Down South

[jammi]

"Carteret, we are green. Upper atmo sample is back. We've got good air up here." Behind his flight visor the Clydesdale's pilot closed his eyes for a moment, relying on his steady hands to keep the ship stable. The Endymion was coasting along at a steady speed above a sprawling rolling grassland.

The plain stretched as far as the eye could see, with no animals visible, other than the black bovines that had been so unsettled by the foreign invasion not long earlier. A tall grass that appeared to have a yellow fruit and blue stalk swayed in the wind. As the wind ruffled the ground, the earth would shift from yellow to blue with the grasses' movement. He looked over at the co-pilot again, who was carefully reading a display bank that was giving her vital statistics about the air they were flying through and the ground they were passing over.

"Best launch the pulse. If we're going to take her down, I want to know what we're landing on." The woman nodded, then removed the safety cover from a small switch and flicked it. The lights dimmed for a moment as masses of power was rerouted from the primary generators. The topographical pulse generator in the central cargo area lit up, drowning the sound of the engines with the roar of mechanical process. A short while later, the bridge lights returned to their prior luminosity, as the source of the power drain completed its work and shut down. There was a laboured hum from the dashboard data processor unit as the reams of raw data that had just flooded it were analysed, sorted and presented.

The main viewscreen shimmered for a moment before a map grid of green lines was overlaid on the scenery. They showed the contours of the land the dips and hillocks that were not immediately obvious to the eye. The computer selected a flat zone about two miles from the ship's current position. Within a few seconds it had closed the distance, the engines now idling as the ship coasted around in a holding pattern to maintain velocity.

I guess we should take her down. The captain nodded gingerly at the co-pilots murmured sentence. They would potentially be the first people ever to set foot on a newly discovered planet, possibly something no other living Bretonian could lay claim to. He eased the throttle back further yet, beginning the final decent.

The air was thick and stuffy with tension. This was a moment of history; the moment Bretonian assets first landed on Planet Sydney.

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