“My gut says to get her in the water as fast as possible.”
“You heard her, Olson. Get us down.”
“Aye, sir.” He input the course, and they were pulled hard to the port side as Freedom turned toward the west. He tapped the ship-wide intercom button and announced they would be making an emergency landing in the water. The sensation of free-fall came a few seconds later, followed by the low hum of the air against the hull. “We’ll hit the water just north of Gaza,” said Olson. “What does your gut tell you about the depth there, Gleeson?”
“Aim for between one and three klicks from the shore,” Gleeson said. “Depth should be enough to submerge without crushing us.”
“That ‘should be’ isn’t exactly reassuring, Gleeson.”
“Make it at least two klicks out,” said Jason. “We’re going to attract enough attention without landing on top of a fleet of fishing boats. Thank God it’s the middle of the night.”
A few minutes passed. The sound of the hull against the atmosphere was now a dull roar. Gleeson’s voice came over the bridge speakers again. “We’re way too hot, Olson. You’ve got to cut the engines!”
“If I cut the engines now,” Olson said. “we’ll hit the water at five hundred kilometers per hour. Even if the ship holds together, the impact will kill everyone on board.”
“We’re looking at a reactor meltdown in less than two minutes,” Gleeson said. “Fire or water, you pick.”
“Just give me one minute,” Olson said. “I think I can do this.”
“What’s the plan, Olson?” Jason asked.
“Going to try a swan dive, sir.”
Jason sat back in his chair. “Jesus,” he murmured, realizing what Olson intended: rather than continuing to decelerate with Freedom’s main thrusters, nose-up, he was going to try to flip her around, so she would dive head-first into the water. That way, Freedom could theoretically hit the water going much faster without breaking up. He considered communicating the plan in a general announcement, but there really wasn’t anything he could say to prepare the colonists and crew for what was about to happen. If the colonists had followed orders, they were still strapped in from takeoff. If not… well, they were going to need more colonists.
The main thrusters cut out, and Jason felt a sickening sensation in his gut as Freedom suddenly spun one hundred eighty degrees. He half-expected her to keep spinning until she broke apart, but she quickly stabilized. She was now falling headfirst at several hundred kilometers per hour. The overhead display said they were less than ten klicks up; the view from the front-facing camera was a field of turquoise water bordered on the right side by a yellowish-brown land mass. The stabilizing thrusters, oriented forward, kicked in, and the restraints pulled hard against his shoulders as the ship began to slow. Soon, rows of whitecaps were visible on the screen. The land slipped off the edge, so that all they could see was the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean—dark blue on the left and a faded turquoise on the right. They were headed right for the middle of the gradient between the two colors, and Jason wondered what the depth was where they were going to hit. Fifty meters? A hundred? Five hundred? Suddenly being seen by a few fishermen didn’t seem like such a big concern. For every ten meters of depth, the pressure would increase by one atmosphere. If the sea floor was more than a thousand meters down, Freedom would be crushed like a tin can—assuming she didn’t break apart the moment she hit the surface.
Freedom shuddered as the hull tore through the atmosphere, the stabilizers firing at maximum thrust. “Velocity fifty meters per second and slowing,” said Olson. “General announcement,” he said to activate the ship-wide intercom. “Brace for impact in twenty seconds.” Jason breathed deeply, willing his muscles to relax. “Ten seconds,” said Olson. The water now appeared to be a uniform blue; Jason could make out individual waves. “Five… four… three…” Jason closed his eyes and leaned his head against his headrest. “…two… one.”
Weight came down on Jason’s shoulders like a sledgehammer, supernovas exploding in his eyes and brain. The sound was like a freight train hitting a mountain. A second later, a second thunderclap sounded as the water closed in around them. The pressure on his shoulders disappeared, and Jason had the sudden sensation of floating. Then gravity asserted itself, and along with it came pain like a shockwave that started in his shoulders, shot into his skull, and then echoed down the length of his body. Jason tried to groan, but found that his lungs were empty. His mind flirted with unconsciousness for a moment as he fought to draw breath. At last his diaphragm responded, and he sucked in a chest full of air. As the oxygen returned to his cells, his body responded with a renewed wave of pain. He kept his eyes closed, forcing himself to breathe deeply.
