by Ginger Booth
“I believe in you, son. And you, Copeland. I’ll visit Nico in a few days, after I hear you’re safe on the planet. You two take care of each other. I love you.”
Ben blew out slowly, and wiped his cheeks. Waiting was hard. All the decision points were behind him. Cope had been over the ship with a fine tooth comb, checking for pressure integrity. The containers were secure and the hopper was full. Practically every remaining barrel of fuel pellets sat ready below. Kassidy and Wilder would need to refuel constantly on the way down, with both star drives burning against the relentless 1.1-g pull.
Far from the low-g moons and asteroids of home, the Thrive wasn’t built for this landing. It would survive atmospheric descent, or it wouldn’t. And a fat lot Ben could do about it now.
He sure missed his dad.
28
Day 163 outbound from Mahina
10 hours to Denali
“We are agreed?” Sass asked Abel and Ben a few hours later. “Moment of truth.”
The bridge trio had labored for hours to fine-tune their plan for atmospheric entry. In theory this was not radically different from landing on Mahina. But the margin for error was much narrower here. Unlike the shuttles that landed on Earth of old, the sky drives conferred the power to basically stop above the planet, and fall gently instead of aero-braking into the atmosphere like a flaming meteor.
Which was good, since their creaky, elderly hull and awkward collection of containers couldn’t survive the friction-induced heat. Shooting backwards into the atmosphere, engines first for braking, the Thrive had the aerodynamics of a brick.
Ben nodded. “Match orbital rotation to the planet’s rotation, done. Brake like hell and barely fall. Then arc down inward to land.”
Abel started to nod agreement as well, but then shook his head. “I defer to you two. I trust your calculations.” His never managed to match theirs, or the computer’s. The whole concept of orbit seemed to boggle his mind, how essentially they were continually falling at 1.1 g. They were just going so fast that they kept missing the planet.
They were about to fix that.
Sass breathed in sharply, and nodded. “Thank you for your trust,” she murmured. She turned in her seat to the console. “We are committed…now.”
She pressed a button to initiate the pre-programmed slowing in orbit. The star drives – both of them – came online with a vengeance. Almost unnoticeable most of the trip, they could feel the thrum of power now, a vibration through their feet, deep but almost audible. Thrive began pushing against Denali at very nearly its full 1.1-g gravity, while also slowly sloughing off 7 kph of orbital velocity.
“Mr. Copeland,” she hailed him. “We’ve begun deceleration. Last chance to abort. How are the engines?”
For a wonder, the engineer was verbal for a change, reading out to her each diagnostic as he checked it. Then he sighed. “Looks good, cap. Burning through fuel like crazy.”
“As expected,” Sass acknowledged. “Thanks, Cope. We are go. Sass out.”
She switched to the public address channel. “Captain speaking. We have initiated deceleration into Denali. ETA 10 hours, atmo in 7. Starting now, all hands keep your pressure suits near at hand. Wilder and Yang, you will refuel near constantly starting now. Try to get some sleep. Captain out.”
Sass dropped her hands to her lap. “God bless and keep us all,” she murmured.
Day 163 outbound from Mahina
3 hours to Denali landing
Sass flexed her fingers again at the pilot’s console. About 7 hours later, Thrive was nearly at a standstill compared to the rotating planet beneath. It was time to start falling. She watched the countdown like a hawk.
Abel did the honors this time on the public address, standing behind her.
“All hands, this is the first mate. We just initiated final approach into Denali. At this time, steward please seal galley and cabins. Cortez to med bay.”
The injured woman was up and about these days, but still fragile enough that Sass ordered her confined to the auto-doc for landing. She wanted to keep the rest of the crew on task rather than worrying about her.
Sass tuned out his continued instructions. The console asked her to confirm she wanted to commence the falling sequence. She refused to agonize any further, and simply tapped the Go button. She shifted the display to their progress on the gentle curve of descent. By now they were a mere 200 km above the surface, having decayed from 340 km while they slowed.
“Copeland, we’re going down,” she murmured. “Beginning to see some warming.”
