by TJ Ryan
CHAPTER SIX
The stars swirled around them as God’s Hammer fell to Earth.
Amazing how accurate the term “drop ship” is, Tara thought to herself. After launching out of the docking port at Overwatch, Sergeant Enverly had piloted them in a curved trajectory around the circumference of the moon until they were in position. Then they shot straight for the planet below, dropping like a stone, letting gravity and thrusters set at half power rocket them toward their destination.
On board the ship, she was strapped into a seat on the right side of the command section, next to Tyrese, behind where Enverly and Crestin had their positions at the controls. Every so often they would say something to each other about what controls to push or what the external readings said. Other than that, there was no sound. The vacuum of space sucked everything away outside, and inside the drop ship there was only their breathing, and the unnaturally loud sound of Tara’s heart in her ears.
There was no sense of acceleration because of the ships dampening and auto-adjustment systems. Although, looking out the viewport a few times told Tara exactly how fast they were going.
Earth rushed up to meet them, surrounded by roiling masses of black clouds made up of fine particulate matter. Soon enough, the viewport was filled with black. She turned away, staring down at her feet in their envirosuit boots, concentrating on taking in slow breaths of the recycled oxygen-air mix coming through her helmet’s vent tube. Protocol, as she learned, was to board ship wearing the suits. No sense scrambling to put one on in the case of an emergency landing.
Which she took to mean crash, and she was pretty sure that’s exactly what Danvers had meant with that smug little expression he wore while explaining the reason for wearing the skin-tight suits for the whole trip. It was not because he wanted to stare at her ass, in other words. It was for their own safety.
In case they crashed. Like that was going to make her feel any better.
Tyrese’s hand settled on her knee. His voice came through the speaker at her left ear. “First time doing something like this, right?”
She nodded, and then remembered that he couldn’t see her nod her head from within the confines of her helmet. Sliding her jaw left activated her transmitter. “Yes, my first time falling into a planet. The Academy had us do a simulated drop ship maneuver for classes, but I was told it was just part of the curriculum. No one uses drop ships anymore.”
“Desperate times,” he said to her, shrugging his shoulder. “This will be the best way down. You’ll see.”
“So… how many have you done?”
“Counting the one that cost me my legs?”
She blushed, and she was glad he couldn’t see it. She hadn’t meant to step into such a sensitive topic. “Yes, including that time.”
“I’ve done three,” he told her. “This will make my fourth. It won’t be a problem.”
“Unless I lose my legs,” Tara amended.
Enverly’s voice cut into their conversation. “Don’t worry you two. I haven’t lost anyone on a drop ship run. At least, not yet.”
She chuckled harshly and reset her gauges based on new readings. Crestin leaned back in his padded chair, hooking his hands behind his head. “Don’t let her worry you, Tara. Enverly here’s the best pilot in Overwatch. Just don’t tell her I said so. It’ll go to her head.”
“Shut it,” Enverly told him. Then after a moment she added, “You big hardcase.”
“Well, you would know.”
Enverly reached over behind him and cuffed him behind the head. If there had been any doubt about those two being together after watching them go through their training, that would have proven it for Tara. It must be nice, she thought, to be able to work so closely with someone you care so much about.
Moving her suit as little as possible Tara turned her head inside the helmet, in Tyrese’s direction. She studied the lines of his face, drinking in the deep brown color of his skin and the cant of his eyes and the little laugh line at the corner of his mouth. She honestly liked this man. She had liked him back when he was just another Defense Engineer voice across her comms, and then she’d liked him after they met in the heat of battle and she found out he was confined to a motorized chair.
Now he could walk again, and he was right there sitting next to her, and she could reach right out and touch him.
Would this change the way they felt about each other?
“Turbulence.”
The word wasn’t from her subconscious. It had been spoken by Crestin, working his hands across the gauges, as God’s Hammer pierced the haze around the Earth. Where silence had filled the cabin of the drop ship before, there was now the constant susurration of particulate against the hull outside. It was like the sound of the sandfalls on Orgafell Seven.
Or like whispers.
In the sound of it, between the harder tink, tink, tink of larger pieces striking them and bouncing away, Tara could swear she heard voices saying half-realized truths and questions that had no answers. She listened, realizing how loud it would be outside of her helmet, wondering if she should raise the faceplate. For just a minute. Open the helmet up and listen to the whispers, because they sounded so important. They wanted her to know something. They wanted her to hear what they were saying…
“Tara, no,” Tyrese’s voice cut in through the constant white noise from the dust clouds. She hadn’t even noticed that she had brought her hands up to the latches on her helmet. Her gloved fingers were working at the catches and in another moment she would’ve had her helmet off.
The whispers continued.
“In here,” he said to her, checking to make sure the transparent oval of the faceplate was still sealed in place, “it won’t matter if you take it off because the cabin is pressurized and there’s breathable air. But if you do that outside of this ship, ever, you’ll die. If you get caught in this ship without your helmet on if there’s a breach—”
“I die,” she said, annoyed at him treating her like a child. “I know how the envirosuits work, thank you.”
“Then why are you trying to take your helmet off?”