Gradually the pain eased enough for him to begin taking stock of his situation. He opened his eyes and looked around. Creed and Schwartz looked alert and unhurt, but Olson’s eyes were still closed. Jason pulled against his restraints and winced. The tissue was tender, but nothing seemed to be broken. The four of them hung upside down in their chairs; there was no sound but the ventilation system.
“Everyone okay?” Jason asked the others on the bridge.
“Aye, sir,” said Josh Creed.
“Hell of a headache,” Mika Schwartz groaned, “but I think I’m all right.”
“Olson?” said Jason.
Olson groaned.
“I think he’s hurt, captain,” said Creed. He put his hands on the latches of his restraints.
“Hold on, Creed,” said Jason. “Let’s not move him until we hit bottom.” He couldn’t tell whether Freedom was still moving, but they would have felt the impact if they’d hit the sea floor. Checking his console display, he saw that the ambient pressure was twenty-two atmospheres and climbing. The sensors, apparently surprised to find themselves underwater, were not yet reporting the depth of the sea floor. “Engineering, report,” said Jason.
“All good down here, sir,” said Kyra Gleeson after a moment. “All systems online, no major hull damage. Reactor has stabilized. You did it, Olson!”
“Olson is taking a breather,” Jason said. “Creed, can you give me an estimate on the depth?” As he spoke, gravity shifted, and he realized Freedom was pitching, her heavy stern falling toward the sea floor as the lighter prow was pulled upward. Over the next minute or so, as Freedom slowly righted herself, she continued to fall until she suddenly came to a halt with a thunk against the ground.
“We’re on the bottom, sir,” said Creed.
“Thanks, Creed,” Jason said. “What’s our depth?”
“Looks like… forty-one meters, sir. Sea floor is pretty level; minimal current at this depth. I think we’re stable.” Freedom seemed to be pointed directly up; the floor was now level beneath them.
“Good. Help me get Olson out of his chair. Schwartz, get Dr. Zotov in here. And get a status report from Nichols on the colonists.”
Chapter Forty-five
There were few serious injuries among the crew and colonists; most were badly bruised from the restraints but otherwise fine. Olson had a broken collarbone. There were some concussions, cracked ribs, detached retinas, a punctured lung, and a ruptured spleen. Olson was the only high-ranking officer with a major injury. Bree Cooper had a concussion, but her counterpart was uninjured. Both doctors on board, Lauren Foley and Adam Zotov, were free of major injuries, as were the two nurses. The animals, which had been restrained (and in some cases, sedated) prior to the launch fared better than the humans.
The news on the reactor was less promising. The reactor would need an overhaul, which would be tricky forty-one meters underwater. Other than Kyra Gleeson, only three of the crew had any training in working on proton reactors; the six engineers with the appropriate credentials, along with the rest of the IDL personnel who would have rounded out the crew, had been left on Geneva. Gleeson estimated that under their current conditions and with their current personnel, the overhaul would take at least six weeks.
Worse,
Gleeson said that even after the overhaul, she could not guarantee the reactor would be able to safely generate the amount of thrust they would need to launch. “The reactor is an array of eight proton reaction chambers,” Gleeson explained. “Four of the chambers are damaged, two of them irreparably. I can run the ship on four chambers, but to reach escape velocity from a planet with one Earth gravity, we need to run at eighty percent for at least nine minutes. That means I need at least seven of the eight chambers online. You see the problem.”
“We’re a chamber short,” said Jason. He sat across a conference table from Gleeson. To his left was Devin Olson, his right arm in a sling. Josh Creed said on Gleeson’s right; on her left was Mika Schwartz.
“Yes. Now I ordinarily wouldn’t even consider doing this, but circumstances being what they are….”
