by Ryk Brown
“I’ll see what I can do,” he told his friend as Vladimir departed. “And lay off the stims,” Nathan told him. “That’s an order.”
Nathan turned back toward the shuttle as Loki made his way up the shuttle’s boarding ramp with two Corinari technicians pulling the carts carrying their space-jump suits behind them. Major Waddell was the last one heading up the ramp.
“Major!” Nathan called out.
Major Waddell turned around and spotted the captain. “Sir?”
“May I speak to you a moment?” Nathan asked.
“Of course, Captain.”
Nathan led the major a few steps to the side, away from the others. “Major, I need to make you aware of a few things, things that I felt it best not to burden Mister Sheehan with.” Nathan stopped and turned to face Major Waddell, looking him straight in the eyes. “The Jung are already aware that we have a jump drive—at least, the ones in the vicinity of Earth are. Whether or not their leaders know for sure is impossible to determine. We don’t even know where the Jung homeworld is, so we have no idea how long it will take word of our return to travel from Earth to Jung command. But that is not so much what I am concerned about. What I am sure the Jung do not know is that we have allies in the Pentaurus cluster and that those allies now have jump drive capabilities, as well as technologies that, at the very least, rival if not surpass those of the Jung. It is imperative that the Jung do not discover this information. If they did, it would put your world, as well as all the worlds of the Pentaurus cluster, in grave danger.”
“Captain, I can assure you that I am well trained in resistance against torture…”
“I’m sure you are, Major,” Nathan interrupted, “but we do not know what methods the Jung have available to them for information extraction. The safest approach would be to assume they are able to retrieve information without difficulty. Furthermore, although you may be able to resist torture, I’m not so sure about Mister Sheehan’s resolve. He is a good man, but he does not have your training.” Nathan looked at the major again. “You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir,” the major said. “However, according to protocol, I’m afraid I must respectfully ask you to explicitly state your orders for me at this time.”
Nathan took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Very well, Major. If you believe that capture of yourself, Mister Sheehan, or anyone else who possesses knowledge of the jump drive or the Pentaurus cluster is imminent, you are ordered to terminate the lives of those people rather than allow such capture. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“For what?”
“For taking the time to come here and give me the order directly, Captain. I would’ve done it anyway, as I know what is at stake. I’ve been doing this a long time, remember? But it is good to know that my commanding officer has the backbone to issue such an order, sir.”
Nathan eyed the major suspiciously. “Are you trying to make a point, Major?”
“No, sir.” Major Waddell smiled. “Just doing my job, sir.” The major snapped to attention and saluted his captain.
“Good luck, Major,” Nathan said as he returned the salute.
“Thank you, sir.”
* * *
“How long of a burn are we talking about?” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic asked, scratching at his beard. They had all given up shaving over six weeks ago, yet the thickening growth on his face still felt uncomfortable to him.
“That’s the thing,” Luis said from his chair at the Celestia’s helm, “the longer the burn, the less thrust is needed, therefore the lower the reactors can be run. That means that the amount of heat and radiation we generate will be lower, reducing the risk of detection. But it also means that we’ll be detectable for a greater period of time.”
“And if we burn hotter and shorter, we’ll be easier to spot but for a shorter period of time,” the lieutenant commander surmised.
“Precisely.”
“Tough choice,” the lieutenant commander said. “Hot and quick and hope they’re looking the other way, or low and slow and hope they’re not looking very closely.” He rubbed his whiskers again. “Don’t suppose there’s a third option.”
“Not that I can think of.”
“What if we tried a combination of the two?” Ensign Schenker suggested. “Wait until the last moment and do a short-duration, low-power deceleration burn, just enough to get us into a high orbit around Jupiter. Once we pass behind the planet, out of sight line with Earth, we go to full power, decelerate hard, and drop down into a lower orbit to rendezvous with Metis. Would that work?”
“I don’t know,” Luis admitted as he started entering the parameters into the helm’s flight computer. He watched as the results began to show on his displays. “It’s possible, but we’re going to have to go to full power pretty fast. Without full inertial dampeners, it won’t be a fun ride.”
“How long would we have to prepare?”
“We’d have to start the low-power burn in about twenty minutes. The high-power burn would come an hour later.”
“So we’d have just over an hour to try to secure everything, so we don’t have stuff flying across compartments and slamming into the forward bulkheads.”
“There’s one other problem, sir,” Luis said. “If we were doing a longer approach burn, one that would settle us into the same relative orbit as Metis, we’d have nearly two hours to rendezvous and set down. Using a combination approach, we’ll be using most of that time to decelerate. It’s going to make the landing on Metis that much more difficult. If we overshoot, we may not make it down before we come back around to the visible side.”
“Does that matter?” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic asked.
“It shouldn’t,” Ensign Schenker said. “We’d have to be running pretty hot to be noticed against Jupiter. The problem is, we don’t know exactly how good the Jung sensors are.”
