“We’ll go in waves,” Antagean said, returning his attention to Garsina. “Two, then two, then two. Each of the starliners will be putting its pair of drop modules into rough atmospheric entry alignment. The computers aboard the modules will do the rest of the work from there. Assuming nobody has a thruster failure, we should have a third of the TGO battalion deployed on the ground within two hours. At which point Captain Loper and the liners will be long gone. Captain Fazal will coordinate with his commander, Major Goodlin, who will be the nominal TGO authority on Uxmal. Overall mission command stays with me, and all civilian and First Family personnel will stay with me too.”
Zoam Kalbi’s eyes looked this way and that. Axabrast’s merely stared forward, as if he were looking at nothing. Some of the other, much younger TGO troops appeared to be doing the same. Garsina wondered: Was it something they’d all learned in training?
“Five minutes,” Captain Loper’s voice said over the drop module speakers.
Helmets came on. Garsina had to fumble with hers a bit—her hair tied back in a very tight bun—before she got it secured, and the neck ring sealed. There was a mild hissing sound, then the regular, gentle whir of the zipsuit’s atmosphere processor. An invigoratingly fresh feeling of icy cold suddenly sprouted out along Garsina’s body as the zipsuit’s internal temperature control system automatically boosted coolant circulation.
“Two minutes,” Loper announced—this time through the speakers in Garsina’s helmet.
The gee chair beneath her felt reassuring, but didn’t stop the tiny little butterflies which began to fill her stomach.
“Thirty seconds—” Then came an audible thunk-clunk as the docking mechanisms which held their drop module in place released. Now it was simply the magnetic lock of the drop module itself that kept the module joined to the starliner.
“DROP!” Loper said loudly.
And for about forty-five additional seconds, nothing seemed to happen. There was no change in the sensation of microgravity. Everyone inside remained perfectly still. But then, Garsina felt the entire module being spun forcefully by its reaction-control thrusters, followed by a seat-of-the-pants thrumming through the entire vehicle, as the deceleration thrusters kicked in. Each thruster was an oversized, finite-fueled version of the reaction-control thrusters used to maneuver the module. As a combined group, the initial set began to take the drop module down from interplanetary speed to relative orbital speed. At first, the gee was negligible. But then Garsina felt herself being pressed into her gee chair.
Looking around the drop module’s main deck, she could see everyone else visibly being pressed into their gee chairs as well. Some of the cargo contained within the netting shifted slightly, but did not move again.
“One gee,” Captain Fazal announced, this time on the drop module’s internal comm circuit, which included all of the suit helmets aboard.
Then, “Two gee.”
“Three.”
By the time Captain Fazal announced four, his voice was wavering, and Garsina thought she could hear some grunting and cursing from some of the other people aboard. She herself could only liken the experience to what she’d dealt with before, aboard the starliner proper. Until Captain Fazal ultimately announced five gee, at which point Garsina was panting and clenching her eyes shut, trying to not think about the immense sensation of being pulled down into her gee chair. Almost as if the universe were going to shove her through the gee chair, and into the deck.
“Six!” Captain Fazal shouted.
“Dear God,” Garsina said through clenched teeth. An intestinally strained groan came from Elvin sitting next to her.
“Are you okay?” she said, putting her hand out to grab Elvin’s through the sealed gloves on their zipsuits. Her arm felt like a solid block of cement.
“I’m…not…as…young…as…last…time…I…did…this.”
“Just a bit more,” Lieutenant Commander Antagean announced, also panting. “The first set of…thrusters, will burn out and then…we’ll use the second set…for a more gentle…ride.”
The spaceframe of the drop module itself was now groaning, and Garsina regretted having the rifle slung across her lap, because it was digging into her thighs quite painfully. In fact, everything about her—the rifle, the bandolier, the zipsuit itself, even the buckle of her harness—felt almost lethally heavy. Her sense of balance began to fail, and suddenly her head was swimming dangerously. She knew that it was quite risky for the human body to endure over five gees. Garsina opened her eyes only to see her view of the drop module tunneling into blackness. She shrieked, and pushed—almost as if constipated—trying to fight losing consciousness.
