Crash

by Guy Haley

  “Wooh, that’s better. Thanks,” said Corrigan. “I was beginning to feel a little queasy.”

  “Not for your benefit, honey. Drag from the exosphere even this high up’d slow us down real quick, and that makes flying a mite tricky. We need to be belly down for a hot landing, and I like to keep my eye on where I’m going.”

  Sand depressed one of the pedals by her feet. There was a rushing sound through the floor and another billow of gas vented from the ship’s underside, pushing them further away from the Mickiewicz. Like much of the equipment on board, many of the Lublin’s systems were simple electronic and mechanical devices.

  “Easier to get out a wrench than reprogramme,” she said.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Something an engineer once said to me.”

  Sand briefly pumped the forward thrusters, dropping her ship’s speed relative to the Mickiewicz, and the colony ship pulled away from them. She gave a couple more outgassings from the ventral thruster as the Mickiewicz’s massive engine units came into view; the drives were out, but Sand wasn’t chancing getting caught in their backwash should they come online. Once she was a safe distance from the vast ship, she pushed the rear thrusters, pulling level.

  “Impressive piece of engineering,” said Corrigan. “Five hundred years travelling through the void and it looks almost new.”

  “Yeah,” said Sand, “almost like this was the plan all along.”

  Periodic bursts of gas puffed from the length of the vessel. Cargo containers were running along the outside of the craft, switching places like puzzle pieces, queuing themselves in preparation for pick-up by the shuttles. The Kraków and Gdańsk were already out, peeling down toward the planet, the Kraków’s bay clutching a hexagonal, rust-red container full of equipment upon its back, the Gdańsk a blue pressurised passenger cabin. Within were the first of the colonists, an advance team of engineers, geologists and exobiologists. All suited up, she thought, until the environment proved safe. If it didn’t, she wondered, what the hell then?

  “Aren’t we following them in?”

  “What’s the rush, honey?”

  “What’s with all this ‘honey’ business?”

  “I call all men I like ‘honey.’” She flashed him a teasing grin. “You object? You aren’t going to go all Brit on me, are you?”

  Corrigan cleared his throat. He was clearly nervous about the flying. “No, not at all. British reserve is a myth, like London fog.”

  “There’s no fog?”

  “Not for a century and a half. Your folk memory of it is an echo of older days.”

  “My, the gun-toting poet. We’re taking a pass around the ship. The sensors are scrambled five ways to next Thursday, along with everything else. I’m to make sure there’s no major damage or anything else that might bring our estimated crash time forward.”

  “That’s a hell of a responsibility.”

  “So’s carrying that cannon.”

  “No, ma’am. I just shoot who I’m told, no thought involved.”

  “Well, I’m first pilot, baby, and hellish responsibility goes with the territory. Flight control, this is Lublin. Commencing inspection.”

  “Shouldn’t you be on the bridge?”

  “First pilot, not senior. Hankinson’s our lead, and he’s at the helm,” she said.

  Sand started at the drive unit, then maneouvred the shuttle carefully down the length of the Mickiewicz, up the mushroom stalk, past the reactor, the secondary shield cap, on by the jostling cargo containers, the shuttle bays, the comms masts, the sail boxes, then to where the hull widened into the segmented hibernation decks, each bigger than the last, until they came to the lip of the mushroom cap of the water shield. She slowed and inspected the colony vessel as it rotated by her. It really had come through its journey unscathed. A little pockmarking here and there, maybe, but nothing serious. “Up front, in the shield, that’s where the damage will be. That’s what it’s there for, after all.”

  She accelerated, outpacing the ship, speeding up and out around the recurved lip of the shield. She swung around in front, and passed right in front of the prow in a way that made Corrigan inhale sharply. The shield was pitted, riven with crevasses. The rich blue of the oxygen-depleted ice with which they’d started their voyage had become dirty grey. The sight of it reminded her of one of the few times she’d seen snow, years ago, a jagged lump by the side of the road, speckled with grit thrown up by the traffic.

