Landing

2048 December 1 21:00 UT
Test Year 21, Day 40, 20:00 CST
Tau, Ocean just off the coast of Caltech
New Charles reservoir

Gamble had been in the Tau Ceti system for eleven days before the landings took place. Noriega and the last Watch had flown the ship at through the skydive: a blinding fall almost to the photosphere of Tau Ceti which the Techers could see by daylight until the ship got too close in. More accurately, Gamble had flown itself while the General herself was quietly cursing under ten gees of load and finally carrying on some semblance of a conversation with the Techers – about how to make negative mass, among other things. The crew in suspension had been immersed in fluid to support them without pressure injuries.

The AI’s programming led it to twist the trajectory of the lightsail so that it came alongside a small chunk of rock, just an anonymous forty meter block of undifferentiated matter that outweighed the spacecraft by a factor of ten. When the mining packages were opened, it would be transformed into solar cells. As it was, the crew merely sealed it inside plastic sheeting and baked it for water and organics while Gamble hauled everything towards Tau orbit at a scant two millimeters per second squared, which would get them there in a week.

Most of the organics and a little of the water went into Gamble’s biosphere. The life support equipment for the livestock was running on edge, and the crew was massively hungry as more of them were awakened. But the rest of the water went into the fuel tanks of the four Nervs. Their fission plants were carefully inspected after five years of being powered down and sleeted with the radiation dose that had gotten through the shielding. The cargo holds were loaded with livestock, still in suspend, functional copies of Gamble’s AI and the rest of their data, and a fair share of the colony-building supplies that were now redundant: utility lasers, construction robots, high-efficiency solar cells, medical supplies vintage 2034, display goggles, and one copy of the Mars Virgil as a present to MIT. When two of the shuttles detached from the hub of Gamble’s wheel eight thousand kilometers above Tau, the passenger cabins carried the pilots, Vesna, two of the doctors, and the General. Akutagawa was now in command of the Gamble, in the event of the time delay in contacting the General ever exceeding a second.

Water ran through the core of the reactor, now operating at what would have been meltdown for a power plant, and exited as superheated steam. Nerv-2 dropped its orbit so it would reenter over California while the other shuttle aimed for Massachusetts.

Over the Feynmanns, the shuttle no longer had a sheet of plasma in front of it. By the time it was a hundred kilometers away from the coast, it had gone subsonic and started to call out its approach to Sarah, who was running communications with Athena’s California distribution. The engines shifted into atmospheric mode as the reactor throttled back and started streaming air rather than water. Now the flight was controlled, and the pilot angled north towards Caltech. Five minutes later, the ship hydroplaned to a stop outside the harbor. Will and Mina, Karen and Z, were waiting.

The meeting was a study in contrasts. On one side of the levy the Nerv floated high in the water on empty tanks, its composite hull marked with the icons of the Group. On the other were the well-maintained and designed but nonetheless crude and wind-powered proas. The Grohar-Chamers wore Techer homespun, coarse in the weave but well insulated, and zard leather. Will carried the daisho, Karen led her favorite pedes. Vesna wore a Gambler spacesuit, with its armor cloth and high-level computer monitoring. The two sisters were now almost the same age, thanks to the vagaries of time dilation. But that did not matter to the reunion.