And then, the weight was gone.
Everyone aboard was gasping.
There was a moment when Garsina could feel something through the gee chair. A kind of buzzing, followed by several noticeable, jarring clanks, and the sensation of heaviness returned. Albeit greatly reduced from before.
“Two-point-five, heading to three,” Captain Fazal said, his voice cracking.
Garsina risked lifting her head up, and looking to her left and her right. All the occupants of the drop module were weakly trying to do the same.
“We won’t do more than three,” Lieutenant Commander Antagean said, “until we’re in atmospheric entry proper. For now, we’ve got at least an hour or more at this deceleration, while the computer lines us up on our precise corridor.”
Antagean labored to hit some more switches on his gee chair.
“Captain Loper, this is Antagean,” he said.
“Good copy, sir,” replied the older civilian officer. “How was it?”
“I wouldn’t do that over again by choice,” Antagean wheezed. “But I think we’re okay in here. Captain?”
Fazal called for a round-robin check with every trooper, and then gave Antagean a thumbs-up sign.
“Yup, we’re nominal,” Antagean said. “How about the other drop modules?”
“There’ve been some problems,” Loper replied.
Garsina’s hand clenched reflexively on Elvin’s.
“How bad?” she asked into her helmet, before anyone else could speak.
“Lady,” Loper’s voice reported, “two of your six drop modules had misfires on the first set of deceleration thrusters. The module flight computers failsafed, taking those two out of their trajectory for atmospheric entry. We’re dropping a starliner back to pick ’em up. But I am afraid that means Major Goodlin and his company commander won’t be joining you on Uxmal. We’ll have to take them with us—and their equipment.”
“Damn,” Lieutenant Commander Antagean said, and slammed a gloved fist onto his knee. He looked up and across at Captain Fazal—who held the lieutenant commander’s gaze for a moment, the two of them simply staring at each other through the transparent surfaces of their face bowls—then dropped his head back into forty-five-degree position, lest the prolonged strain of three gees prove too much for the muscles in his neck.
“Anyone else having issues?” Antagean asked.
“The rest of your drop modules are sending solid metrics,” Loper said. “We’re well past you now. Once we’ve resecured the two which misfired, we’ll begin our own burn for the gravity assist. I know you can’t see it from inside, but Uxmal is getting mighty beautiful out the porthole.”
“I hope Uxmal is worth it,” Antagean said. “Thanks.”
Garsina felt the sudden urge to urinate, and realized she was going to have to use her zipsuit’s waste handling protocol for the very first time. There wasn’t much to it, save for using her fingers to depress a few raised patches on her stomach and thighs, which activated the correct mechanisms riding next to her skin. But then she realized she was sitting in a room filled almost entirely with men, and the last time Garsina had gone to the bathroom with anyone watching she had been all of two years old.
Her expression on her face must have given away her discomfort.
“Problem, lass?” Elvin asked.
>
“Big problem,” she said.
“Anything I can do to help?”
“You can fetch me a privacy curtain,” she muttered.
Elvin’s face—through his helmet—appeared mystified for a moment. Then he roared with a belly laugh that seemed like it would make them all deaf.
“There’s nothing to it, Lady,” he said. “Half the troops in this drop module have already pissed themselves. Hell, I’ve done it twice. Just close your eyes and think of how much better you’ll feel when it’s over.”
There was laughter from some of the other TGO people, and even Lieutenant Commander Antagean.
“I…I don’t know if I can,” Garsina squeaked.
“Hush, lads,” Elvin barked. “A moment, please.”
Garsina’s bladder warred with her brain until finally her bladder won, and there was a curiously euphoric moment of warm release—urine passing out of her body, gratefully, and into the zipsuit’s catch membrane, where it was promptly absorbed and passed into the feeder tube that dumped the urine down to a holding bag on her right calf.
“Better,” Garsina finally announced, and was greeted with hoots and laughter, as all the TGO personnel—who’d endured such things many more times than Garsina—enjoyed the notion of Lady Oswight, of the First Family Oswight, wetting herself.
