Earth and Air

by Janet Edwards

  I was both startled and disappointed to hear that. Felipe had seemed the perfect example of a handsome, courageous hero when he described the rescue in Paris Coeur. Now I was picturing him being air sick. Admittedly, it was possible for someone to be both brave and air sick, at least at different times, but it still tarnished my heroic image of him.

  On the other hand, discovering Felipe wasn’t so intimidatingly perfect after all was reassuring. He had weaknesses just the same way that I did. It suddenly seemed far more likely that I could match his achievements and get a place on a University Earth research team.

  “I made Felipe come back later and clean up the mess,” said Gradin, “but the smell lingered for days.”

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “Felipe is an unpleasant young man, and I advise you to stay well away from him in future,” said Gradin. “Now let me tell you all about the time I rescued Valeska from a flood on Paris Coeur Main Dig Site. She’d had Earth 1 working on ...”

  “Wait!” I interrupted him sharply. “You aren’t talking about the same Valeska who I met at Athens, are you?”

  “Yes,” said Gradin.

  I made a faint squeaking noise. “But ... You mean that Valeska is Professor Valeska Orlova, senior team leader of University Earth Archaeological Research Team 1?”

  “Yes,” repeated Gradin. “Well, she led Earth 1 for over twenty years, but she isn’t leading it any longer. Valeska retired from the job a few months ago, and is still working out what to do next, which is why she was free to help out at Athens.”

  I had a weird dizzy moment. I’d read so much about the exploits of University Earth’s most famous research team under the leadership of the legendary Professor Valeska Orlova. I’d dreamed of meeting her one day. Discovering that I’d actually talked to her without ... Chaos, what clueless things had I said to her?

  “Why didn’t you tell me who she was?” I wailed.

  “You’re so keen on archaeology, I assumed you’d know all about Valeska,” said Gradin.

  “I’d no idea she was that Valeska!” I swung round in my seat to glare at him, which was a mistake in two ways. Firstly, Gradin couldn’t see my savage expression through my sealed impact suit hood. Secondly, it meant the aircraft drifted sideways.

  I hastily faced forward again, and corrected my course. “I’ve seen lots of images of Professor Orlova, but I only met Valeska in person once when we were at Athens, and she had her impact suit hood sealed so I couldn’t see her face.”

  I tried to remember exactly what I’d said during that meeting, and made the squeaking sound again. “You always casually referred to Valeska by her first name, and you’d obviously known her for years. How was I to guess that you were a friend of such a famous archaeologist as Professor Orlova?”

  “I’m friends with lots of famous archaeologists.” Gradin sounded offended, but then he surprised me by laughing. “Well, it’s more that they’re under an obligation to be friendly with me because I’ve saved their lives. Valeska is a bit different though. I’ve known her since long before she was famous.”

  He shrugged. “Now, I was going to tell you about how I rescued Valeska from that flood.”

  While I flew the next few survey legs, Gradin told me several rescue stories where he featured as the hero. Every time, he waited expectantly for me to say something flattering. This was far less painful than usual, because I’d discovered the magic words. All I had to do was keep repeating the same thing at intervals in the closest thing I could manage to a sincere voice. “You’re the best pilot in the whole of humanity.”

  Gradin’s lookup chimed, but he ignored it. The lookup kept chiming at strangely irregular intervals for the next five minutes, until I felt I had to say something.

  “Wouldn’t you like to answer your call?”

  “I don’t want to answer either of my calls,” he said. “One is from the Chief Administrator of New York Fringe, who’ll want to nag me about inventory reports. The other is from Valeska, and I refuse to listen to her yapping about that battle re-enactment again.”

  “My history teacher is going to be fighting for the Confederates. I expect Valeska wants you to fight for them too, because they’re short of Confederate soldiers.”

  “I don’t care if Valeska wants me to fight for the Confederates, the Romans, or the cross-sector Military,” said Gradin. “Those battle re-enactments are silly. They tell you who’s supposed to win before you start fighting. What’s the point in that?”

  “The point is to be historically accurate.”

  Gradin’s lookup eventually stopped chiming, only to bleep for an incoming message. He frowned at it and made a rude noise. “Valeska’s given up on the battle re-enactment. Now she’s trying to persuade me to go to a banquet.”

  “What’s wrong with going to a banquet?”

  “It’s going to be an authentic Roman banquet. Authentic historical food always tastes terrible. Valeska says there’ll be entertainers as well, and I know exactly what that means. The musicians and singers aren’t so bad, but the jugglers are embarrassing to watch. I don’t know why it is that every re-enactment group has a misguided member who thinks they can juggle when they’re incredibly bad at it.”

  I didn’t say a word. On the last evening of every school trip, Crozier would give a juggling demonstration, and Gradin was perfectly right about it being embarrassing to watch.

  Gradin tapped busily at his lookup. I guessed he was messaging Valeska to tell her his feelings about banquets. Intermittent bleeps for incoming messages alternated with more tapping from Gradin. I kept carefully quiet rather than get caught up in some sort of message war.

  I finally completed the last leg of the morning survey. “Should I head back to the landing area now?”

