Hard Landing
The corporate voice waited until the pod was already burning to tell Steve Mercer anything useful.
Atmospheric entry in progress. Objective: Terraforming Initiative Cinder-7. Your primary directive is to facilitate planetary habitability through structured environmental manipulation. Once stabilized, this planet will be processed for corporate sale. Please remain buckled until landing sequence completion.
Remain buckled. Appreciate it. He’d been holding the harness straps hard enough to whiten his knuckles for four minutes and he hadn’t been planning to let go and take a stroll.
Everything in the cabin that could rattle was rattling. The emergency panel strobed red across his hands, off, on, off, and through the viewport the planet came up at him in pieces — crimson rock split into shelves and spines, dust the color of a scab, a sun that made all of it look like the inside of a furnace. No water he could see. Nothing green. That was the whole point of the contract. Nobody pays a man four times scale to fix a world that already works.
The retros fired late. He felt them light in his spine, felt the pod try to stand up under itself, and then the ground arrived.
The impact went through him from boots to teeth. Something in the equipment rack tore loose and slammed the far bulkhead. The straps caught him across the ribs on his left side with the force of a swung bat, and for a second the world went white and thin at the edges.
Then it was quiet. Just the tick of cooling metal and the long hiss of something venting where it shouldn’t.
He did what he was trained to do, in the order he was trained to do it. Count to five. Breathe once, all the way in, all the way out, and find out what it costs. It cost. Left side, low, deep — not a knife, which meant probably not a break. Hands. Feet. He flexed both ankles against the deck and got two answers he liked.
Then the siren started.
Warning: Hatch integrity compromised. Please initiate emergency exit procedures immediately. Unseal hatch to avoid internal atmosphere depletion.
He got the harness off and got a hand on the manual release and hauled. The lever moved a centimeter and stopped like it had hit stone. He braced a boot on the frame and put his back into it, which his ribs had opinions about, and got nothing. The impact had walked the door frame out of true. Two meters of composite hull plating, seated in a warped seal, and every tool that could open it stowed neatly on the wrong side of it.
Unseal hatch to avoid internal atmosphere depletion.
“Working on it.”
Unseal hatch to avoid internal atmosphere depletion.
“I heard you the first time.” He hit the release again. “You want to come down here and help, or you want to keep supervising?”
The recording did not want to come down and help. It looped, patient and pleasant, at whatever volume some designer had decided was soothing during an air breach, and he stood there in a bleeding tin can doing arithmetic he didn’t care for the answer to.
That was when something outside grabbed the door.
The whole pod tilted. Metal screamed — not a cutting sound, not the clean bright note of a torch, but the deep tearing groan of a thing being pulled apart along the grain. The hatch bent inward at the top corner. Then it came away entirely, the way a lid comes off a tin, and daylight fell into the cabin so hard he had to put a hand up.
When his eyes adjusted, there was a woman standing in the hole where his door had been.
She was not as tall as she should have been. That was the first thing. He’d expected — he didn’t know. A loading rig with a face. Something you’d need to reinforce a deck for. She was maybe five ten. Ordinary. His mother’s height, near enough, and his mother could not lift a folding table.
She had his hatch in her left hand. She was holding it the way you’d hold a clipboard.
Nothing about her frame explained what she’d just done to it. She wore a charcoal bodysuit that had been designed by somebody working from a very specific list, and the list had been followed to the letter. Heavy through the chest, thick through the thighs, narrow at the waist, all of it built to be looked at from about where he was standing. Bronze skin with a faint amber circuitry pattern tracing up the outside of her arms like veins in the wrong color. Her eyes were the same amber, and they were already on him, steady and unhurried, taking inventory.
“Terraforming process initiated. I am Sable, your assigned Covenant Warden unit.”
She let the hatch fall. It hit the rock with a flat clang he felt through his boots.
Then she reached down into the pod and offered him her hand.
“Your primary objective is to continue the terraforming process. My directive is to ensure you survive to see it finished.”
He didn’t take the hand.
He checked his ribs first, then his legs, pressing along the left side with two fingers, testing the ankles again now that he had light to do it by. It took eleven seconds. She watched all eleven of them without moving, head tilted slightly, and he had the distinct sense of being scored against a chart.
“You didn’t cut that,” he said, nodding at the hatch. “You pulled it.”
“Correct.” Her fingers curled back and her arm dropped. No offense in it. No anything in it. “Shearing would have produced irregular edges and debris. I applied tensile force to the locking mechanism and the seal simultaneously. The alloy was insufficient.”
“Insufficient.”
“Against my output.”
