Abyss Deep by Ian Douglas Page B

on the contact pad.
    There was a burst of in-­head static, and then I was standing on the surface of Abyssworld.
    My God , I thought. “ Goddamn bleak” doesn’t even begin to cover it . . . .

 
    Chapter Six
    A bit of background came down the link first.
    The formal name of the place is GJ 1214 I, but most ­people call it either Abyssworld or Abyss Deep. The data we were simming had been sent back to Earth just five years ago, but in fact the world has been known since the early twenty-­first century. It was discovered by the MEarth Project, which was searching for extrasolar planets by watching for minute dips in the brightness of some thousands of red dwarfs, an indicator of a planet transiting the star’s face. They used red dwarfs because it was easier to record light fluctuations against a dimmer light source, and because planets circling red dwarfs tended to be tucked in a lot closer to their parent suns, and therefore had orbital periods measured in days as opposed to months or years. In 2009, the planet named—­by the astronomical convention of the day—­GJ 1214b was first detected, and subsequent observations showed that it was a so-­called super-­Earth, with more than six and a half times Earth’s mass and over two and a half times Earth’s diameter.
    The real surprise came when they did the math and determined that the new planet had a density of just one-­third of Earth’s, which meant that the huge world had a quite small rocky core covered by either ice or liquid water.
    It was, in fact, the first true ocean exoplanet discovered; the side of the world eternally locked beneath a small sun just 2 million and some kilometers away was hot , well above the boiling point of water. At first it was assumed that the surface of any world so close to its parent would have to be well above habitable temperatures. The measured equilibrium temperatures, however, turned out to be from dayside cloud decks; the nightside was cold enough that the global ocean was half covered by a permanent ice cap, with the entire night hemisphere locked in ice.
    The extreme differences in temperature between the day and night hemispheres, though, resulted in some absolutely incredible storms.
    If Dubois and I had really been standing on the edge of the Abyss Deep icepack in nothing but our shipboard utilities, we would have been dead in moments. The environment was nothing short of hellish, balanced precariously between frigid ice and scalding steam, with a poisonous pea-­soup-­fog atmosphere and a wind thundering in from the day with tornadic force. The docuinteracive wasn’t recreating all of the possible physical sensations, though. I could see water spray and surface clouds whipping past me, hear the deafening roar of moving air, but the wind didn’t sweep me off my feet. The two of us could stand there, at the very edge of the ice, and take in the view.
    And the view was . . . spectacular.
    Despite both high-­altitude cloud decks and the scud whipping across the surface of water and ice, I could see the star on the knife-­edge horizon across the purple-­red ocean, a swollen, deep ruby dome mottled by vast, ragged sunspots. Clouds—­black, green, and purple—­banked hugely to either side in an emerald sky; lightning played along the horizon. As I watched, fast-­moving clouds filled the momentary crack in the sky that had revealed the star, blotting it out.
    In the opposite direction, the sky grew darker still and heavy with snow. Ice, undulating and raw, ran off into the distance in a barren white desert, punctuated here and there by upthrusts—­slabs, pillars, daggers, and tumbled blocks of ice, some of them hundreds of meters across. A hundred meters away, a low, bright orange dome added a spot of color to the endless white—­the colony’s main dome. Smaller domes and Quonset-­style huts were scattered