by Guy Haley
“That’s not true,” said Mori. “On some worlds of this kind, that is probably the case, but not here. The evidence does not support it. It’s far out in the habitable zone, and there must be some kind of meteorological temperature exchange going on between the hemispheres, or it would just be a blasted rock, as you say. In fact, we suspect that is occurring now, or is about to occur, as we have observed the formation of several storm systems in the nightside, suggesting the introduction of hot air from the dayside.” She pointed out the hologram’s miniature weather fronts. “There are small oceans, which, together with this mountainous region on the dayside equator – the ‘near pole,’ I’ve called it, and the large icecap on the ‘far pole’ – are probably the drivers of the temperature exchange. We’ve identified several potential settlement sites close to the shore of this sea here.” Red dots flashed in the band of shadow.
“So we land,” said Posth. “Beginning immediately.”
“No, no,” said Yuri. “All our equipment and supplies are tailored to the expected environment of Heracles V. We’re not equipped to land here!”
“Not true,” said Maalouf. “We have equipment for all environments. Our information about Heracles V was incomplete. This world is more extreme than expected, but – we believe – survivable. The atmospheric mix is right, there are suggestions of life, and an active magnetosphere. We can live here.”
“Fine. If what you say is correct, maybe we can live here, but Amir is correct. We have to stand off. You have halted the emergency revivifications?” said Leonid.
“Yes, sir,” said Posth.
Leonid nodded. “There we are, then. Have those already awake form survey teams. We can hold in orbit. We are going to have to stay here, that is clear, but we must take our time before committing to a settlement zone, and be sure.”
“And if we are not sure?” said Yuri. “Where else can we go? We have no fuel. We have to land, have to!”
“Quiet, Yuri,” said Leonid. “Captain?”
“With all due respect, sir, it will make no difference,” said Posth. “We have a limited amount of antimatter remaining. Our ion drives are hopeless in this kind of proximity to a strong well, and although I cannot rule out rerigging the sails, even all together our drives are not enough to free us from the planet’s pull.”
“We have run multiple simulations,” said Maalouf.
“This is a large vessel,” continued Posth. “We were awakened too late. We are already being pulled down the gravity well of the planet. This ship was never intended to get this close to a large planetary body. We do not have sufficient power to break free of its grip, and once our fuel is exhausted, our descent will be rapid. We can hold off in a controlled, decreasing orbit for a while, perhaps for four days, maximum, before the ship begins an uncontrolled descent.”
Anderson chose to butt in then, much to Leonid’s surprise. The man never said anything he did not have to. Leonid was an introvert, he disliked the needless chatter his brother so loved, but Anderson generally made him look like the life and soul. “Someone introduced an unknown agent into our bio-computer, that agent reprogrammed it so that our ship has drifted away from the rest of the fleet, fetching us up at a planet hundreds of light years from where we were supposed to be and five hundred years late?”
“That is an accurate summary, yes,” said Posth testily.
Anderson grinned wolfishly and shook his head. Leonid suspected he was enjoying himself
“I must insist that we begin landing supplies and the construction of a primary settlement immediately,” said Posth. “We will keep the remainder of the colonists in hibernation, and wake them in strict rotation, once shuttle space is available for them.”
“How many are dead?”
“The support systems were supposed to function for fifty years, not five hundred,” said Kaczynska. “We have casualties of over thirty per cent. We are lucky to have as many officers alive as we do.”
Yuri looked lost, the last vestiges of his charm sublimating directly to despair. Leonid did not like this turn of events. He asked himself, much to his own disgust, what his father would do in his place. He had to be decisive.
“Very well,” he said. “We begin landing immediately. Yuri and I will go down with the first teams to supervise. We’ll only be in the way up here.” Posth and the others kept stony faces, but Leonid suspected they were relieved.
