I could almost hear that machine, 90,000 miles away, grinding its mental gears, adding this new bit of data. We proceeded just as if we were landing on solid ground: braking rockets, falling, skids out, hit the water, skip, hit the water, skip, hit the water, sink.
It would have made sense to go ahead and land on the bottom-we were streamlined, after all, and water just another fluid-but the hull wasn’t strong enough to hold up a four kilometer column of water. Sergeant Cortez was in the scoutship with us.
“Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get-”
“Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.” “Lord” was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.
There was a loud bubbly sigh, then another, and a slight increase in pressure on my back that meant the ship was rising. “Flotation bags?” Cortez didn’t deign to answer, or didn’t know.
That was it. We rose to within ten or fifteen meters of the surface and stopped, suspended there. Through the port I could see the surface above, shimmering like a mirror of hammered silver. I wondered what it would be like to be a fish and have a definite roof over your world.
I watched another ship splash in. It made a great cloud of bubbles and turbulence, then fell-slightly tail-first-for a short distance before large bags popped out under each delta wing. Then it bobbed up to about our level and stayed.
“This is Captain Stott. Now listen carefully. There is a beach some twenty-eight klicks from your present position, in the direction of the enemy. You will be proceeding to this beach by scoutship and from there will mount your assault on the Tauran position.” That was some improvement; we’d only have to walk eighty klicks.
We deflated the bags, blasted to the surface and flew in a slow, spread-out formation to the beach. It took several minutes. As the ship scraped to a halt, I could hear pumps humming, making the cabin pressure equal to the air pressure outside. Before it had quite stopped moving, the escape slot beside my couch slid open. I rolled out onto the wing of the craft and jumped to the ground. Ten seconds to find cover-I sprinted across loose gravel to the “treeline,” a twisty bramble of tall sparse bluish-green shrubs. I dove into the briar patch and turned to watch the ships leave. The drones that were left rose slowly to about a hundred meters, then took off in all directions with a bone-jarring roar. The real scoutships slid slowly back into the water. Maybe that was a good idea.
It wasn’t a terribly attractive world but certainly would be easier to get around in than the cryogenic nightmare we were trained for. The sky was a uniform dull silver brightness that merged with the mist over the ocean so completely it was impossible to tell where water ended and air began. Small wavelets licked at the black gravel shore, much too slow and graceful in the three-quarters Earth-normal gravity. Even from fifty meters away, the rattle of billions of pebbles rolling with the tide was loud in my ears.
The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth’s. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both…?
“This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.” He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air.
They wouldn’t offer much in the way of cover.
“We’ll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right. Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?” Sure, we could do that “arrowhead” maneuver in our sleep. “OK, let’s move out.”