“It’s just…”
Before she could find a good way to explain that she was hearing voices, the drop ship bucked hard in a direction that Tara’s brain translated as down and to her left.
“Hold on to something,” Crestin told them, his voice tight and strained across the comms. “The eddies are pretty thick here. We’re flying blind as it is, using the controls to… Watch it, Enverly!”
“Shut it,” Enverly snapped back at him. “Who’s flying this thing, anyway?”
“Right now? Me.”
“I’m adjusting the thrusters… We have to project the wings. We need the stability.”
“You insane?” Crestin asked her. “In this soup the wings will get snapped right off.”
“Baby. Give me back the controls, then.”
“Just give me a minute, I’ve got this.”
Tyrese slammed his head back against the wall of the command section behind where he was sitting, causing an ear-piercing screech to burst out over his comms. Everyone went silent.
“That’s better,” he said. “You two military brats have never flown anything this big before, have you?”
After a moment where both Crestin and Enverly ignored him, Tyrese nodded.
“That’s what I thought.” He slapped his glove against the release catch on the safety restraints over his chest, and the straps that had been holding him in place retracted back into the seat. Up on his feet, his envirosuit bulky around his new exotech legs, he took the time to hold the side of Tara’s helmet. “I’ll be right back,” he shouted at her through his helmets, comms off so only she could hear him for the closeness of his faceplate.
Then he was up with the two sergeants, standing between their chairs and pointing out control sequences they obviously had never thought of. Tara had noticed during the last two days, while training to be the “backup” pilot for the dropship
, that flying this thing was a lot like flying a Defense Pod. In fact, she figured that she and Tyrese already knew more about flying the God’s Hammer than either of the sergeants did. Turned out she was right.
In another few minutes, the ship coursed out through the bottom of the dust clouds, out of the dark black nothing of shifting pieces of burnt Earth, into the murky lower atmosphere that now surrounded the planet. Through the viewport windows Tara could just see the tips of the extendable stabilizers—the wings, as Enverly had called them—protruding from the front shoulders of the ship. Tyrese had won that argument, apparently, because it was smooth sailing now.
“There you go,” Tara heard him say. She watched him point out command sequences for the other two. “Follow that, and that, and shift that up another degree. The coordinates are locked and all you have to do now is land us.”
He came back to his seat next to her, and buckled himself in again before shifting his entire body to face her, and winked. “Just needed a man’s touch.”
Enverly’s comm crackled to life again. “I’ve got your man’s touch, right here.”
Tyrese chuckled but left it alone.
Tara watched the world outside unfold. Brown crags covered with some sort of leathery plants as tall as four dropships end to end dominated the landscape. Broken mountains, shoved up through the Earth’s crust by the hand of some insane giant. From some of them, a black liquid poured over the edges of the rocks in iridescent waterfalls. What light there was, filtered through miles of dust clouds, was gray and weak. It was a horrific sight, especially when compared to the holovids that Tara had seen of the Earth before it had been destroyed. Where were the green grasses, the sparkling blue waters, the gentle rolling hills?
Gone. All gone.
They flew over an area of bubbling black muck at one point where steam rose in yellow plumes. A close flyby of one of the mountain shards showed them that those brown tree-like things had leathery fronds that waved in the wind and curled on themselves when God’s Hammer got too close. Nowhere did they see any sign of animals or sentient life. Although, if those tree things were growing here didn’t that confirm that life was possible?
If humans were ever going to live on homeworld again, would they have to adapt to this new, mutated environment? Alter their biology to breathe whatever that atmosphere out there was made of? Harden their bones to compensate for the lesser gravity? Eyes grown larger and… what, yellow? Something like that, to adjust to the lower light conditions. Tara didn’t know, but it wasn’t a nice image. Any hope the seed had brought her has been squashed.
Bringing humanity back to this planet wouldn’t be coming home. They wouldn’t even be human beings anymore if they had to go through that to come back to Earth.
She put her thoughts on finding the tech to fix the fission cell. Maybe turning what was left of this place to bagging ashes wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“Um, ahem,” Crestin said. The four of them seemed to come alive again after a long period of slumber. The first sights of the Earth, after a millennia of no one seeing more than a peek of homeworld, had been holding them in thrall. “Uh, right. All recorders active. All images being archived. Destination coordinates are close.”
His voice shook as he gave them the rundown of their status. He sounded so unlike himself. In the two days they had trained together he had always been loud, and always ready with a joke, and never humble. Something about the Earth just a few kilometers below them had changed him. Not that she could blame him for letting that view affect him, she thought, looking out through the viewport at the world displayed beneath them.
A dark wave of black liquid threw itself off the surface of a wide lake they skimmed over, just as they passed, and Enverly banked the God’s Hammer hard to one side, putting them perpendicular to the ground, to avoid being swamped in mid-air. When they were past it and level again, Crestin had his hands clamped down hard on the edge of his console. “Bagging, sucking hell,” he muttered, apparently not remembering that his comms were open.
“Sergeant?” Tara asked him. “Are you okay?”
