Unbounded

Chapter Three: Significant Sea

An hour later, Tai left his lab and walked to the skiff bay. He put on a pressure suit in the skiff's alcove and was sterilized by an electric membrane as a mechanical arm inserted him into the single-chambered craft. Titanium petals folded down, the alcove was sealed off from from the bay, and the air was pumped out. The floor opened, and the rails telescoped from the ceiling, pushing him outside the hull.

Tai muttered to himself as he monitored and adjusted controls. "Timing release; bay door facing planetside." He became weightless as the spinship receded above his head. "Borrowing rotational momentum for linear acceleration into the atmosphere, thank you very much." He nodded to himself. "Of course, the orbit is geosynchronous but not precisely geostationary, so my linear throw is actually a parabola--and the end-point is slightly off-target. Atmospheric breaking, turning--and now the descent path is helical."

"Acknowledged, Doctor Tai. Happy landing," someone from the spinship responded.

When the altimeter read two kilometers, he could make out the Kea skiff parked on a wrinkled, brown plain, pock-marked with circular lakes. The green waters were limned from the brown rock by bright oranges and reds, and they vented tall stacks of steam, all leaning at fifty-degree angles. Tai tightened his spiral and fired landing thrusters, setting down twenty meters from the larger skiff. With engines powered down, his small vessel unfolded like an upside-down lotus flower as his harness slithered away, and then he carefully stepped onto the soil.

Tai walked slowly to where the others were gathered around a small water hole. Past them, the land sloped gently downwards to a tidal flat, beyond which lay only the bright reflections of a sea.

Tekoha was wading in the tidal zone, the water-level half-way to his knees. He was walking away from a round stone, back to dry land. The others were huddled in swift discussion. Tai noticed Ryder was standing just outside the group, listening; he went to join him.

"What's got them so excited?" Tai asked him.

Ryder pointed at the colorful edge of the steaming water hole.

"Oxidation of iron in the soil? What is the oxygen level of the air, by the way?" Tai looked at his arm-calc.

"Zero-point-one percent. No, Doctor. That is life."

"Yes!" Tekoha said loudly in their earpieces as he stepped onto dry land, carrying a toolkit. "This is magnificent! A momentous ..."

"This is a disaster," Ryder said. "We found our cake, but we can't eat it. It's a habitable world, mostly uninhabited, except the microbes. Planetary Protection Policy clearly states we may not settle on a world with life. We may not even breathe its air."

"Hold on, let's not get ahead of ourselves," Tekoha said. "These organisms use monomers of opposite chirality from Earth biology. They can't eat us, and we can't eat them. They don't use the same amino acids, and the nucleotides of their genetic material are not the five found in Earth life, which means they can't infect us, nor we them. We would be completely parallel, separate biospheres. I think that's an argument worth putting to Mbali."

"No multicellular organisms?" Tai asked.

"There doesn't appear to be any, though we would have to send a probe to the ocean floor and look around some more." Tekoha pointed to the round rock in the tidal flat which he had just investigated. "There is some rudimentary colonialism. That thing is similar to Earth's stromatolites. The microbes are photoautotrophs." He approached the edge of the steaming water hole and pointed to the swirling colors at the edge. "But these are hyperthermophiles. The water is ninety degrees Celsius, and I don't think they could survive at temperatures much below that, based on the structure of their proteins."