  “I’m not going to get my lunch if we stay up here, am I?” Gradin tapped aggressively at his lookup.

  I sighed and banked the plane to head back towards the New York Fringe Command Centre. I was ten minutes away from starting my approach run, and already feeling my tension building as I thought about the landing, when the survey plane tipped sideways on to its right wing and started skidding across the sky.

  Chapter Eight

  Gravity was throwing me in impossible directions, the dig site ruins were somewhere beside me instead of below, and my main display screen showed we were losing height rapidly. I instinctively battled with the controls, trying to get the aircraft back to something approaching level flight.

  After a few seconds of blind panic, I managed a partial victory, but the survey plane was still behaving like a wild thing, constantly trying to break away into that weird sideways skid. This didn’t make any sense, because there weren’t any warning lights on my control panel, but then I saw the indicator bar for thruster 2 had entirely vanished.

  “Thruster 2 has failed,” I gasped. “Gradin, take control of the plane!”

  “No,” said Gradin. “You’ve managed to stabilize our height. We have to try to work out exactly what’s gone wrong before we do anything as drastic as transferring control between the two pilot positions. Just keep heading for the New York Fringe Command Centre. Whatever is wrong, that’s our best landing area, because they’re fully equipped to deal with crashes.”

  I groaned. I was desperate to pass this crisis over to Gradin’s expert hands, but he was right. I was still struggling to keep the plane level, but at least I understood why it was trying to slide away sideways. The plane thrusters were a complex multi-directional design to allow for both standard flight and varying combinations of thrusters and hovers. With only three working thrusters instead of four, the whole system would be out of balance.

  I tried juggling the power on the other three thrusters, and found a setting that was much better. The plane still kept drifting sideways though, so I had to keep nudging it back on course. Gradin wasn’t saying anything. Presumably he was thinking through the problem, but I couldn’t help babbling away to myself.

  “We’ve definitely lo
st one of the thrusters, but it can’t have blown. If it had, we’d have heard an explosion, seen smoke, noticed something. There should be a red warning light on the control panel too. That means it might not be a thruster failure, but a failure of the control system that ...”

  An anxious voice on the broadcast channel interrupted me. “This is Fringe Dig Site Command. New York survey plane, what is your status?”

  Gradin sighed. “Dig Site Command must have noticed that spectacular slide towards the ground, and how we’re jerking our way across the sky. Talk to them, Jarra.”

  “Why me rather than you?”

  “Because you’re the one that’s flying the plane.”

  I took a deep breath, dragged up memories of the emergency procedures that I’d learnt for my pilot theory test, and set my suit comms to speak on broadcast channel. “This is New York survey plane. We have engine problems. Thruster 2 has stopped working, but the fault may actually be in the control systems. Currently heading for New York Fringe Command Centre landing area while assessing situation.”

  “This is Fringe Dig Site Command. Initiating emergency landing protocols. Standing by for further updates.”

  I set my comms back to normal. “What should we do, Gradin? Jump?”

  “If possible, we’re going to land,” said Gradin. “I only jump out of planes when it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “But we can’t possibly land on three thrusters,” I said. “The plane keeps tipping sideways, and if our wingtip clips the ground at speed then ... Oh, wait a minute. If we cut the matching thruster on the other side of the plane, then the power will be balanced!”

  “Ah, you’ve finally worked that out,” said Gradin. “I thought you’d get there eventually.”

  “You mean you’ve been sitting there waiting for me to work out ...?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Why didn’t you tell me to cut thruster 3? You’re the instructor. I’m just a pupil.”

  “Once you’d got the plane out of the slide, we weren’t in any immediate danger, so I could afford to use this as a teaching experience.” Gradin’s voice was maddeningly calm. “You have to think for yourself when you’re flying a plane, Jarra. You don’t wait for your passengers to do the thinking for you.”

  “All right, I’m doing my own thinking now, and I think we have to shut down thruster 3 to land!”

  “There’s no need to shout when I’m sitting right next to you.”

  I told myself that I couldn’t kill Gradin until we were safely on the ground. “We should be able to hold height on two thrusters at full power, shouldn’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Gradin.

  “It seems likely the problem is with the controls rather than the thrusters themselves. I’ve been able to operate the remaining three thrusters so far, but logic tells me that shutting one down is pretty drastic because the control systems must get ... rerouted or something. That means there’s a risk that shutting down another of the thrusters could cause a total failure of the whole engine control system.”

  “I agree with your logic,” said Gradin. “If you think you’ve got a control problem, you have to be really careful about making changes. I learnt that the hard way three decades ago. One of my displays was flickering on and off. It was annoying me, so I turned that display off, and the entire rest of the control panel went black as well. I had to ...”

  “I don’t care what happened three decades ago!” I snapped at him. “I’m only interested in what’s happening right now. We have to cut thruster 3 to land. That could cause more problems, so we need to do it now rather than when we’ve committed ourselves to a landing approach. Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” said Gradin.

  “And just in case ...” I changed my comms to speak on broadcast channel. “This is New York survey plane. We have to cut another of the thrusters to balance our engines before attempting an emergency landing. There is a small chance that will cause catastrophic control failure and we’ll have to jump. Are there any people on the ground near us?”

