“Bringing us down,” Satie said. We started our descent.
“Remember, Jamie and I get out first,” Ardeleanu said. “Then I’ll signal you two, and you get the instrument packs out of the cargo hold. Jamie will signal Satie to lift off when you two have gotten everything and secured the hold.” Aparna and Niamh nodded at this. “It’ll be fine,” Ardeleanu repeated.
The earth rose to meet us, and then Satie hovered, inches above the ground. “This is it,” he said. And nodded to me. “Watch your step.”
I nodded, took off my headset and attached a much smaller headset, opened the door to jump out, exited, and slid hard on my ass. The moss and algae had made the ground slippery. I cracked my knee on the way down and cursed at the pain. I could hear Satie saying something to me through my new headset, but the racket of the rotors made it difficult to hear. I decided to ignore it and instead got up （carefully）， retrieved my canister launcher and shotgun, switched over the safeties, then hobbled over to the passenger door. I pounded on it; Ardeleanu opened it up and got out. He’d seen me tumble and was more careful about putting his feet down before retrieving his own weapons.
The two of us did a quick look-see and didn’t see anything bounding up toward us; the copter was probably scaring the hell out of everything in a hundred-meter radius. Ardeleanu motioned to Aparna and Niamh, who got out—carefully—and then went to the small cargo hold directly behind the passenger area, getting out the two large, soft-walled instrument bags that carried inside them two instrument packages, their stakes, and the “embedding tool,” which was a fancy name for a rubber mallet. The instrument packages were inside acrylic domes that looked like the sort you’d put cakes inside at a diner, but instead of cakes were several cameras and other scientific equipment.
Niamh and Aparna closed the cargo hold, gave me a thumbs-up, and then we all moved away from the copter. Satie was waiting for my thumbs-up; once he saw it he went straight up one hundred meters and held position.
“Watch out, it’s slippery,” Niamh said to me, through our headsets. I gave them a look. Then I turned to Aparna. “You come with me,” I said.
“Safety first,” Ardeleanu said, and undid the compartment on his bandolier that held the parasite pheromone. “Screamers and spray.” I nodded, got out my own spray, and then sprayed down Aparna while he did the same to Niamh. Then I sprayed him and he sprayed me.
“We smell like fucking death,” Niamh said.
“That’s the point,” Aparna reminded them.
I put the spray back and got my screamer out of my pocket, turned it on, and put it back. I watched as Aparna did the same, and gave a thumbs-up to Ardeleanu, who did the same once his and Niamh’s screamers were switched on as well.
Ardeleanu looked at his watch. “That was a minute,” he said. “We did this in practice in six minutes. Let’s be back here in five forty-five.” I saw Niamh roll their eyes at this; they were not on board with striving for a personal best. But they went off with Ardeleanu anyway.
I looked at Aparna. “Ready?”
“I’m not going to rush, if that’s all right with you,” she said.
“That’s fine,” I assured her. “Let’s be quick but not stupid.” We walked in the direction opposite of Niamh and Ardeleanu, toward our first chosen spot, roughly a hundred meters away. We walked carefully, because the algae and moss weren’t getting any less squishy as we went along.
Our first destination was the farthest out because we wanted to work our way back in. As we walked, I kept an eye on the scenery, both at the landscape immediately around us, from which anything that might want to try to eat us would come from, and at the tow ering form of Bella. Walking around her was like walking around the Statue of Liberty, if the Statue of Liberty might, at any second, sprout wings and take to the sky.
Aparna followed my gaze. “She’s amazing, isn’t she?”
“Amazing is understating it.”
Aparna nodded. “It still doesn’t feel real, does it? All of this.”
“Falling on my ass back there felt real,” I assured her.
“Yes, all right, fine,” she said. “But the rest of it. We’re standing where a nuclear explosion went off two weeks ago. The ground is slippery with life.” She pointed off to the side of us, where the natal jelly lay thick on the ground. I could see the eggs in it, spheroidal and the size of bowling balls. Vein-like growths came out of them and dissipated into the jelly. “There are things in that, that will grow up into that”—she pointed at Bella—“who still shouldn’t physically exist, if you ask me, and yet, here we are. Unreal.”