Unbounded

Chapter One: Rock Garden

Mission Time: +138 Earth-years

On his hands and knees, a man stared through the floor. A dry world floated in the false window below. A few people walked by and barely looked at him.

"Ryder? Are you alright?"

Ryder looked up and saw the weakly wrinkled eyes of a short man looking down at him. "I'm fine Hemi; thanks." He stood up and touched the wall; the window winked away. "I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed," he said.

"It's a lot to take in, I know," Hemi said. "I'm heading for Command Sector. Walk with me?"

"Sure." Ryder passed over the now plain white floor and went with Hemi to a nearby door.

This sector of the ring was dim and hushed. Blue hues stretched to orange, and a computer terminal washed a man in ruddy light. His facial muscles gradually squeezed inwards towards a frown. Without shifting her head, a woman in a white uniform glanced at him.

"Tangaroa--" the woman called out. "--what's wrong?"

"I'm looking at the spectrographic analysis we just did, and it ... it doesn't ... correspond to anything we were expecting," Tangaroa said.

The woman shifted her body in the shadows. "What are you talking about?"

Tangaroa pressed his hands to the glossy surface in front of him. Glowing lines and boxes of text radiated from his fingers on the terminal's surface. "Our data do not match the original telemetry from the Flamecast probe. The atmosphere is cold and toxic."

The woman's eyes widened.

"Mbali, I have triple-checked our location," another man near Tangaroa called out to the woman. "Navigation was successful."

"Then quadruple-check," the woman named Mbali said. "Tangaroa, is it possible the planet's atmosphere could have changed that much in one century?"

"It's not just the atmosphere. The surface gravity is only 0.76 g, but Flamecast had reported 1.7 g. This is a different world entirely."

"Anaru, you are certain we are at the precisely correct orbital distance from Wolf 1061?" Mbali asked the navigator.

"Yes ma'am."

"Is it possible another planet shares the same orbit?"

"Not in this case," another young man in a black uniform answered. He walked to a cylindrical console in an alcove. When his hands touched the dark surface, they sprouted flowers of data. "Mbali, take a look through your viewer," he said.

She blinked, activating bionic implants, and black nictating membranes slid over her eyes. Mbali's sight was replaced with a vista of a brown and white world one megameter below, the arc of the Milky Way above. She rotated her head around in real space, braided dreadlocks shifting between her shoulders. Heads-up displays highlighted a speck above the planet. She zoomed in to the speck and dimmed the luminosity of everything else around it. At maximum zoom, she could barely make out that the object was dimensional. It occasionally glimmered in the sunlight. "Is that the orbital component of Flamecast? I can't see it very clearly. But it's sparkling."

"Yes. It's a bit too small for our telescopes to resolve at this distance. The reflections are from solar panels."

"Is the landing component still in its integrated state?"

"It should be, in theory. We have no signal from the surface, but we do have the coordinates of its original landing site."

Mbali blinked again, and the membranes retracted. "Then we need to verify it's really there," she said. "Ariki," she addressed the man to whom she had just been talking. "You and the other senior scientists are going down. Security Chief Zhao, as well. Now."