Chapter Text
At first when he breaks atmo, all Crowley sees through the shuttle’s wide transparent viewscreen is water.
Clear, calm liquid. A panorama of sparkling ripples, spread out below him in an endless plain, as far as the eye can see. He knows a bit of what to expect from the briefings, but it’s still arresting to see. Marvellous. Stunning. Ethereal, even. Hey, that’s probably how Aethera got its name in the first place? Whoever named it.
And yet…it feels wrong, somehow. To be sailing down over that gleaming unstable surface, even if his shuttle does have appropriate float landers. As if his Terran ancestors are kicking up a fuss, deep in his genes: Where’s the bloody earth?
Water, water everywhere, and not a place to land.
But he can’t really worry about evolved psychology bullshit, because the shuttle goes dead.
Dead dead. A wild futz from the electronics and then? Navigation, diagnostics, scanning. All of it! It all fizzles out in a blitz of black-and-white jitter. Crowley manages to switch over to manual for guidance before the power goes completely, and he’s left feeling every twitch and shudder of the shuttle through the grip of his hands on the yoke and throttle.
And suddenly, all that gorgeous gleaming water takes on a very different, very threatening feel. It yawns in front of him, beckoning and hungry.
His gut clenches. At the thought of drowning, mostly. Of implacable waters closing over his head, filing his lungs, eating his life. Dying and dead, lost and alone, (probably) unmourned.
C’mon, Crowley. He’s crashlanded before. He’s piloted on manual before. He can do it again, for all it feels like he’s pulling an elephant up a rocky slope. He bullies the shuttle’s nose up to slow his descent, and lets the tug of the heavier gravity in his churning gut and trembling legs guide his balance, his senses, his instinct.
Gradually a serenity settles over him like a cloak. He’s fallen before, yes. And this feeling is familiar, too. A heavy inevitability of what’s to come – a fall, a crash.
His hands steady, thank the stars. His vision sharpens.
He’s skimming over the glittering water of Aethera, silent, dead, in a long hop like a skipping stone, when he sees it. There! There’s something there, distant but not too far.
A long strip of pale beach, and the stretch of rocky land off behind that.
Land. Land! A place to drop. His relieved heart begins to beat again, and he breathes, shaky, one-two-three-four.
Then he slams at the manual override for the float landers, but it’s gone completely unresponsive. Like punching a rock. The shuttle rattles around him, and then goes quiet, and he’s falling down through the alien sky in a final, graceful, terrifying pitch.
He tries to relax for the landing. It’s the first thing they’re taught, indentureds like Crowley who arrive at flight training without ever having touched a shuttle throttle. Go limp as a snake. But it’s too much. He’s so tense for the landing that when it comes, it nearly jars his bones right out of his skin. Well, at least his skeleton’ll make it.
The shuttle bounces and skips and lets out a horrible shrieking-groan as it skids across the strip of pale crystalline sand, and then…stops.
Breathe, one-two-three-four. Breathe.
Crowley unsticks his hands from the flight controls. It takes a moment for his brain to recover from its heavy kathunk against the inside of his skull, but gradually he is able to grasp some basics:
He is down.
He is in one piece.
He is alive.
The shuttle’s front end is half-buried into pale sand, but there’s no death on sudden massive impact, and no drowning. Nice work, Crowley.
He takes a few hundred more deep breaths until the landscape beyond the shuttle’s viewscreen stops trembling. Then he makes himself stand up, shake out the shakes, put on the rest of his suit—protocol, even by Bea’s generally lax-assed standards—and ventures out like the explorer he’s supposed to be.
The sand is soft and giving under his boots. The water gleams a placid silver, mirroring the sky.
Despite the tinted faceshield, he still has to squint. Of course it’s bright as fuck; Aethera has two suns. The brilliancy of his sandy-rocky landing area is a migraine waiting to happen.
He doesn’t have time for a migraine. He’s got his mission, and before he can even get started on that, he has to dive into the shuttle’s cramped diagnostics array, figure out just why he’s crashed.
He takes another step, and another.
Beep.
Fuck.
Beep-beep.
Okay, Crowley tells himself. Two beeps. His suit could be resetting to deal with the alien atmo and possibly, possibly whatever it was that maybe knocked him out of the sky.
Beep-beep-beep.
Three beeps.
Lost power. Crashed the shuttle. And now, two steps onto alien soil, his suit—Crowley taps up the diagnostic panel—has a leak.
Supposedly. Hell if Crowley can see where or why. But in the event of any leakage, the sleek black STARLITER 7000 model S (for shit, thinks Crowley viciously if unoriginally, but originality isn’t his primary concern at the moment) will throw all its impressive power into maintaining system filtering and integrity.
He can’t even send a priority distress beacon message. All he has is the piddly rocket that comes standard in the Duke’s shuttles. Would that even break Aethera’s heavier grav?