Abel hastily wrapped up his instructions to the crew in the background.
“Within tolerance,” the engineer replied. “By the time we hit the top of that cloud cover, I sure hope we’re going less than 100 kph.”
“That’s the plan. Sass out.”
Ben pulled up the feed from a couple of the aft cameras, one looking down along their angle of descent, and the other a corner angle. The sun abruptly set behind the limb of the planet. They hurtled into the blackness of polar night. But even in the attenuated atmosphere so far up, thin gases began to glow.
Sass checked the temperature and velocity, and nibbled at a finger. So far descent was proceeding according to plan. Abel offered her a cracker and a drink. She accepted the latter. And their air speed slowed to 150 kph, 120 kph, 110 kph.
The ship started to shudder. The glow on Ben’s camera display just barely lit some high thin clouds. Sass shot into action to override their braking schedule and speed it up. “Mind the fuel,” she murmured over damage control. “High clouds. Sorry.”
The shudder evened out. She verified that the computer made enough allowances to still get them to Waterfalls. Yes, they were still within tolerance.
“Abel,” she said in abrupt decision. “I’m not leaving this chair. Go to the cargo hold.”
“Aye, sar,” he acknowledged, with an upward lilt of question. But he instantly turned to unseal the bridge.
“Are you sure, cap?” Ben verified.
Sass’s mental state didn’t budge from the zone, doing, not thinking. “Do I look unsure, Mr. Acosta?”
“Unsure of what?” Copeland inquired.
Ben might have told Cope to never mind. Sass was busy. A blast knocked the ship sideways. She fired quick thrusters to compensate, but the force kept going. What the…?
Ben, Copeland, and Abel might have echoed that thought aloud, but she tuned them out. Jet stream, she thought.
“Cap, what just happened?” the engineer asked. “It’s very bad for the cargo frame.”
Sass rapidly adjusted her strategy, and turned the ship to take the wind on their nose. Well, sort of on the nose. Actually, more like the ventral side, with the nose only slightly more to the wind than the containers, but the main engines still oriented downward to counteract the brutal pull of Denali’s gravity. Sort of like a dolphin perched on its tail on top of the water, leaning backwards.
But the ship stabilized. It was also going in the wrong direction at an amazing clip. She’d traded her 100 kph toward Waterfalls for 320 kph around the –
“Polar vortex,” she finally voiced aloud. “Like a river of wind around the polar region. I wasn’t expecting one of those.”
“River of…?” Ben echoed. “Um, you deviated from –”
“Never mind,” Sass assured him. “Or, well, it depends on how wide it is.” She realized ruefully that she sounded like Copeland when he was too deep into a problem to translate to English for the onlookers. “We cross the river of wind, then recalculate our flight plan. Ben, do that, would you?”
“Um?”
“Set up a program to continually recalculate a programmed course to Waterfalls, from current location, as current location adjusts.”
Ben hesitated only a split second this time. “Got it.”
Sass meanwhile battled the winds, trying to angle across the river without putting too much strain on their stubby little wings. Not that the wings were pointing in
any useful direction at the moment. In fact they acted more like sails, but so did the rest of the ship.
And suddenly they were out, jetting off at the wrong angle.
“New heading,” Ben rapidly supplied.
Sass quickly absorbed the new plan and found they were going entirely too fast for it. She ‘shimmied the dolphin’ around on its tail just a bit, and added some horizontal braking action with the thrusters again. She liked this dolphin visualization. Ben’s method of modeling force vectors with the thumb of his closed fist, made her head hurt.
“Cap, be advised, hiccup on refueling,” Copeland warned.
Damn it! Sass clutched at straws trying to imagine something, anything, she could do to cut fuel consumption.
29
Just a few minutes before, Wilder took a break while Kassidy took her turn manhandling out a spent fuel barrel and bringing in the next one. Stronger than Kassidy, he took two turns at the chore for every one of hers.
He wished, not for the first time, that they’d thought to put a bench in here to sit on. This time he chose to lie down, with his knees up for lack of room. By mutual consent, they decided their pressure suits just made them tired. Neither of them elected to admit that to Copeland.
