Alder's World Part One: Mass 17

by Joel Stottlemire

  Sunrise came a few minutes later. The edge of the sun was hard but the sky around it glittered with water in the halo of atmosphere. As the sunlit surface came into view, Alder got a good look at it for the first time. It was mostly flat and grey, black, the color of raw basalt. There were no high mountains but in some places the hills seems to swirl into circles and crescents as if the disturbance caused by something moving underwater had somehow been frozen in place.

  For long minutes they rode with only the chatter from crewmembers reporting statuses as the planet rolled under them. “Twelve minutes.” Gibson called and a rumble moved through the ship. High density ion engines were little use against the gravity of the planet but they were being used to control the descent.

  “It is beautiful.” Alder said as the rumble faded. His mind had filled suddenly with the thought of Elana and their crewmates strapped into steel tubes deep in the ship, unable to see what was happening. “You should see it El.” The microphone picked up his voice and echoed it around the deserted areas of the ship. He knew it would find its way deep into the inner chambers where Elana and the others were pinned in the padding and the fear. “The surface cooled so quickly, you can see ripples from the Coriolis effect in the underlying magma. Uh, I mean, the hills seem to spiral in on each other in some places. Not mountains, just long ridges of hills that form spiral patterns. It’s almost like the surface was scarified on purpose.” The ship was shuddering slightly as the first fringes of plasma wrapped their fingers around the outer ring.

  Wei was reading off numbers and Gibson sat tensely at her control panel. Alder glanced at Mbaka who smiled and nodded for him to go on.

  “We’re low enough now that I can see the atmosphere on the horizon. It’s blue. I know you miss the sky El, like the skyline outside of Myfor Proper. We’re going to have a sky again. It will be nice. I know you’ve missed it.” He felt awkward but Mbaka was still gesturing for him to go on and Wei was smiling in an affirming way.

  “We’re only about a hundred and twenty kilometers up now. The plasma is something to see. We’re not fully in the ball yet but it looks like a really hot torch is running all along the main ring. I can still see the bridge but I’m glad I’m not down there…” He struggled, lost for words. “When we come out of the plasma storm it will be twilight. New stars in a new sky. I remember seeing you by starlight but it’s been a while.” He stammered again. “You’re pretty in moonlight.” He continued talking while the minutes spun by.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Hold on El,” Alder instructed. “The ship has one last chance to make corrections here in about twenty seconds. If it doesn’t like our posture, it will adjust us one last time before we hit maximum stress.” He didn’t mention that it was the first time that there was a real chance that the ship might start tumbling. “We should be coming up on it,” he glanced at Wei who nodded, “right about now.”

  Alder’s chair lurched down and away from him, dragging him down by the straps. The room around him seemed to shift in shape, almost as if all four sides were bending down away from him.

  “Autocorrection initiated.” Gibson’s voice rode calmly over the storm. “Yaw increasing. Pitch near redline.”

  The steadily rising rumble had become a horrible howl. The external view was almost blotted out by the plasma boiling over the front edge of the ring and lashing like whips of fire against the shields.

  “Twenty seconds to end of autocorrection.” Gibson’s voice was choppy with the bouncing of the ship.

  Alder wanted to speak to Elana, but found himself instead pulling at the shoulder straps that were digging into his flesh. Mbaka was saying something and laughing but Alder couldn’t hear him over the roar.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Alder scowled at Mbaka. Reacting positively to stress was one thing but Mbaka seemed a little too happy. Alder felt prepared for the risk, but he was not enjoying having his vision go red from all the blood rushing to his head and his straps were beating his shoulders unforgivingly.

  “Coming out of auto correct now.” The howl shrank back to a roar. The ship was still shaking and buffeting from re-entry but it was upright, still under the computer’s control. “We’re in the pipe. Approach is nominal to profile.” Gibson’s voice was calm showing no sign of the strain they were all under.

