Chapter 9: Splashdown

The girls stood on the beach, breathing the CO2-rich air, as their spaceship came into view. Only Leila had binoculars, but they could all see the silvery shape emerge from the cloud, two kilometres away. Its trajectory was looking good, but as its size came more into scale, against the trees on the island, the venture looked increasingly outlandish.

“It only weighs 125 tonnes, in Earth terms,” Leila reminded everyone, and herself. “I mean kiloNewtons.”

““Yes,” mumbled Susan.

It didn’t need saying that if the ship smashed instead of skimming on the surface, they’d struggle to survive for long, with no technology or equipment. And would it really skim? - a hundred metres in diameter, five hundred tonnes of mass, hitting the water at three hundred metres a second ... but nobody wanted the alternative of living in it for 1500 years.

It was 300 metres away, huge and silver, so fast ... dropping lower, and lower ... touched, skipped with a cloud of spray, once, flew over the water a long way, touched again, with more of a splash, then again, and again ... it disappeared in a huge eruption of water.

Had it flipped? Crushed itself? Or had it survived? They couldn’t tell for a full minute, until the sea had subsided.

Yes! There it was, the right way up with the roof of the farm on top. And it had finished where they’d planned, at least: in the big bay, upwind of a shallow shelving beach. It wallowed lazily but buoyantly, floating with hatches above water level.

“Quick,” gasped Leila, “we’ve got to wind the tail in, before it gets stuck on the bottom. Why didn’t I think!”

They started running, along the beach. Melissa tripped and fell. The others waited, then Leila fell. They were clumsy and uncoordinated. The low gravity meant they could leap a long way with each stride, but they hadn’t run before, with the Cryo unit being closed, preventing circuits of the ship. The soft sand gave way under their feet.

They struggled on in pursuit of their spaceship, until finally, exhausted, they found it nudging the shore at the far end of the bay. It was a few metres off the beach, aground on the sand underneath.

“Whew,” Isobel wheezed, “it made it. Now we just have to get aboard.”

The girls looked at the problem: the smooth, rounded sides towered about eight metres above them.

“Tree trunk?” Melissa suggested.

They pushed into the wooded foreshore, hoping to find something they could use as a bridge and ladder. The dense foliage tore at their thin dresses, the twigs and vines catching and tearing the flimsy fabric, but luckily, not having thorns, not tearing their soft, indoor-conditioned skin. Then once through the outer layer into the darker interior of the forest they had gloomy space to search in.

“How about this?” Eventually Leila came to a branch that had broken off a big tree. The others rushed over.

“What is it, five metres?” Susan spread her arms as she walked along it.

“It might do,” Melissa agreed. “We can make a human ladder can’t we? On top.”

With all four of them pulling they managed to drag it back as far as the dense undergrowth at the edge of the forest. They looked for the easiest way through, but there were no trails, no breaks in the intertwined mass of vegetation that were wide enough. The smaller branches spreading out from the big one were too big to break, and spread too wide to pass.

They sat down on it in frustration.

“How about the lander?” asked Isobel, while knowing the answer, really.

“We can’t propel it,” Leila pointed out sadly. “It’d just blow around, even if we could get it launched off the beach. It’d catch so much wind. We can’t use the thrusters like that and there’s no way we can paddle it hard enough, through the hatch.

“Let’s go and look at it again,” said Susan.