Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  And Skippy? That little shithead was fine, never better. He still thought he had done a big favor for me, and hinted he wanted an apology for me rejecting a wonderful gift.

  The last star in the universe is going to be a cold, dark cinder before he gets an apology from me.

  We had reached target depth, about eighty thousand feet deeper than the first mission of this refueling op had flown. Those ships had reported bad and unpredictable turbulence, and been forced to cut their flights short due to stress on the pilots. I had wholeheartedly agreed with their decision to come back early with their tanks less than seventy percent full. The last thing I needed was pilots pushing themselves too far because of some macho bullshit.

  The good news about being eighty thousand feet deeper in the thick, toxic atmosphere was the collection apparatus would siphon fuel faster, and cut our flight duration by an estimated forty minutes. The bad news was the air outside the ships created a lot more resistance so we had to run the engines hotter to compensate. We also had another eighty thousand feet to climb on our return flight. And, you know, we were that much closer to the depth at which the atmospheric pressure would crush our ships. Good times.

  We leveled off and spent twenty minutes verifying every system was working perfectly, and that the turbulence was manageable. The air was smoother than the previous flight encountered, but we still hit vicious updrafts and downdrafts that came out of nowhere, Skippy didn’t have enough data about this planet to make an accurate model of the air circulation patterns. The pilots of both ships conferred, and agreed they were confident in the delicate operation of deploying the drogue chute, so we got started.

  Strung between both ships was a thin cable we had hooked up in orbit, the cable had enough slack and stretching ability that the ships could fly in a loose formation. If that lead cable snapped, we would have to climb back into orbit to attach another, there was no way to do that while the pair of Condors were bouncing around in the atmosphere.

  The other Condor started the process of deploying the drogue chute, and when the thing was about three quarters unrolled from its reel, disaster struck. We hit an updraft which was not a problem by itself, but at the same time, we got a visit from the screw-up fairy.

  The hatch from which the chute deployed was on the port side of the Condor, and it was a crappy design by the Thuranin. Instead of the door retracting in the hull, it popped out slightly and slid forward. This feature demonstrated that big Condors were designed as spacecraft first, with considerations for flying in atmospheres second. This would not be a problem, except we had used that hatch a lot to deploy safety lines and reel in stuff we wanted from the junkyard. The cables and reels had been inspected, along with the sliding door mechanism, but neither humans nor Skippy’s bots took the mechanism completely apart to check on the pin that held the door when it was retracted. That jolt from turbulence was enough to make the worn-out pin snap, the airstream howling past caught the door and it slid back to slam shut. Or, it tried to, because the folded drogue was in the way. The violent impact of the door crushed the tough nanofiber strands of the drogue and for a couple seconds, the spool kept feeding out the folded drogue inside the bay behind the partly-closed door. Then the door, which had slipped off its tracks and gotten bent, broke away. Thirteen meters of drogue got pulled out all at once, pulled hard because the crushed part of the chute was no longer folded and the air yanked on it. The Condor yawed and rolled to port, out of control.

  Skippy’s homemade fuel collection drogue was designed to break away at both ends if stress on the drogue got too strong. The end attached to my Condor separated as designed to protect us. Unfortunately, the breakaway part on the other Condor’s end was still wrapped around the reel, so the reel tore loose and because it didn’t fit through the hatchway, it took part of the hull with it.

  No longer having a rapidly-unfolding parachute pulling it to port made the Condor snap abruptly to the right, putting the portside engine intake directly into the chaotic path of the flailing drogue. Part of the drogue got sucked into the intake, wrapped itself around the turbine blades, and jerked the solid reel with it. Before the heavy reel shattered the turbine blades and destroyed that engine, the drogue whipped over and around the hull, the unravelling end being pulled into the starboard engine.

