by Ginger Booth
“What is that?” Ben pointed to his camera feeds. Lines streaked across them at a diagonal.
“Rain,” Sass replied shortly. “Ben, does this plot take the mountains into account?”
“The… Damn. No.” He got busy correcting that oversight.
And none too soon. They were now only 10 km up from the surface, going about 45 kph. Some of the Denali mountain ranges exceeded that, but here at the north pole, most of them stayed below the 7 km level.
Most but not all. “Veer heading 348,” Ben instructed urgently.
“Is that for the peak or the shoulder, Mr. Acosta?” Sass asked evenly.
“The…huh?”
Sass veered to heading 335 degrees. “Mountains have width as well as height.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You did well.”
“I could do with less bouncing,” Copeland commented.
“Damage report, Mr. Copeland?” Sass inquired sweetly. This hell-ride was making her punchy.
“Just bruises. Be advised fuel rate is restored. Hard for them to keep it up when you drive like that, though.”
“Thank God. Current ETA less than 30 mikes. Hang tough. And hang on.”
Ben offered, “New plot for you. Using radar for the surface altitudes. That makes the route much wigglier.”
“Excellent, Mr. Acosta,” Sass purred. With her rate of fall arrested by now, and enough power to cope with life’s little ups and downs, she turned onto the route heading he supplied, curving around the right to approach Waterfalls from the mouth of its canyon. Or at least the dolphin-on-its-tail listed backward in that direction. Their radar and camera coverage was much better on the roof, without the cargo in the way.
A few minutes of peaceful progress almost lulled her into complacency.
Two things shattered that. First, her plot suddenly flashed red and insisted she take a sharp right bank. Apparently the radar got a glimpse into the valley ahead of them and the computer decided it was a box canyon. Sass laid on the turn as sharply as she could manage as a massif loomed for her to shatter the Thrive across. They were well below the mountain peaks by now, and their shoulders as well.
Simultaneously, Ben murmured, “What the hell is that?” He peered into his threat radar display. “Why are they gray instead of black?”
“Mr. Acosta,” Sass hissed, “do I have a problem?”
“Uh, maybe.” He leafed through cameras, then shot one of the guns. “I just shot to light up – What the fuck is that?!”
Sass finished straightening out from her turn. She cast around for another route into the Waterfalls valley. Scowling, she spared a glance at his moving displays. “Show me a snapshot, Mr. Acosta,” she growled. There, she decided. If that next opening wasn’t another box canyon, she was in business. The map showed a river flowing out of it. But every one of these valleys had a river. No reason to expect they were connected.
Ben swiped a still frame image onto her display.
“Bird,” Sass identified in exasperation. She flicked the picture away.
“Captain, it’s the size of the Thrive!” he objected.
“If it gets too close, shoot it.”
“I saw a bird in Mahina Actual,” he ventured. “It was about 10 centimeters, and blue.”
Sass sighed. “Well, this is a big bird. It’s gray on radar because it’s alive and squishy. Less radar return.” Her screen flashed red again. She barely managed to pull out of the next box canyon, and had to lean on the engines hard to rise above a buttressing slope.
They cleared it low enough for the engine to light the forest below, a riot of fanciful colors. Regardless of the vibrant hues in the understory, a rain forest back on Earth would still be green on top. Here green made up only about half of the canopy, with red-purple a close second, and strong notes of yellow, scarlet, whites and blues.
She sat back for a quick breather as the ground fell away over some foothills.
Ben shot a laser again, causing her to jump. “Just checking. They’re following us.”
“So shoot them,” Sass encouraged.
“I don’t want to shoot a bird!”
“Ben, it wants to eat you. Kill it!” She checked that her course was still safe, and she was still casting for the right valley. Then she leaned over for a quick glance at Ben’s displays, only to hang arrested. She thought he meant two or three birds, not a damned flock of a dozen. And he wasn’t exaggerating. The…fuzzy pterodactyls…really were bigger than the Thrive!
