The new planet filled almost the entire vision of the panoramic viewport, suffusing the waiting room with a nurturing azure glow. A beep announced that the landing pod was ready. “Let’s go,” I said, in what I hope was a solemn voice.

When our party of twenty had all got into the pod and buckled in, I pulled the hatch door shut with a deep thunk, airlocked it, and sat down, buckling in myself. “This is it, lads,” I announced with a voice full of gravity, before pushing the launch button. With a hissing snap, our landing pod floated free from the ship.

As the planet loomed ever larger in our tiny, circular viewports, I scanned the faces if my landing crew. There were traces of apprehension, but there was also a palpable excitement evident in their expressions. Although I strove to keep my face a mask of detachment, I was also burning with the same sense of anticipation inside, and knew that some of it seeped into my body language. Finally, it was happening. Our people would soon have a new homeworld.

I was shaken out of my thoughts by the familiar crackling of the radio. “Mothership Aeneas to Johnston, you have entered the atmosphere, standby to extend landing claws.” I acknowledged the transmission. After surveying the planet from orbit, the Captain had decided the general location to set up our initial colony, an alluvial plateau on the equator he dubbed ‘New Latium’. Our job was to scout the terrain from up close, gather data not available from the spectro-chemical survey, and determine the exact location for setting up the initial colony.

“Mothership Aeneas to Johnston, you seem to be entering a freak thunderstorm, try to-” the radio transmission from the ship was lost in a hiss of static. Just then the landing pod trembled violently. It was pitch-black outside the viewport, only occasionally illuminated by a brief flash of lightning, revealing a nightmarish hellscape of billowing thunderclouds.

Fear clouded the faces of my crew. I started to reassure them with my best gruffly-confident voice, but the pod shuddered again, interrupting me before I even began. A persistently winking red screen told me that landing was imminent, so I kicked in the pod’s thrusters, extended the pod’s landing claws, and prayed hard.

For a tense moment, I was afraid that I had initiated the landing sequence too late—I had practiced countless times on simulation, but I had never done it in real life, with the lives of twenty men and women depending on me. But my fears were unfounded, and we landed safely, if a little bumpily.

I unsealed the hatch of the pod and opened it. Fierce winds buffeted my face, and the icy raindrops pelted on me unrelentingly. The environmental suit that the crew and I wore shielded us from the excesses of such weather, but even through the suit, the cold made itself felt.

I stepped out of the pod onto the soil of the planet for the first time. Through the rain, the ground felt solid enough, if a little squelchy. I signaled the rest of my crew to exit the pod. Their immediate dismay was almost palpable. All around us, the thunderstorm had reduced visibility to a few, grey metres. New Latium was supposed to be one of the more temperate parts of the planet. Was this what the weather was like on this planet? I suppressed my instinctive misgiving and forcibly recalled my pre-landing briefings. The meteorological report said that New Latium was prone to seasonal rainstorms. It was temporary, then.

It certainly didn’t seem so. The rain beat down like so much artillery —I shuddered at the thought— and the wind howled at us through our environmental suits. Occasionally, lightning cut briefly through the grey, accompanied by the deep growl of thunder.

I led my crew doggedly up an incline, hopefully to a high ground where we could get a better idea of where we are. We trudged through the cold mud and endless deluge for what seemed like forever. Finally, the rainstorm showed signs of slowing down. Visibility improved, but slowly, as the rain petered out.

It seemed that we had landed near the top of a gently sloping hill. As we trooped to a point where the incline leveled out, the first rays of the alien sun broke through the cloud cover. New Latium lay beneath us, luminescent with promise after the rain. I smiled proudly. We had made it, at last.




Note: This is quite a recent school essay I wrote about, I'd say, last November or so. It was actually off-topic (it was 'The Discovery'), and was over the word count, but I liked it all the same. It's part of a story that I've been spinning on-and-off in my head for a while.