“That’s enough,” Lieutenant Commander Antagean said. “Captain Fazal, what does losing Major Goodlin do to us?”
“Sir,” the captain replied, “we’ll have to shorten up the command structure once we land. With both Major Goodlin and Captain Chuq derailed from the landing, there’s just you, me, some lieutenants, and the colour sergeants to lead the battalion. Which is now going to be more like a big company.”
“No critical hardware aboard those two modules?”
“I won’t know for sure until we’re down,” Captain Fazal said.
“Okay,” Lieutenant Commander Antagean said. “Let’s just pray nothing goes wrong at entry. Losing two modules on the initial burn didn’t kill anybody.”
“Copy, sir,” Captain Fazal said.
Much of the rest of the time passed in silence. Until the module entered yet another momentary period of microgravity, during which the second set of deceleration thrusters and their pylons were shed. Then it was the drama of entry. Which proved to be far more nerve-wracking than anything Garsina had ever endured while riding a clipper. Especially in Planet Oswight’s thin atmosphere, where the clipper’s engines did the bulk of the work, and there wasn’t a deafening roar of superheated plasma passing below and around the spacecraft. The drop module began to vibrate and shake, with netted cargo shifting noticeably, and people once again dropping down into the padding and protection of their gee chairs. Fazal called off the gee numbers, and when he hit six once more, Garsina was back to groaning through clenched teeth, her eyes clamped shut, as she tried desperately to keep from passing out. The reclined gee chairs were reclined for a reason—positioning the human body at a forty-five-degree, seated angle greatly relieved the work done by the body to keep circulation going. But it was still a fight with an elephant on her chest.
Garsina thought she heard Fazal call out another gee number, but then she experienced a blank moment during which it seemed like absolutely nothing had happened at all.
When she came to—her lungs heaving—the drop module was vibrating even more noticeably than before, but the force of deceleration was much, much less.
“We’re through the worst of it,” Elvin gasped, his hand still clutching hers. “Only part now, is the landing.”
Which did not take long. Gee ramped back up momentarily, and then everyone aboard grunted as the drop module slammed down on its landing bag. The world seemed to tilt and sway, falling over to one side. And then the whole module was rolling, which meant everyone aboard was left dangling practically upside down from their gee chair straps.
“Bloody hell,” Elvin said.
“Won’t the module right itself eventually?” Garsina asked.
“Unless the module came down on something preventing it from righting itself,” Captain Fazal said.
“We’ll know once we’re outside. Blow the number one and number four bulkheads only,” Lieutenant Commander Antagean ordered.
Half the walls of the drop module suddenly ceased to exist, and a bright, brilliant light flooded into the decks, earning gasps from virtually everyone aboard.
Garsina was not surprised to see sunlight. But this sunlight had been filtered through a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. Craning her neck to get a better view—along with everyone else—she gazed out through the empty space between decks, at an upside-down-at-an-angle landscape that seemed to be heaped sand and jutting rocks rising into a gorgeously magnificent blue sky. The kind of blue that seemed to go on forever. Like a perfect blue, stretching off to meet a horizon made entirely of water.
“Lord above all!” Garsina heard Elvin exclaim with reverence.
TGO troops began to carefully unlatch themselves, dropping temporarily to the ceiling, before they crawled to the edge, and carefully began helping each other—often with crates or equipment in tow—down out of the drop module.
Garsina herself waited, at Axabrast’s behest, until at least half the module had been vacated. Then she—and Zoam Kalbi, with TGO assistance—were being carefully let down out of the module, and onto the surface of…well, Garsina had only ever seen pictures of it in school. Like on the Constellar capital. But this time in virgin form.
The drop module had landed on the edge of a shallow, sandy bluff, overlooking a wide, long beach. The sand and gravel were an identical light gray color, but some of the rocks sticking out of the shallow bluff were covered in what appeared to be green moss, which snaked tendrils down the stone until touching the damp sand at the bluff’s bottom. Directly across from the bluff lay the ocean, which rolled lazy combers toward them at regular intervals. The sound of the waves was muffled through Garsina’s helmet. She reached up to begin taking the helmet off, but was stopped when Elvin grabbed her hand.
