Pavel nodded. Look who was talking. Was Ethan freaking out in the claustrophobic confines of the ship? No. He was doing his job. Pavel would do his. But in his mind rang out, like a ceaseless prayer, please please please please.
~ ~ ~
Jess keyed in the order for the forward thrust burns to slow her the moment she hit seven and one half kilometers above Earth’s surface. She scheduled two to maximize efficiency: first she would slow herself to two hundred kilometers per hour, then, as she reached three kilometers above her landing target, she would do another burn, slowing her craft to just under thirty kilometers per hour.
“Then we land vertical using hover boosters,” she whispered to herself. Although that was assuming she had fuel left. The Galleon was rated to land at speeds of up to fifty kilometers per hour on Mars, but landing at such a speed on Earth would be dangerous—the ship weighed more here than on Mars.
“Never mind,” she muttered, her fingers dancing upon the nav-screen, inputting the command sequence.
But something very, very unwelcome showed up as she ordered the second fuel burn. The Galleon returned a message—a grim fact that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times Jess repeated “never mind.”
The Galleon requires additional fuel to follow this command.
Jessamyn’s heart froze.
Additional fuel? She had none.
~ ~ ~
Pavel had never been more glad he’d insisted upon a fast ship. The trio sped toward the coordinates Jess sent after cutting vocal communication. He’d angled the ship slightly north, flying over a peninsula off the Puget Sound and out over the Pacific. Wallace was muttering, either to himself or to a Divine Being; Pavel couldn’t tell. Pavel had tried to hail Jessamyn one last time, but she gave no response.
He didn’t think he could bear finding her on Earth but no longer among the living.
And he began to pray too.
36
AN INFINITY OF MOMENTS
“What do you have?” Jessamyn asked herself as she sat before the nav-screen, staring at its unwelcome message. “Come on, Jaarda. What do you have?”
Not enough fuel for braking, that was for certain. Jess could see the ship decelerating as she descended, but she wasn’t losing speed fast enough. The heat shield was complaining, operating at levels over its intended tolerances—not unexpected considering she’d had to use a steeper angle of descent than was advisable. In six minutes, her first—and perhaps her only—burn order would commence, slowing the Galleon to two hundred kilometers per hour. But she couldn’t land at that speed—she could only crash at that speed.
Trying a few other requests for more modest thrust burns, she quickly found that the best the Galleon could do was to reduce her speed to one hundred eighty kilometers per hour prior to impact. “Splat,” she muttered.
Fear threatened to break through her cool responses, panic hovering just behind. “Phobos and Deimos,” she said—the moons named for Mars’s companions, Fear and Panic. But if she was going down, then by Hades she would go down like Ares—like the warrior-god for whom her world had been named.
“You have to eject,” she whispered.
The Galleon’s landing would not be something she could survive, and that crystallized her only course of action. In a pod, she might stand a chance. The escape pods had parachutes to slow them.
She had only minutes before impact. And now she wished she’d left fuel in one of the pods. Without the fuel, the Galleon, falling at the same rate as a pod, would be in the way of parachute deployment. She didn’t have time to refuel the pod in order to steer it away.
Before her mind even had a chance to catch up, she’d given navigation two final commands. The ship accepted them. Then she ran, careening to the rations room, barely cognizant of the moment’s pause to snatch her sling-pack. Into the airlock—agonizingly slow—down the first set of stairs, then the second, and finally she could see the row of escape pods.
She threw herself at the first in the row, pounding upon its hatch, hurling herself inside, one hand attaching the harnessing restraint over her shoulders while the other pre-authorized launch. She paused, waiting for the slight change in angle that would tell her the Galleon had obeyed her first order. There it was—she launched the pod.
“Launch” was a deceptive term. The pod was given only a slight assist to place it outside the Galleon. Jessamyn was supposed to burn fuel to get farther away. She hovered just beside the great ship, much too close for comfort. And then Mars’s last great raiding ship followed Jessamyn’s second order, pulling off to the side, giving Jess a better chance for her parachute to deploy without smashing, useless, against the ship’s underbelly. A small window allowed Jessamyn to watch the Galleon as it drifted inexorably away from her.
