of the sky. Flying through it brought a whole new world of dread. But neither could he really tear himself away from the view. The shuttle glided over the vast, sapphire ocean. The color was breathtaking. Benson had spent some days at the beach with Theresa and seen the ocean, of course, but the vantage from up here was totally different. He could see the white caps of waves, but the expanse of water was so vast it was impossible to get a sense of scale. Benson wasnât even sure how high above the waves they were.
It reminded him of floating in the space outside the Ark, except here, infinity had shape and form.
The shuttle slowed as they passed the first barrier island. A smattering of scrub brush among the dunes gave Benson some idea of altitude. They were coming in low, no more than a hundred meters. The hull groaned gently as the exhaust from the turbines was redirected through ducts in the fuselage and took the shuttleâs full weight. They were hovering. The landing site had to be very close by.
Gaia was, as a general rule, a flat world. It was over a billion years older than Earth had been. The core was still molten enough to maintain a weakened magnetic field, but volcanism was rare, and plate tectonics had slowed to, well, even slower than plate tectonics usually were. The worldâs mountain ranges werenât being built back up nearly fast enough to keep up with the erosion and gravity dragging them down. Canyons and valleys, however, were the opposite. Rivers had been cutting through the landscape for hundreds of millions of years longer than on Earth. Canyons were deeper, wider, often reaching all the way down to solid bedrock. One such enormous canyon snaked through the high plains a few tens of kilometers north of where they were now.
âThere it is,â Valmassoi said loudly from the other side of the cabin. The seatbelt light forgotten, Korolev unbuckled himself and scooted over to the other side to get a better look.
âHey. Get back here,â Benson shouted. âYouâll unbalance the shuttle.â
âChief, thereâs twenty of us. She can handle it.â
âUgh,â Benson said, embarrassed by his anxiety-fueled outburst. Temporarily pushing his fear to the background, Benson unfastened his webbing and joined Korolev and the others getting a look at their destination.
âThatâs a big hole,â he said, and indeed it was. The village where the temple to the humanâs rover had been built sat in a bowl carved out of the ground, but not by hands, human or alien. And not by water or wind, either.
It was a crater, an eroded remnant of a meteorite impact eons ago. The surface of Gaia was covered in them. The Tau Ceti system held ten times the density of protoplanetary material compared to Earthâs solar system, despite Tau Ceti itself being a metal-poor star from an earlier generation of star formation than Sol. There were competing theories as to why, including a lack of Jovian-class gas giants to hoover up much of it, but no one was really sure why the dust and asteroids were so thick.
But the why didnât matter. The practical effect for Gaia was a period of heavy asteroid bombardment that still hadnât entirely run its course more than five billion years later. It was why the discovery of the Atlantians had come as such a huge shock to everyone. With a dinosaur-eradicating impact event averaging once every few million years, no one expected complex life wouldâve had a chance to evolve, to say nothing of an entire civilization.
Yet as the
Benson had enough trouble dealing with the mere existence of the sky. Flying through it brought a whole new world of dread. But neither could he really tear himself away from the view. The shuttle glided over the vast, sapphire ocean. The color was breathtaking. Benson had spent some days at the beach with Theresa and seen the ocean, of course, but the vantage from up here was totally different. He could see the white caps of waves, but the expanse of water was so vast it was impossible to get a sense of scale. Benson wasnât even sure how high above the waves they were.
It reminded him of floating in the space outside the Ark, except here, infinity had shape and form.
The shuttle slowed as they passed the first barrier island. A smattering of scrub brush among the dunes gave Benson some idea of altitude. They were coming in low, no more than a hundred meters. The hull groaned gently as the exhaust from the turbines was redirected through ducts in the fuselage and took the shuttleâs full weight. They were hovering. The landing site had to be very close by.
Gaia was, as a general rule, a flat world. It was over a billion years older than Earth had been. The core was still molten enough to maintain a weakened magnetic field, but volcanism was rare, and plate tectonics had slowed to, well, even slower than plate tectonics usually were. The worldâs mountain ranges werenât being built back up nearly fast enough to keep up with the erosion and gravity dragging them down. Canyons and valleys, however, were the opposite. Rivers had been cutting through the landscape for hundreds of millions of years longer than on Earth. Canyons were deeper, wider, often reaching all the way down to solid bedrock. One such enormous canyon snaked through the high plains a few tens of kilometers north of where they were now.
âThere it is,â Valmassoi said loudly from the other side of the cabin. The seatbelt light forgotten, Korolev unbuckled himself and scooted over to the other side to get a better look.
âHey. Get back here,â Benson shouted. âYouâll unbalance the shuttle.â
âChief, thereâs twenty of us. She can handle it.â
âUgh,â Benson said, embarrassed by his anxiety-fueled outburst. Temporarily pushing his fear to the background, Benson unfastened his webbing and joined Korolev and the others getting a look at their destination.
âThatâs a big hole,â he said, and indeed it was. The village where the temple to the humanâs rover had been built sat in a bowl carved out of the ground, but not by hands, human or alien. And not by water or wind, either.
It was a crater, an eroded remnant of a meteorite impact eons ago. The surface of Gaia was covered in them. The Tau Ceti system held ten times the density of protoplanetary material compared to Earthâs solar system, despite Tau Ceti itself being a metal-poor star from an earlier generation of star formation than Sol. There were competing theories as to why, including a lack of Jovian-class gas giants to hoover up much of it, but no one was really sure why the dust and asteroids were so thick.
But the why didnât matter. The practical effect for Gaia was a period of heavy asteroid bombardment that still hadnât entirely run its course more than five billion years later. It was why the discovery of the Atlantians had come as such a huge shock to everyone. With a dinosaur-eradicating impact event averaging once every few million years, no one expected complex life wouldâve had a chance to evolve, to say nothing of an entire civilization.
Yet as the
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