“I’m afraid I cannot allow that, sir,” said Anderson. He stood to attention and looked at a fixed point in the air. “I appreciate your desire to engage with this new property of Petrovitch Holdings, but I insist a basic strongpoint is constructed first, before you set foot on the planet. I will send a detachment down to scout whatever is determined as the most suitable location and set up a broader perimeter. I’m sorry, sir, but I have my orders from your father.”
“My father is five hundred years dead, Anderson.”
“That might be so, sir, but his orders were clear. I am to intervene should your actions endanger your own life or affect the position of your family.”
There it was, baldly stated. Ilya had told Leonid he was being sent as he was a better man. But Ilya’s self-reflection only went so far. Anderson was to be Leonid’s check. The Pointers’ men had the guns. The Pointers’ men were utterly loyal. Therefore, the Pointers would remain in charge, no matter how enlightened a ruler – and that was what he had been sent to be, a petty king – Leonid chose to be. Leonid wondered how much of what Anderson said was born of genuine tactical considerations, and how much was to remind the ship’s crew of who held power. He wished Anderson would shoot him and remove him from this impossible predicament.
“Then at least have your men watch over the initial survey teams and construction crews. You can do that for me, can’t you, Captain Anderson?” said Leonid hotly. “I won’t have them stand by for the sake of my safety if anything goes wrong.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” said Anderson.
“Then you are dismissed. See to your men now. I will review the landing sites with Captain Posth. You will be briefed in due course.”
“Sir...”
“Get out, Anderson,” said Leonid wearily. “I’m sure Captain Posth isn’t planning on assassinating me.”
Anderson looked at Posth like he thought she was, in fact, planning on just that. He left the conference room with ill grace.
Leonid felt more at ease without Anderson breathing down his neck. It felt like his father was right there, and he did not enjoy the sensation.
“My apologies, captain. Can we review the sites you have chosen?”
Posth nodly curtly. “Certainly, sir. If I may call in the ship’s pioneer corps?”
Amir agreed. “Please, if possible, let us include any colonist engineers who have awoken? They will need to hear this information at some point. The sooner the better, I say.”
Posth considered this a moment. “No word of the ship’s position is to leave this room; is that clear?”
“All the men and women aboard have been carefully selected, Captain. They knew the risks, and they are still alive,” said Amir.
“Even so, these are risks they were not expecting...” said Posth.
Amir held up his hands, exasperated. Ordinarily he would talk for a week over the smallest detail, he was a filibusterer by nature. That he gave in so quickly was testament to their peril. “Very well.”
“Bring up the sites now,” said Leonid.
Mori did so. The display zoomed in on a pair of mesas jutting out of the desert. “This is site A,” she began. “Defensible, within the liminal zone and of comfortable temperature – note these indications of vegetation.” She highlighted a sorry collection of bushes, like sage brush. “We also have strong indications of a water-bearing aquifer all around the mesas...”
Leonid stared at the grainy hologram of his new home.
His new home.
CHAPTER NINE
Sand’s Flight
SAND WAS ASSIGNED
a security detail – which was overstating it, she thought, as her detail comprised precisely one man. He was to meet her on the shuttle deck. She picked up a bike and made her way to her rendezvous.
The corridor was quieter than before. No more colonists or personnel were waking, and those who had woken were confined to the RVLs. The rest of them would be roused in strict rotation and shuttled down to the planet’s surface by Sand and the other pilots, once the initial equipment drop had been accomplished. There had been 14,498 people on board. That number had been slashed to around 10,000. It was still a hell of a lot of folks to get off a starship.
News of their changed destination was being disseminated carefully. The colonists were taking it remarkably well; they were, supposed Sand, all specialists in their own right, the few children aside, and now that a settlement plan had been drawn up, everyone awake was occupied with the evacuation.
Five of seven pilots had made it through the hibernation process. Hankinson and Komorovsky were on the bridge, doing what they could to stabilise the ship’s orbit. The other two, Kulicz and Mohandji, had been give shuttle duties with Sand.