  The portside engine had zero chance to survive even before the reel came crashing into it at supersonic speed, but the starboard engine was lucky. Either the screw-up fairy missed a golden opportunity, or she wanted to prolong her mischief, because the portside engine survived long enough for its rotating blades to pull back on the drogue. The end that had whipped over the top of the fuselage was already playing havoc with turbine blades on the starboard side, so the lucky part was the drogue was tugged in two directions and tore apart, with the break happening on the starboard side. Only six meters of drogue was ingested by the starboard engine, snapping off or bending less than twenty percent of those turbine blades.

  That Condor began dropping, unable to maintain altitude on one damaged engine.

  “What the-” I shut up because answering questions from me would distract the pilots from what they needed to be doing: flying the aircraft. There was one being who boasted a near-infinite capacity to multi-task, so I called that asshole beer can. “Skippy, what is-”

  Instead of the familiar arrogant tone of Skippy the Not-Quite-as-Awesome-As-He-Thinks-He-Is, there was a scratchy recording of a bland female voice. “Your call is important to us. Please hold and we will answer your call in the order it was received. Thank you for your patience.”

  I stared at my zPhone in disbelief. “What the F- Skippy! Answer me right now, dammit!”

  “Busy, Joe. Super-duper busy.” He actually sounded distracted.

  “You are never too busy to bug the shit out of me when you want to talk. Sing it if you want to, but I need a SITREP right now.”

  “Sing it? Oooooh, that is a great-”

  “No, it is a terrible idea. What the hell is going on?”

  “Oh for- UGH. Fine. It is a fluid situation, Joe, more data is coming in every nanosecond. If you can wait a-”

  “Bad news is not like wine, it does not get better with age.”

  “That is a good point. Ok, Lieutenant Reed’s Condor has suffered the loss of one engine, and the other is badly damaged. It is losing altitude.”

  It took twenty minutes before we had enough info to fully understand the situation, and for Lt. Reed to get enough control of her ship that she could talk to us. “Engine Two is gone. It shredded and tore lose, damaged the tail cone as it went. There is damage to the portside hull, we’ve lost sensors to see how bad it is, we can tell parts of the outer skin are peeling away.” She took a pause for breath, and when she spoke, her voice was dead calm, relaying purely the facts with no hint of her inner emotions. “Engine One is running at forty percent power, we tried higher power settings, but the vibration caused the engine controller to throttle back.”

  “Understood, Fireball,” I used her callsign, unaware that she was not fond of that pilot nickname. “We show you descending at two hundred meters per second, can you confirm?” It was a stupid question but I had to confirm the datalink was accurate.

  “Confirmed,” this time there was a catch in her voice. “We can’t lighten load, there’s nothing to dump overboard. As we get deeper in the atmosphere, I will need to reduce airspeed to reduce stress on the hull. That will increase our sink rate.”

  “Under, uh, stood.” Shit, that time my voice nearly cracked.

  “Colonel?” She asked.

  “Yes?”

  “This would be a really good time for a monkey-brained idea.”

  Lieutenant Samantha ‘Sami’ Reed was spot-on that only a crazy idea could rescue her ship and crew. Her Condor was sinking so fast, there was no time for a rescue attempt from the Dutchman, we needed to do it with our ship and what we had on board. I asked Porter, our lead pilot, for ideas and he and his team came up with a couple off-t
he-wall suggestions that were not quite crazy enough to work. We could not attach a line to the stricken ship and winch the crew across the gap. We could not clamp onto the other Condor with ours, the landing skids had no way to attach to the smooth hull of another dropship. Porter then got excited when he remembered an incident during the Korean war, and another during Vietnam, when one fighter jet pushed a damaged fighter that had lost power. In Korea, the pilot stuck his fighter’s nose cone up the crippled jet’s tailpipe and pushed it beyond enemy territory, in Vietnam the pilot used the windshield of his Phantom jet to push against the tailhook of another Phantom.

