Perezsire glanced across at Nicraan. "How's it holding?"
The pilot studied his digital gauges. "Everything's working. For how long, I can't say."
"Just long enough to get us up." Capel looked over his shoulder. "Moela, how do we look from over there? Can we make it out without engaging the deep drive?"
The science officer's reply was hopeful, if not exactly encouraging. "Okay. But remember, this is just a patch job. Need shipyard equipment to make proper repairs."
"Will it hold together?'
"Computer thinks so, unless we hit too much turbulence going up. That might blow the new cells ... and that's it. No way could we fix them again. So, Nicraan, take it easy."
"I hear you. We'll watch it. All we must do is reach zero-gee and we can go hyper all the way. Until we're up, try and keep the cells intact if you have to hold them steady with your bare hands."
"Just remember, Nicraan, I'm a scientist. I'm used to dealing with hypotheses, not syntheplast and such. I'll do my best," Moela replied, trying to add a bit of levity to the tense air.
"Check." Nicraan turned to face the Pioneer's environmental scientist. Retho was presently doubling duty for the deceased Lunon. "I'll take us up a hundred retems and then bring in the exposed landing gear." He turned his attention to his own console. "I'll keep it steady."
"Up a hundred," Retho said as he touched astrogator controls. "Increasing main power for the antigrav engines and magnetic field regulators.” He touched more specific icons, saying, “Activating unitectic gravity field projector."
An ugly black cloud suddenly swept in from the west. The occupants of the Pioneer 4 braced for another thunderstorm. What fell instead resembled soft sand. Within micronodes, more than half a centiretem blanketed the saucer, precipitating anxiety and bewilderment. Largely composed of fine volcanic glass particles, the cloud was itself a mass of cutting edges. If any life had survived, the fatalities would be quick and numerous, the edges would have quickly abraded insects wax coatings and allow vital body fluids to escape -- dehydration and death. Some small creatures would have quickly choked; some birds might lose bearings and vision and fall. Larger creatures might avoid suffocation but would be disoriented; either huddled in fields or wander crazily in the maelstrom.
The planet heaved and pitched beneath the Pod. While the temblors were considerably varied in strength, the quakes that were shaking the surface to pieces were continuous now. Floating atop the planet’s upper mantle, the continents were temporarily buffered from the complete destruction that had commenced further below.
As they sought to shut out the chaos rising in intensity around them, the Aidennians focused on the task at hand, survival.
“Sire!” Moela called out, tilting her head back from her console’s readouts. “The planet is no longer safe. The sun’s singularity has ignited the planet’s core. There may be only micronodes left.”
Looking up at her and meeting her gaze, Capel nodded.
“Commander!” Matasire yelled as displays before him lit up, all with the same message. “All stations report ready!”
“Lift off!”
"Here we go!" Nicraan called out and jabbed at the command console's flight control. "Initiating liftoff sequence, main drive systems to on line status."
An eerie glow cocooned the Pioneer Pod in chorus with the antigravity drive's thunder as the nuclear drive at the base of the saucer exploded; the giant craft trembled, straining towards the sky. The loud hum intensified outside as the saucer lifted from the lightning-blasted surface that had held it captive, rising in a bolus of phosphoric light. The wail of the ascent fields cried out strangely tantalizing. Vibrations from the antigrav drive engaging overwhelmed the quaking of the ground.
“We have lift off!” Nicraan almost screamed in both delight and relief. “Retracting struts!”
On the command apse’s central console, the main presentation jutter showed a graphic of the Pioneer’s trajectory as the podship prepared to arc toward the outer edge of the atmosphere. Both Matasire and Capel fought the controls as the podship labored seemingly futilely to throw off the weight of eight mets of sky and escape the planet’s failing surface. Yet, eventually, fighting the impossible odds, the saucer-shaped podship wrenched free of the crumbling caldera floor and began to rise.
The podship hovered high above the ground, debris racing confused beneath it; swirls of rain funneled in reaction to the antigrav field projected from the underside of the large saucer. Below the concave negative field projector, the land rolled and billowed, vomiting sparklers of magma, torn by glaring explosions.
