“A forcefield is a forcefield is a forcefield,” Kirk reminded Picard.
“That sounds vaguely familiar.”
“All it means is that for the first ninety percent of any orbital freefall, we’re strictly at the mercy of physics and computers.” Not even a Vulcan had the mind and reflexes to manually control an exospheric-entry trajectory as precise as the one required for an individual jumper. “So it doesn’t matter if those computers are Starfleet-issue, Cardassian refits, or Bajoran antiques.”
“How about Ferengi stolen property?”
“The calculations are all the same, Jean-Luc.”
“Not for that last ten percent.”
Kirk grinned in anticipation. On any orbital skydive, that last ten percent was one hundred percent of the reason for doing it in the first place. By the time an orbital skydiver had reached subsonic velocity at an altitude of approximately fifteen kilometers—depending on local planetary atmosphere characteristics—the aerodynamic forcefield had bled off enough velocity for the jumper’s thermic armor to be able to protect against the residual heat of atmospheric friction. In that thicker atmosphere—again dependent on local conditions—attitude gyros were also no longer necessary. Arm and leg movements alone could control the jumper’s position and rate of fall.
For Kirk, and all the other jumpers he had met across the galaxy, it was that transitional moment in the jump when technology was no longer required and individual skill and judgment came to the fore that truly defined the sport. Everything up to that transition was simply a wild ride—not that there was anything wrong with simply enjoying the scenery and sensation. For all Picard’s apparent reservations, Kirk was certain his friend had to feel the same way.
“See the shadows?” Kirk said now.
Eighty kilometers below, the regular topography of the Trevin Desert had become more pronounced as the rocky, windblown expanse reached the ancient folds of the Lharassa Foothills, and led into the continent-spanning range of the B’Hatral Alps.
The Bajoran foothills were especially striking because of the length and the depth of the shadows that streamed away from them.
It was sunset in Lharassa Province, which meant—
“We’re coming up on the terminator.”
Kirk saw the sunlit land below him fall off into starless darkness ahead.
“This is where it really gets interesting,” he said, laughing.
Then night engulfed him faster than thought, and the unseen air came alive with a crawling web of incandescent tendrils flickering over his forcefield.
And even as the rush of the atmosphere became a roar, Kirk was certain he heard Picard’s laugh, too.
They were meteors, the two of them. Luminous trails of radiant light that eclipsed the Bajoran constellations with their brilliance.
A handful of Bajorans in Lharassa Province looked up that night and saw Kirk and Picard. A few trembled, recalling memories of the occupation, when Cardassian fighters had streaked down through the night skies in just that way, to rain arbitrary destruction on a once peaceful world. Others, more worldly, fought bitterness at the realization that privileged offworlders were responsible for the distinctive light trails of an orbital skydive, turning Bajor into little more than a playground for a vast galactic empire that had no place in the teachings of the Celestial Temple. And a handful of Bajorans, more innocent of heart and history, gazed up at those wondrous tracks of light across the darkness, and though they assigned them to a likely human cause, felt the stirrings of hope that, just perhaps, what they witnessed might be the fall of new Tears of the Prophets. For if nothing else, Bajor was a world whose people lived in hope of better days. Certainly, at Cardassian hands, they had seen the worst.
Kirk and Picard, two captains, two friends, blazed through the Bajoran night, unaware of those who witnessed their flight, unaware that, in a way, they were portents of all the things the Bajorans who saw them thought and hoped for.
Cardassian destruction. Offworlder interference. New Tears of the Prophets.
Like Kirk and Picard, all these portents drew closer to Bajor, the inevitability of their coming as inexorable as the physics of an orbital skydive.
* * *
Picard was laughing.
The light that danced around him was like a living thing, and in a lifetime of plying the stars and seeing more worlds than he could tally or remember, he had never seen anything like the auroral display of Bajor.
A part of him understood what it was that surrounded him. Bajor was a world unique in many ways, and one such singular characteristic was its enormously powerful magnetic field.