  “Lublin to flight control. All looks good as far as I can see, the shield has taken a hammering, but it has been out there ten times longer than it should have been. It’s in good shape for its age. I’m doing a datadump now, if you can read it.”

  “Are the shuttles not affected?” asked Corrigan.

  “No,” said Sand. “They were inactive when the main Syscore was infected. First thing we did when we turned everything back on was make sure the systems that had been isolated stayed that way. It’s been scrubbed, recalibrated from file and clean rebooted. I can transmit, but I’m not even to receive any non-verbal data.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow indeed.”

  “Data received,” said flight control. Sand couldn’t remember the name of the person attached to the voice. “You are to proceed to landing one.”

  “Will do, see you in two hours.” A tight turnaround, but Sand was glad Posth was taking no chances. That Leonid Pointer might have got his way regarding the colonists’ slow deployment, but Posth had been firm about getting as many of the cargo containers down as possible.

  “You ready for this, gunfighter?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t sure me, my man, re-entry is no picnic. And I’m doing it all manual.”

  Corrigan grimaced.

  “Don’t worry, this is all new to me too,” she said with a smile, enjoying the soldier’s discomfort.

  She aligned the ship, broad tail lowermost, nose up. The shuttle’s broad underside was coated in a nanoweave thermal blanket. She’d done space-to-surface runs in the sims and for real on Mars and the Moon, but modern craft back home did not do hot landings on Earth, period. Cargo on Earth came in via elevator.

  She wondered how things might have changed back there, five hundred years on; if there were elevators or even people there now. She put the thought away, unwilling to examine it.

  “Okay, here we go.” The air was thickening, rushing past the hull. The Lublin bucked. “I seriously advise you to fasten your seatbelts.”

  The Lublin roared down. The glow of heat from the underside of the vessel coloured the edges of their viewports. Air screamed past the ship as it plummeted, the planet growing beneath them until it filled their view. They rushed over the endless dayside desert, the terminator between night and day approaching quickly.

  They were through it in a blink, passing over the liminal zone in seconds, the planet below going black with startling suddeness. Sand could make out little down there, lots of cloud, plenty of lightning, none of the seas or ice cap she’d seen on the bridge. Her ship glowed hot, wrecking her night vision and stopping the ship’s sensors from working. They’d have to slow down for that.

  They were close to the boundary with the troposphere. The planet’s gravity was a quarter of a g higher than Earth’s, and the atmosphere correspondingly denser. Good in some ways – the pull might be stronger, but she had more air and so more time to slow down – but worse in others, as there was more atmosphere to fry her through friction.

  “Deploying wings,” she said. She flicked the wing release safeties, one and two, then reached for the deployment switch. “Three, two, one and out.”

  The Lublin wobbled. There was a metallic noise as its wings reconfigured, shifting from a dart to a delta form. Sand wrestled with the controls, and the quality of descent altered, becoming less violent. “Activating Sabre XIIs.”

  This was the real test of the day: if any of the micropores on the precooling systems were compromised, they were b
oth dead. She elected not to share any of this with Corrigan.

  The engines slid out of their housings, and engaged with a jolt. The shuttle shifted from gliding to powered flight. They were still going at around Mach 5, but Sand had wrested control of her ship back from the planet.

  She whooped unashamedly. “Goddamn! This is flying!” She brought the ship round in a steep curve. Corrigan kissed a crucifix he’d plucked from under his shirt. He caught Sand’s raised eyebrow and shrugged apologetically.

  Sand loved to fly, really loved it. This was the best part of it all. The terminator came into view again, the motion of the craft providing them with a sunrise the planet itself would never experience. She allowed the rush of air to slow the craft further, bringing it down to a manageable three times the speed of sound. Their progress became smoother. Corrigan let out a breath and stopped bracing himself between the floor and seatback. They burst through the strange, linear storm and back into the daylight.

