Xeelee: Endurance Read Online Free PDF Page B

all.’
    They looked at me, the three of them in a row, distracted, absorbed by their science. Then they looked ahead, to see what I saw.
    They were like birds, black-winged, with white lenticular bodies. Those wings actually flapped in the thick air as they flew up from the polar seas, a convincing simulacrum of the way birds fly in the air of Earth. Oddly they seemed to have no heads.
    And they were coming straight towards us.
    Michael Poole snapped, ‘Lethe. Vent the buoyancy!’ He stabbed at a panel, and the others went to work, pulling on their helmets as they did so.
    I felt the balloon settle as the hot air was released from the envelope above us. We were sinking but we seemed to move in dreamy slow motion, while those birds loomed larger in our view with every heartbeat.
    Then they were on us. They swept over the gondola, filling the sky above, black wings flapping in an oily way that, now they were so close, seemed entirely unnatural, not like terrestrial birds at all. They were huge, each with a wingspan of ten, fifteen metres. I thought I could hear them, a rustling, snapping sound carried to me through Titan’s thick air.
    And they tore into the envelope. The fabric was designed to withstand Titan’s methane rain, not an attack like this; it exploded into shreds, and the severed threads waved in the air. Some of the birds suffered; they tangled with our threads or collided with each other and fell away, rustling. One crashed into the gondola itself, crumpled like tissue paper, and fell, wadded up, far below us.
    And we fell too, following our victim–assassin to the ground. Our descent from the best part of eight kilometres high took long minutes; we soon reached terminal velocity in Titan’s thick air and weak gravity. We had time to strap ourselves in, and Poole and his team worked frantically to secure the gondola’s systems. In the last moment Poole flooded the gondola with a foam that filled the internal space and held us rigid in our seats, like dolls in packaging, sightless and unable to move.
    Even so I felt the slam as we hit the ground.

 
    7
    The foam drained away, leaving the four of us sitting in a row. We had landed on Titan the way we had entered its atmosphere, backside first, and now we lay on our backs with the gondola tilted over, so that I was falling against Miriam Berg, and the mass of Bill Dzik was weighing on me. The gondola’s hull had reverted to opacity so that we lay in a close-packed pearly shell, but there was internal light and the various data slates were working, though they were filled with alarming banks of red.
    The three of them went quickly into a routine of checks. I ignored them. I was alive . I was breathing, the air wasn’t foul, and I was in no worse discomfort than having Dzik’s unpleasant bulk pressed against my side. Nothing broken, then. But I felt a pang of fear as sharp as that experienced by the Virtual copy of me when he had learned he was doomed. I wondered if his ghost stirred in me now, still terrified.
    And my bowels loosened into the suit’s systems. Never a pleasant experience, no matter how good the suit technology. But I wasn’t sorry to be reminded that I was nothing but a fragile animal, lost in the cosmos. That may be the root of my cowardice, but give me humility and realism over the hubristic arrogance of a Michael Poole any day.
    Their technical chatter died away.
    ‘The lights are on,’ I said. ‘So I deduce we’ve got power.’
    Michael Poole said, gruffly reassuring, ‘It would take more than a jolt like that to knock out one of my GUTengines.’
    Dzik said spitefully, ‘If we’d lost power you’d be an icicle already, Emry.’
    ‘Shut up, Bill,’ Miriam murmured. ‘Yes, Emry, we’re not in bad shape. The pressure hull’s intact, we have power, heating, air, water, food. We’re not going to die any time soon.’
    But I thought of the flapping birds of Titan and wondered how she could be so sure.
    Poole started