  “Number 5 shield now at 125% of tolerance.” Wei added. “Power output still at 100%.”

  Alder forced a deep breath. He couldn’t tell if the room was heating from the plasma fire burning a few meters away or if it was just the adrenaline in his system. “Okay. Okay. We’re in the worst of it now Elana.” He reported over the cacophony of radio chatter and the groaning of the ship. “But we’re still upright. If we could see outside, the hills would be close enough to see light and shadow sides. We’re running towards twilight so we’d have a nice bright view in front of us.” Something in the ceiling above Alder banged and crashed suddenly into something else. He glanced up nervously. “We’re getting close to maximum stress, the point when our odds improve. Every second that we stay in profile past that moment is one less second we have to survive.”

  Alder’s stomach was turning. The motion was getting steadily more dramatic. All of the ship’s engines were now running well past maximum trying to hold them upright against the buffeting wind. “Hold on El. We’re almost there.”

  “Eight minutes.” Gibson called as if on cue.

  “Hey Alder.” Mbaka called. “We just passed eight minutes.”

  “Yes. Maximum stress.”

  “You said the computers would fail at eight minutes.”

  “So?”

  “So, A lot us have been saying for years that we wanted to be around when you got one wrong.”

  “What?”

  “My computer is still up. You’re off by at least fifteen seconds. Ooop. Sixteen.”

  Alders sputtered. “When we land, I’m letting Ronald Midbits into your bunk.” He shouted over the roar.

  “Now you’re getting it.” Mbaka laughed, as he bounced up and down in the chaos. “You’re doing great! Wrong by twenty seconds.”

  “We are passed maximum stress. Seven plus minutes to impact.” Gibson reported.

  “All shields over 125%” Wei chimed in. “Number five at 145%. No power drops.”

  “All right El.” Alder started talking again, knowing full well the entire crew had heard Mbaka. “It will start quieting down now. We’re moving into much thicker air but our speed relative to the surface is dropping. We should see the shields start to cool off. It will give them more strength at impact. We’re approaching mid-afternoon local time. I can’t see out yet, but I should get a glimpse before the end.”

  Alder talked about the numbers, the percent of water in the atmosphere, and anything else he could think of as the roar retreated back to loud rumbling. The plasma boil faded away over the next few minutes, replaced by whistling wind. They were almost at the light/dark line of morning when glimpses of the sky became visible over the scorched main ring. “I can see the stars El. We’re almost home.”

  “Last adjustment. Two minutes to impact.”

  The view outside swung to the left as the ship began a flat turn on its axis. The number five shield, having taken the brunt of the burn, was being moved to the rear of the ship where the impact would be felt least. While the shields were expected to fail during slide out, they had to survive at least a few seconds after impact. Number five was expected to be hottest after entry and therefore first to fail.

  The turn was slow and dizzying. They weren’t flying in any real sense; just falling in a controlled manner. The leisurely spin gave the illusion that they were still somehow in charge of their fate.

  The dawn landscape came into view speeding away behind them at a thirty degree angle. It was close now; so close that it flitted out of sight almost before Alder’s eyes could process what he was seeing. He tried to force his vision to match the flicker, to give him some idea of the surface but it
was too close and they were moving too fast.

  “Altitude 400 meters. 900 kilometers per hours. Still in profile.”

  “This is it El. This is…”

  “I’ve lost my reading. Impact. Impact. Impact.”

  The landscape spun under Alder’s eyes and his jaw worked open and shut. “Elana, I want you to know how much…”

  Blackness. Blackness and a tiny light ringed in red. Alder focused on the light. He didn’t know where he was; somewhere dark. The light grew as he turned his attention to it. It was a torus now, white on the inside and red on the outside. It seemed bigger. Like it was bigger but he wasn’t understanding what he was seeing. He thought about his birds. Flights of birds in order. y=2x+1 birds. A line. Y=2x^2+1 a parabola of birds.

