He found that the mere idea of controlling the Nightshade in this manner was far simpler than the reality of making it work on a real ship in a real atmosphere. Just tweaking the shape of the boundary layer and the slight but constant adjustments to maintain stability was extremely challenging. But, Max had to do more. In order to live through the landing, Max had to bring his ship down on a part of this planet’s surface that wasn’t covered with mountains, trees, boulders, or deep blue sea, which meant that he had to be able to steer the ship. Simple stability was not enough.
Max needed maneuverability.
Max cobbled together combinations of airfoil shapes and virtual control surfaces that looked good to him in hastily configured computer simulations but that when implemented set the ship careening into flat spins or wild tumbles every time he tried to turn a few degrees to the right or left. These failures not only inflicted serious dynamic stresses on both the Nightshade and on Max, both of which had already received just about as much rough handling as they could stand, they also caused rapid loss of precious altitude, cutting into Max’s flying time and reducing his choice of landing sites.
Max was constantly conscious of how far he was above the ground, a distance that was diminishing rapidly. He was running out of time before he and his high tech ship became a very low tech smoking hole in the no tech ground. Finally, on the fourth attempt, Max wound up with a configuration that would keep the spacecraft stable and allow him to steer it, but he was now down to 3850 meters and still falling fast, although not so rapidly as before. The weak atmosphere deflectors didn’t allow him to create a shape that provided much in the way of lift.
It would have to do. Fortunately, one of the systems that had come back on was the terrain mapping system which had scanned the surface for several hundred kilometers around Max’s predicted area of impact. He pulled up a topographic map and keyed for the computer to highlight suitable landing areas.
He was surprised to find that virtually all of the scanned area was covered with vegetation, generally trees that showed up on sensors as being very similar to trees on Earth. Designed for intelligence-gathering, the computer (not so) helpfully classified the plants as wetlands hardwoods in the swamps and estuaries and forests comprised of trees that were similar to pines or to hardwoods in the drier alluvial soil (planetary ecology data constituting useful intelligence more often than most people think).
Putting aside the unexpected issue of “what’s a nice Earth-like plant like you doing in a place like this?” Max frantically looked for a large flat area, preferably covered with soft dirt or mud. The limited control he had over the Nightshade was not going to let him set the ship down like a butterfly lighting on a flower, as Max liked to think of his landings. Rather, he was going to hit the ground with a fair amount of residual velocity, most of it (he hoped) horizontal rather than vertical.
There really wasn’t anything suitable. There were only a few clearings, the largest about a third of the size he needed, and all located near lakes, a few of which were over 3000 meters across.
Too bad I can’t land on those.
The ship unexpectedly began to roll, completing a rotation ever three or four seconds. Apparently the airflow over part of the deflector boundary was no longer strong enough to provide enough stabilizing force to counteract some irregularity or other on the Nightshade’s hull or mass distribution. Max fiddled with the deflector controls, trimming his virtual ailerons to counteract the roll. It was hard to fly the ship with the yoke and manipulate the deflectors while continuing to look for a safe place to land and trying not to totally lose his mind over the rate at which he was losing altitude.
The landing was going to be dicey enough as it was. He visualized himself flying the ship as it slowed and descended until the last moment, at which point the laws of fluid dynamics dictated that the airflow over the deflectors was no longer fast enough to stabilize the ship, at which point it would tumble uncontrollably and drop out of the sky like a brick thrown out of an airplane.
Someday there will be a brass marker: “Here (and here, and here, and over there) lie the remains of Lt (JG) Max Robichaux, done in by the laws of fluid dynamics.” Maybe they should say “aerodynamics.” I remember that Dad was a stickler: aerodynamics is the more specific term because it is a branch of fluid dynamics. “Aerodynamics” applies only to gases while “fluid dynamics” applies to fluids, that is, to gases and to liquids.
Suddenly the hairs on the back of Max’s neck and along his arms stood up in a frisson of hope.