“Not yet,” he said, and pointed to some of the TGO people who’d set up a little atmospheric sensing station on a tripod. The tubes on top of the sensing station were tasting the atmosphere, and giving the sergeant at the controls a determination regarding Uxmal’s regional atmospheric content.
The sergeant began to nod his head vigorously, then he gave Captain Fazal the thumbs-up.
“Remarkable,” Lieutenant Antagean said over Garsina’s helmet speakers.
Almost at once, every single human began to rapidly uncouple his or her helmet from the collar of his or her zipsuit.
Garsina almost threw her helmet off, and held her breath for a few seconds, letting her skin feel the intense warmth of the sun as its rays fell on her cheeks. The air itself felt humid, but not so humid as to be unpleasant. And there was a breeze blowing somewhat parallel to the shoreline, which seemed to carry the scent of…
Garsina exhaled once, then inhaled deeply, and gasped. The atmosphere had a pungent quality—the scents of plant decomposition, mixed with wet clay, and a very mild brine. But fresh. Fresher than anything Garsina had ever breathed outside of a hydroponics bay. Not machine-conditioned for comfort, nor sanitized against bacteria. It was the air of the world as humans must have first experienced it, when they’d dropped from the arks of the Exodus—onto the five clement planets which had eventually formed the cores of the extant Starstates.
Now, there was a sixth Earth world within the Waywork.
Garsina almost felt like singing, she was so thrilled.
“It’s beyond beautiful,” she said, enthusiastically rubbing a hand along Elvin’s shoulder.
“Wait until you see the bones of the ship, though,” said Wyodreth Antagean. Garsina turned to see where the lieutenant commander’s arm and finger were pointing. Zoam Kalbi—his recording glasses placed back onto his face after the removal of his helmet—intently stared at the huge, arching spires which sprouted out of the b
each perhaps three kilometers distant. They had been the skeleton of a vessel once. Anyone who’d been around a Waywork shipyard—as Garsina had—could tell. What boggled the imagination was the scale of that skeleton. It was bigger by far than anything the Oswight yards had ever produced. The metal curved up, and up, and up, until it almost met itself from both sides, but had crumbled from corrosion. The interior could have contained dozens of starliners, and held many thousands of people—greater than the greatest surface dome to have ever been built, on any terrestrial world anywhere.
“We saw it in the imagery Daffodil sent,” she whispered to no one in particular. “But now that we’re here, I can’t wrap my mind around it. It’s…it’s inconceivable.”
“Sir,” Captain Fazal said, “we’re having trouble reaching Captain Loper.”
“What about the other drop modules?” Wyodreth Antagean asked.
“That’s just it, sir. We’re having trouble reaching them, too.”
Suddenly, Antagean stopped staring up at the astounding picture of the beached, mammoth ship, and charged up the slope of the shallow bluff—past the deflated landing bag of the drop module—and stood at the bluff’s rim. He swiveled on a heel, while he used the blade of his palm to shield his eyes from the very bright Uxmal sun.
“Nothing,” he shouted down at them. “I can’t see another goddamned drop module in any direction!”
Chapter 29
Unity and her three companions braked hard until they were in a roughly matched solar orbit two hundred thousand kilometers distant from the Kuiper object. If the Constellar squadron was still in the vicinity, they weren’t showing up on Unity’s sensors. Of course, the blizzard of small debris which expanded outward from the comet made accurate sensor readings difficult. Indications were that one or more nuclear detonations had recently occurred in the comet’s immediate vicinity. Plus, there was the repeating distress call from the small Constellar craft, which identified itself as the private property of none other than Lady Oswight, of the First Family Oswight. The repeating message—from the ship’s pilot—indicated that something had gone seriously wrong within the past day. The yacht was damaged, suffering failing reactors and life support. Immediate assistance was requested, from anyone able to respond.
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