  “Nearly there, gunfighter,” she said. She flicked a few more switches. A screen came on, giving her a radar-generated map of the terrain below. All useful information for the colony effort, but she was looking for something else. There. The steady pulse of a radio locator beacon, bounced off the stratosphere, not strong and not long range without relay satellites, but strong enough to hear. “Corrigan, this is First Landing.”

  She brought the shuttle lower, burning through the liminal zone, toward the sunward side of the twilight band encircling the planet.

  The mesas they were to build their city on came into view, a pair of them, out of place in the sand and scrub. A dry river bed lined with thorny bushes ran in front of them from the north, turning to the west to where evening sunlight glimmered on the ocean twenty kilometres distant; an evening that would never end. The country of evening. A cluster of dropped containers were scattered around the mesa. Small figures and machines were already at work in the ruddy light, stacking them, unpacking them, clearing the ground to make a landing field to the west of the mesas. A team were already laying down a mesh road from the would-be city.

  “High ground,” said Corrigan.

  “You approve?” said Sand.

  “There’s no telling what’s here. Good to pick a defensible spot, better to be safe than sorry.”

  “Looks desolate to me.”

  “We don’t have time to be picky. You seen anywhere else that looks more inviting?” Corrigan stared out of the window.

  “No, I suppose not,” she said. “This is Lublin, requesting drop point.”

  A new voice, weak and crackly, came over the radio. “Welcome, Pilot De Mona. Co-ordinates coming through.”

  “Co-ordinates received.”

  She slowed the shuttle, adjusted her course and opened the cargo clamps at the back. “We’re not carrying bodies, so we’re not stopping,” she said to Corrigan. “First Landing control, prepare for delivery.”

  A klaxon sounded as the shuttle’s lower cargo doors gaped wide and the container extruded itself from the vessel’s underside. Sand circled once, twice, around the drop point. A container truck and heavy lifting robot waited a safe distance away.

  Sand rotated the shuttle’s jets downwards, and hovered briefly a few metres above the ground. Dust was blasted into a wide, billowing cloud around the ship. She kept the drop as short as possible to conserve fuel; hovering was a bitch for mileage. She twitched the stick, then hit the cargo release button. The Lublin lurched as the container slid from its rails and dropped onto the desert, its own feet taking most of the shock.

  “And it’s away. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Thanks, Sand.”

  “That it?” said Corrigan as the Lublin turned and rose again. It moved off quickly as its directional jets returned to flight position.

  “That’s it. Waste of time and fuel setting down, the stuff in those containers is packed just fine, nothing’s going to break from a five-metre soft landing. Now we’ve got to clear out the cooling vents, suck in some gas to replenish the tanks, that’ll take a couple of passes through the atmosphere, get some mapping data while we’re at it, then we switch to rocket mode, and do it again. And again. And then again a few more times.”

  They headed back into the night, skimming a few hundred metres over the ground. Under the cloud cover, the dark was less total than it first appeared. There was much fog, but where there was not, Sand caught glimpses of lights on the ground, whole areas that glowed pale green, and flashes of colour, before she pulled up through the cloud layer to get a good radar sweep. She thought of cities, but obviously not. Life, maybe. Weird.

  They flew over the nightside at subsonic speeds, crossing the planet’s massive equatorial icecap, dragging a wide radar broom across the landscape and puffing out particles from the engine’s cooling micropores. The ride was choppy, strong laminar flows in the air bouncing them as they changed altitude, plenty of clear air turbulence too. Fifty minutes later, and they returned to the ship. She flipped the vessel and approached her bay topside on. Docking was awkward, but Posth wasn’t willing to release the containers into the void for pick-up so close in to the gravity well. No problem, Sand enjoyed the challenge. The Lublin clanged into place, docking clamps biting the upper side of the ship.

  She shut off the flight systems and unbuckled herself.

  “Two minutes before the next container comes sliding down the rails, ten minutes before we’re cleared to launch again. We’ve got twenty runs to do before we take a break. I need to pee. Do you fancy a coffee? It’s five hundred years old, so it’ll probably taste like shit.”

  Corrigan smiled and ran a hand over his shaved head.

