Our lounge dominated the middle section, fitted with luxurious reclining chairs. Everyone settled down in there as the drivers went forward to the cab. A couple of stewards came in and asked us if we wanted any food or drink. It was all slightly surreal. I’ve seen old videos that included plane flights and traveling on the Orient Express. For a moment I could believe the portal to Nkya had actually transported us into the twentieth century. This was traveling in history.

I have to admit, there was a degree of elegance to it. If it wasn’t so ridiculously time consuming, I could probably get used to it.

“We’re sealing up in two minutes,” Sutton Castro announced over the PA.

Sandjay splashed the garage airlock schematic, showing me both doors closing and undergoing pre-start pressure tests. I didn’t ask for it, but Sandjay was an adaptive altme, about as smart as an old G6Turing, so it can pretty much anticipate what I want and need to know. The biometrics my medical peripheries were reading would’ve revealed rising heart rate, a small adrenaline flush, and raised skin temperature. All its core algorithms would interpret that as one thing: anxiety rising. So Sandjay did what it could to reassure me, and showed me lots of systems working smoothly.

The garage dome pumped its atmosphere away. “Access the vehicle net,” I whispered soundlessly. The peripheral fibers riding alongside my vocal cord nerves picked up the impulses, and Sandjay coupled to the Trail Ranger’s net. “Give me an external camera feed.”

I closed my eyes and watched the image splash. In front of the Trail Ranger, the big garage door was opening, slowly hinging up.

It was dark outside. Gray sky lidded a rust-brown rock plain. A fine dust suspended in the super-thin atmosphere gave everything a hazy quality. Yet I could see tiny zephyrs twirling along across the metamorphic mesa, sucking up spirals of sand. Spectacularly sharp mountains shredded the eastern horizon. The sight was entrancing. Virgin land, desolate and alien.

The Trail Ranger rolled forward. I could feel the movement, the slight rise and fall of the suspension pistons as if we were a yacht sailing over mildly choppy waters. Then the tires were biting into the loose regolith, churning up big fantails.

I opened my eyes, and Sandjay canceled the camera feed. Yuri, Callum, and Alik were all doing the same thing as I was, watching the images coming from the Trail Ranger’s net, while Kandara and the three aides had chosen to stand, pressed up against the long windows, seeing the landscape for real. I guess that’s a comment on age.