“Then you’ll just have to get us down on the first pass, Ensign,” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic said.
“Easy for you to say,” Luis mumbled as he started checking his burn profile.
* * *
“The shuttle is about to jump,” Cameron informed him as Nathan approached the Aurora’s port side tactical station.
Nathan watched the main view screen as the shuttle continued flying ahead of them, becoming smaller as the distance between the two vessels increased. Just as the shuttle was about to fade from view, it glowed blue-white for a split second, then flashed as it jumped away.
“I’ll be in my ready room,” he announced as he turned and headed aft.
Nathan went straight to his desk and returned to his monitor to study the ship’s daily reports. As he took his seat, Cameron entered the ready room as well.
“Did you tell him?” she asked, her face impassive.
“I told him.”
“How did you tell him?”
“I was quite specific in my orders.”
“How did he react?” Cameron wondered.
“He acknowledged that he understood the order,” Nathan explained. “Then he said he would have done exactly as I ordered regardless. He knows the score.”
“The man scares me,” Cameron said. “One minute he’s polite and professional; the next minute you’d swear he’s about to tear someone’s head off, especially with the Takarans.”
“The man has been through a lot.”
“We all have, Nathan.”
Nathan shook his head. “Not like him. We give orders and push buttons. We watch the destruction unfold as data feeds on various monitors. We may fly into harm’s way, but we don’t stand in the thick of it with nothing more than a gun and some body armor. People like Waddell, Jessica, Sergeant Weatherly… those are the type of people who do.”
> “You did back on Haven,” Cameron said.
“Only for a brief time,” Nathan said, waving the comparison off with one hand, “and not because I chose to, but because I had no alternative. It’s not the same. If I had known what was going to happen on Haven, I never would have left the ship.”
Cameron sighed. “Sometimes I can’t tell if Waddell even cares if he lives or dies.”
“Maybe he doesn’t,” Nathan said. “Maybe that’s not a bad thing, though, as long as he cares about getting the job done.”
“Kind of a cold way to look at things, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” Nathan said. “But perhaps it’s also the best way to look at things, given the circumstances.”
“Perhaps,” Cameron agreed. “You know, we are taking a big risk by sending them to Tanna. We know nothing about this resistance. For all we know, they could be an intelligence gathering unit for the Jung.”
“Trying to fill the conspiracy-theory void left by Jessica being away?”
“Somebody has to,” she said.
“We both know we have no choice. We need propellant. We need intel on the Jung. The Tanna resistance has the highest probability of providing us with useful intelligence with the least expenditure of resources.”
“Is that how you look at our crew now?” Cameron said, one eyebrow raised. “As resources?”
“I was speaking about propellant,” Nathan said, “but I suppose I should look at the crew that way as well.”
* * *
“Engineering reports reactor one is running at ten percent,” Ensign Souza reported from the Celestia’s comm station. “Reactors two, three, and four are all holding at less than one percent.”
“I’ve got our nose down as far as I can while continuing to align the deceleration thrust ports with our actual course,” Luis said. “Any more and our center of gravity will be too far off to compensate for it with maneuvering thrusters.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic answered.
“Coming up on the first burn threshold in twenty seconds,” Luis added as his eyes double-checked his flight displays. He had run over his procedures at least a dozen times in the last twenty minutes, even referencing them against the Celestia’s flight manual. Although the manual covered all operational aspects of piloting the massive starship, it offered absolutely no advice for ‘settling’ the ship onto the surface of a small moon, even one with as little gravity as Metis. To Luis, the fact that the authors of the manual never considered such a maneuver was in itself a bad sign. “Ten seconds. Powering up outboard mains. Engines one and four show ready. Five seconds.”
They had been cold-coasting for two and a half months. This would be the first time they would be doing anything on the bridge other than staring at unchanged displays or running training simulations on their consoles. It was also the first time in over two months that all eight of the men living on the Celestia’s isolated command deck were on the bridge at the same time. Months of mind-numbing tedium followed by an hour of intense maneuvering seemed an odd lifestyle to Luis. Fortunately, if he could successfully set the ship down on the surface of Metis, it would likely be the end of his flying career.
The countdown display reached zero. Luis pressed the button on his console, executing his preprogrammed command to fire their only two operational engines at a small fraction of their capable output.
“Mains are burning at one percent,” he announced. There was almost no sensation that anything was happening other than a barely audible rumble reverberating through the ship’s framework. “Throttling up slowly to ten percent.”
“I’m not feeling anything,” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic said, seeming surprised.
“At such a low thrust level, you won’t,” Ensign Schenker said. “Even with only one reactor running at only ten percent, that’s enough power for the inertial dampening systems to compensate. When we hit phase two of our approach, trust me; we’ll feel it.”
“Looking forward to it,” the lieutenant commander said as he rolled his eyes.
