Mara stared into the roiling atmosphere of HD 203492 d, an angry mottled red streaked through with veins of lightning, and felt like she was already falling into a whirlpool she’d never escape from. The transport ship Forlorn skated above that atmosphere, and the planet that was the Jovians’ last, best chance to find a new home. Mara stood with her fellow Jovians on a five-foot wide shelf beyond the Forlorn’s loading bay doors, the shelf small and fragile under the bulk of their atmospheric entry suits.
“Are you ready?” asked Sidé, Mara’s wife, on a private comm.
Mara steeled herself. “I’m terrified.”
The Jovian expedition consisted of scientists, engineers, and survivalists, all except for Mara, who was a poet. She had the general training everyone received, but her job was unique: documenting the expedition. Of course, every measurable aspect was logged mechanically, the data shot back to the Forlorn and redirected back to inhabited space, relay by relay. Mara was responsible for translating the experience to politicians and the public, imbuing the fall itself with meaning, whether they found a new home for all Jovians or died in the descent.
Dure, the expedition’s leader, spoke his last instructions to the Forlorn’s pilots, and then dove off the shelf, the other Jovians following in quick succession, suits flaring briefly as jets aimed them toward their designated portions of the planet’s surface. The atmospheric entry suits were designed for this, but from a distance of light-years. In practice, the blood-colored atmosphere could end up destroying the suits instead of embracing them. The first of many risks.
The red clouds closed over Mara so completely she lost all visual sense of motion. Lightning kept everything bright as day, each fractaling bolt felt through the atmospheric entry suit more than seen, a repetitive, nervous shudder. A meter marked every burst of electricity, another registered falling speed, a cluster of others recorded her vital signs, those and countless more scattered over her visor, all of which she ignored to try and take in the splendor of it all, to imagine what it would be like without the suit.
Mara thumbed the recorder awake. “Take away the expedition and the threat of death, and the fall feels like lowering yourself into bed after an exhausting day of work, darkness settling with a lover’s embrace right behind your eyes.”
“Okay now,” Sidé murmured. “Let’s not get emotional.”
Yet her words were emotional, too. The Jovians had lived for the fall for years, in training and in travel. Now they were falling. Dure hummed his anxiety. Polu and Inpa, brother and sister, worked to decipher the radar image as it grew clearer, as if knowing for sure would matter since they were already on their way. The expedition kept the general comm channel live, ostensibly for Mara, but also because none of them wanted to be alone right now, not for this.
Though, in fact, they were all alone.
Each Jovian’s individual angle of entry spread them out to cover a large enough area to make sure their collected data was reasonably conclusive, but also so they’d land close enough to meet up again in a few days, assuming they survived the landing.
The atmosphere swirled around Mara like drops of ink in water, the twisting expansion speeding up until every possible shade of red strobed by. It seemed to her she could only see inches away one moment and miles the next, distant swelling bulbs of cloud larger than Earth’s orbital cities. For a time, dark bubbles of what looked like ash fell alongside her, their prismatic surfaces reflecting the red of the atmosphere like a form of camouflage. When she touched one, it burst along the edge of the suit’s glove, a freeze-frame puff and then it was gone.
A break in the clouds dropped Mara into a gulf of empty space, darkness rising up towards her like a solid layer of whatever made up the ash bubbles. According to her instruments, she was still tens of thousands of feet up from where the hoped-for land would be. Her visor highlighted where the others were, tiny bright yellow circles surrounding emptiness in every direction, too far away to be even a dot on the horizon without the highlighting. The voices of her colleagues chattered in her ears. Friendly, loving, tense, fearful, a swirl of opaque emotions and word paintings Mara would play back later to mine for her account of the expedition.
If there was a later.
Sidé whispered on a channel only for them. “I’m right here.”
What she meant was Don’t be scared. And it was only then Mara noticed her quick, shallow breathing, that evidence of her fear audible to all on the general comm.
“I know,” Mara whispered back, consciously slowing her breathing.
Dure began counting down to the deployment of the spider strands, long cords of twisted nanotubes that would stretch out for thousands of feet behind them to break their fall. It was a technology untested in the conditions it’d been designed for. Another risk. Another chance for anything to go wrong.
Mara whisper-typed her exhilaration as they sped towards the void of darkness, and the land that might be a home hidden from their view. The mass below the clouds could be an ocean, or even just a magnetic storm showing up as a solid on scans. There was no way to know except to go, and so they went.
The spider strands shot out and her suit jerked her back and her ears filled with cries of awe and apprehension. Sidé gave a shout of pure joy. The ball of tension in Mara’s stomach dissolved like sugar on the tongue. The black layer was close now, seeming just underfoot. Ripples played along its surface as though it were a deep lake brushed by the wind. It was peaceful, almost unbearably beautiful.
Whatever happened now, they were home.
And yet there was so much distance left to fall.
About the author:
Andrew Kozma’s fiction appears in Apex, ergot., and Seize the Press, while his poems appear in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.
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