Fluid dynamics applies to liquids . . . liquids like water.
Just as aerodynamics was keeping him alive right now, maybe inventive application of another branch of fluid dynamics--hydrodynamics--might keep him alive in a few minutes by letting him land on one of those lakes.
Just maybe.
It wouldn’t be easy. Max knew that he couldn’t just fly in and drop his ship into the water at several hundred kilometers per hour because the Nightshade didn’t have a boat-shaped, hydrodynamic ventral hull like a seaplane or an amphibious spacecraft.
No, Nightshade class stealth and reconnaissance fighters were anything but hydrodynamic. The ship’s bow was nearly square with just a bit of rounding at the corners, and its bottom was nearly flat save for a few dozen antennae, scanner domes, transducers, sensor emitters, and other decidedly non-hydrodynamic irregularities stuck on at various places with no regard for the drag they might create. Max’s best guess was that if he sat this thing down on the water at the speeds he was expecting for the landing, it would hydroplane in more or less stable fashion so long as it had enough inertia to overcome the hull’s unfortunate shape, but when it slowed down and the rest of the hull dropped into the water, the absence of any steering force and the irregular sources of drag all over the hull would cause the ship to skitter across the water uncontrollably.
This chain of events could come out any one of several ways: slamming into the shore—killing Max with longitudinal G forces; capsizing or rolling--killing Max with radial or lateral G forces; nosediving followed by the ship driving into the bottom of the lake--strand Max underwater and killing him with the longitudinal G forces (which would make being stranded much less difficult to take); and flipping the ship end over end--tearing Max’s body apart with the G longitudinal and radial G forces.
Max was sure that there were others, but they didn’t come readily to mind. He had never done particularly well in fluid dynamics.
What he needed was a lower hull shaped like that of a seaplane, and the chances of being able to swap one out for what he had out here in the Centaurus-Crux arm of the galaxy were thinner than a ballerina on a hunger strike.
Except that he had a way of doing just that.
Continuing to steer with one hand, Max punched into the computer some quick (and very rough) calculations. He concluded that if he configured the impulsion boundary in front of and under the ventral hull so that it was shaped like that of a seaplane, the deflectors--even at their highly reduced output--might provide enough stability to keep the ship under some sort of rough control until friction slowed it enough so that it would move through the water like an incompetently designed barge rather than an out of control speedboat. In theory, at least, he should be able to bring the ship to a stop along a length of water of 3500 meters or less.
This water landing deflector configuration was easy to input, as it was geometrically simple and didn’t have to have a complex system of control surfaces for steering and maintaining stability in three dimensions. He programmed the system so that pressing one of the pilot-configurable buttons on the yoke (the one Max usually set to dispense sensor decoys) would shift the deflectors from flight mode to water landing mode. He figured that he had improved the odds of his surviving his landing on this planet from 0% to about 40%. I’ve survived longer odds.
And, lots of people have died on shorter ones.
Max quickly input new landing parameters into the computer, instructin
g it to find for him a lake at least 3500 meters long with no obstacles or shallows, bordered by a reasonably flat area covered with reasonably soft soil, all within his present glide range. It took the computer exactly 0.00027 seconds to generate an answer:
Unable to locate terrain meeting stated parameters.
Shit.
Max keyed for the computer to show him the area that came closest to matching his criteria. An area started blinking green on the topographic map. He touched the spot and keyed for the computer to tell him which parameter or parameters failed to meet his requirements.
Diameter of water body at widest chord: 2854 meters.
Double shit.
It would have to do.
Hell, they were rough calculations anyway. Maybe I was excessively conservative and 2854 meters is all I need.
He felt a cold jab right between his shoulder blades as the other shoe dropped.
And, maybe I was excessively optimistic and I need 4000 meters, or even more than that.