The insatiable maw of the hopper was retracted for the moment, so it could grunt and chew on its last feeding. He vaguely understood that the engines didn’t actually run on fuel pellets. The hopper accepted them, and depending on demand from the star drives, transferred them into a second stomach to add water in an explosive exothermic reaction. The results of that digestive step continued on to the fuel tank.
Wilder was never much for mechanics. His forte was brawn and personality. The digestive analogy was good enough for him. He didn’t extend it to include his surroundings. For today, all the planters and hydroponics were drained and shoved out of the way. The star drives were sheathed, all their output directed out the back, leaving the room a murky blue under emergency lights, and the fueling enclosure even dimmer. In addition to the shin-barking rim around the floor of the hopper, the engineering crew had sealed it off with translucent curtains, with a dogleg entrance.
All Mahina mushroom-colored, of course. How come everything from Mahina is that same damned color? Wilder was getting tired.
“I wish they’d given us a ramp,” Kassidy complained again, jockeying barrel number umpty-dump over the lip. She was still behind one of the curtain layers from Wilder. All the full barrels lived outside the refueling bay until needed.
“It’s all to make sure the pellets stay in here,” Wilder supplied the oft-repeated refrain. “Can’t blame him for being paranoid.” Him, of course, was Copeland, bane of their existence for the day.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kassidy grumbled. Her barrel, followed by herself, finally emerged to the waiting spot. As she was side-shuffling past it, the ship lurched. She tripped on the shower curtain and tried to catch her fall on the barrel.
Still on its grav carrier, the barrel didn’t resist her weight as it would have on the deck. It rocked and tipped onto the side lip. Kassidy slipped past it to hit the deck.
“Ow, ow, ow…”
And then that side’s shower curtain fell on them.
Annoyed, Wilder swatted the curtain off his face and levered himself up. The full barrels in their tidy array stared back at him from just outside their now-open enclosure.
“Boss?” he reported on his channel to Copeland. “Accident. Curtain down. Do we repair the curtain or keep fueling?”
After a brief hesitation, Copeland replied, “Halt fueling. I’ll send Abel in to help fix the curtain.”
“Yes, sar.” Wilder cut the channel. He offered Kassidy a hand up, then went to fetch the ladder. Walking back thus encumbered, the ship threw him the greatest jolt yet. With the excellent reflexes of a warrior born and trained, Wilder managed to jam the ladder into the base of a bulkhead to stop himself.
Abel wasn’t that lucky. Walking across the engine room, he was knocked flying into the parked empty barrels. Unlike the full barrels, they left a few empties outside the rack to make it easier to pry out the next one.
“Everyone alright?” Wilder called out, when the ship settled down.
“Fine,” Kassidy grumbled.
“Yeah – no,” Abel reported. “Dammit, I twisted my ankle. Never mind, I can walk on it.”
Great. Wilder hit his comm again. “Cope? Abel’s hurt, and we’re bouncing around in here like beans in a can, because the captain drives crazy. About this curtain? How are we supposed to do that with the ship jerking?”
“Understood. Sending Clay,” Cope replied. “In the meantime, you report to Abel.”
“Aye, sar.” The sergeant didn’t bother to repeat the verdict – Abel surely heard for himself. He lay the ladder on the floor by the barrel rack and walked over to give Abel a hand up. The first mate limped beside him back to the open enclosure, while Wilder wondered aloud how they were going to suspend the curtain again from the hook 3 meters up. There was a tubular plastic spreader hung below that, presently half-dismantled.
“You see any better options?” Abel asked, eyes scouting the room.
“The hopper wants to be fed,” Kassidy reported. A red light blinked next to its door.
“We could hold the curtain while she does that,” Wilder suggested.
They did that for the time it took to pour in a single barrel. Then Abel held the ladder steady as Wilder climbed it to insert the fallen piece of the spreader. He tried tugging the other curtains around as far as they’d go, but they couldn’t reach to close.