“Shoot, damn it!” she yelled.
30
Belatedly, Ben got past his scruples and started firing into the raptors. But the highly collimated guns normally relied on a radar lock to guide them to an item on a smooth ballistic trajectory. In this case, the guns and the birdies were all jerking around. The birds lurched tens of meters up and down with each vast flap of the wings. And the radar couldn’t get a lock. The system was designed for asteroids, not complex inverting shapes. The harpies were gaining on them, now plainly visible on their camera feeds.
After a dozen shots, he managed to hit one. Then he sat frozen in horror as the others attacked it, ripping it apart before it could fall to the ground.
“Ben, keep shooting!” Three of their pursuers were undeterred by the feeding frenzy behind them, and still hot on the Thrive’s trail. Sass tried goosing the engines to get them upward a bit. But her screen flashed with a new insane route change demand.
Infuriated, Sass hit the comm button, “Waterfalls, this is Thrive Actual. Which direction does your valley open to lower elevation?” The comms system would show her location. She leaned hard against the g-forces on this latest bank, and hoped everyone was holding on down in the engine room.
“Thrive, sending coordinates. You’re 15 klicks from us now, but if you’re below the peaks, you need to back out and approach from the northwest. Stay above 5000 meters. Be advised the pterries are ferocious in your area.”
“Pterries are the giant hostile flying things?”
“That’s them,” the male somebody at Waterfalls confirmed. “Short for pseudo-pterodactyl.”
“Thanks, Thrive out,” Sass acknowledged shortly.
Driving with one eye and hand, she updated their destination coordinates herself into the route-searching program. Sweating with the strain beside her, Ben was too busy trying and failing to bag his second birdie. Her driving them into a cloud bank of rain squall didn’t improve his aim.
She finally sat up and executed a long smooth turn, banking into the correct gap in the wall of mountains and slowly adding a little altitude. With no wing-lift to aid her, and scant leverage against the planetary gravity, she needed a long ramp to add another half kilometer up to negotiate the pass. Waterfalls was at 3500 meters. She’d only held onto an extra 1000 meters clearance to reach it.
The boldest of the pterries reached them, and grabbed on by their lone bottom container. Thrive started to bob with its powerful wing strokes. Sass’s jaw dropped. She’d never imagined the creature could budge her whole ship!
“Ben!” Copeland barked. “Get that thing off my ship!”
“I’m trying!” Ben retorted. “I can’t! The guns won’t bear!”
This was not surprising. The gun mounts weren’t designed for suicide.
“I’ll try to knock it off,” Sass said. “Hold on.” She meant that advice literally, as she used the thrusters to swerve and turn. But another dip, and another, lost her more altitude as two more ‘pterries’ grabbed on.
Apparently Copeland had enough. “Ben, I’m ejecting container –”
“NO!” Abel yelled. To lose another container at this point was agonizing.
Sass hastily straightened the ship back onto the right heading, and emerged from the rain squall.
Copeland overrode Abel’s objections. “Be ready to kill the damned things on three. One, two, three!”
Ben overestimated how fast the box would fall with three giant monsters on it. They had
wings, after all, and cooperated scarily well. He took three more tries to line up the shot. Then cargo container and three birdies exploded.
“Score!” he yelled in triumph. As an afterthought, he added, “Poor creatures.”
Sass laughed in spite of herself. Losing another container hurt. But Abel had rearranged the cargo so that one mostly held food supplies. Awkwardly sticking out by its lonesome, they always feared it wouldn’t survive the trip down. “Bye-bye, last of the Sagamore fish paste!”
“Good riddance,” Abel and Copeland muttered. Those two were the least enamored of Wilder’s signature ‘ramen and fish balls.’ The dish was one of Sass and Clay’s favorites. But then, they grew up eating fish. The Mahina natives didn’t.
Sass gained altitude smoothly now, if slowly. The mouth of the path to Waterfalls was almost upon them.
And the ship lurched downward again.
