Trying was a thin man. His mahogany skin and snow-dust hair reminded her of her uncles, and his ready smile reassured and calmed. She had been in the observation deck, pretending that the high-resolution screens looking down on the planet were really windows, that the light of this unfamiliar sun was actually bouncing off the wide, muddy seas and high frosted clouds and passing directly into her eyes even though the deceleration gravity meant they weren’t in free orbit yet. It was a strange, beautiful sight. A single, massive ocean scattered with islands. A large continent that sprawled comfortably across half of a hemisphere, widest at the equator and then tapering as it reached north and south. The official name of the world was Bering Survey Four, named for the probe that had first established its existence. In the corridors and cafeteria and gym, they’d all come to call it New Terra. So at least she wasn’t the only one swept up by the romance.
“What are you thinking, Doctor Okoye?” Trying’s gentle voice asked, and Elvi had jumped. She hadn’t heard him come in. Hadn’t seen him beside her. She felt like she was supposed to bow or make some sort of formal report. But his expression was so soft, so amused, she let it go.
“I’m wondering what I did to deserve all this,” she said. “I’m about to see the first genuinely alien biosphere. I’m about to learn things about evolution that were literally impossible to know until now. I must have been a very, very good person in a past life.”
In the screens, New Terra glittered brown and gold and blue. The high atmospheric winds smudged greenish clouds halfway around the planet. Elvi leaned in toward it. The governor chuckled.
“You will be famous,” he said.
Elvi blinked and coughed out a laugh.
“I guess I will be, won’t I?” she said. “We’re doing things humanity’s never done before.”
“Some things,” Trying said. “And some things we have always done. I hope history treats us gently.”
She didn’t quite know what he’d meant by that, but before she could ask, Adolphus Murtry came in. A thin man with hard blue eyes, Murtry was the head of security and as hard and efficient as Trying was avuncular. The two men had walked off together, leaving Elvi alone with the world that was about to be hers to explore.
The heavy shuttle was as large as some ships Elvi had been on. They’d had to build a landing pad on the surface just to support it. It carried the first fifty structures, basic array laboratories, and – most important – a hard perimeter dome.
She had filed through the close-packed hallway of the shuttle, letting her hand terminal lead her toward her assigned crash couch. When the first colonies had begun on Mars, the perimeter domes had been a question of survival. Something to hold in air and keep out radiation. On New Terra, it was all about limiting contamination. The corporate charter that RCE had taken required that their presence have the smallest possible footprint. She’d heard that there were other people already on the planetary surface, and hopefully they were also being careful not to disturb the sites they were on. If they weren’t, the interactions between local organisms and the ones that had been shipped in would be complex. Maybe impossible to tease apart.
“You look troubled.”
Fayez Sarkis sat on a crash couch, strapping the wide belts across his chest and waist. He’d grown up on Mars, and had the tall, thin frame and large head of low gravity. He looked at home in a crash couch. Elvi realized her hand terminal was telling her that she’d found her own place. She sat, the gel forming itself around her thighs and lower back. She always wanted to sit up in a crash couch, like a kid in a wading pool. Letting herself sink into it felt too much like being eaten.
“Just thinking ahead,” she said, forcing herself to lie back. “Lot of work to be done.”
“I know,” Fayez said with a sigh. “Break time’s over. Now we have to actually earn our keep. Still, it was fun while it lasted. I mean apart from burning at a full g.”
“New Terra’s a little over that, you know.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said. “I don’t know why we couldn’t start with some nice balsawood planet with a civilized gravity well.”
“Luck of the draw,” Elvi said.
“Well, as soon as we get papers for a decent Mars-like planet, I’m transferring.”
“You and half of Mars.”
“I know, right? Someplace with maybe a breathable atmosphere. A magnetic field so we don’t all have to live like mole rats. It’s like having the terraforming project done already, except I’m alive to see it.”
Elvi laughed. Fayez was on the geology team and the hydrological workgroup both. He’d studied at the best universities outside Earth, and she knew from long acquaintance that he was at least as frightened and delighted as she was. Eric Vanderwert came by, easing himself into the couch beside Elvi. She smiled at him politely. In the year and a half out from Ceres, there had been any number of romantic or if not romantic at least sexual connections made between members of the science teams. Elvi had kept herself out of that tangle. She’d learned early that sexual entanglements and work were a toxic and unstable mixture.
Eric nodded to Fayez, then turned his attention to her.
“Exciting,” he said.
“Yes,” Elvi said, and across from her, Fayez rolled his eyes.
Murtry walked through, stepping between the crash couches. His gaze flickered over everything – the couches, the belts, the faces of the people preparing for drop. Elvi smiled at him, and he nodded to her sharply. It wasn’t hostile, just businesslike. She watched him size her up. It wasn’t the sexual way that a man considered a woman. It was like a loader making sure a crate’s magnetic clamps were firing. He nodded to her again, apparently satisfied that she’d gotten her belts right, and moved on. When he was out of sight, Fayez chuckled.
“Poor bastard’s chewing the walls,” he said, nodding after Murtry.
“Is he?” Eric said.
“Had us all under his thumb for a year and a half, hasn’t he? Now we’re going down and he’s staying in orbit. Man’s petrified that we’re all going to get ourselves killed on his watch.”
“At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.”
“You like everyone,” Fayez teased. “It’s your pathology.”
“You don’t like anyone.”
“That’s mine,” he said, grinning.