Pressing one hand to the porthole, she uttered her farewell: “Godspeed.”
~ ~ ~
“She’s coming in too fast,” Pavel said, slamming a fist on his navigation panel. Shizer! Why couldn’t it be him at the helm of the Galleon, Jess aboard this craft? He turned his eyes over to Ethan. “Eth? What d’you got?”
“I concur with your assessment,” replied Jessamyn’s brother. “Her speed is not consistent with a safe landing.”
“Bloody hell,” muttered Brian Wallace. “Why does it have to be the lass?”
“I have obtained a visual from a satellite relay,” said Ethan. “I do not know how long I can maintain visualization, however.”
Pavel and Wallace leaned over to gaze at the picture upon Ethan’s screen. Clouds and blue sky and more clouds, and then, there it was: the Red Galleon.
“It looks so small on that wee screen,” said Wallace.
“The Galleon is an M-class vessel,” said Ethan. “The last Mars-class ship upon our planet. It is not small.”
“Aye, lad, aye. I know it’s a grand ship,” replied Wallace.
Pavel squinted to see the ship better. It did look tiny upon the screen. Miniature and vulnerable.
When it burst into flame seconds later, Pavel couldn’t stop his heart pounding. He’d known it was coming. The ship was heat-shielded. The flames weren’t dangerous. At least not yet. But knowing these things it didn’t help his visceral response.
“She is attempting a water-landing,” said Ethan.
Pavel nodded. That would take care of any residual heat, wouldn’t it? He’d flown an M-class, but not at this speed. He loved Jess at that moment more than he’d ever loved anyone.
And then the screen went dark.
“No!” Pavel cried.
“I am attempting to construct a visual animation via instrumentation,” said Ethan. “There. The moving object represents the Galleon.”
She was coming in at over one hundred fifty kilometers per hour.
No, no, no, said Pavel’s mind.
Time seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl as the Galleon continued its descent. To Pavel’s thinking, the animation lent an unreal quality to the event. When finally the ship collided with the ocean, the impact shown upon the screen revealed nothing. Was Jessamyn okay? Pavel checked his heading against the numbers on Ethan’s screen. They would arrive in less than five minutes.
Another speck moved onto the screen at Ethan’s station.
“Is that us?” asked Wallace, tapping the new craft.
“No,” replied Pavel, his voice flat. “That’s one of my aunt’s ships. They got there first.”
~ ~ ~
Lucca replayed the vid she’d just received. Watched as the enemy ship—first flame-engulfed, then cooling—crashed into the Pacific.
“Well done,” she said to the leader of her Seattle squadron, as if he had personally brought the intruding ship to ground. “New orders. I want the crew alive. If they have expired, prep their minds for immediate transfer. I don’t care who you have to kill to do it. I want those consciousnesses re-bodied while there’s time.”
“Yes, Madam Chancellor,” replied the squadron leader. “Understood, Madam Chancellor. Howev
er …”
“Yes? Spit it out, man,” said Lucca.
“It is our opinion that this was not a survivable landing,” he replied.
“Your opinion?” barked Lucca. “Did I ask for your opinion? Find those bodies!”
“We have divers on their way.”
“Contact me the moment you know anything,” said Lucca.
~ ~ ~
Jessamyn watched her altimeter: Ten kilometers. Nine. Eight. At seven point three kilometers above Earth’s surface, she deployed the pod’s drogue chute. Built to withstand the higher speeds which could shred her final descent chutes, the drogue slowed her in a whiplash-inducing handful of seconds. Nauseous and blurry-eyed, she was still falling toward the Pacific Ocean at just under two hundred kilometers per hour.