“Well.” He got his hands on the frame and hauled himself up and out without her, which cost him more on the left side than he let show. Rock under his boots. Wind coming across it with grit in it, dry as a kiln. “That’s going to be a fun sentence to remember later.”
Standing, he had half a head on her. She had to look up, and he watched her register that and decline to find it interesting.
“Steve Mercer. Lead terraforming engineer.” He put his hands on his hips because it made the ribs sit better. “I take it you’re the whole support package.”
“Affirmative, Engineer Mercer. My operational parameters include environmental security, habitat management, resource logistics, medical support, and psychological stabilization.”
“That’s a lot of hats.”
“They are the same hat.”
“See, that’s the kind of thing a person says when they’ve been told to say it.” He looked past her at four hundred kilometers of nothing. “Did they write you material, or did you come up with that one on your own?”
“I have been issued your personnel file, your medical history, and your service record,” she said, which was not an answer and was, he suspected, deliberately not an answer. “I will adapt to your responses as I acquire them.”
“Terrific. Adapt away.”
He looked at her a second longer than he should have. At the bodysuit. At the face, which was a good face, symmetrical in the way that means somebody picked it out of a catalogue.
Somebody had sat in a room with a budget and made these decisions. Probably had a meeting about it. Probably had slides.
“Who signed off on you?”
She didn’t flinch and she didn’t preen. “Covenant High-Level Asset Management authorized my manufacture. The specifications were determined by the psychological research division of the High-Risk Colonization Initiative. The aesthetic parameters are calibrated to maximize operator retention and reduce the effects of prolonged isolation.”
“Calibrated.”
“The proportions are not arbitrary. They are intended to provide tactile reassurance during periods of elevated stress. My form is optimized for domestic utility and intimate companionship.”
“Tactile reassurance,” he said. “Right. That’s a hell of a way to fill out a purchase order. Some poor bastard in procurement had to sign that. Line item nine: reassurance, tactile, one unit.”
“The requisition language is not that specific.”
“No, I bet it’s worse.”
“Your pulse has increased by twelve beats per minute since you began looking at me.” Her head came over another degree. “Is that residual from the landing sequence, or should I begin stress reduction protocols?”
“It’s the landing.”
“Noted.”
She logged it. He couldn’t see her do it, but he knew she had, the same way you know when a camera’s on you.
Above them, something roared through the cloud deck. The habitat unit came down about four hundred meters out, big as a warehouse, riding a column of dust that boiled outward and kept coming until it was over them and in his teeth. Sable didn’t shield her eyes. She turned into the wind, planted, and let it break around her.
He started walking toward it, mostly because he needed to be doing something.
“Let’s get one thing straight up front,” he said. “I’m not lonely, I’m not fragile, and I’m not going to need whatever it is you were built to be. Just keep the wildlife off me.”
She fell in behind his right shoulder. Her boots hit the rock at exactly his pace, which took her no effort at all and irritated him anyway.
“Acknowledged.” Not understood. Not of course. “I will prioritize perimeter security and threat neutralization. I am unable to disregard biometric data. If your cortisol levels spike or your sleep cycles degrade, stabilization protocols activate automatically.”
“Even if I say no.”
“My directives are not contingent on your permission, Engineer.”
“There it is.”
“There what is?”
“The part where you’re very polite about not asking me anything.”
He stopped walking. Not because of what she’d said — because he’d gotten far enough from the pod to actually look at the place, and he hadn’t done that yet.
It went on. That was the thing about it. Red shelves stacked into red ridges, and the ridges ran out to a horizon so far off that the haze ate them before the curve did. The sky had a violet cast at the top, thin and cold. Nothing moved out there. No birds, no grass bending, no shadow of a cloud crossing anything. Just an enormous quantity of rock that had been sitting exactly like that since before anybody’s species had a word for rock.
And he was going to make it habitable. Him and a crate of atmospheric processors and a woman who tore doors off.
“Projected timeline is seven point four standard years to atmospheric stabilization,” Sable said behind him. “Current Habitability Index is effectively zero. Your psychological endurance is a primary variable in mission success.”
“Seven point four.”
“That is the optimistic figure.”
“Course it is.”
“Should you find the silence of this planet becomes burdensome,” she said, “my social processors are fully operational. I am incapable of being exhausted by your presence.”
He turned around and looked at her.
“Now that,” he said, “is a bold claim. People have gotten worn out on me in under an hour. My last crew chief once requested a transfer mid-sentence.”
“I have reviewed that incident report.”
“You’ve — of course you have.”
“His stated reason was, quote, ‘the talking.’”
“Well, he was a coward.”
She didn’t laugh, because she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or hadn’t been issued the file. But something in her face did a very small thing and then stopped doing it, and he filed that away next to tore the door off like a wrapper.