“Ten percent thrust and holding,” Luis reported from the helm. “We’ll maintain this thrust level for another fifty-seven minutes. That should slow us down enough that Jupiter’s gravity will pull us into a high orbit.”
“I’m assuming you double-checked your calculations,” the lieutenant commander said.
“They aren’t my calculations, sir,” Luis answered. “They’re the flight computer’s… and yes, I did double-check them, several times, in fact.”
* * *
A small flash of light appeared in the night sky above Tanna. The flash appeared to move laterally against the background of stars for a brief moment before it faded away.
The night air of Tanna rushed into the jump shuttle as its rear cargo hatch split in half horizontally. The two halves separated and swung in opposite directions, one upward and one down. A few seconds later, both halves were parallel to one another as well as to the line of the shuttle itself, the bottom half now forming a deck of sorts that extended out the back of the shuttle.
Major Waddell and Loki stood just inside the aft end of the shuttle facing the open cargo hatch, fully encased in their jump rigs.
“Are you ready?” Major Waddell asked over the helmet comm.
“No…” Loki’s voice trembled.
“Good. Remember, radio silence from this point forward.”
“No…” Loki repeated, trembling even more. He turned and looked at the Major as the technicians unplugged the comm-lines from both their suits. “No…”
Major Waddell looked at Loki’s face. He could see his mouth forming the word ‘no’ in repeated fashion. He gave him a thumbs up sign and pushed him toward the aft end of the ramp. Holding Loki’s left arm at his elbow, the major guided the frightened pilot in a jog toward the aft edge of the ramp where they both jumped off into the darkness.
Without the suit-comms turned on, Major Waddell couldn’t hear Loki screaming as they fell. With the air rushing past their helmets, he also couldn’t hear the fizzle of the shuttle’s jump field. He did see the light of the departure jump as it reflected off the top of the clouds they were falling toward. A few seconds later, those very same clouds enveloped them.
CHAPTER THREE
“All hands report ready for burn, sir,” Ensign Souza reported from the Celestia’s comm station. “All supplies are secured, all loose equipment has been tied down, and all personnel have positioned themselves with their backs against aft bulkheads and facing forward.”
“They made sure that nothing forward of them could come flying aft, right?” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic asked.
“Yes, sir. Everyone knows what to do.”
“Very well.” The lieutenant commander turned forward toward the helm. “Time to maximum burn mark?”
“One minute,” Luis reported from the helm.
The lieutenant commander looked around his command chair. “Sure wish they’d thought to put seat belts on this thing.”
“With full inertial dampeners, we’re not supposed to need them,” Ensign Schenker said.
“I’m sure that will be a comforting thought if I go flying back-first into the tactical console, Ensign.”
“Forty-five seconds,” Luis reported.
“Tell engineering to stand by to bring the reactors up to full power,” the lieutenant commander ordered.
“Aye, sir,” Ensign Souza answered.
“Ten seconds until we slip behind the horizon and lose line of sight with Earth,” Ensign Schenker reported from the sensor station.
“Thirty seconds to burn,” Luis announced. His attention darted about the helm console, as he performed last moment checks of all his systems. As best he could tell, everything was ready for full power.
�
��Be ready to pitch over into tail-first attitude as soon as we duck behind Jupiter,” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic reminded Luis.
“I’m ready, sir.”
“Three seconds to line-of-sight horizon,” Ensign Schenker reported.
“Two……”
“Engineering, bridge,” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic called over his comm-set.
“One……”
“Engineering. Go ahead, sir,” Tilly’s voice answered over the comm-set.
“Zero.”
“All reactors to full power,” the lieutenant commander ordered.
“We’ve lost line of sight with Earth,” Ensign Schenker announced.
“Helm, pitch over.”
“All reactors to full, aye,” Tilly acknowledged.
“Deceleration thrusters at zero. Pitching over,” Luis answered. “Fifteen seconds to max burn.”
“As soon as those reactors are at full power, bring up the inertial dampeners as much as possible, Mister Tilly,” the lieutenant commander added.
“Aye, sir,” Ensign Tilly answered.
“Bring up all sensors and navigational systems,” the lieutenant commander ordered. “I want active tracking of all objects between us and Metis, especially Metis.”
“Aye, sir!” Ensign Schenker said.
“Pitch maneuver complete,” Luis reported. “Ship’s attitude is level to flight path,” Luis announced. “Flying tail first. Five seconds to max burn.”
“Bridge, engineering. Reactors one through four at full power. Bringing up inertial dampeners.”
“Four……”
“Very well. Comms, all hands, brace for hard deceleration burn,” Lieutenant Commander Kovacic ordered.
“Three……”
“All hands! Brace for hard deceleration burn!” Ensign Souza announced over the ship’s comm-network and loudspeakers as he placed both hands on his forward facing console.