by Marko Kloos
“Nothing,” I shout into the cockpit, where Halley is strapping herself into the right-hand seat. “Network’s down. I can’t see shit.”
The lights in the hangar come on again suddenly. I hear the soft whirring of the refueling module as it resumes its task. I look at my admin deck’s screen, and see that the local network is once again coming to life.
“What’d you do?” Halley shouts.
“Not a damn thing. It came back on all by itself.”
“Can you get into the refueling subsystem?”
“Hang on, I’m already on it,” I reply.
I go back down the menu tree from memory to get to the hangar bay systems. The access is mercifully quick, since I am directly at the destination node without having to go through a quarter mile of damaged neural pathways. The active menu still says READY FIVE LAUNCH PREP, and the progress bar underneath is only three quarters complete.
“System says five more minutes,” I tell Halley.
“Cut it short,” she says. “Power goes out again before we’re clamped and ready to drop, and we’re fucked.”
“I’ll try.”
Thankfully, the fuel systems are labeled very predictably, presumably simple enough for enlisted personnel to figure out. I delete the fueling process from the task queue, and tell the system to shift the Wasp to READY/LAUNCH status. A moment later, the noise from the refueler stops, and the fuel hose retracts away from the ship. Then a warning klaxon blares, and there’s a low rumbling sound overhead as the docking clamps roll into position above the Wasp.
“Outstanding,” Halley says, relief in her voice. “Now get your ass into the chair over here, and strap in.”
I feel out of place in the left seat of a drop ship. The automatic clamp lowers itself onto the Wasp, locks onto the hardpoints, and then lifts the ship off its landing skids. Next to me, Halley is powering up avionics and going through on-screen checklists at a rapid, focused pace, her fingers doing a quick dance on the various screens. I strap myself in with shaky hands and watch as the docking clamp moves the drop ship across the hangar bay at infuriatingly slow speed.
“Plug in your helmet,” Halley says. “If we get a hull breach out there, you’ll want to be hooked up to the oxygen feed.”
I slip the flight helmet over my head and attach the hose coming from the mask to its receptacle on the side of the cockpit wall. The helmet is made for someone with a smaller head than mine, and the helmet liner squeezes my head uncomfortably. I connect the voice circuit and toggle the intercom channel.
“If there’s a Chinese destroyer out there, this will be a short flight,” I say.
“If there’s a Chinese destroyer out there, they would have boarded us already, or blown us into tiny little bits,” Halley answers without taking her gaze off her screens. “Besides, there’s precisely fuck-all we can do about that, unless you want to wait for the rescue ship on this busted tub.”
“No, thank you,” I say. “I’m not a huge fan of suffocation.”
The lateral movement of the docking clamp stops, and then the ship moves down into the drop hatch. We’re just a few moments from getting off this ship, and I hold my breath and pray to the entire Terran pantheon of deities for the ship’s power to stay on until we release from the docking clamp.
“Turning One,” Halley says as she reaches overhead and flips a succession of switches. Behind us, one of the drop ship’s engines comes to life with a loud and steady whine. When the engine has spooled up to Halley’s satisfaction, she moves her hand to a different bank of switches.
“Turning Two.”
The noise outside doubles as the second engine starts up. I feel a low vibration going through the hull.
“I feel like I’m taking my parents’ hydrocar for a joyride without permission,” Halley says. “Never had one of these to myself before.”
“Did we fill up enough to get us down?”
She checks a display with a few taps of her gloved finger, and shrugs.
“We’re half full. Enough to get us to the surface, and then some.”
Underneath us, the floor drops. The drop hatch is a huge airlock in the bottom of the hull. Normally, the ship would be oriented with its belly facing the surface of the planet below, but all I can see outside is the nothingness of space. Despite Halley’s assessment, I imagine a Chinese cruiser right next to the Versailles, point defense armament standing by to shred any escapees that manage to get clear of the hull.