An overly large iron core, far more energetic than would ordinarily be predicted by the planet’s mass and age, was responsible for the field. And one of the results of its strength was that Bajor was virtually immune to the sporadic gamma-ray bursts and even the radiation assaults from nearby nova that were so often a danger to the genetic stability of life-forms on other, less well-protected planets. As a result, Bajor had one of the lowest background mutation rates of any world known to the Federation, almost as if it had been purposely designed to harbor a long-lived civilization.
Picard knew that the theocracy that ruled Bajor found no quarrel with that interpretation, because its leaders believed their entire world was indeed watched over by the Prophets who dwelt within the Celestial Temple, beings also known to non-believers as the multi-temporal aliens of the Bajoran Wormhole.
Picard had also seen enough of the universe, and was enough of an appreciator of the tenets of the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC, not to reject the theocracy’s belief in the Prophets out of hand.
But belief in the Prophets was not required to appreciate the wonder of the physical display created as his hypersonic forcefield envelope sliced through Bajor’s lines of immense magnetic force, freeing electrons at a mind-boggling pace, causing molecules of atmospheric gases to jump from state to state of energy in a scintillating cascade of color and light.
Picard heard a whisper though the white-noise static that crackled in his helmet: Kirk. Most probably his friend was attempting to signal him through the interference created by the aurora.
He checked the situation display in the upper area of his faceplate. All readings, including Kirk’s position, were exactly as they should be. It seemed Kirk was merely commenting on the view.
Or maybe, Picard thought as he listened more carefully, Kirk’s still laughing, too.
The breathtaking passage through Bajor’s night took less than twenty minutes, and when dawn came, Kirk’s faceplate dimmed instantly to protect his eyes from the sudden flare of Bajor’s sun.
At this stage of his descent, his speed had diminished to the point that there were no more flashes of dust particles against his forcefield. If the field failed now, instead of burning up, Kirk knew he would be torn to pieces by the violence of hitting the still air—at this speed, little different from hitting solid rock. Either way, friction or impact, he would be dead. A more positive view of his situation was that at least it marked progress of a sort. Not until Picard’s forcefield and his had slowed their descent speed to three times the Bajoran speed of sound would their jumpsuits alone be capable of protecting them.
As the auroral display lessened along with their speed and altitude, Kirk’s communication with Picard sharpened. All signs, Kirk knew, that the nightside segment of the jump was nearly at an end.
So was the time for merely being along for the ride.
Now, thirty kilometers above the rich green swells of Bajor’s Valor Sea, Kirk saw his situation display switch from yellow to orange, indicating that he and Picard were within ten standard minutes of going to manual jump status. Picard was less than eight hundred meters to his north now, matching altitude and velocity, his position slowly converging with Kirk’s. They would land together.
“Jean-Luc, has your display switched over?”
“Just now,” Picard replied.
Kirk savored the new ene
rgy in his friend’s tone. Picard had never made an orbital jump before, and Kirk enjoyed having been the one to properly introduce him to the experience.
“Time to run a manual diagnostic,” Kirk said, knowing that at this point in the jump, should any of the manual components necessary for the final ten percent of the jump register as compromised, their suits’ automated systems could be left in control of the terminal descent. Their forcefields would change shape to form emergency ballistic umbrellas that would continue to slow each of them, much as would the monomer parachute packed beneath Kirk’s armored back pod, though without the precise directional control.
Kirk had only experienced two ’chute malfunctions in several hundred jumps, and both had resulted in a fully automatic and completely uneventful descent. Preferable to the alternative, but disappointing nonetheless. He’d not burdened Picard with this unnecessary information. Beginners had enough to think about, and Kirk had wanted Picard’s first experience to focus on the wonders of the jump, not the mechanics or potential hazards.