The entry to the shuttle decks was an atrium area, intersected by both ventral and dorsal access corridors, and was open all the way around the inner hull. Sand grinned at the sight of people strolling upside down, ninety metres above her head, as she stowed the bike in a rack. The shuttle deck doors were spaced evenly around the hull. From her perspective, there were two in front of her, slightly up the walls, the other directly overhead. She took the leftmost door, went into the suiting room, grabbed her pressure suit from her locker and slipped into it. She activated it and it gripped her body firmly. Flimsy-looking but sturdy, fashioned of dense materials that kept the body’s gases from expanding in hard vacuum, by evenly applying force to the skin rather than through the pressurisation of air. It felt constricting to begin with, but was more comfortable and less bulky than older suits. She pulled her helmet collar on, and dangled the helmet from her hand. She was whistling as she strode onto the shuttle deck.
The deck was a long hangar with two points of access to the Lublin, her vessel clinging to the outside of the Mickiewicz. A large, square hatch, surrounded by hazard striping and a rail, opened onto a ladder that led down to the cockpit’s top hatch. A broader opening thirty metres away gave onto a ramp to the rear of the shuttle, and so onto the back of whatever container had been loaded by the ship’s automatic stevedore. This was to allow passenger access, when she was carrying passenger pods, or to facilitate loose loading of empty cargo containers. At the moment, the doors were shut. Ordinarily, there would have been a deck crew present, but with things being the way they were, the place was deserted. Sand checked her manifest again.
“Building modules,” she said. “Ah well, best get the homestead in place before asking the cowboys in for supper,” she said, in a mock Texan drawl. She recommenced whistling, and headed to the pilot hatch.
“You’re happy, considering our circumstances.”
She started, her hand flying up to her chest. A tall man wearing a spacesuit like hers was leaning in one corner. He could have been a spacer, were it not for the assault carbine he held across his body.
She gathered her wits quickly, shooting him a quick smile to cover her fright. “I like flying, it makes me happy. It’s keeping my mind off all this, you know, ‘lost in space’ shit.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“I like to keep people on their toes.”
“English?”
“When it suits me,” he said.
“Nice not to have to speak Lingua Anglica, annoys the shit out of me,” she said.
“Well, you say that, but what you Americans do to our language...” He grinned at her to show he meant no offence.
Sand’s smile broadened. She probably looked goofy, but what the hell. The guy was cute. Tall, well-muscled, looking very good in his flight body glove: even, heavy, masculine features, the kind she liked, not one of the foppish girl-boys that periodically came into fashion. A real man. With a gun.
“The name’s Corrigan.” He reached out his hand. He had a firm grip, but wasn’t pulling any macho bullshit and trying to crush her fingers, nor was he giving her the come-on squeeze. A good, decent handshake. “You must be Pilot De Mona. I’m here to protect you from the novelty items in your cockpit, or maybe aliens, if there are any, which there won’t be.”
She smiled wider. “Cassandra. Or just Sand, that’s what they call me.”
“Sand? Okay. Wow, you’re smiling like we’re all going on a trip to the seaside.”
“I’m a sucker for an armed man.”
“Is that so? In that case, I’m delighted you’re so forward, but won’t your intended be a little annoyed with you flirting with me?”
“Nah.” She flapped her hand. “He’s still frozen stiff. He won’t mind. Shall we?” She pointed to the hatch in the floor of the hangar bay. “I’ve got... I mean, man, we’ve got, seventeen runs of supply containers to drop before I can even think about some R&R.”
“That so? Doesn’t sound so bad. I’ve been asleep for five centuries; I’m rather glad to be up and about.”
Sand laughed. “Right. Yeah, me too. Still. Let’s go.”
She keyed open the cockpit hatch with a thought through her inChip. Yellow and black hazard striping slid away to reveal a ladder leading down. The top hatch of the ship followed a second later, sliding backwards into its recess. She pointed to it. “Corrigan?”
“Ladies first,” he said. He gave a small bow, and shouldered his carbine.
