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volunteered to bear extra children after the Daedalus had lost nearly one third of its population to the Luyten Separatists over two years ago. Their fourth child had been born only one year before she had left on this mission. She hadn’t wanted to leave her daughter at so young an age, but Dr. Wagner was just too old and weak to make the journey. And Dr. Wagner’s son had joined the Luyten Colony. That left only her, and so here she was, about to ride along into history with the rest of the crew as they set foot on another world.
    “ Ten seconds to aero-braking, ” Frank’s voice announced through their comm-sets.
    Mac noticed Maria holding Adia’s hand. He reached over to Will and grabbed his arm. “Hold me, Will?” he teased.
    “You’re a pig,” Sara commented, more as a reflex than out of real anger.
    “Stop it, babe. You’re gettin’ me all hot,” Mac sneered.
    “ Five seconds… ” Frank’s voice warned.
    Sara’s defense of Adia was needless, as Adia hadn’t heard Mac’s teasing.
    “ Four… ”
    Adia gripped her armrest even tighter.
    “ Three… ”
    Tony shook his head in dismay at his friend’s antics.
    “ Two… ”
    Everyone braced themselves for the shock of atmospheric interface.
    “ One… ”
                    
    Lynn braced the palm of her right hand against the butt of the control stick, not wanting to bump it during interface.
    Jack clutched the armrests of his seat as he continued to scan the instruments in front of him.
    Frank watched the mission chronometer as it ticked away the last second. “Zero.”
    There was a slight bump. Then a distant rattling, lasting only a second or two. Then it came: a heavy thud that threw them all forward into their harnesses, nearly knocking the wind out of Jack.
    “Interface!” Frank announced, the word forced from his mouth by the sudden jolt.
    Jack glanced at the navigation display. A constant low rumbling followed the thud, reverberating throughout the ship. “How’s our course, Lynn?” Jack asked.
    Lynn examined the navigation display carefully but quickly. “Down the middle,” she reported calmly. “Attitude is good, altitude is holding steady.”
                    
    Adia was now squeezing Maria’s hand so tightly it almost hurt.
    Laura shifted slightly after the initial impact with the planet’s outer atmosphere threw her forward against her chest restraints. She decided to tighten them.
    Sara’s eyes widened. She was having second thoughts.
    Will wasn’t moving or reacting. He just held on tight, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the back of Laura’s helmet.
    Tony watched the flight display from his seat at the front of the compartment. He rolled his eyes and smiled as he heard Mac cry out from the back row.
    “Yee haw!” Mac exclaimed as the intensity of the vibrations rose.
                    
    Frank watched as the external balloot pressure and temperature increased rapidly. His eyes danced across his critical monitoring displays—from balloots, to reactor, to maneuvering, and back again. As the vibrations grew, it became more difficult to read his displays. He noticed the balloots shifting out of alignment again. This time, it stayed shifted long enough for him to be concerned before they settled back into proper alignment. Wanting to be sure that it was an instrumentation problem, he initiated a quick calibration check on the alignment sensors. It took only a few seconds. Unfortunately, the sensors reported to be in perfect calibration.
    Another thud hit the ship without warning, even harder than before. It was so pronounced that Frank glanced at the collision sensors, afraid they might have actually hit something solid as they plowed through the upper atmosphere of Tau Ceti Five.
    “Jesus!” Jack exclaimed. “What the hell was that?” Jack had spent a lot of time in the simulator back in training. The sim operators had rattled their bones on more than one occasion, but it