Down and down and down the lander spiraled, passing over millions of square-miles of sagebrush, cactus and sand. Rugged-looking wasteland, mostly; broken here and there by chains of desolate-looking mountains. Descending through a perfectly clear sky that lacked even birds or a decent breeze to make it interesting. That is, beyond a promise that he could soon walk for a while in air that wasn't filtered, replicated or way-cleaner than air was supposed to be. Maybe even find something to eat that actually once belonged to the plant or animal kingdom.
Plus the business, of course. Not my usual work, for certain, but somebody's gotta do it. Cruickshank had said he could use a break in his routine, and Razeela was always keen to take a little side-trip, but Blunt had decided to go himself. The last time he'd sent Cruickshank on what should have been the most-mundane of ground operations, it had taken him three days to return and a week to detox afterward. The last time Razeela went, there'd been a pile of slaver-cop bodies to dispose of and damned near an interstellar war.
I can't do worse than that today, Blunt told himself. Unless I don't come back at all.
At last, the controller granted him final approach, with several new waves of pointless instructions and rambling warnings as the price. Teeth clenched in a false smile that no one else could see, Blunt let the sentmech's chatter roll over him like just another wave of solar particles or gamma rays deflected by the lander's shields, and kept his eyes moving more or less alertly from one display to another on his piloting console. He was even quick to key on local gravity at the very instant the blinking green light indicated, which automatically nulled-out the lander's slightly stronger artificial version with only a minor resultant lurch to his insides. As the controller-mech pointed out several times during the approach in rather different language, these precautions and others eventually allowed the spaceport’s automatic tractor beams to grab the little craft and bring it in to a landing soft as a supermodel’s bottom, with minimum time and energy expended by the dog-karking Vikkanian Port Authority staff and no fresh dings in the konk-eating Authority’s landing surface.
Within ninety seconds of touchdown, Blunt shut off the lander's main power, most-happily killed the comm, and activated the airlock cycle. Precisely as the controller-mech had commanded before signing off with a rapidly spoken disclaimer of all planetary government responsibility for anything bad which might befall a visitor to Vikkania.
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