Her eyes on the altimeter again, she waited. The numbers ticked down more slowly now. That would be the drogue’s work. From seven kilometers to four kilometers, she worked at regulating her breathing, clenching her abdominals. The g’s disoriented her, but she clung to an innate resistance to failure. At three and one-half kilometers, she placed her hand, shaking uncontrollably, over the instrument panel to jettison the drogue and launch the pilot parachutes.
As she descended at bone-rattling speeds, she thought of Pavel, of his idolization of Earth’s first astropilots. This was an old-school landing, all right. She remembered Lobster’s saying, “La plus ça change,” which meant, “The more things change, the more they don’t.” She thought of Ethan, her mother, her father, Mei Lo. Was this what it meant to see your life flash before your eyes? Jessamyn saw not her life, but those she had loved.
“Pavel,” she whispered.
She sped past the three-kilometer mark and deployed her remaining chutes. Despite the crushing pressure, she felt relief at the increased g’s because they informed her more certainly than her instrument panel (shaking unreadably) that she was slowing.
The last thousand meters stretched into a quiet infinity of moments during which Jessamyn repeated the names of those she loved: Ethan, Mom, Dad, Lobster, Crusty, Harpreet, Mei Lo, Pavel.
Pavel. She admitted it at last.
I love him.
Falling in love and falling to Earth melted into a single experience as Jessamyn plunged hurly-burly toward the ocean. The pod smacked water, as unforgiving as a solid surface. Jess lost all sense of up or down as the pod thrashed one direction and then another, tumbling wildly. Was this what Mars rock felt like as it was crushed into gravel for building projects? Consciousness became a thing separate from her, an entity bidding her farewell. This was dying, this was the end. Her stomach felt like she’d taken a blow to the gut. She couldn’t catch her breath; her lungs ached. Spots blurred her vision and then she saw nothing.
37
FOUND SOMETHING UNEXPECTED
Pavel soared just above the water, causing Wallace to utter odd expletives denoting terror.
“It is necessary in order to avoid detection,” explained Ethan to the cursing Scotsman.
“Aye, I’ve no doubt it’s necessary,” replied Wallace. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Flying low to the water was dangerous and demanding work and it matched the feelings inside of Pavel— tumultuous, jagged, desperate.
But when they began to pass bits of the broken ship spread upon the waters, Pavel felt the cruel bite of despair. They pulled up as close as they dared, just to where Ethan could grab visual contact with Lucca’s Red Squadron Forces.
Pavel hovered the ship as the three assessed the situation.
“Only the one enemy ship, then,” said Wallace.
“More are on their way,” replied Ethan.
“Have they seen us yet?” asked Pavel.
“When they’ve seen us, I’m sure we’ll know,” said Wallace.
Ethan indicated a length of material descending from the ship. “A towing device?” he asked.
“No,” said Pavel. “That’s Davy Jones’s ladder. They’re sending divers down to search for—” He broke off, unable to finish.
“We have been detected,” cried Ethan. “We must depart, immediately.”
“We can’t just leave,” said Pavel. “That’s your sister, man!”
“Lad, we’re no good to Jessamyn once your aunt’s boys get ahold of us,” said Wallace.
“They are preparing to fire upon us,” warned Ethan.
Pavel nodded, curt, and turned the ship about, shots peppering the water as they fled. Pavel recreated in reverse the pell-mell journey along the white-flecked waves of sapphire.
“That’s odd,” muttered Wallace. “They’re not pursuing us.”
“My aunt must consider the wreck a priority,” said Pavel, trying to convince himself this was a good thing. “More ships are on the way,” he added, pointing to his screen. “Where are we heading?”
“I have found something unexpected,” said Ethan. “I detect no live signals from Marsian wafer-computers aboard the wreckage. However, I have located a signal some hundred kilometers south-southwest.”
“Marsian?” asked Pavel.
“It is an escape pod,” said Ethan.
“What?” demanded Pavel. “The Galleon had escape pods and you didn’t think to mention this until just now?”
“Steady, now, lad,” murmured Brian Wallace.
“It did not occur to me,” admitted Ethan.
“Well then, give me the shizin’ coordinates already!” shouted Pavel.
