Expendable - James Alan Gardner [22]
I shook my head at his naïveté. “If we’re really planning to survive for any length of time, we’ll put down on the edge of polar permafrost and hope we can subsist on scrub vegetation.”
“Why?” Chee sounded outraged.
“Because,” Yarrun explained, “the colder the region, the less microbial activity there is. When we land, we’ll each have twelve hours of canned air; after that, we have to start breathing local atmosphere. Our tightsuits do their best to filter microorganisms from incoming air, but don’t expect a hundred percent effectiveness. Theory says we’ll live a lot longer if we go where the airborne microbe count is low.”
“Theory says?”
“Actual evidence is skimpy,” Yarrun shrugged. “No Explorer has come back to tell us either way.”
Kicking a Lion In the Ass
“Are we really going to land near the poles?” Chee asked with conspicuous lack of enthusiasm.
Yarrun answered for me. “Festina was joking, in her way. When we land, we want the Jacaranda to remain in geosynchronous position above us so they can pick us up at a moment’s notice. However, the Jacaranda was designed as a deep-space ship, and its sublight engines are not very efficient. If it parks close enough to the planet to pick us up, it has to maintain a reasonable speed relative to the planet’s center of gravity, or else expend a lot of energy trying to hold altitude. Close to the poles, a hovering flight path is just too slow for the ship to hold very long. We’re pretty well restricted to the region between, say, forty-five degrees north and south latitude.”
“Which gives us plenty of land to choose from,” I promised Chee, “and many types of terrain. To land safely, we’ll choose somewhere fairly flat. To survive the first few hours, we’ll pick a place with sparse vegetation and little animal life…”
“But not too sparse,” Yarrun added. “We don’t want to find ourselves in the middle of a desert if we suddenly go no-comm.”
“Close to fresh water, far from any oceans…”
“I like the ocean,” Chee protested.
“So do thousands of other lifeforms,” I told him. “We must think defensively, Admiral. We know nothing about this planet except that it’s dangerous. If we set down near an ocean, we have to worry about nasty ocean things as well as nasty land things. The fewer environments and ecologies we have to contend with, the fewer variables we need to think about and the more likely we are to be here this time tomorrow, drinking lukewarm chocolate and mushrooms. All right?”
“You don’t have to snap, Ramos,” he pouted. “I’ll bow to your expertise on every point…which is generous of me, considering that standard Explorer techniques work like shit on Melaquin.”
“Admiral,” Yarrun said quietly, “we recognize the standard methods have proved inadequate. Even so, we shouldn’t abandon them entirely. Sometimes all the procedures in the book can’t protect you from the perils of a planet; but that’s no reason to walk up to something that looks like a lion and kick it in the ass.”
“On the contrary,” Chee answered with a gleam in his eye, “suppose the first thing I did on Melaquin was boot some large toothy animal in the butt. What would happen?”
“Depending on its ecological niche,” I replied, “it would run, kick you back, or bite off your foot.”
“And what would you do?”
“Depending on the size of its teeth, we would run, laugh, or shoot it with a stunner.”
“What would happen to me?”
I threw up my hands. “There’s no way to know. How fast is the animal? How deadly is its attack? How susceptible is it to stunner fire? Does it sever a major artery or just give a flesh wound? Does its saliva happen to be poisonous to human life? How fast can we get you back to the ship’s infirmary?”
I stopped, realizing what I just said.
Chee nodded happily. “Standard policy says when a party member is injured, you must request immediate pickup.”
We all pondered that a moment. Yarrun said, “Suppose the Admiralty have ordered Prope not to pick us up.”
“They