Echoes in the Void

The craft came down on grey ground and settled, and that was all that happened.

Marcus had done atmospheric entry more times than he could count. He knew the shake of it, the heat bloom, that animal part of him that never stopped believing the hull would open. None of it prepared him for the quiet on the other side. The craft settled onto the ground, and the dust it kicked up rose in slow spirals and then simply stopped. It hung where it was.

He kept the recorder running. That was his job.

"Personal log, Marcus Reeves." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "We're down, and the dust doesn't fall."

The hatch cycled. Grey light came in — flat, sourceless, the same light that had lain on the world from orbit, and no warmth in it. Rylee went out first, because she always did. Her boots hit the ground and she turned a slow circle with her rifle up. She finished the circle with the rifle still up, and then brought it down across her chest.

"Clear," she said.

Marcus went down the ramp behind Chelsea. The ground was packed grey-brown, uniform, not a crack in it. He crouched and dragged two gloved fingers across it. The dust clung and did not scatter. When he lifted his hand the particles held their place in the air a hand's width from the ground, waiting to be told to move. His back was stiff from the descent chair, and he stood up slowly on account of it.

The silence pressed on him. He had stood in vacuum quieter than this, but vacuum was allowed to be quiet. The suit read this world at nine-tenths of an atmosphere, breathable, with a wind speed of zero.

He looked up out of habit. There was no sky to read — only the flat grey glare that came from nowhere and lay on everything the same. Somewhere under that light was the colony they had been falling toward when the dark took them, if it was still there, and if it was ever where the charts promised. No one aboard said its name.

He crouched and touched the ground again. It gave nothing back — not a temperature, not a grain. He had walked a hundred worlds, and every one of them pushed back at his boots with some small argument of its own — a give, a grit, a cold. The print of his boot stayed where he put it. He stepped off it and it was still there when he looked back.

"Wind's dead," Lucas said, stepping past him, rifle up, his arm held close to his ribs — the grey side of him. He'd refused to stay aboard, and no one made him. "I've stood on rocks with more air than this."

Marcus said it into the recorder. "No wind. No sound. The dust holds where it falls."

"Put the temperature on it," Rylee said.

"I don't have the temperature."

"Then get it off your suit and put it on. If we're doing this we're doing it the whole way."

He got it off his suit and put it on. It was four degrees above freezing, and it was still four degrees an hour later, and it was four degrees when they came back past the lander at the end of the day, which he also said into the recorder, because by then he was saying everything into the recorder.

***

The trace brought them here, and the trace was dead.

None of them had said that out loud yet. Back in the dark, before the descent, Nigel's board had caught a thread of a signal — automated, thin, cycling on a loop with no hand behind it. A beacon still calling because no one came to tell it to stop. It pulled from this grey world. They had followed it down because the route allowed down, and because a signal, even a dead one, was a direction.