Kirk held out his arms in a standard freefall position. Though, since the air within his sealed forcefield envelope moved at the same velocity he did, his action had no effect on his speed or attitude—he just liked the movement. Next, he slightly angled his forearm so he could read the status lights as one by one they winked out, then flashed on again as all systems were tested. The purple glow of the induction plasma had faded as his speed had diminished, so that it no longer interfered with his perception of the lights.
“All purple here,” Kirk transmitted to Picard.
“Purple here, as well,” Picard answered. Then he added, “Are those clouds up ahead anything to be concerned about?”
Kirk checked ahead, both visually and with his forward sensors. The clouds, brilliantly lit by the rising sun, were about one hundred kilometers dead west, forming at the orographic uplift where the Valor Sea met the rocky coastline of the B’Laydroc continent. At this latitude, the warm, moisture-laden sea air was a breeding ground for tropical storms, and Kirk was not surprised that a storm system had developed since the shuttle’s last orbital sensor sweep before the jump began. Picard was right to be concerned. In the meteorological display holographically projected at the bottom of his faceplate, Kirk studied the cloud bank’s tumbling growth as it rose to form the dark, anvil-shaped thunderclouds familiar on a thousand Class-M worlds.
Kirk was aware that it wasn’t prudent to punch through storm clouds with or without forcefield protection, if only because a lightning strike might interfere with the more basic, and thus more fragile, manual descent controls. But according to their positional track, he estimated that he and Picard would miss the brewing storm by twenty kilometers at least, streaking past to the north, toward their touchdown coordinates now 220 kilometers downrange.
“Looks like we’ll miss them,” Kirk said, glad the clouds were a false alarm. He always preferred jumps during which he could see the ground approach, instead of merely relying on sensors.
“I know we’ll miss them,” Picard replied. “But we’re carrying a substantial ionized charge, and lightning has been known to travel scores of kilometers on a horizontal track.”
Kirk reluctantly reassessed the situation, disappointed that manual completion of their jump was now in jeopardy. He dismissed Picard’s unspoken implication that his jump preparation had been a touch incomplete in anticipating the danger a lightning storm on Bajor might present for them.
Fortunately, he could already see a quick way out.
“Only thing we can do is to lose our charge,” Kirk said.
“How?” Picard transmitted back.
Kirk didn’t reply at once, simply because the answer was so obvious. He checked the ionization level in his display to work out the time required to discharge it. “We drop shields for about fifteen seconds and our field generators will dump the charge to the atmospheric dust.”
The pause that followed was beginning to make Kirk think his transmission hadn’t been received, then Picard said, “Jim, we’re currently traveling at Bajoran Mach factor two point six.”
Now there was a statement worthy of the old Picard, Kirk thought: staid, sensible, in need of a little prod now and then. “Jean-Luc, these suits are stable at Mach three, Bajoran standard.”
“Are you referring to these stolen antiques, rented from Quark, with no guarantees?”
Kirk sighed. “No, I mean the suits Quark doesn’t get paid for until we get back. Trust me, Jean-Luc. I did a cold-shield restart on Vulcan not six months ago.”
“When was the last time there was a thunderstorm on Vulcan?”
He’s got me there, Kirk decided. The Bajoran cloud bank was close enough that he could see its moving billows without using the sensor display. It wasn’t a sight that was at all common on Vulcan. Still, Picard’s suit and his were stable at Bajoran supersonic speeds, and the field generators were designed to discharge the ionization that resulted from high-speed passage through the atmosphere. To Kirk, it seemed to be a simple go/no-go decision.
“Running out of time,” he said briskly. “Either we drop shields at Mach two, bleed charge, then raise them again till we go subsonic, or we risk landing on automatic like a pair of amateurs.”
“Healthy amateurs,” Picard amended. “With all limbs intact.”
Kirk grimaced. All this talk. If they were to do anything, they had to do it in the next thirty seconds. They would come into range of Picard’s possible lightning strike within a minute.
“Jean-Luc, my friend, where’s your sense of adventure?”
