Descent

She took the lander down alone, because waking anybody else meant deciding what to tell them, and she did not yet have a version of it that did not sound like a woman ninety years into a bad dream.

The atmosphere took her the way atmospheres do, all noise and no opinion. Below the cloud deck the lights resolved into a grid. Streets. A landing field, cleared and marked and swept.

Someone had been expecting her for a long time.