The next time the ship lurched, Wilder was ready for it at Mahina-normal 1/6th g. He hopped to the floor rather than drag Abel and the ladder down. At that gravity it wasn’t much of a fall.
“Sar,” he complained in exasperation, picking himself up, “is it really that important?”
“Yes,” Abel said simply. “Kassidy, get that new barrel in position.” She’d already dragged out the empty, her second in a row.
“She’s tired, Abel,” Wilder reminded him softly. “Hey Yang, you want to fly this turn?”
She shot him a grin and a chuckle. “Hang the curtain? Sure! You do this.” She eagerly kicked the lock on the grav carrier and headed for the ladder.
Wilder finished putting the empty barrel away. He couldn’t stop to pick up all that Abel knocked over. But he decided one or two each trip couldn’t hurt.
Another wild jerk of the ship disabused him of that notion. Kassidy lazily floated by at zero-g. Laughing, he plucked her out of the air. “See, Yang? I knew you’d be perfect for that job!”
She paused for an exaggerated curtsy, then scurried to Abel before he mouthed off at her.
The deck dropped from under them, then suddenly lurched upward, sending all of them staggering.
“Such a simple thing,” Wilder sang out. “Grab a barrel, dump it in the hopper…”
“Don’t let the pellets loose!” Kassidy crooned back. “Because they’ll explode! Ha-ha-ha!”
Even Abel laughed at that. “Back to work. Kassidy, up top! Get this done.”
By then Clay joined them. There being no curtain in the way, he simply worked a barrel out of the rack, over the lip, and into position waiting for Wilder. Which was just as well. The indicator light of a hungry tummy blinked angry red at them again.
“Hell of a job, gang,” Abel noted. “Really appreciated!” He reached in to shake Wilder’s hand just as Kassidy dropped the edge of the curtain onto his head.
With her fuel limited, Sass pursued a slow arc over the ocean, taking a less direct route to Waterfalls. The thin prevailing winds helped her dump some more speed.
“You did see the plot I gave you?” Ben inquired.
“I did. I’m relying on it utterly,” Sass agreed. “Thank you.”
“You’re 25 degrees off the beam,” Ben clarified his complaint.
“We are slowing down. That is the name of the game this morning, Mr. Acosta. Slowing down.”
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Another buffet of wind hit them, from the opposite side of the ship this time. Sass almost reacted as for another air current, but she checked herself in time and merely tapped the thrusters experimentally to compensate. That was enough to stabilize them.
“Entering cloud ceiling,” Ben reported. “Ground in 15.5 klicks.”
This wasn’t the high wispy stuff. These were the true mountains of cloud. And like mountains, they didn’t all reach this height. Sass found a valley to snuggle into. But her valley was shallow.
“Brace for impact again with true cloud cover in 5, 4, 3 –” Bam. Clouds were hard to localize, and shifting. She hit this one before her count ran out. The ship started to bob and jerk. She hoped that retching sound on her damage control channel didn’t come from her refueling duo. Ben beside her merely looked as green as she felt. At least they were both clamped to their seats.
They couldn’t see anything on Ben’s camera feeds except the blinding blue-white of their engines reflected back at them from water droplets. Ben tried other cameras, but they were no better.
Sass studied her latest, continually-updating flight plan, and hesitated a moment. Eh, why not? She tapped the button for the computer to take over and fly by wire. They jerked, spun, dropped, and jolted before she managed to reach her flailing finger to cancel that plan. She took back manual control of the helm and persuaded the bucking bronco act to stop.
“Ouch,” Copeland commented.
“Cap,” Ben interrupted, “is that sunrise?”
Sass sighed. “No, that is lightning. Going around…”
“Lightning?”
“Ask me later.” Good thing she’d taken the helm instead of Abel. She hadn’t fully appreciated how clueless her crew was about weather. She found another cloud valley and fell off their heading to sink into it for a while, veering counter-clockwise around the thunderstorm. The storm looked much like the terrestrial ones she hadn’t seen in 70 years, the massive ones that calved tornados.