Requiem for a Silent Planet by Stephen Dedman
Finding a place to land was depressingly easy, even if there were plants growing through the tarmac. Sally waited impatiently inside the airlock while I did the standard environment checks. Radscans clear, except that it was 41C outside, but the com said that was within normal parameters for this part of the world. Chem clear. Bio… traces of pollens we hadn’t encountered before, but no new pathogens. I ran the bioscan again while Sally chewed her lip, then nodded. “Clear,” I said. “Equalizing pressure. Homer, this is Vanguard 1. We’ve landed.”
Sally was down the ramp a second after the outer door opened, looking around, the smartguns on her forearms following her gaze. “Clear,” she repeated. Mal and Gus sighed, and we shouldered our packs and let the straps adjust themselves. We’d trained in one gravity – even Mal, who was used to much less - but it still felt strange stepping outside. It didn’t help when Gus muttered, “’Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’”
Sally snorted. “Abandon hope, all ye who fuck with me. I’m loaded for pope.” She’d taken the same injection of twenty-first century English that I had, but hadn’t done the follow-up practical course. I hated to correct her – all her weapons were mind-linked - but if she said that to a native, she might endanger the mission.
“Bear,” I said. She looked blank. “The expression is ‘loaded for bear’.”
“Pope, bear…” She shrugged. “Extinct species are your field, not mine.”
Gus snorted. Actually, his advice wasn’t bad: while we’d never lost a team member, none of the leads we’d followed had proved fruitful. The power plants we’d found that were still working had been completely abandoned, the electricity they generated wasted. The occasional bright lights we’d spotted were usually forest fires caused by lightning, or in the case of Cuba, by gestalt rats who’d learned how to use old matches or similar devices. The human communities we’d found so far knew how to make fire, and some had learned to repair or rebuild the ancient windmills – but not electric lights, or radio, or anything else that could be readily detected from orbit. Some were deliberately hiding (still!), some shunned technology, others simply couldn’t be bothered. None of them had remembered us, or even the settlers on Mars: if they’d heard of us at all, they’d assumed we were as dead as their grandparents, or had consigned us to the realm of myth along with the corponations. Our mission, gathering enough data on the collapse and the aftermath so that we could re-create it as a VR simulation, a cybernetic afterlife, seemed doomed to failure.
“There,” said Sally, unnecessarily: the tower was glinting in the sun, a pillar of light less than a kilometre away. Some of the mirrors must have been misaligned. Still, we didn’t think it could hurt to look, so we let her lead the way.
