Her pod hummed, using her entire frame to convey connections through its induced neural web. Sheets of sensation washed over her skin, bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from intricate flurries of her nervous system—the burr and tang of temperature, particle plasma flux, spectral flickers, kinesthetic glides and swivels, sharp images in the unending dark, lit by a smoldering dot of a sun.

These merged with her own inboard subsystems, coupled with blazing high-bit-rate feeds. The scrupulous Artilects had already processed and smoothed from the sailcraft’s decades of laser-beamed signals back to Earthside.

She went to fast-forward and the sailcraft plunged, its magnetic brakes on full. Down the potential well it flew in star-sprinkled dark. It heard no electromagnetics-bearing patterns, from radio through to optical. Yet Earthside knew from a few telescope pixels that one world here held an atmosphere out of equilibrium, clean signs of life that used oxygen and methane. So: life, perhaps minds, but no technology that spoke in waves. This L-dwarf star was of the commonplace majority, perhaps 75 percent or more of those stars in the disk, fully half of the total stellar mass in the galaxy.

Small but many, ruddy crucibles for life.

The craft chose its own path, looping intricately through repeated gravwraps around three gas giants in the outer system, losing delta-v’s all the while. Now it had lost enough of its interstellar velocity to rummage among the inner worlds—one cold and gaunt, then the prize, long known from Earthside ’scopes: a super-Earth.

The sailcraft folded in its mag-web brake and deployed ’scopes as it swanned into a high orbit around the cloudy world, 1.63 Earth masses. Its burgundy star glowered down on cloud decks thick as buttery pancakes in the morning.

Rachel licked her lips. The pod used body-hungers as prompts, always fun. Here was the tasty truth, a world for the unwrapping. Smart and sure, the white metal bird blew itself into full plumage. Its inflatable beryllium sails shone in ruddy daylight, hollow-body banners just tens of nanometers thick, the body swelled by low-pressure hydrogen. These it used to steer into lower orbit, scanning the orbit space for satellites—and finding none.

The overseer Artilect inserted: Correlates with the spectral strength of water, with spiky water absorption lines as seen in clear-atmosphere planets, the weakest features suggesting clouds and hazes— She cut it off.

Now the main show: a self-guided human artifact plunging into a fresh solar system, embodying her: a hairless biped, so noble in reason, so infinite in faculties, heir to all creation—and an animal trapped in a box, really, just lying in a pod and sensing inputs that had flown on wings of electromagnetic song across the light-years.

This world she dubbed, to herself, Windworn. For such it was. A thick atmosphere ripe with oxygen, smothered in good ol’ neutral nitrogen, yet beset with methane, too—clearly a world-air out of chemical balance. Good!—life.

Pearly cloud decks prevented much down-seeing. A pole, scoured by ice and darkness, continents poking mountain snouts above rich, moist, layered air. The Artilect aboard the craft had elected to deploy its one great immersion resource: the balloon.