“Disclaimer noted, Gleeson,” said Jason. “What’s your idea?”
“We could conceivably use the two damaged chambers for a very brief amount of time, by removing the control rods entirely. If we do that, though, they will melt down. And a proton reactor meltdown isn’t like a fission reactor meltdown. The reaction will continue until so much energy builds up that the atoms of the chamber are torn apart. In other words, big explosion.”
“How long will we have?”
“No more than five minutes per chamber.”
“The reaction chambers can be jettisoned individually, can they not?” asked Jason.
“That’s right,” said Gleeson.
“So we launch on seven chambers, jettison the damaged one halfway through launch, switch to the eighth chamber, and then jettison that one when we’re in orbit.”
“That sounds, um, exciting,” said Olson.
“It’s lunacy, is what it is,” said Gleeson. “But it’s the only way we’re going to get off planet.”
“It also means we only have one shot,” said Olson.
“That’s right,” said Gleeson. “Sir, I know the plan was to land again in sub-Saharan Africa, but I would strongly recommend against it.”
“We don’t have to achieve orbit to get to Africa, though,” said Schwartz. “We could launch and fly low.”
“It won’t make any difference,” said Olson. “Freedom isn’t an airplane. Without constant thrust, she will drop like a rock. We’re going to need eighty percent of our reactor output just to get off the ground.”
“That’s right,” said Gleeson. “Once we fire one of those damaged chambers, we either reach escape velocity in ten minutes or we die on Earth.”
“Then we have to find our colonists here,” said Schwartz.
“At the bottom of the Mediterranean?” Creed asked. “Good luck with that.”
“Here in Israel, genius,” Schwartz said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find refugees. My people weren’t exactly treated well by the Romans.”
“Judaea,” Jason said. “And I caution you against thinking of them as your people, Schwartz. The IDL is your people. The residents of Judaea are people from another planet and another time, who don’t even speak your language.”
“Of course, sir,” said Schwartz. “New Jerusalem is a signatory of the IDL. I only meant ‘my people’ in terms of ancestry.”
“In any case,” said Olson, “unless we’re looking to recruit the rare deepwater Jew, we need to get to land.”
“Can Freedom make it to shore without lifting off?” asked Josh Creed.
“No,” said Gleeson. “That is, we could purge the water from the holds to give us some ballast and use the aux jets to move us closer to shore, but we’ll end up dragging the stern on the sea floor and falling over. In any case, until we get the reactor overhauled, the twenty-degree water we’re immersed in is the only thing keeping us from melting down.”
“A spaceship lying on the shore like a gigantic beached whale is going to draw attention we don’t want,” said Jason. “And I assume it’s going to take some time to acquire our genetic payload.” This was the euphemism they’d settled on for the group of colonists and the sperm samples they would need to ensure the survival of humanity. “We’ve got the perfect hiding spot here, and we might as well take advantage of it. While Gleeson’s team works on the reactor, we’ll have another team working on the acquiring the payload.”
“We’re two klicks from shore,” said Josh Creed. “That’s a long swim, but not impossible. But how do we get to the surface?”
“Space suits will suffice for diving gear,” said Gleeson. “We can turn one of the airlocks into a compression chamber. Pump it full of water and gradually increase the pressure to four atmospheres. As I recall from diving instruction a few years back, a safe rate of ascent or descent is about ten meters per minute. So figure five minutes in the airlock and then another five minutes to reach the surface. That should be enough to prevent pressure trauma and decompression sickness.”
“Okay,” Creed said. “So we get a team to the surface, and they manage to swim to shore. Then what? Assuming they can acquire the genetic payload, how do we get it… them… aboard Freedom?”
“We’ll have to bring Freedom to the surface,” said Olson. “We can bring her a little closer to shore, but we’ll have to ferry people by boat.”
“And we’re expecting to avoid making the history books?” Creed asked.
“UFO reports were common in the twentieth century,” Jason said. “They rarely made the news, much less the history books. If we rendezvous at night, all most people in the area will see is a momentary rocket plume. In any case, as Olson says, there’s no way around it. We have to take the risk.”