  The torus unfolded as he ran through the mathematical models in his mind. He was looking at Mbaka. Mbaka’s head was held upright by the neck brace he was wearing but his hands were hanging at his sides. Well, not hanging, bouncing sort of. Everything was bouncing. He swung his head around. Wei was there. The side of his face was covered in blood and he was digging at something in his cheek. Gibson was in front of him. He couldn’t tell if she was moving.

  The lights and computer screens were all dark. Outside, he could see a red line of molten rock stretching out behind them. They were in slide out. The shields were holding and their pressure against the rocks below was heating and melting them. He couldn’t guess their speed, 200 kmph maybe and slowing quickly. They were cutting a trough the width of the ship maybe ten meters deep into the surface. Molten rock was flying out away from them in all directions. At the pressures they were creating, they had spent the first few seconds sliding on a layer of plasma made from vaporized stone.

  He became aware of the noise, enormous but dry and hard after the sounds of descent. Some part of the ship was actually touching rock and screaming metallically as it sheared away. Sparks flew from somewhere to his left arching high into the air behind them. ’Three shield is failing.’ He managed to process.

  There was a lurch and a crunch. A hundred meter piece of the Engineering module tore away and pinwheeled behind them down the trough. The sound changed to all metal against stone. At least three of the shields and the crew maintaining them had broken away with the section of Engineering that was gone. More pieces of Engineering sheared off in balls of fire. The ship was moving slower now and not digging so deep. As their momentum bled away, they were rising slowly from the end of the long channel they had cut.

  It stopped. It all stopped. There was the clattering of something under Alder’s feet. Then silence. The monitors were dead. “To the Stars Triumphant” had died. The lights, except a few battery powered backups were dead. Several large pieces of the ship were burning in the distance behind them, but they were alive, upright on the ground. Somewhere in the dark of the ship behind them someone cheered, a single voice at first, but it rose up, muted through the bulkheads, hundreds of voices, crying and clapping.

  There was a groan and one last sway as the last of the shields failed dropping what was left of Engineering flat against the earth.

  “What happened?” Mbaka asked groggily.

  “I let Ronald have his way with your face.” Alder answered, but his efforts at humor were sideline by a sudden, terrible shaking in his hands. He clasped them together tightly. “That and we survived.” His jaw was quivering like his hands. He wanted to unfasten himself but was shaking too badly to grip his harness.

  “It’s all dead.” Wei said. He was tapping at his monitor with his left hand while holding his face with his right. “We’ll have to see how much of it we’ve lost for good.”

  Alder vomited. It slid down his chin and into his clothes. He couldn’t lean forward because of the harness. Again and again he heaved as his hands shook.

  “Hold on Alder.” Mbaka said, more coherently. “You’re okay. Lupe.” He called to Gibson who still hadn’t stirred. “You okay?” Mbaka unfastened his straps and began working himself free from the harness. “I need you to answer me Guadalupe.” She didn’t respond.

  “Hold on Alder. I’ll come back for you.” Mbaka said, rising gingerly from his chair. Wei was up too, moving unsteadily towards Gibson.

  Someone was running in the hallways behind them, shrieking with joy. Alder gasped and fought to steady his breathing. “Is she all right?” He managed to ask finally.

  Alder couldn’t see what Mbaka and Wei saw but they shook their heads no in response to his question.

  As they worked on the unresponsive Wei, and Alder sat holding his hands together, waiting for the shaking to subside, a brilliant dot of light appeared behind them. It was white hot and lit the room with a contrast maddening glare. As Alder watched, prisms spread along the horizon and a rainbow rose above it. It was beautiful and hypnotic. It shown down the long trough they had cut in the earth, erasing the fading glow of the super-heated rock and painting the hull of the Duster pale white.

  “What is that?” Mbaka asked, squinting over his shoulder at the light.

  “That,” Alder panted, “is sunrise.”

  End Part One