  “This is Fringe Dig Site Command. New York survey plane, stand by for transmission of current dig site location data to your main display. Impact suit locations are marked in blue. Dome locations are marked in red.”

  A few seconds later, dots appeared on my main display. One big red dot well off to my left, with two groups of smaller blue dots near it. If this plane crashed, I had to make sure it crashed to my right.

  I closed broadcast channel, and glanced down to check my hover tunic was strapped on properly. “As pilot, it’s my responsibility to check my passengers have their hover tunics fitted correctly,” I said bitterly.

  “Mine’s fine,” said Gradin.

  “If it’s not too much trouble, then perhaps you could stand by ready to blow the cockpit cover if we need to jump. We were flying low after doing that survey, and lost more height when thruster 2 failed. If we start falling out of the sky, then every second will count.”

  Gradin leaned forward in his seat. “Standing by to blow cockpit cover.”

  “Shutting down thruster in three, two, one ... now!”

  I was ready for the plane to do anything from another mad lurch sideways to going into a complete spin, but there was just a slight bump as we went down to two thrusters. The plane was flying perfectly now but gradually losing height. I increased power on the remaining two thrusters to maximum, and our altitude stabilized. I gave a huge sigh of relief, and opened broadcast channel again.

  “This is New York survey plane. We’ve shut down thruster 3 without problems. Co-pilot handing control back to pilot.”

  Gradin opened broadcast channel as well. “This is Gradin. New York survey plane control remains with co-pilot.”

  “This is Fringe Dig Site Command. Exactly what’s going on up there?”

  “This is Gradin. We daren’t risk transferring the controls between the two pilot positions, and we can’t change seats in midair. Co-pilot will make emergency, two-thruster landing at New York Fringe Command Centre landing area.”

  “We have to transfer ...” I remembered the whole of the dig site could hear what I was saying, and closed broadcast channel before starting my sentence again. “We have to transfer control now, Gradin. I can’t make the landing myself.”

  “You have to make the landing, Jarra,” Gradin said, in what was probably supposed to be a soothing voice. “We’d no choice but to shut down thruster 3, and we got away with that, but transferring system control between the two pilot stations is far more drastic. We can’t take the risk when we’re too low for a safe jump. Our hover tunics wouldn’t have enough time to activate and slow us before we hit the ground.”

  “Our impact suits would protect us.”

  “You know there’s a limit to what impact suits can do, and we’d be right on that limit,” said Gradin. “We might just suffer minor injuries, but we could well suffer major death. I want to live to celebrate my hundredth, and my best chance of doing that is if you land this plane.”

  “But I can’t land this plane, Gradin. I can’t transition to hovers with only two working thrusters.”

  “No, you can’t,” he said, “but neither can I. Even for the best pilot in humanity, transitioning to hovers would be impossible when the transition system is trying to use balancing thrusters it doesn’t have. You’ll have to make your landing approach as normally as you can. At the point you’d usually go for a smooth transition to hovers, you have to cut thrusters dead with one hand and activate hovers with the other.”

  He shrugged. “You’ll drop like a rock when the thrusters cut out. At best, you’re fast enough and lucky enough to catch the aircraft on hovers. At worse, it hits the ground hard enough to damage it, but we should be fine inside our impact suits.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We’re getting close to the Command Centre, Jarra. You have to make the landing. It’s the lowest risk option.”

  I looked out of the side window at the ground. It seemed a long way down, but i
t wasn’t far enough. I groaned, and opened broadcast channel.

  “This is New York survey plane. Jumping isn’t an option given our low altitude. Co-pilot attempting emergency, two-thruster landing at New York Fringe Command Centre landing area. Commencing landing approach now.”

  “This is Fringe Dig Site Command. Emergency teams are standing by to assist you.” The voice paused for a second before adding three words that broke all the dig site protocols. “Deity aid you.”

  I eased off the thrusters and started losing height. With only two working thrusters, I was totally committed to the landing now. I focused my attention on the ground next to the great domes of New York Fringe Command Centre. There were bright red hover sleds waiting at the side of the landing area. Those had to belong to the emergency teams.

  My brain conjured up an image of emergency teams rushing towards a burning plane, putting out the flames, dragging out figures in blackened impact suits. I blinked my eyes to banish it, checked my altitude, saw I was losing height too fast, and gave the thrusters a little more power. A few seconds later, I had to increase power again. Having only two thrusters rather than four made a chaos big difference.

  I was back on a standard approach path now. Not too high. Not too low. Not too fast. I alternated between checking my control panel and looking at the centre of the landing area ahead, trying to ignore the bright red hover sleds. My hand tightened on the thruster control, as I counted the seconds down to the moment when I’d normally transition to hovers.

  Three. Two. One. I cut thrusters with one hand and slammed hovers to maximum with the other. The aircraft dropped under me, then bounced ludicrously high into the air, dropped again into a second, gentler bounce, and then settled down at standard hover height.

  I closed hovers down slowly, and the aircraft lowered gently onto the ground. I sat there for a moment, just appreciating the fact I was still alive, before remembering to speak on broadcast channel. “New York survey plane has landed.”