  Those ideas were not practical for our situation, but they did get me thinking. First, Porter made me realize that plenty of humans got wild-ass ideas when they were needed, and it was time for me to stop screwing around and step up my game. Second, he reminded me that dropships had something like a tailhook, they all were equipped with some kind of mechanism that could catch on netting in a docking bay for emergency recovery. Sometimes in combat, a dropship needed to be taken aboard quickly and there was no time for gentle and precise flying. Instead, the dropship aimed at the open docking bay and flew in, trusting suspensor fields to slow it down and catch it. In my pilot training, I had practiced that maneuver a dozen times, it was nerve-wracking to fly toward an open docking bay, seeing the back wall approaching way too fast and hoping the mysterious invisible technology of suspensor fields will work correctly.

  Because it would be foolish to rely on one system to prevent a crash, suspensor fields aboard a Thuranin ship had a backup; netting stretched across the open bay door. This netting was a tough and smart nanofiber that sensed the nose of an incoming dropship and created an opening so the nose didn’t crumple on impact. The rest of the netting caught the wings, engine nacelles and most important, the hooks. Just behind the engines were hooks, either four or six of them depending on the model of dropship. These hooks deployed in a star pattern to catch the netting and bring the dropship to a halt before it damaged the mothership. A ‘crash-landing’ as we called it was something we only practiced in the simulator for a very good reason: the crash-landing maneuver was rough on biological beings like humans. Supposedly, a properly strapped-in crew of a dropship would survive a crash-landing, but it wasn’t something we wanted people to experience unless they absolutely had to.

  The reason I mentioned emergency docking procedures was not for suspensor fields or nanofiber crash netting, it was for the hooks. Even one of those hooks could stop the mass of a dropship traveling up to thirty meters per second, that was a seriously strong hook. The strength of those hooks is why I traded my flightsuit for a hardshell Kristang powered armor suit.

  “Joe, are you sure about this?”

  “Skippy,” I gave a somewhat shaky thumbs up sign to the pilots helping me prep the suit. “If I was sure about doing this, I wouldn’t have asked you to recheck your numbers a half-dozen times. Were you wrong?”

  “No, but that is not the point. My calculations confirmed the arrestor hooks of your ship are strong enough, that the cables you are using are strong enough, and that the nose landing gear of the other Condor is strong enough. If you can get a cable attached from your hooks to the other ship’s nose gear, you will be able to tow it up into orbit. Probably. Unless you run into bad turbulence. Or the pilots lack the skill to-”

  “The pilots are going to do just fine, Skippy.”

  “We’ll see about that, since none of the pilots have done this before, trained for it, or even thought about it. If Captain Porter in the lead ship, or Lieutenant Reed in the trailing ship, are not able to fly very smoothly, their actions could set up a vibration in the cable that could-”

  “You told me this superduper high-tech cable is smart, it has some sort of self-correcting thingy that can help steer it and dampen vibrations.”

  “Yes, Ugh,” he gave an exasperated sigh. “The cable can make adjustments to a certain point. After that, it gets dicey. Anyway, you are missing the point as usual. I am not worried about the equipment or the pilots’ skill. I am worried about you, dumdum!”

  “Skippy,” I waved to the pilots and closed the airlock door behind me, “thank you. It’s nice to know that you care-”

  “Oh. I meant I am worried you will screw this up and get a bunch of people killed, but let’s go with the caring thing if you like.”

  “Why are you such an asshole?”

  “Hey! I wouldn’t have to worry at all if you weren’t such a dumb monkey. This is all your fault anyway.”

  “Me?” The airlock finished cycling and I opened the outer door into the back ramp area of the Condor, hooking a safety line onto my belt. “You designed and built that crappy fuel drogue.”

  “And you are a trouble magnet. This is the first time you’ve been on a refueling mission, and the first time we have had a problem. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Totally your fault. We should never have-Oh, dammit Joe.” His voice broke and he was blubbering. “If something bad happens to you, I don’t, I don’t know what I will do.”

  “Jeez, Skippy,” now I was finding it hard to talk. “I would miss you too. It’s good to-”

  “I mean, I do know what I will do; I’ll train another monkey to replace you. But, damn what a pain in the ass that will be.”

  “Skippy?” I shook my head ruefully. “Can you save your heartwarming motivational talk for after I’m aboard the Dutchman? I’m going to be kinda busy.”