The drop hatch finishes its downward-and-outward travel arc, leaving nothing between us and space but ten feet of drop through a hole in the ship’s armor plating.
“Here goes,” Halley says. “Dropping in three. Two. One. Drop.”
She thumbs a button on her throttle lever, and the Wasp drops out of the belly of the ship, sixty tons of spacecraft in freefall. I feel my stomach lurching upward sharply. Then we are clear of the hull, and the artificial gravity field of the Versailles, and the feeling of falling from a great height is replaced by a sudden weightlessness that pulls me out of my seat and against the straps of my harness. The floating feeling doesn’t last long. Halley guns the engines and whips the Wasp into a steep turn as soon as we’re out of the Versailles’ gravity field. She turns left, then right, and the countermeasures dispensers underneath the engine pods kick out a burst of decoy cartridges.
“I think we’re good,” she announces after a few moments of hard turns, and reverts to a less stomach-churning flight profile. She brings the Wasp around to get the Versailles into view.
“Holy fuck,” I say, and Halley merely exhales sharply into her helmet mike.
The Versailles looks like someone blasted her flank with a giant shotgun. Gray smoke is pouring from hundreds of holes in her outer hull. The planet below looks much closer than it should be for a proper orbit, and the battered frigate is drifting without propulsion, pointing nose-first at the green and brown planet surface below.
“I hope we were the last ones on there,” Halley says. “That thing’s going to come down in a million glowing pieces.”
We make a slow pass along the hull. The smooth and streamlined cigar shape of the ship is peppered with holes from bow to stern. Each hole is no bigger than a foot or two across.
“That wasn’t done by anti-ship ordnance,” Halley says. “What the hell kind of weapon makes holes like that?”
“Whatever it was, it did the job,” I reply. “I bet there’s not an airtight compartment left on this side of the hull.”
The Versailles is trailing debris on her aimless trajectory. There are bits of armor plating, frozen bubbles of leaked fluids, and random bits of junk from the compartments that were vented into space. As we make our way along the hull, Halley has to bob and weave to avoid hitting larger chunks of debris head-on. We see a few bodies, too—shipmates, asphyxiated and frozen in an instant, drifting away from the ship in head-over-heel tumbles. There are body parts as well—arms, legs, and heads, torn from the bodies of their owners either by the impact of whatever tore through the hull, or by the shock of the sudden decompression that ejected everything in the compartment into space in the fraction of a second. I recall that the berthing spaces for the enlisted Engineering crew are close to the outer starboard hull, and I wonder whether Halley and I would be floating out there as well if I had left the NNC on time at the end of my watch. Of all the possible ways to die, gasping for air in hard vacuum while being shock-frosted is one of the least pleasant ones I can imagine.
“Let’s see who else made it off this wreck,” Halley says. She toggles the comm channel over to the Navy emergency frequency.
“NACS Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” she says into her helmet mike. “Anyone listening in on shipboard or escape pod comms, please acknowledge.”
There’s only static in response. Halley repeats the broadcast twice, but there’s no reply, not even the click of a toggled “send” button.
“I’m going to get us clear of this hull, and closer to the
planet,” she says, and pulls the Wasp into a roll. I look at the Versailles through the side window of the cockpit until the battered frigate disappears from view.
“Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” Halley transmits again when we are clear of the Versailles’ bulk. “Anyone copy down there?”
This time, there’s a garbled response on the emergency channel. Halley looks at me and exhales with emphasis.
“Thank goodness. I was starting to think we’re all alone out here,” she says to me.
“Versailles personnel, stand by. I’m going into a lower orbit to improve reception. Next transmission in five.”
We coast away from the Versailles, and toward the planet below. Under other circumstances, the ride would be a spectacular sight-seeing tour. There’s nothing between us and the blue-green planet but a few avionics consoles and an inch of armored glass. The planet spread out in front of us is a pristine world of clean oceans, snow-capped mountain ranges, and wild and empty continents. The NAC colony is the only human presence on Willoughby, twelve hundred colonists on a planet two-thirds the size of Terra.
