Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

that its peak was above us.
According to the centuries-old survey maps the locals had called it
Mount Perfect, and, yes, once it must have been a classic cone shape,
I thought, a nice landmark for an earthworm’s horizon. But now its
profile was spoiled by bulges and gouges, ash had splashed around it,
and deeper mud-filled channels had been cut into the landscape,
splayed like the fingers of a hand.
    Somewhere down there, amid the bleating locals, there was an
Academician called Tilo, dropped by the Navy a couple of standard
months earlier, part of a global network who had been gathering data
on the causes of the volcanism. Tilo’s job, bluntly, had been to
prove that this was all the Xeelee’s fault. The Academician had
somehow got himself cut off from his uplink gear. Our mission, along
with helping with the evacuation of the locals, was to find and
retrieve Tilo and his data. No wonder Xera had been so hostile, I
thought; the Commissaries, paranoid about their own power, were
famously suspicious of the alliances between the Navy and the
Academies.
    Green lights marked out the hatch in the transparent wall. Show
time.
    The loadmaster came along the line. ’Stand up! Stand up!’ The
marines complied clumsily. ’Thirty seconds,’ the loadmaster told me.
He was a burly, scarred veteran, attached to a rail by an umbilical
as thick as my arm. ’Winds look good.’
    ’Thank you.’
    ’All clear aft. Ten seconds. Five.’
    The green lights began to blink. We pulled our flexible visors
across our faces.
    ’Three, two - ’
    The hatch dilated, and the sudden roar of the wind made all this
real. The loadmaster stood by the hatch, screaming, ’Go, go, go!’
    As the marines passed I checked each static line one last time
with a sharp tug, before they jumped into blackness. The kid, Lian,
was the second last to go - and I was the last of all.
    So there I was, falling into the air of a new world.
    My static line went taut and ripped free, turning on my suit’s
Yukawa-force gravity nullifier. That first shock of no-gravity can be
a jolt to the stomach, but to me, after maybe fifty drops in anger,
it came as a relief.
    I looked up and to my right. I saw a neat line of marines falling
starfished through the air. One was a lot closer to me than the rest
- Lian, I guessed. Past them I made out our Spline vessel, its hull
charred from its hurried entry into the atmosphere. Our open drop
blister was a glistening scar on its flank. The Spline looked
immense, its pocked hull like an inverted landscape above me. It was
a magnificent sight, an awe-inspiring display of human power and
capability.
    But beyond it I saw the hulking majesty of that mountain, dwarfing
even the Spline. A dense cloud of smoke and ash lingered near its
truncated summit, underlit by a fiery glow.
    I looked down, searching for the valley I was aiming for.
    I was able to pick out the target. The Commission’s maps, two
centuries old, had shown a standard-issue Conurbation surrounded by
broad, shining replicator fields, where the ground’s organic matter
was processed seamlessly into food. But the view from the air was
different. I could see the characteristic bubble-cluster shape of the
domed Conurbation, but it looked dark, poorly maintained, while
suburbs of blockier buildings had sprouted around it, as if the
colonists had moved out of the buildings provided for them. Well, you
expected a little drift from orthodoxy, out here on the edge of
everything.
    Still, that Conurbation was our target for the evacuation. Amid
the domes I could see the squat cone shape of a heavy-lift shuttle,
dropped here on the Spline’s last pass through the atmosphere, ready
to lift the population.
    But I had a problem, I saw now. My marines were heading straight
for the nominal target, the Conurbation, just as they should. But
there was another cluster of buildings and lights, much smaller,
stranded halfway up the flank of the mountain. There was no sign of
domed Conurbation architecture, but there seemed no doubt this was
human. Another village? And then I saw a pale pink light blinking at
me from the middle of that cluster of shacks.
    I’m not sentimental, and I don’t go for heroic gestures. In a
given situation, with given resources, you do what you can, what’s
possible. Given a free hand I’d have concentrated my energies on
evacuating the Conurbation which undoubtedly held the bulk of the
population. I wouldn’t have gone after that isolated handful