The smart aero package fell away on its own braking wings and, soon enough, slammed through the cottony clouds, its brake shell burning away—and into a realm of thick, filmy air. Blithe spirit, bird thou never wert—blazing through alien skies as a buzzing firework. She felt this flight as strumming joy.

The balloon popped into a white teardrop, lighter than this sluggish air and with its heater able to stay buoyant. Many kilometers below, the large lands opened, solemn dark green and cloud-shrouded.

The first clear glimpse below was of big, smooth, whitecapped ocean waves that crashed like armies against the rearing snow-white mountains guarding the continents. I should have called it Rawworld, she thought.

Below the balloon she watched alien vistas unfurl—broad brown rivers, lakes, crags. The vegetation was gray and black, not green. Just as the astrobio people had said: around small red stars, plants needed to harvest all the ruddy glow. So they evolved to take in all the spectrum, with little to fear from the small slice of ultraviolet, since it was weak. She watched the land and air carefully as the balloon skated tens of kilometers above, its cameras panning to take it all in. Odd yellow clouds like writhing snakes. Oval mountains. Colossal waterfalls hanging in air… She did a close-up of the data feed, saw broad birds flapping below—and roads.

She froze the image. Small dots that might be vehicles. Yes—she watched them crawl along. They went to—caves. Entrances to large hills that had slits of windows in their slopes. Rank upon rank of them, orderly, horizontal… all the way to the summit.

Hills upon hills, marching to the distant horizon. Hills of grassland, hills of rumpled brown rectangular stone, hills with chopped clefts sharpening their edges. Plainly, artificial hills.

Hailstones rattled on the balloon. Ground-directed microphones recorded long shrills, the trembling of tin in sheets, snapping steel strands. Harsh, brittle rings. Distant bellows, perhaps from the barrel-chested six-footed ambulating creatures far below in their herds of many, many. Once the hail cleared, the balloon could see things the size of houses burrowing into moist soil, defensive. Yawning herbivore throngs looked up at the balloon, showing great rows of rounded molars. Forests, animals, birds—all moved before the surging winds.

The balloon acoustic microphones caught a huge manta-ray-like thing conning Fwap fwap fwap fwap across the roiling sky, somehow navigating through. She thought, Crazy thing, looks like it escaped from a cartoon on video, with its long lazy strokes and manic grin that she saw was a scissor smile sporting long teeth… on a bird. Mouth yawning open. Nearer. Huge—Then—black.

End of craft report # 3069 a flat statement told her.

An interstellar spacecraft moving at a hundred kilometers per second does not have accidents; accidents have it. The craft turns into a blur of tumbling fragments inside a second.

2.

Rachel let herself drift up from the immersed state—slowly, letting the alien landscapes seep from her mind. It was over. She knew going in that the mission had snapped off, never heard from again. The balloon, its gossamer-thin carbon nanotube and graphene covered in conductive metal skin, the super-lightweight rectenna—all gone. Something had blocked their transmissions—accident, intervention? No one knew. The mission report ended in a blank wall.