As we dip into a lower orbit, Halley rolls the ship around its dorsal axis to give us a better view of the outside. She has a very light hand on the controls, and the Wasp follows her input like a powerful, well-trained animal. I remember how difficult it was for me to simply get the nose of the simulated drop ship pointing the right way in Basic, and Halley says that the real thing is about five times more difficult to fly than the simulator.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” she says to me, and I nod in response.
“Look at all that land down there, and it’s all unsettled,” Halley says. “We could set this ship down in the middle of one of those continents, and live on the supplies in the back for years. You’d get your wish early, about that patch of land on a colony planet.”
I laugh in response, but the thought of being marooned on a far-off world with Halley is almost indecently exciting for a moment.
“The Navy would come looking for us,” I say. “They’d want their drop ship back, and I doubt they’d be willing to forgive us the rest of our contract.”
“The hell they would. The Versailles is going to break up in atmo. Far as the Navy would know, we burned up in that hull, and the second drop ship never made it out of the flight deck.”
For a moment, I can’t tell whether she’s kidding, and the possibility hangs in the air between us almost like a physical thing. Then there’s another garbled transmission on the emergency channel, and the ear-grating sound of the mutilated broadcast serves to snap us both back into reality.
“I guess we shouldn’t have advertised that we’re up here with a working Wasp,” she says. “Makes it kind of hard to skip town unnoticed.”
“Stinger Six-Two, do you read, over?”
The voice on the emergency channel is suddenly perfectly clear, as if the broadcast is coming from our own cargo hold.
“Affirmative,” Halley replies. “Stinger Six-Two copies five by five. Broadcasting party, please identify.”
“Stinger Six-Two, this is the XO. What’s your status and location?”
“Stinger Six-Two is in orbit. We’re clear of the ship, and heading for the deck, sir.”
“Six-Two, do you have any ordnance loaded?”
Halley exchanges a glance with me.
“Uh, that’s a negative, sir. This is the spare drop ship. We just have gas in the tank, but the racks are bare.”
“Copy that, Six-Two. That’s too bad.”
Halley taps a few buttons on the tactical console before toggling back a reply.
“Sir, my TacLink node shows your pod four hundred klicks north of my position. I can be on top of you in twenty minutes.”
“Sooner would be better. Six-Two, do you have any weapons on board at all?”
“That’s affirmative, sir. We have a full weapons locker with standard tactical loadout.”
“Outstanding,” the XO says, and the relief in his voice is unsettling. “Expedite your descent as much as safely possible. Don’t break your ship, because you’re the only hardware we have in the system right now.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Halley asks me. “What about the other drop ship? That one’s fully armed with air-to-ground ordnance.”
I can only shrug in response.
“Sir, didn’t Six-One make it down to the surface with you?”
“If they did, they’re not talking to us. You can try to raise them on the way down. Now hurry up, we need you down here yesterday.”
“Affirmative, sir. We’re on our way.”
Halley cuts the comms and starts tapping buttons on her tactical console again.
“Flight profile for descent says we’ll be down on the deck in twenty-two minutes,” she says. “I’ll be goosing it all the way, so make sure you’re buckled in tight. It’s gonna be a bit bumpy.”
“What the hell is going on down there? He sounded like he’s scared shitless. You think the SRA’s trying to take the place?”
“I have no idea,” Halley replies as she adjusts our trajectory and points the nose of the Wasp below the far-off horizon.
“I guess we’ll find out in twenty minutes,” she says. “Now hold on, and shut up, will you?”