“Sorry, didn’t see that one,” Ben muttered. Fortunately, the latest pterry had the misfortune to park its chest over a forward gun mount. Ben barely tapped the laser and the pseudo-pterodactyl exploded, raining blood and gore over the entire ship.
Pterries bled red just like she did, Sass noted.
Ben finally gave in and upchucked to the side of his seat. “Sorry.”
“No problemo,” Sass assured him.
Meaning, of course, that she had bigger problems. The joker at Waterfalls wasn’t kidding about the height of the pass, and he didn’t include any margin. Mercifully, they’d lost all their momentum from re-entry by now. She was tootling along at no more than 45 kph. But she had to throttle even that back to 25, and zig-zag up a narrow valley, struggling to put on altitude. She’d already seen for herself that the downdrafts around these ridges were murderous. She wanted to clear the saddle ahead by at least 250 meters.
“Cap,” Copeland warned, “you’re exceeding the refueling rate.”
Sass winced. “I have to. So how long can I get away with it? Waterfalls is just 10 minutes ahead.”
“Maybe 3 minutes at this burn rate,” Copeland cautioned.
“Alright.” Sass blew out and straightened her course for the last high pass – 50 meters clearance would have to suffice. The chaotic hues of the vegetation below seemed to scurry upward to eat them, bathed in the brilliant light of their engines.
She nosed into a downdraft and lost 70 meters, cutting all forward motion.
“One minute,” Copeland warned.
“Are the thrusters included in that?” Sass suddenly asked.
“Uh, no,” he allowed.
She goosed them to maximum, shooting up a sudden 100 meters, and pushed forward over the saddle. She caught another downdraft just shy of the high point, until the engines below scraped the trees, setting them ablaze.
And they were over.
“Thrive, this is Waterfalls, do you have our landing beacons?”
Sass checked her radar, and there they were, beckoning her like the promise of heaven. As promised, the locals had set out radio beacons to mark the four corners of their arranged ‘spaceport.’
Currently occupied by hostile wildlife, of course.
“Waterfalls, I have your beacons. Thrive arriving. We need to glass that landing pad. Please confirm all personnel are outside the marked zone, by a wide margin.”
“Thrive, define ‘wide margin,’” the Waterfalls spokesman inquired in alarm.
Sass looked to Ben, who shrugged. “Maybe 50 meters?”
Sass conveyed his suggestion to the ground crew. They confirmed they were clear of that now, and would retreat to 75 meters. “Thrive out. Abel, can you take over driving from Copeland’s station? Just get us above the landing beacons.”
“Uh, sure!” Abel agreed, caught by surprise. “Cap? Reminder. We can’t land on our containers. We’re too heavy in this gravity.”
“Noted. I’ll let you deal with that after Ben and I clear a spot to set down. Cope, tell me I’m not power limited on the guns. This ground is crawling with hostile wildlife, and we need to level it.”
Ben hunched over his display. With detailed line of sight radar topography of their new parking lot, he updated their plan for rock cuts.
The engineer replied, “Refueling team keeping up again. No holdups. Try not to take too long.”
“Right.” Sass leaned over to check Ben’s progress. But she could shoot from here, as Abel guided them on a smooth straight-line approach toward their destination. A steady rain fell on the midnight forest, which should help keep the burns from turning into wildfires.
Belatedly, she recalled her little incident coming in. “Waterfalls, be advised we set the ridge on fire coming into your valley. Is this a problem?”
Come to think of it, she could probably burn out all this vegetation with just the engines, no need for guns. “Abel, keep us at least 200 meters up. Especially over the domes.” A smattering of these glinted in the light of the engines now and then. Rather than a large dome, the community appeared to consist of small domes daisy-chained together, marching up the sides of their narrow valley. With work to do, she didn’t pause for sightseeing just yet.
“Thrive, forest fires are not a concern,” her Denali liaison returned over the radio. “Too wet.”