  I was flying feet-first behind the lead Condor, being literally jerked around at the end of a cable that was attached to my legs. Because I needed to see and grab hold of the nose gear of the trailing ship, I had to be facing backwards. The only way I could steer was with my arms, it was like skydiving backwards. To make the experience extra superduper fun and easy for everyone, Reed’s Condor was now sinking at three hundred meters per minute and that rate was accelerating. At the controls of our ship, Porter had to match Reed’s sink rate. He also had to fly above her altitude, with my weight making the cable droop down. Porter also had to adjust to turbulence and try to think how an up or down draft would affect the trailing ship. For her part, Reed could not simply watch the lead ship and adjust, she had to anticipate Porter’s moves.

  All I had to do was get whipped around on the end of a cable, find Reed’s Condor, bang into it without killing myself and loop the cable around the front landing gear.

  If you want to visualize what I was doing, rent one of the ‘Airport’ disaster movies, I think it was ‘Airport 75’ or maybe ‘Airport 78’. Whatever. It’s the one with the actor who played Jesus in an old movie. No, that’s not right, maybe he played John the Baptist. I know it wasn’t John the Methodist or John the Presbyterian. Wait, I got it! He played Moses. I remember that because we were living in Boston when that movie came on TV, and during the scene when Moses parts the Red Sea, my father said that if Moses wanted a real challenge, he could try parting Boston traffic during rush hour.

  Anyway, in that ‘Airport’ movie, the actor needs to go from an airplane into a big jetliner to fly it, because the pilots of the jetliner are dead. He is dangling on the end of a cable and he somehow has to fit through a broken windshield, he gets his legs in and the flight attendants pull him into the cockpit.

  My point is, that guy had it easy. It was a clear day so he could see what he was doing, whereas I was flying through clouds of hydrogen sulfide and other nasty toxic stuff, and I couldn’t see a damned thing without the synthetic vision provided by my suit sensors. He had help while I was by myself. Also, the aircraft I was trying to hook onto wasn’t flying nice and level on autopilot, it was sinking at an increasing rate. The force of gravity on me was seventeen percent greater than on Earth, and the lower we dropped, the greater the effect of gravity would be. Ok, yes, you there Mr. Nerdface in the back with your hand up because you are so smart, I know that before the gravity becomes a big problem we would have fallen so deep the atmospheric pressure would crush the Condor, but the extra gravity was
already making it more difficult for me to judge my aim. Imagine you are shooting free throws in gravity that is seventeen percent higher than normal. You have probably shot thousands of free throws in normal gravity, and your eye-hand coordination, your reflexes and your muscle memory are all set up for normal gravity. Suddenly, you have to put a bit more effort into shooting the ball, and the arc it follows is steeper than you expect. It was like that as I awkwardly tried to steer myself at the end of the cable.

  My first attempt to contact the target was almost a disaster, I came in from the right, overcorrected and was about to smack into the hull hard enough to dent it and kill me. Fortunately for me, the crew aboard the lead Condor recognized the danger and reeled in the cable enough for me to zip past the nose so fast it was a blur. “Sorry!” I called out as I tried to swing back to the center.

  “No problem, Colonel,” Reed assured me. “Take your time out there.”

  “Thanks, I-”

  “Not too much time, Sir.”

  “Affirmative.” After my near-disaster, we kept the cable short enough that I couldn’t hit anything, and I concentrated on keeping myself centered. The twelfth attempt was going well enough for me to call for more cable. I was below and in front of the target and we had gotten lucky with the turbulence. The air was smooth, I had gotten better at free-flying on the end of the cable. We tried letting out the cable so I could slip under the Condor’s nose, it was tricky because the air pattern close to the ship was different and it pushed me away. “Ok, I know how to do it now,” I advised after the crew retracted the cable again. For the first time since I stumbled out the back ramp of my Condor, I was confident this crazy scheme might actually work. Until then, truthfully, I had launched this rescue operation more because I felt we had to do something than expecting we could save the crew of that crippled ship. “Next time, let the cable out-”