Each crewmember felt the change in intraship gravity and tried to stifle the giddy feeling that tickled their guts. It was a good feeling; the planet’s chains that had held the podship prisoner for far too long were breaking.
Massive metal leg-like struts lifted neatly into the ship's curved belly. A slight thump sounded on the flight deck, confirming computer telltales.
"Struts retracted,” Retho announced.
The re-enforced metal plated skids stowed tightly shut over the strut housings wells, sealing out debris particles and alien atmosphere.
"Standing by," Moela declared.
“Continue with ascent,” ordered Perezsire, his knuckles bone-white in their grip of his flight chair’s armrest.
Outside the unshuttered bowport, the crew could see the volcanic storm from a different angle. It was a sight none could have envisioned in their wildest nightmares. In all directions, as far as any of them could see, mountains and bluffs and ridges and sea and desert were breaking apart. The planet was folding. Solid rock resembled plastic giving violent birth to mountains that were as suddenly swallowed down again into the planet’s core.
Beyond the transparency of the bowport, the obsidian mountains rained fire upon the desert; rivers of lava embraced the land. The caldera floor was turning from a set of spider’s web fracture lines into a lake of fire. Subsurface magma no longer held back by the caldera’s ancient volcanic cap, chewed away the surface where once the podship had crash-landed, and the whole massive groundscape broke loose, sending chunks of earth skidding, scrabbling as they floated out on lava, sinking slowly as they melted and burned away.
A vertical tidal wave of stone heaved up directly in the podship’s path, towering over the saucer, and its pilots could only stare, their minds empty, as it began to break. Giant slabs of bedrock split off from the stony curtain’s crest, falling back in an avalanche that smashed down onto a different landscape that had given rise to it.
On what caldera surface area that was left intact, the frantic bodies of fleeing animals could be seen. It was a lesson in futility. There were no safe places to run, to hide, to escape the inevitable. The distinctions between predator and prey dissolved, a strange truce had evolved as the urge to survive surged forth in each beast’s frantically beating heart. It was soul-wrenching to watch the palliative attempts as herds and individuals dashed hither and near attempting to avoid the colonnades of fire and gaping cracks on the very ground they ran across; some leapt in wide arcs over the lava’s boil. Pockets of gas percolated to the gouting flame surface like arms reaching to gather them in.
On the islands of cracked soil, diverse wildlife sought temporary safety as the riverlets of lava arced over the disappearing landscape; only to be lost as the floating earthen-berg was overwhelmed by an oncoming tide of surging magma. Desperate cries, screeches, and squawks lost in the din of the apocalypse. Birds took flight as the very gourd-tree woodlands they had sought refuge violently fell as they ignited, most flocks being overwhelmed by the very flames that uprooted their sanctuaries and falling in a rain of burnt flesh and ash.
At the abandoned bore-well, a chasm split open in the desert’s contorting crust. It was so vast and wide the planet seemed to be swallowing itself, as if one could see clear down to the molten core. As the fresh chasm opened, a new roar began to overtake the already overburdened sound envelope. The rivers of lava su
ddenly dropped away in a vertical sheet of fire that vanished into boiling clouds of smoke and gases. The newly-formed coulee lake was being carried, inexorably, out over a vast lava-fall destined for the planet’s very core.
The sky was pitch as black could ever be imagined. Only the frequent blast of explosive lightning allowed any type of clarity. It brought a new fear into the thoughts of the Aidennians as the mighty thunderheads were exposed in those brief moments of light. An immense cloud of glassy powder, spewed from the crescent range grotto, desert perimeter, and Pylon Crater volcanoes, drifted downward over the plains. The prodigious ashfall blanketed hundreds of square mets. Herds of indigenous mammals such as three-toed horses, cameloids, and tiny saber-toothed deer, confused and choking, perished in the blizzard of abrasive dust.
The outcroppings of rock on which the saucer rose from shattered and flung the crew forward. A blast-furnace wall of heat rushed around the podship, pulling a stream of noxious dust and smoke and soot with it. The full force of the corrosive gale blasted straight into the Pioneer 4 hitting its defector shields full on, utterly blinding sensors, forcing the crew to recalibrate frequencies. The wind carried fine-grained sand, and that slammed into the ship as well, reacting to force field auto-control, setting the shimmering orb that had coalesced to intensify.