  “Not used to flying orbital insertion and back? You look kind of poorly.”

  “Not in forty minutes, no,” he said.

  “You’ll get used to it. Let me get you that coffee.”

  They were sucking on bitter, rehydrated mess when the container slid down the rails and onto the rear cargo bed. A succession of bangs announced its arrival and lockdown.

  Sand sealed her cup and stowed it. “That’s it, load secure,” she said. “Running preflight checks.”

  “Roger that, pilot,” said flight control. “All running smoothly?”

  “Indeed.”

  “That’s the best news we’ve had in a bad day. Keep it up.”

  Sand checked the manifest. Hydroponics. Fine.

  “Buckle yourself in, Corrigan, we’re going back in five minutes.” She smiled widely at him. “I love my job.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Crash

  LEONID STOOD NEXT to Captain Posth, both of them clutching at the railings to stop the ship’s rotation sending them in a slow tumble toward the wall. Or the floor. Was it the floor? The centrifuge effect was so weak at the centre, and so the stations on the bridge were arranged more to deal with high-g acceleration than for the niceties of up and down. Making sense of the bridge’s topography would have given Leonid motion sickness, were he not possessed of perfect balance. They stared at the globe hanging luminous and strange in the display void. The display appeared almost solid; Leonid had only the vaguest impression of people moving around on the other side.

  “Not a bad spot, I think,” said Posth. First Landing was highlighted on the map by a rotating reticule. Leonid felt pleased. The captain was warming to him.

  “Yes, it is.”

  The captain had spent some time explaining the fuel situation. She was right; they needed to get down quickly. He was working on encouraging her original plan without admitting defeat. More his father’s style than his, but self-preservation had led him by the nose; the Pointers were loathed as it was, things had gone seriously wrong, this was ripe territory for a revolution. He would bring equality, but in the meantime he was eager to avoid having his head on a pike. Was he getting paranoid? Nothing seemed real after so long asleep, and now this...

  “We’re going to have to choose a name for the planet, captain,” he said.

  “Mori has
a suggestion,” said Posth. “If you would like to hear it, sir.”

  Yes, thought Leonid, this relationship could work out fine. He needed her more than she needed him. They both knew it.

  “Of course.” He looked about for Mori, finding her sitting, as far as he was concerned, on the ceiling.

  “I suggest Nychthemeron,” she said.

  “Really?” said Yuri, who had yet to recover his shell of poise and charm. “Is that... Greek?”

  “Yes, sir. It means a night and day combined. There are cognates in several languages, including in Polish.”

  “Why not use their word? They’re the majority.”

  “Doba?” said Mori. “Because the Poles are in a majority. There are no Greeks at all present on board the Mickiewicz, and I thought a neutral term would be preferable.”

  “Do you approve, sir?” asked Posth.

  “Sounds suitably mythological, ‘Nychthemeron,’” said Yuri. “We were to settle on Heracles, why not on a world with a similarly pompous, Hellenistic name? I like it.”

  Leonid winced inside. He hoped Mori was not offended. “Amir? Your opinion.”

  “As you desire, sir.”

  That annoyed Yuri. “Don’t give me that. We asked for your opinion, not ours. What do you think?”

  Amir became thoughtful. He showed no sign of awkwardness at his rebuke. Leonid became hopeful that his father had not loaded his court with idiots. And a court, he thought angrily, was exactly what it was. He was thinking in terms dictated by his father. He had to watch that.

  “It is a good name. It sums the planet up. A little long, maybe, but it sounds... If you will permit me, it sounds more grandiose than pompous. I think we need a name we can respect.”

  “Very well,” said Leonid. “Nychthemeron it is.”

  Posth nodded at Mori. “Input the name into all our chart data.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  They watched as a string of boxes extended out from the graphic representing the ship, depicting the flight path for the latest shuttle launch. The five desks in charge of flight control hummed with quiet chatter, human and computer assisted traffic controllers directing the delivery of supplies and personnel to the surface.