“Suit yourself.” Sand clambered down easily. Or was it up? Sand preferred zero-g, even if it did eat your bones. Zero-g was more fun, rotational pseudo-gravity made a nonsense of everything, and the Coriolis effect on smaller units made her want to barf constantly.
There were five seats in the cockpit. Three aft of the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs, for mission specialists or passengers. She settled herself into the pilot’s seat as Corrigan came down the ladder. “You can sit there,” she said, pointing to the co-pilot’s chair next to her. “Just don’t touch anything.”
“Okay.” He sat next to her. Sand was acutely aware of his presence at her elbow. She hadn’t been laid for five hundred years, she thought suddenly, and laughed.
“Something funny?”
Sand ran through her preflight, flicking switches and activated systems. The ship shuddered as its reactor woke, the faint thrum of it joining the small electronic noises of the cockpit. Blast shielding on the shuttle’s windows screeched open, revealing the interior of a dark segmented shell outside. “Oh, now, private joke.” She looked at him and gave her best smile. “Very private.”
“I’m not sure if I like the sound of that,” said Corrigan. “Or maybe I do?” he ventured.
Sand laughed. “Corrigan, just what is a good looking bastard like you doing on a flight like this? With a gun, no less.”
“Just doing a job, ma’am,” he said with a mock American accent.
“Man, that’s the worst accent I ever heard.”
“It’s why I’m not in acting.” He became serious. “Nothing for me on Earth, fancied a change. You know how it is.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I do.”
“What is that?” said Corrigan.
“Roosevelt?” Corrigan was staring at the mascot hanging from the ceiling, a battered teddy bear, purple and garish as was the fashion when an ex she barely remembered had bought it for her. “You got a problem with my bear? Get out now, if that’s how you feel.”
“Hey! Steady. No, no problem with the bear.”
“Good. He and I have been through a lot of shit together.”
“He just doesn’t seem very you.”
“Well, live and learn, gunfighter, live and learn.” She keyed the radio on. “This is Pilot De Mona aboard the SS Lublin. All systems running a-okay down here. They mothballed
this thing real carefully. Requesting permission for take-off.”
There was a pause. A voice replied in the cockpit. “Flight control affirmative. You are clear to blow shuttle shielding.”
“And there we go. We are good. I’ve been looking forward to this,” she said. “On my mark.”
“On your mark, Lublin.”
She reached out to a toggle switch. “Three, two, one.” She flicked the toggle. Explosive bolts detonated with muffled snaps around the shuttle. There was a wash of gas as a short-firing CO2 thruster pushed the shielding free of the Mickiewicz; it spun off into space, so much junk. “Won’t be needing that any more,” she said. Carbon frost dissipated from the glass as quickly as it had formed, as the Mickiewicz’s rotation presented the Lublin to the system’s star. The windows darkened automatically.
“Here we are, shuttles three, just like ticks on a dog,” she said, sing-song. She felt a little giddy to be flying down to an extra-solar world. How many people had done that? “Preparing to detach docking clamp.”
“You are cleared for launch, Lublin.”
Sand caught Corrigan staring out of the window as the planet was brought into view by the ship’s rotation. It was a glorious, blazing caramel. Her breath caught in her throat. She found it amazing herself, but she was feeling mischievous and put on the airs of a spacer bored past caring by commonplace wonder.
“If you think this is all fun and exciting now, wait until we’ve done it thirty times,” she said. “This is Lublin. Initiating launch.”
“Countdown initiated. You are good to go.”
“Releasing docking clamp in three... two... one. release.”
Another switch, a low clunk sounded from above.
“Docking clamp detachment confirmed,” she said.
They were flung out by the ship’s rotation, up and away from the Mickiewicz. The four-and-a-half kilometre colony ship dropped away above their heads. Sand gave a light burst on the jets, ridding the ship of the last vestige of centrifugal forcing and bringing them into line with the horizon of the planet below. The Mickiewicz now appeared to rotate. The planet below became steady, their new frame of reference.