Pioneer 4 edged itself onward. As the melting ground peeled away beneath its glowing hull, a great canyon was in the process of ripping itself open some fifty kiloretems from the rising podship; chunks of stone rained down like ashy talcum. The head-on collision of tectonic plates heaped up stratospheric mountain ranges resembling crumpled fenders while at the same time gargantuan pits were forged in the shredded crust. The ponderous folds of bedrock poured toward the lips of the gaping splits as if skidding on an oil-slick surface instead of magma. The noise alone was excruciatingly loud. Each time the earth split, it was if an impossibly colossal fist was smashing into an infinite quantity of drums and cymbals. Great jets of combustible gas shot up from smaller cracks radiating out of the canyon, some igniting when they were struck by one of the bolts of multicolored lightning. There was smoke everywhere, and above them, the sky, once again, seemed to burn.
The saucer podship continued to rise from the burning cauldron where once it had been marooned upon. Geysers of flame persisted to rise from the broken ground like liquiform pillars, resembling a fiery fountain; ever threatening to burn the podship to an alloyed ember. Nicraan Matasire deftly avoided a sudden burst of flaming gas, the clouds of dust rising from the upheaval below, coupled with the smoke from the burning earth, made targeting an ascent vector impossible.
“Status?” Perezsire asked desperately.
A tremendous crash outside the hull gave him his answer.
“It’s going to get bumpy,” Nicraan groaned as he set the Pioneer 4 in a wide, upward-looping arc.
Capel’s expression held a mixture of exasperation and profound empathy. “Just get us spaceborne.”
The bowport continued to frame the pilot’s efforts. The violently morphing environs looked less and less like a landscape as the podship continued to rise. For a heartbeat, panic seized Nicraan’s throat. Then his Spacecorps’ training kicked in and his mind turned cold and metallic, and filtered through every fact he had on emergency maneuvers. He had to think or die.
He risked a glance to the left and right of the sectional bowport. The one hundred thousand hectares of forest that ringed the monotonous desert terrain was now being devoured by walls of flame. Coils of heat and thick black smoke spiraled into the sky.
Oblivious to the Pioneer 4’s plight, the crumbling surface imploded with another deafening roar. There was a harrowing moment when a black plume of smoke from one of the burning geysers enveloped the podship, completely stealing the view of the world outside. To his credit, Matasire only grunted and altered the ascent trajectory by a few points. The podship emerged from the black fog almost instantly and farther away to the trouble below, projected deflector shields aglow.
“Retho,” came the deliberate call from Dara. “Don’t forget to close the ship’s atmospheric intakes. If that volcanic gas gets into our recycling system, our air will become lethal!”
Battered and exhausted from what had been a very long morning indeed, Retho still managed to grin. “Do you mind handling that yourself? I’m kind of busy with navigation.” He nodded toward the chaotic command apse and the scene aflame beyond the bowport.
“Got it!” the medical commander said without offense.
In a true athletic fashion, she dashed from her quarterdeck console and sprinted the distance into the ops pit and over to the EVS station. Once there, Dara quickly instructed the environmental computers on what task needed to be accomplished before heading quickly back to resume her position.
“I see where I get my athletic prowess,” Retho regarded her, smiling.
“Who?” Dara sniggered. She grew more serious as her console readouts changed. “Speaking of prowess, the need for it is on the way.”
Retho raised his eyebrows. “Oh? In what form, may I inquire?”
After almost twenty-four nodes of continuous eruption, the supercontinent’s volcanoes delivered their final blows. A sudden increase of material ejected into the unstable mushroom columns set off the collapse of their whole lower halves, which spread lethally in all directions. This final surge was enormous. It reached many kiloretems further than the previous flows, particularly to the south of the central desert region. The surge went right across the agitated inland sea in both directions, walking on water the edge of the cloud just reaching its opposite shoreline.