He keyed for the computer to give him a course that would bring him to the lake lined up to land across its widest part and landing into the wind, while providing a glide path that would maximize his limited ship control while minimizing his landing speed. He steered the ship to the indicated vector and dropped the nose a few degrees to align it with the computer’s glide path calculations. While doing so, he glanced at the landing parameters. He wished he hadn’t, as there was one line that gave him considerable pause:
Landing speed: 873 kph +-184 kph.
He typed a few queries into the computer and shook his head at the answers.
I’ve got to be totally insane to try to land--on water!-- at 873 kilometers per hour! Well, crazy or desperate. The computer doesn’t know and I have no fucking idea what the energy transfer between the ship and the water at the deflector boundary is going to do to the water at that speed. Well, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.
File me under “D” for desperate.
Max noticed that the computer was following normal safety protocols and spotting his landing about 60 meters from the near shore.
I’m gonna need those 60 meters.
Accordingly, Max adjusted the aim point to 15 meters from the shore, which was the closest possible landing point given the steepness of his glide slope and the height of the trees that grew to within 78 meters of the lake’s edge.
Or course, he could fly toward the lake in an “S” pattern dumping as much of his velocity as possible and using the last few seconds of his controllable flight to skim just above the surface of the lake until he lost lift and dropped to the water. The problem with that apparently clever notion was that the computer had not been able to model accurately the aerodynamics of the ship and its deflector boundary at low speed, so it couldn’t calculate with any precision at what point Max’s jury-rigged virtual flying wing would lose controllability and lift. If he tried to allow his landing speed to drop all the way to the theoretical limit of controllability, he just might find himself losing control sooner than the computer predicted and dropping into the trees like a brick that bounced out of the bed of a truck, making for very bad end to a very bad day for Max.
Accordingly, Max chose maintaining the higher airspeed as the lesser of two evils: he would rather touch down on the lake under control at 873 kph than drop on it (or into the trees) unexpectedly at 400 or 500 kph. Even if he managed to avoid instant death by coming down on the water instead of on land, he’d probably hit in in a violent roll or yaw, in which case he’d get bounced around more violently than those daredevils who used to go over Niagara Falls enclosed in beer barrels, with certainly painful and probably fatal results. It wouldn’t do the ship much good, either, likely ripping the fuel tanks from their brackets, splitting them apart and triggering an explosion. Since deuterium’s combustion properties are virtually indistinguishable from those of regular hydrogen, the resulting fireball would be spectacular.
Of course, by that point, my brain will have been shaken enough to have reached the consistency of overcooked tapioca.
The computer had directed him toward a waypoint 12.8 kilometers to the right of the lake and 2.5 kilometers to the near side, from which he would begin a long, slow rounded “L” turn to align his glide path with the lake’s long axis. The Nightshade responded to the maneuver even more poorly than Max expected, bucking with the enthusiasm of a pissed off rodeo bull and fishtailing like an alligator gar trying to swim against the current. Only some very fancy flying could prevent these unexpected movements from depriving the ship of its fragile aerodynamic stability and resulting in it falling from the sky and hitting the ground in an unsurvivable crash. Fortunately for Max, he was fully capable of delivering flying that was just about as fancy as could be executed in that ship under those conditions. Max’s near-instant, instinctual corrections preserved his life.
For a few more seconds, anyway.
As for the seconds that came after those seconds . . . they were next in line and Max would deal with them when it was their turn. But, for now, the ship was still in the air and still under (relatively) stable aerodynamic control, rather than wreckage at the bottom of a hole in the woods.
Max had to remind himself to breathe. He absently wiped the sweat from his brow with the left forearm of his flight suit. His undergarments were soaked with sweat, and yet he had to work to keep himself from shivering and his teeth from chattering. It was becoming more and more difficult to hold the yoke steady. The rough handling inflicted on Max’s body by the last several minutes combined with the emotional stress of staying calm enough to fly the ship and otherwise keep functioning in the face of life and death peril were starting to take their toll. The ship was still flying, but the pilot was running on fumes.