~ ~ ~
Lucca hated inaction at times such as this. She’d been at the point of ordering her cruiser several times. She was close. So close. But there was no point leaving her military hub in Mexico City until they recovered the crew for her interrogation. On the other hand, she might like to try interrogating prisoners aboard the cruiser. They could fly circles over the wreckage of the enemy vessel. It was good to wear down prisoner morale with compelling visuals when possible. She smiled as she lost herself in imagining the possibilities.
Her secretary scurried in. “Madam Chancellor,” she panted, “A call from the Pacific. You weren’t answering, so I thought—”
“Yes, yes,” said Lucca. “Put the call through.” She was annoyed at herself for having been pre-occupied. Seconds counted at times like these.
“Madam Chancellor, we are continuing our search for any signs of life aboard the vessel,” said the officer. “However, we show signs of a craft separation.”
“Another ship?” asked the Chancellor.
“An emergency escape vehicle, we believe,” replied the officer. “Large enough for one or at most two people. It crashed several minutes after the larger vessel just off the coast.”
“Send me the coordinates at once!” demanded Lucca.
Then she called for her cruiser.
38
NO MORE
Jessamyn’s tiny craft bobbed, a small cork in a giant ocean. She took a deep breath as her eyes fluttered open and then she clawed at her helmet with one hand, punching at pod air-intake valves with the other. Several hairs were removed by the root in Jessamyn’s eagerness to get her helmet off and breathe freely. She felt like one very large bruise, but she was alive!
Deeply, she inhaled her first breath. Her nose remembered the metal-tang of Earth’s oceans. The moisture, the salt, even the cold of the air struck her as tiny miracles of delight.
She laughed aloud and then groaned, her abdominal muscles cramping into a charley horse. But what did pain matter? Pain meant she was alive. She leaned back to ease her stomach muscles. The pod, already tossing on the waves, bobbed in response to the shifting of her weight. It was a strange sensation, such motion when she knew she’d landed.
“I made it,” she shouted, cackling gleefully. “It was impossible, but I did it! I made it!”
She stood, abruptly curious to observe the ocean outside. Pressing her face against the pod’s porthole window, she saw kilometer after kilometer of water. Water as far as the eye could see. She had a strong notion it wasn’t dr
inkable, but the wonder of it struck her mute. So much, so much. How could there be so much water?
She felt her unnatural heaviness as another wave struck the tiny craft, and she sank back down to rest. Her craft tipped again and she floundered forward into the wall before her. She ought to have adjusted the Galleon’s artificial gravity with more regularity.
The Galleon.
A wave of utter horror passed over her, more incapacitating, more powerful than the ocean swells. Her brave, beautiful ship was no more. The Red Galleon lay in pieces, scattered over the waves, and Jessamyn felt her heart squeeze tight in anguish.
Why could she never save what she cared for most?
This, she thought, was why the captain always went down with her ship. Because it hurt too much to live on when your bonny ship was no more. Tears welled up in her eyes.
She heard Harpreet’s gentle voice in her mind, telling her, “Tears are a gift from the Divine, child.” But these tears did not feel like a gift. They felt like failure.
What did it matter that she’d survived her landing if she’d destroyed her ship? She’d stolen Mars’s last raiding ship and then obliterated it. She could never make up for what she’d done, for what she’d taken from her world. She deserved to die, miserable and alone on the waves.
And die alone, she would. She’d cut communication to Pavel and her brother before choosing to eject. They would never know she’d left the Galleon. And the thought of her brother’s grief wove itself together with the thought that she would never, ever tell Pavel she loved him, and Jessamyn felt as though the weight of her sorrow would surely press down upon her and destroy her, millibars of woe to crush her heart.
She wept and wept, gulping for air as heaving sobs stole her breath away. And when at last she could cry no more, she did not open her eyes to gaze upon the wondrous ocean. She did not see the shadow over the water growing closer and closer. She did not register the ship as it approached at all.
Defying Mars (Saving Mars Series-2) Page 22