She heard him suck in a long breath like he was about to tell her exactly what she could do with her question, but then he blew it slowly out again and released his grip on his control panel. “Yeah. I’m fine, Tara. Just a little on edge, I guess.”
“Stow that bagging screte,” Enverly swore at him. “You want to get sick, go in the back and use the purge stations. Don’t you let no puke spill on my baby, understand?”
She stroked the side of the console when she said it, like a mother caressing a newborn’s face. Then she wrenched on the control stick and sent them spinning sideways in a slow arc that put their nose pointed back the way they came.
With the whine of repulser jets, God’s Hammer came floating down to ground that had not felt the tread of human feet for centuries. The dropship rocked, and swayed, and then settled down on its splayed-toe landing gear, adjusting to the uneven ground beneath.
“Touchdown,” Enverly added unnecessarily. “The world is ours once again.”
Tara held up her two gloved hands, wiggling the thick fingers back and forth. “Too bad we can’t touch any of it.”
“Yea, well,” the rose-skinned woman said. “That will come next. For now, let’s figure out where this tech of yours is, Engineer Tara Royce.”
They were all watching her suddenly, and Tara felt like the biggest fraud ever. Where were they supposed to look for the technology to fix the fission cell?
She had no idea.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Really, she had no idea how to fix the thing. Danvers had given her an ultimatum. Fix it or… well, he hadn’t really specified the “or else” part of that, but it was clear in Tara’s mind. So she agreed to fix it. She knew what it needed. That part of what she said was true. In theory, any Defensive Engineer could build one of them from the ground up given the proper tools. They all knew the theory behind the madness that had broken the Earth. There was just no way to duplicate the parts and tech and knowhow that the previous generations of humans had employed to make the things in the first place.
So here she was. Time to make good on her promise and find what Danvers needed to make his dreams of absolute power become real.
“Uh, all right. Sure.” She undid her safety harness and stood up, a little woozy on her legs as she got used to the higher gravity. She’d spent most of her life on space stations and in starships of one kind or another. Earth’s planetary pull had her feeling twenty pounds heavier. “How far are we from the coordinates where the probe picked up the fission cell?”
And the seed, she added mentally. She had the container stowed with her equipment at the rear of the ship. It seemed right to bring it back here, where it had been found in the first place.
Enverly was looking over at Crestin, waiting for him to answer Tara’s question. The passive radar displayed on his side of the control panels. He was staring outside the viewport though, at the swirling eddies and coils of dirt and debris that ranged across the rocky landscape. Tara had been watching them too. At times it looked like the streams of air would stand in place, close enough to see them inside their ship.
When the big man didn’t say anything, Enverly sighed out a breath and reached across in front of him to read the display herself. “Your target point is about one kilometer in that direction,” she told Tara, pointing off to their ten o’clock.
Directly into the heart of the worst of the raging storms. The air was being pulled up from the ground and twisted into circles that rolled and bunched into nearly visible shapes, backlit by bursts of purple lightning. The way forward was obscured through the thick, heavy tempests.
“No, no, no,” Crestin said over and over. “Not going there. Not going anywhere near there.”
Enverly punched him in the shoulder of his envirosuit. “Come on, big man. You and me have faced down entire squadrons of alien fighters together. There’s nothing to fear here. Just a planet
full of gas and big rocks.”
“Poisonous gas,” he muttered into their comms. “Gas that’s gonna kill us. Rocks that are gonna drop on our heads. Shouldn’t be here, Enverly. We shouldn’t be here.”
Tyrese shared a worried look with Tara as Enverly tightened her grip on Crestin’s arm. “We are here,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. “We’re here, and we don’t have any choice but to finish this. It’s simple. Alright? We go held Royce find the tech, we collect it, we bring it back to the ship. You don’t have to worry about anything else – I’ve got it covered, okay? Once we’ve found what we’re looking for, we’re off this rock and into the history books, baby! How’s that sound? Huh?”
“What are you looking for?” Tara asked, her arms crossed. “We’ve got to face those poisonous clouds together. Might as well be honest with one another.”
Enverly rolled her eyes. “Stop whining. Your tech. We’re looking for your tech.”
Crestin turned in his chair so that Tara could see his face, and the little smile that tried to erase some of the terror etched in his eyes. “I guess I always did want to be someone special before I died,” he said.
“There. Settled.” Enverly got up, waiting for Crestin to follow. When he did, the four of them exited out the back of the command section and through the center of the ship to the airlock.
There were checks on each other’s suits to be performed, each of them checking the other three in turn, just to be sure everything was locked down the way it was supposed to be. When Tara’s hands brushed over Tyrese’s waist, he shifted his feet and sort of leaned into her hands. His exotech was sensitive enough to feel her touch through the envirosuit. That brought up some interesting possibilities for her. She moved around to his front, checking the catches and seals, all the while holding his eyes. She wanted so badly to tell him she wanted to take this suit off him, right here, and find out just how sensitive his new legs were.
She didn’t, but only because Crestin and Enverly were right there, and there were no secure comms channels in the suits. Everything was being recorded for posterity. She didn’t want her posterior to be part of it.