The Bonaventure rocked down through the upper reaches of the planets atmosphere. Rene reached out and squeezed Solae’s arm and then strapped himself in. Part of Rene wanted to take the controls himself but that wasn’t a logical part of him, rather it was simply a man’s desire to spare his beloved a task which she didn’t relish. Rene could not, simulation had shown, pilot the ship as well as Solae did and while training might one day make him a competent pilot he just didn’t have the natural flair for it that Solae exhibited. Winds buffeted the hull of the freighter as it sank lower, growing cooler as the flow of air began to scrub the heat of reentry away. The slightly unstable weather systems of the terraformed world shoved the vessel this way and that, each time Solae allowed the ship to shift, countering the trust gently almost in harmony with the weather until they got low enough that the heavier more stable air permitted a smoother flight.
 
The landscape below was breathtaking, great mountains and sheer valleys that dwarfed anything in Rene’s alpine home flashed beneath them. The vegetation had appeared terran from orbit but as they got closer Rene saw a shocking divergence from Terran standard. Pine trees the size of giant sequoia rose up off the mountain sides, needles bending and questing like snakes. Great fields of undulating lichen covered areas of rock too barren to permit the penetration of roots and strange birds with two sets of wings startled from hides among sheer faces of vertical rock.
 
“It all looks so weird,” Rosaria said, voicing the thought they had all been thinking. Rene nodded.

“It is the radiation from the terraforming,” he explained. It had only been a thousand years since the human colonization of this place, not nearly long enough to account for such rapid divergence, but the background radiation had multiplied the chances for mutation in the plant and animal germplasm, speeding the process considerably. 

“Is it dangerous?” the girl asked, looking a little nervous.

“Maybe,” Rene conceded, “but it cant be that bad if Bouradine was willing to bring Bel’sian here.” That wasn’t necessarily true of course. Bouradine might be insane, or suffer from the blindness to danger that enthusiasts sometimes had for things they were passionate about, but nothing Rene had noticed in the careful way Bouradine had executed the ‘kidnapping’ suggested that were true.
 
“We are nearly down,” Solae stated, feathering the thrust controls to arrest the vertical motion of the ship to the speed of a falling leaf. They were out of the mountains now and in a low range of hills that sank towards the coastal plain. The Bonaventure had come down on the far side of a mountain range and slid around the foot of it that stretched towards the coast, concealing them from any possibility of visual detection.  Frequent gorgeous, apparently cut by rainfall and water run off, gave the ground an odd striated appearance. The ruins of several human settlements were within a few miles of the spot Solae had selected as their landing ground, behind a few shallow hills to shield them from direct observation. The sensor suggested that the pods were close to, but not quite at the ruins. The ship set down with a sudden thump like a distant clap of thunder and Solae cut the feeds to the thrusters before reversing them, sucking away the oxygen that would allow the touch down to start a grass fire. The ship settled for a moment on its struts and then was still as Solae cut power to the thrusters. Rene clasped Solae’s shoulder, pride in her accomplishment evident in the simple gesture.
 
“Why are there two pods,” he asked. The question had been bothering him during the decent but he hadn’t wanted to distract the pilot while she made the difficult approach.

“Maybe they plan to leave in the second one?” Rosaria asked. It was a shrewd guess but based on a mistaken assumption.

“No, a pod can’t make orbit again once its down, the propulsion system would require…” Rene trailed off as he saw Rosaria’s eyes begin to glaze over. Alric Quentain had been a naval officer and though he had decided to send his son to court for political reasons, Rene had gotten a reasonable education on naval matters by simple association with his father and his circle of friends and allies.
 
“It just can’t,” he amended, unstrapping himself and standing up preparatory to heading back to the hold to collect equipment.

“Maybe they are meeting someone,” Rosaria tried again. Rene shrugged, that was certainly possible but it was alot of trouble to go through to meet someone in an extremely efficient manner. If they were meeting confederates then there was nothing to stop the second party from bringing a ship, in fact it made more sense to do so as presumably Boradne and Bel’sian didn’t plan to spend the rest of their lives here.
 
“The simplest way to discover this is to go and investigate,” Yarue said, so unexpectedly direct that Rene almost started.
 
“This is very true,” he conceded, eager to encourage the Syshin to directly communicating their thoughts. All in all there were a few too many mysteries beginning to assemble around Bouradine and this world. If they had been human nobles Rene might have suspected a lure for a trap, but it seemed too convoluted and too dependent on secrecy for what he knew of the Kalderi mindset.