Chapter 20
If the combat landings in the TA were a high-speed descent in an express elevator, the ride into Willoughby’s atmosphere from high orbit is like a rocket-assisted free fall down the elevator shaft. As we enter the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere, Halley pulls up the nose to expose the ceramic belly armor of the Wasp to the friction heat generated by our high-speed entry. For a good ten minutes, I can’t see anything on the other side of the cockpit window but superheated gases streaming past in bright flares. Halley makes control inputs on her stick and throttle to keep the ship on the right angle and trajectory, but the results of her corrections are too subtle for be to feel. To me, it feels like we’re just falling into the atmosphere belly-first, and only Halley’s calm and focused demeanor keeps me from full-blown panic. When the fireworks outside the cockpit finally subside, the blackness of space has given way to the bright, pale blue of a clear sky.
“Altitude one hundred thousand,” Halley announces, more to herself than for my benefit.
“Ever done this all by yourself?” I ask.
“Not without Lieutenant Rickman riding shotgun in the left seat. Relax, Andrew. I know what I’m doing here.”
“Never doubted it,” I say, and claw the molded armrests of my seat as she increases thrust and pulls the Wasp into a banking turn.
“They got some shitty weather down there,” Halley says when we pass through twenty thousand feet. “All I see is storms. I thought this place was terraformed.”
I look outside at the top of the cloud cover, a roiling mass of gray and black that extends from one end of the horizon to the other.
“Just because it’s terraformed doesn’t mean it’s like Earth in springtime,” I say, remembering Sergeant Fallon’s words back at the Medical Center.
“Well, if this is what it looks like after they had the atmo exchangers running for a decade, I don’t want to know what it looked like when the survey ship got here. Hang on, this is going to be a bit bumpy.”
Halley has a gift for understatement. As we enter the cloud cover above Willoughby’s surface, the ship gets whipped around like a plastic bag on a wind-swept sidewalk. We’re in the clouds just a few moments before rain starts hammering the thick glass of the cockpit, fat drops that sound like heavy-caliber small arms fire hitting the window panels. I shoot Halley a worried glance, but she’s focused on her instruments and flight controls. There’s nothing I can do to help get us down on the ground in one piece, so I do my best to merge with the thin padding on my armored seat.
“This weather is fucked up,” Halley says after a while. “We’re at five thousand, and it’s twenty-five degrees celsius out there. It’s like fucking Florida in late spring
.”
“Too warm?”
“For this rock? Hell, yes. Weather briefing yesterday said they’re just above freezing this time of year.”
We finally break out of the cloud cover over muddy brown terrain that looks entirely too close for comfort. Halley levels out the ship and banks slightly to the right to get a good look at the planet surface below.
“Wow, that mess went almost all the way down,” she says. “We’re fifteen hundred feet above the deck.”
“Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” Halley broadcasts. “I’m a hundred and ten klicks out from your position. ETA five minutes. Can you find me a nice flat spot and pop some IR smokers?”
“Copy, Six-Two,” a voice replies on the emergency channel. “Uh, negative on the smokers. We have hostiles in the neighborhood. Just home in on the pod and set down as close as you can. And have that ramp down, ‘cause we need to evac in a hurry.”
“Six-Two, copy,” Halley replies, and then gives me a bewildered look.
“Hostiles? What the hell is he talking about? My threat board is blank.”
“Native wildlife?” I offer, and Halley shakes her head.
“Ain’t nothing living down there except what came in on the colony ship, except for some algae.”
“Chinese or Russians? Think they have troops on the ground?”
“I don’t fucking know, Andrew,” Halley replies. “All I know is that I wish we actually had some ordnance on those pylons, ‘cause if we bump into someone who needs shooting, all we can do is flip ‘em the bird.”
The escape pod looks like a projectile from a giant cannon. It’s lying on its side on a gently sloping hillside, lines from the retardation parachute draped all over it like bright orange vines. Halley makes a low pass over the site, and I can see several people down by the pod, waving at us with urgent gestures.
“Well, that looks flat enough,” she says. “Hang on, I’m putting down in that spot over there.”