Shit. Cosmic, elemental shit.
He stares up at the wide stretch of pale grey sky, the awful even paler sandy beach and the calm, colourless ocean that seemed to stretch on forever and ever.
Definitely he’s had better first days on wild planets.
But this isn’t just any wild planet, is it?
Aethera’s surface is supposed to be twenty percent landmass in the middle of planet-wide ocean, so he should probably be grateful he came in with his planned trajectory—the chances of his crashing into water were much greater.
Most of that land that he can see, apart from the sand, is grey-white and rocky, with sections here and there that look more shimmery and pinkish in the sunlight. Fascinating from a geologic standpoint probably, though that’s not Crowley’s specialty.
Despite its supposed capability of supporting life, there’s nothing much indigenous here, apart from compatible bacteria, some kind of pretty clam that Bea swears up and down is a twin to Earth’s geoducks, and a cold creeping golden lichen that apparently turns yellow during the long winter. Whenever that is.
With Crowley’s current luck? Probably tomorrow.
Anyway. Greenery, chlorophyll and photosynthesis, might not be a thing here. Crowley grins at that, and pats his specimen case with its tiny leafy transplants. Yet.
The pale sand glimmers beneath his feet, and look—there’s one of Bea’s clam things now, nudging his boot. Crowley squats down for a better look.
It is pretty. The flat shell is a little larger than the size of his palm, and as pale as the rest of the washed-out surroundings, but its rubbled lines run in pleasing patterns. Crowley carefully picks it up for closer examination. The dying glare from Aethera’s second sun catches a glitter of gold, like veins of liquid light, glittering all through it.
“Look at you,” Crowley whispers, enchanted despite himself, despite his wretched circumstances. “Lovely thing. You’re gorgeous, aren’t you.”
He fancies the clam gives the tiniest wriggle, and then a bit of the bivalve peeps out. Like it’s inspecting him right back, hah. It’s a creamy colour, and it looks soft. Malleable. As if it would be pleasant to touch, rather than slimy or toxic.
Hmph. And what are we basing that on, Doctor Crowley? Instincts aren’t worth shit here. Aethera is still alien. Still uncharted. There’s no cause for false optimism.
His suit beeps thrice at him again. Speaking of false optimism. That’s Crowley’s cue to stop faffing around and set up the rocket beacon—no time for romantic detours into discovery when his equipment is acting up. So he carefully returns the fascinating little clam to its scuffed line in the sand, and gets to it.
The rocket beacon is undamaged. He gives it a bit of extra oomph with a jury-rigged battery pack cannibalised from the shuttle backup console, and then sets it for a direct intercept to the Grand Duke, Bea’s command ship of the small Stana Corporate fleet. Stars willing, Bea’s still got them all trundling along the proper course.
He ducks down as it blasts off, and then watches as it soars high, trailing red sparks, into the darkening sky.
He squints. It looks a bit…wonky. Is it suffering from the same weird malfunction as the shuttle? The same reaction to whatever it is about Aethera that didn’t show up on the scans. That wasn’t in Bea’s reports.
He can’t tell if the rocket clears atmo or not.
His suit beeps again. The panic creeps back, tightening round his chest like a steel band, and he takes several deep breaths, tries to center himself. Rearm himself with his usual easy flippancy.
No need for worry. C’mon. Not really. Bea will declare him missing (or AWOL) at the seventeen day mark. He has more than enough food and supplies till then. Veritable feast, really, considering how much—or how little—he eats. He can patch the suit leak for any trips outside the shuttle and shelter, until the computer verifies his breathability survey of Aethera’s air.
Hey, he still has the computer and its cache. If he can power up. He tinkers with the battery pack, and manages to get one of the main consoles online for long enough to pull the cache and drop it into the portable computer. The remote connection seems to be functioning, even if the main console is still hiccuping. The portable should have at least a few days of battery, too. Hopefully by then he’ll have main power back up and running.
Crowley pokes at the main console controls, but the screen goes dim again. Something properly vital must’ve come loose in the crash. He won’t be able to lift off until he gets under the hood and figures out what.
To give himself a bit of breathing room, as well as something to do, he erects the emergency shelter around the shuttle. The sand, though clinically safe according to his instruments, isn’t suitable for the seal. But luckily his shuttle nosedived right next to this lovely massive hunk of solid rock. The pinkish stuff, rather than the grey. That’s nice. He stretches the shifting fabric-metal-plastic tube of the shelter up to it, and…hrmh. It’s covered all over with an abundance of the shiny, scale-like clams.
Crowley scans them. Yep. They register more as kind of a conglomerate life like this, in these weird overlapping clusters, but still harmless. Just like Bea had reported. Phew.