*****
Over the next two days, as work began on the reactor, Kyra Gleeson also oversaw the conversion of one of the airlocks to a compression chamber. When the chamber had been adequately tested, an ensign was sent outside the ship in a space suit to secure the end of an umbilical cable to a communications port on the hull. The other end of the cable was then attached to primitive buoy constructed from two empty steel storage drums that had been welded together. The buoy was released to float to the surface.
“We’ve got eyes on the surface,” said Creed, looking at his console display. “Not the most exciting view.” The buoy had been equipped with four tiny cameras to give a panoramic view of the area around it. At present, all four cameras showed only water and sky. Occasionally the camera pointing east caught a glimpse of land. The buoy also carried a radio transmitter and receiver, which Freedom could use to stay in contact with the away team.
When it had been verified that all the equipment on the buoy was functioning correctly, Jason, Schwartz and Creed entered the compression chamber in space suits. Olson, recovering from a broken collarbone, remained behind. Jason still had his doubts about bringing a woman along on a mission in second century Judaea, but his team was, after all, going to have to convince thirty women to leave with them on a spaceship, so having a female along could be helpful. Schwartz’s familiarity with the Jewish religion and customs might prove useful as well, even if she didn’t speak Aramaic.
They spent seven minutes in the compression chamber as it filled with water and the pressure was gradually increased to four atmospheres. Then the door opened overhead, and they floated outside, using their helmet lights to see. They had all gone through underwater training in space suits, so this was not entirely unfamiliar. The suits were weighted to give them minimal buoyancy; with no resistance, the three would float to the surface at about ten meters per minute.
“We’re outside,” Jason said into his helmet radio. “Heading for the umbilical.” He pointed toward the cable. His feet no longer touching the hull, he performed an awkward breaststroke to propel himself toward the cord. It was only a few meters away, but the current was against him, and actually swimming in a space suit proved to be far more difficult than he’d imagined. By the time he reached the umbilical a minute or so later, he was breathing hard, and sweat was pouring down his face despite the cold water pressing all around him. Schwartz and Creed arrived a momen
t later.
“Made it,” Jason gasped.
“Good to hear, Captain,” said Olson. “Take your time.”
Jason didn’t need to be told that. The three remained there for another minute, clutching the umbilical and panting. “Ready?” he said at last.
“Aye, sir,” said the others together.
“Beginning ascent,” Jason said. “All right, nice and slow. We’ve got plenty of air.” They were breathing a tailored mix that substituted helium for some of the nitrogen, to reduce the chances of nitrogen bubbles forming as the pressure on their body decreased. He loosened his grip on the umbilical and began to slide slowly upward. Gleeson had said ten meters per minute was safe, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Five minutes later, he judged they were about halfway up. He no longer needed the helmet light; the surface shimmered brightly twenty meters overhead. “Everybody okay?” he asked.
“We’re fine, sir,” said Creed. Jason thought he sensed some impatience.
“Relax, Creed,” Jason said. “Nobody up there is waiting for us. We’re two thousand years early.”
They continued slowly upward, finally breaking the surface almost ten minutes after leaving the ship. The three clung to the handholds that had been welded onto the buoy as they were gently rocked by the waves. It was late afternoon, and a blazing sun hung low over the Mediterranean. Opposite the sun, the hills of Judaea could be seen over the swells.
“We’re at the surface,” Jason said.
“Copy that,” said Olson.
“May I, sir?” Creed asked.
“Go ahead,” said Jason, who was in no hurry to get moving. The process of getting to the surface had been surprisingly tiring.
Creed pulled himself out of the water and onto the top of the buoy. He began the laborious process of removing his space suit. When he’d finished, he stripped off his t-shirt and underwear, sparing a wink for Mika Schwartz, who had been doing a poor job of pretending not to watch. “Just remember,” said Creed, stretching his lithe, naked body in the sun, “you’re next.”
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 30