I don’t think I can do this. There’s only so much fuel in the tank and mine’s just about empty.
The idea of running out of fuel brought to Max’s mind the clear image of a prop-driven airplane exhausting its fuel: the engine sputtering and dying, the propeller lurching to a stop, the cockpit emptying of all sound save only that of air moving over the plane’s metal skin.
But for Max, this wasn’t just an image. It was a memory.
And it made him smile.
It had happened when Max was eight—just two days before the Gynophage attack. It was Max’s last happy time with his father. Spacecraft designer/engineer, Harvey Q. Robichaux, M.Eng, Eng.D., Ph.D., had taken Max up in one of his experimental airplanes which, because Dr. Robichaux was a member of the “Wrights’ Brothers Experimental Aircraft Society,” he had designed with pencil, paper, and slide-rule and built with his own hands and simple power tools with nothing but pre-1947 technology. As often happened when they went up together, Dr. Robichaux had let Max take the controls. Little Max sat on two boat cushions duct taped to the seat so he could see over the dashboard and was able to reach the rudder pedals only because there was a 30 centimeter thick wooden block strapped to each. Even on Nouvelle Acadiana, a planet that took a more “relaxed” attitude toward legal regulation than one found on most worlds in the Core Systems, letting an eight year old fly an airplane was not even slightly legal, even though Dr. Robichaux was a licensed pilot and flight instructor and even though he was sitting in the left hand seat.
Just as Max had turned the aircraft back toward the airport, the engine died. Dr. Robichaux tapped the reproduction vintage analog fuel gauge, causing the needle to drop almost instantly from showing 3 gallons (whatever a “gallon” was) remaining, to E. “Fuel gauge must have stuck,” he muttered. “Keep the aircraft straight and level. She’s very stable, even on a dead stick.” His voice was patient. Calm. Matter of fact. He turned to Max and smiled, “So, young man, this is your first in-flight emergency. How does it feel?”
“Kind of exciting,” Max said, truthfully. “But, I’m not scared. Well, maybe a little, but not much. I can see the airport dead ahead, and I know you’re a good enough pilot to make a dead stick landing. And, I know yo
u’re too smart to think that I can do it, so I’m confident that you’ll set us down safe. I like it. It’s like this weird electricity that just went through me.”
“That’s called an ‘adrenalin rush.’ I think I’m raising an adrenalin junkie. Anyway, thank you, young man, for your kind words about my piloting ability. But, I prefer to save my dead stick landings for when they are absolutely necessary.”
He then grabbed a small green lever on the dash and flipped it from MAIN to RESERVE. “Just keep flying, son, and when I tell you to, depress the starter for five seconds or until the engine catches.”
Max nodded his understanding as he heard the rustle of his father’s sleeve as he looked at his wrist chrono and quietly counted down the seconds from fifteen to one. Max guessed that the delay was to allow an auxiliary fuel pump, probably driven by a battery or a small air turbine that popped out of the fuselage somewhere, to pump fuel from the auxiliary tank to the carburetor.
“Hit it!”
Max hit the starter and the engine, after a single cough, started and within seconds was running normally. “I always put a twenty liter reserve tank on these little airplanes, with its own fuel line, fuel pump, and power supply. Costs me a little payload, but gas, tank, pump, brackets, battery, and fuel lines all told come to about eighteen kilos. In the air or in space, always remember these words, my son: ‘Critical systems must be redundant.’ Those eighteen kilos saved me from having to make a dead stick landing today, so I’d say they were worth it. The trick about auxiliary fuel is to forget that it’s there until you really, truly need it. Otherwise, you use it up joyriding and when it runs out you wind up burying your plane in the mud of your Cousin Maurice’s crawfish farm. ”
Max shook his head, as though to knock the memory loose from his brain, and wiped the beginnings of a tear from his left eye. No time for that, Max. He grit his teeth to put the memory back behind the locked door in his mind where memories like that one were supposed to stay.
The Hunters of Vermin Page 4