The whole uneven surface works very well for mounting the wall of the shelter. Out of relief, he gives the rockface a pat between the scaley clusters—it’s sunwarmed, he can feel it even through his glove, and it’s surprisingly comforting—and goes inside to pressurise the whole thing.
He presses the last seal into place. The shelter inflates in a giant cylinder, and the sunlight glows through the transparent pieces in startling rays of pink and orange and gold. And his suit stops beeping every five minutes. Finally.
Crowley runs the filters. Does one final air, bugs, and integrity test, and everything’s in the green. Safe.
He strips out of the big suit. Ahhh. Better. Clad in only his lightweight black workshirt and trousers, he feels more capable. He stretches his legs and wriggles his hips. Stifling, those things. Like he’s a block-man.
He does the necessary stuff: toileting, sterilising, double-checking the shuttle’s systems via the portable computer for power and backups. And everything stays all beautifully in the green. He’s got a charge in the main battery for at least two solar years, thank fuck—though not even Bea would let him rot here that long.
He still can’t tell what knocked him out of the sky. The portable isn’t reading any glitches. But seeing those healthy indicators for stored power? That goes a long way towards easing the spiky tension in his shoulders. His wrist monitor doesn't seem to be working, but he leaves it on anyway. Maybe it'll come back, too.
Still. Crowley adds some of the longer-lasting foodstuffs to the backup bag. Or the SIF bag, as he and Eric have always labeled it when they’ve gone on scout-trips together. As in, if you’re using this bag, shit is fucked, and so are you probably.
It adds to the SIF bag’s bulk of filters, meds, and other basic necessities. Glorified fucking first-aid kit. But it’s something.
With a sigh, Crowley flops down in the pilot’s chair with the portable computer. He eats a delicious concentrate meal while he reviews Bea’s overall report on Aethera.
It’s written in typical Bea style, unfortunately. Broad and sweeping and full of assumptive leaps without evidence. The only real research deep-dives are into the little clam guys. Due to the atmosphere and distance and whatever else is going on, Crowley doesn’t have any connection to the interstellar comm net. But! He’s still got that cache from the latest update, so he searches through it for any known data on the planet.
Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of info he doesn’t already have.
Aethera’s part of an infamous planetary map: the Ineffable Road. A winding route of potential planets that most terraforming collectives avoid like the space plague. The tale goes that the planets and systems were investigated and catalogued ages ago by some super-race, but for whatever reason, left be. One or two of the planets have turned out to be habitable. Some of them have warning beacons bristling round their systems for hundreds of lightyears, on account of all the missing people.
Bea’s version of the map has each of those planets crossed out with a big green X. HERE BE DRAGONS.
Aethera has no such mark. No such lore. It’s a dead, wild planet. Deadish, on account of the clams and lichen. But no one’s touched it. Even the Arches, their biggest rival in the terraforming collective game, have passed it by. And this despite Gabriel’s insistence on being, unprovably, a descendant of the oh-so-hallowed mapmakers. Crowley’s team—well, Bea’s rather—have been competing with them for years now, and he knows Gabriel would rather eat an asteroid steak than cede them any ground.
So why have they avoided it? Maybe their copy of the Ineffable Star Road map doesn’t show Aethera at all?
On a whim, Crowley does a query—but there’s nothing in the databanks. No recent news from their enduring nemeses. Though Gabriel’s smarmy face pops up in the streams from about six months ago. Lost a member of their team on an exploratory mission, apparently. Such a loss, sacrifice not made in vain as long as humankind benefits, and blah blah typical Gabriel blah. Blahbriel, more like. Crowley snorts at himself, and trawls through the stream results for a few more minutes. No further info.
He dislikes Gabriel, so much. He dislikes Gabriel’s team, and their smug self-assurance in their own supremacy, their star-blessedness. But he imagines someone on Gabriel’s team going through what Crowley did today. Dropping out of the sky. Controls unresponsive. That yawning, pitiless stretch of water…
He can’t help but feel sympathy. Kinship. And a bone-deep dread that he might be about to follow in an Arches explorer’s empty footsteps.
Crowley shuts down the portable, suddenly exhausted. No doubt the adrenaline rush of OH FUCK OH SHIT OH FUCK CRASHING has faded. As well as the smoothed-out zen. He stares up at the darkening sky through the transparent ceiling of the shelter. There’re a few distant moons, but between their distance and the stars, Bea’s report says Aethera has no tides to speak of.
Lucky for him. It’d be pretty annoying to crash on the beach and then get submerged, eh? Tomorrow he’ll find the problem and fix the shuttle. Then he’ll fly up again and do a proper circuit. Find a better place further in from the shore to set up camp.
Despite how appealing he’s finding this particular spot. The view of the open sky through the window is…nice. And that rock seems so stable, so sturdy. Best thing about today so far.
Crowley leans back in the pilot’s seat, and drifts off.