The tiny podship resembled a mote of dust in the prevailing winds as it struggled for atmospheric purchase.
“What next!” Retho’s amusement replaced itself with a look of mock resignation.
In seeming retaliation, the subcontinent that the surge cloud had overwhelmed responded with its own salvo of destruction. The small islandesque landmass belched forth cavalcades of brimstone and fire in waves of vertical thursts. A resounding shock wave shivered out-and-downward manifesting into a powerful seaquake that churned the inland sea until it resembled a boiling pot.
Breakers. Waves. Tsunami. Rising out of the sea, huge continuous waves surrounded the supercontinent. Half-met-high walls of water about to strike every coastline of the planet’s massive landmass; they would destroy everything in their paths for mets and mets inland. All the by-product of the energy venting as the world was jostled about by buffeting solar and gravitation forces like a shaken waterglobe.
“You know, you might want to relay all environmental controls to your station,” Retho frowned, studying his readings.
“Already done,” Dara said, her eyes flashing, from behind him at her quarterdeck-positioned console.
Retho nodded. He looked grim as the astrogator’s holographics morphed yet again into something more sinister. Hidden from view of the podship crew by the ring of the desert caldera’s volcanic amphitheater, but made visible on the circular console’s display plinth, a twenty-five hundred retem high wall of water was ready to come crashing down on the supercontinent’s eastern seashore, ready to destroy – for the moment dwarfing all the other works of Nature.
Perezsire allowed these moments of camaraderie and even happiness, because he knew more battles lay ahead, with the threat of a new, even stronger foe rising out of the ashes of the dying planet, a destruct force that was causing the board in front of him a red rash.
Capel smiled more to himself that to those he addressed, “It’s always nice to see clan-bonding.” The smile vanished, the eyes went steely. “But, can we stay focused on our task?”
The flight deck instantly became a nexus of concentrated activity. Nicraan fed the antigravity engines all the power the podship had to offer, causing the deck to buck and shudder. Partnering with Moela and Retho, he fought to stabilize the podship’s pitch and yaw, to maintain enough altitude to survive and still achieve the speed and momentum needed fo
r escape velocity.
All the while, Perezsire kept his eyes glued to the gravity well indicator before him on his command console’s angled surface. His expression betrayed the protest frozen in his throat.
All along the eastern shore, pyroclastic flows and tsunami collided in a clash of titans, convulsing up an impossibly high seven-met-high wall of rock, fire, and spindrift. The sonic boom was a deafening sound, a plaintive, screeching wail that sounded at once both otherworldly and distinctly familiar. Howling shock waves rippled across the beachline and over the bluffs onto the main desertscape in wrinkles of sand, flora, fauna, and stone like expanding transmitter source rings.
There was no longer any solid rock on the planet. It was all crumbling, contracting, collapsing in upon itself. What planetary life had remained was quickly consumed as the ground beneath rushing hooves, paws, claws, splayed feet, and even wings and flippers vanished as the last of the planet’s corporeal beings began to fall, to drop away into pyre chasms of brimstone and combustion.
Great whirlpools had formed in the surrounding storm clouds as ground and atmospheric temperatures joined and tried to establish equilibrium. Many of these spirals had transformed into gigantic funnels that fingered down from the sky to the erupting surface. Nicraan Matasire spotted four tornados whirling across the approaching flatlands as another burst of lightning cut across the Pioneer's path. It was hard to believe that by the planet's rotation, this side of the world was noon. The wind began to howl as the saucer moved higher and higher into the nightmare, dust storms popping up everywhere.
In the podship’s wake, from the saber ridges of the calderas’ volcanoes, came Retho’s prophecy of doom and destruction. The entire eastern volcanic ring of mountain ranges suddenly reached out vertically and laterally toward the racing Pioneer 4. An explosive eruption blasted molten and solid rock fragments into the air with tremendous force resembling solar flares. The eruption columns were enormous in size and grew rapidly, reaching more than twelve kiloretems above the volcanoes in less the thirty micronodes. A gray, choking blizzard enveloped the saucer from the spewed rain of ash.
Sidereal Quest Page 22