Experimentally, she shot one a wide laser into the center of the marked landing plot at low power. A few 90-meter ‘trees’ went up like torches, explosively. A few lines flamed outward, possibly thick vines. But as advertised, the fire was doused in half a minute. Good. This wouldn’t be as picky work as she feared.
She gauged the width of her burn, added a few meters margin, and began a careful burn along one side of their new hectare of suburban Waterfalls, Denali.
The flames overshot a couple times, maybe a particularly big and flammable sort of plant below. She simply shifted to burning along the adjacent edge until the first fire died back, then resumed.
Ben sat back from his calculations. “Sass, we can’t level this lot.”
“Oh?”
“We don’t have enough lift to pick up slices of rock like we would on Mahina. It’s too heavy. And there are domes in every direction. We can’t risk dropping stone on them.”
“We have anything level enough to park on?” Sass asked. “And a place to park the containers? Instead of leveling the whole thing, think of wide steps. And we might not be able to level it, but we can shoot some into gravel. Or pick up one piece and shatter it on another.”
Ben nodded, and tried to apply those ideas to his problem.
Meanwhile Sass finished her tidy firebreak around the edges. Once they were above their new land grant, Abel returned piloting control to her. She shifted them just outside the zone, then systematically burned the interior. She watched with a careful eye as a few large sparks and vines conveyed her holocaust outside her plot, but they died out safely.
Now that she could see the ground, a number of beasts scampered out of the forest into her burned area. For the moment, they trotted right back out again because the ground was hot. That wouldn’t last. And a couple of those creatures appeared the size of hippos, or bigger.
“Ready, Ben?”
“Do I have to shoot the animals?”
Sass shot him a withering look. With an effort, she managed not to mention that she’d likely just burned thousands alive, maybe millions. “I’ll shoot the wildlife. Gun 5 is mine, you take the rest.”
“Right.”
Aside from his squeamishness about murdering alien koala bears or whatever, Ben knew his business and executed it well. Two scarps of rock he sliced off at the base. He grabbed the larger one with the grav grapples. He was right. Thrive groaned to lift it even 10 meters. He had to abandon his plan to take the chunk high enough to shatter. Instead he used it to hammer some minor protuberances into gravel. Then he simply carried the somewhat rounder boulder to a corner to get it out the way.
The second carved rock was smaller. Sass brought it up 60 meters for him to smash to smithereens to fill in a low spot.
“Thrive, how long will this take?” the Waterfalls representative inquired.
“Couple hours, we hope,” Sass relayed, rounding up from Ben’s muttered estimate. “Then we need to set down our cargo and electrify our perimeter.”
“OK. I’m going to pull my people indoors for a break. Call me when you’re ready. We’ll come back to escort you to the bio lock. We’ve already rigged you a sonic perimeter. Once you settle below 100 meters, we can turn it on.”
As an afterthought, he added, “Hell of a thing, your landscaping. Can you do this for hire? Cut level ground for us?”
“Abel? Talk to the man,” Sass invited. She grinned as her partner took over the channel with his ready sales patter.
Her smile died as he explained their tight fuel supply, presently an irreplaceable resource, to jack up the price. Except he wasn’t exaggerating. He really would ask one hell of a price in return for clearing any further plots of land. Their remaining fuel governed how many years they could keep the Thrive livable here.
And whether they would ever manage to leave.
But as the local hunters withdrew, she grew entirely too busy shooting creatures to follow the conversation.
Welcome to Denali.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading Interplanetary Thrive!
Knock on wood, the crew’s next adventure, the quest to escape Denali, will release later this summer (2019). Volcanoes, an undersea habitat, and wildlife galore!
And the Thrive just might walk away with the most valuable prize in the Aloha system.
Be sure to join my mailing list, or follow me on Amazon or BookBub, to hear when it’s available.
If you enjoyed the book, won’t you please leave a review? It only takes a sentence or two, a few minutes of your time. Independent authors like me depend on readers like you. Reviews fuel the next book! Thank you.
Best wishes,
Ginger Booth
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