To Kirk’s delight, Picard instantly transmitted back, “When you put it that way, preparing to drop shields at Bajoran Mach factor two. Coming up in fifteen seconds…fourteen…”
Deciding he must have hit some kind of nerve in Picard, and that he’d have to remember how he’d done that so he could do it more often, Kirk input the same sequence timing on his forcefield generator: a ten-second count to auto-shutdown, followed by a full ionization discharge, then reactivation fifteen seconds after that. It had to be an automatic sequence, because at the speed he’d be traveling when the forcefield switched off, his arms would be immoveable at his sides.
His systems check complete, he joined Picard in the countdown.
“Five…”
“Four…”
“Three…”
“Two…”
“One…”
Kirk hit a brick wall. Fun.
Chapter Three
BAJOR, STARDATE 55595.5
SO THIS IS WHY JIM DOES IT, Picard thought.
The moment his force field had shut down, Picard felt as if he’d just completed a one-kilometer high dive into mud.
The yoke of his chestplate slammed against his shoulders and the rest of his suit compressed. It was as if the air of Bajor had instantly grown thicker by a factor of ten.
In some calm, rational part of his brain, Picard reviewed what he knew about an orbital skydive suit. First, and most important, it was designed to be self-stabilizing at low supersonic speeds. The atmospheric pressure wave automatically flexed the dynamic fibers woven through the suit’s insulating layers. The process itself acted somewhat like a starship’s structural integrity field to make the entire suit rigid, with the helmet locked at a precise angle to function as a stabilizing rudder.
Later in the jump, when the speed came within the realm of human senses and reactions, Picard knew he was supposed to be able to move his arms and legs and so adjust his speed and attitude. But for now, he was little more than a falling rock, no longer at the mercy of computers and physics, but controlled strictly by physics alone. Just the sort of thing that Jim Kirk lived for. And that he himself did not.
To Picard, those fifteen seconds of unshielded, supersonic flight seemed to span minutes. His senses were so charged, so heightened, that he could only compare the sensation to what Anij had taught him on the world of the Ba’ku—how to live an eternity in a moment.
&nb
sp; By the time the countdown indicator showed his forcefield was ready to be reestablished, Picard knew he simply had to make another orbital jump. And not just on the holodeck. Kirk was right. The experience was entirely too intense to take in with a single occurrence.
Then Picard’s forcefield reformed and the deceleration pressure on his shoulders vanished as once again the air around him moved as quickly as he did, encased within the field.
He glanced to the left, to check on the passage of the growing thunderclouds to the south, and was momentarily puzzled to see Kirk’s small, dark silhouette pulling ahead of him. Kirk was about a kilometer distant, though their jump plan stated they should only be five hundred meters apart by this segment. Picard blinked, and Kirk was lost against the dark clouds beyond. A few of the cloudtops sporadically glowed with deep, inner lightning.
Picard felt his heart rate quicken.
“Jim, I have you gliding off track.” He focused on the sensor display at the top of his faceplate, his pulse steadying as he located Kirk’s yellow position-marker. Picard frowned. Kirk’s speed wasn’t diminishing as quickly as his own. “Jim…this might not be the time to start a race to the finish.” Kirk was one of the most competitive people Picard had ever encountered. In a crisis, Kirk would give a friend, or even a total stranger, the last oxygen replicator from his environmental suit without thought of reward. But at any other time, if an activity could be turned into a race or any other kind of contest, Kirk was always the first to suggest it, and usually the one to win.
“Jim?” Picard retransmitted. He saw the plot on his sensor display indicate that on his current trajectory, Kirk was going to set down at least eighty kilometers uprange from their target zone. That translated into a long hike, indeed. “Jim, if this is a race, you can’t win if you overfly the target zone.”
Picard angled his forearm to check his suit’s status lights, and make sure his onboard communications system was functioning. He sighed as he sensed he was about to find himself once again in an unsought competition with the old Kirk: enthusiastic, headstrong, in definite need of a little lesson in humility now and then.
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