Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 12 of 18

The bug-light held her ship on course, but Thren watched the ground rush up and knew the harder problem waited below. The fireflies had guided her home. Now she had to land. Her hull was heavy and alive, packed with colonies that breathed and fed. Drop it on hard rock and she would crush the beetles, the spider, the tubers, everything she had grown. She had no soft field cleared beneath her. The ship sank fast. On her screen the shipyard grew, its green rows and packed dirt. Too hard. She keyed the winged plant one last time and swung the light, buying a slow drift instead of a fall. It gave her minutes, not a landing. Thren ran the rows. She needed something soft and wide enough to catch tons of living hull. Her eyes stopped on a stand of dense fiber plants, their pale cotton growths swollen into thick pale sheets. She had grown them for insulation. Soft. Plush. She grabbed a handful and squeezed. It sprang back. One pad would flatten under the ship's weight. She needed a bed of them, spread wide, and she needed it in minutes. Rope. She pulled thread from the spider's cone habitat, the pale silk gathered in small tight balls. Strong, and she had spooled it for months. She worked fast. She cut sheet after sheet of the cotton fiber and lashed them edge to edge with silk. A wide woven mat took shape across the packed dirt. She staked the corners with root pegs. The bed swelled thick, layer on layer, soft enough to give but too broad to bottom out. But a bed alone would not save the hull. The ship still fell too fast. Impact would tear the mat and split her colonies. She needed to slow the drop itself. She looked up at the winged plant on the nose, its broad bat-shaped leaves stretched wide against the sky. They caught wind. They gathered air. Thren cut cords of silk and rigged a wide canopy of woven fiber above the hull, tied to the frame. A parachute. The broad leaves and the canopy together would drag against the air and bleed off speed. She sent the command up the fungal web. Open now. The canopy bloomed. The winged leaves spread flat. The ship's fall slowed, then slowed again. It came down soft over the cotton bed. The mat gave under the weight, swallowed the hull, and held. No crunch. No split. The colonies breathed on. Thren stood in the rows, hands raw from silk. Her ship rested whole on Sporis, home at last. Then she saw the fireflies in their nose pod, their glow gone dark and cold. The bugs had died on the way down. She had landed, but her light was spent. The next launch would leave her blind again.