According to the record, compiled in the various inquests after the loss of the Gabriella, she arrives on Madreperla in the early hours of the morning on a Wednesday, shortly after Ferguson contacted all those captains.
The Gabriella sends automated notifications to W&D, stating she is in orbit around Madreperla. There is no more information than that. W&D does not require any progress reports along the journey, just location reports.
There is nothing in the official record that tells us why Ferguson wanted another ship nearby. Nor are there records from the Gabriella. Her internal logs disappeared along with her. Ferguson never practiced off-ship backup protocols, even though they had become standard.
“He said he would have made off-ship backups had he been captain of a government ship,” Imelda told me in our longest interview, the one that focused mostly on Ferguson. “But he was leery of reporting anything when he was on a commercial vessel. He figured too much information invited poachers and pirates. He didn’t even like pinging locations, but he couldn’t avoid that requirement.”
There are no records of poachers or pirates in the area, at least not in the official information.
During a direct question session at the second inquest, the Decker’s Gerhardt says he saw no evidence of pirating or poaching while he was observing the Gabriella from afar.
Gerhardt: No one in their right mind poaches ships near Nájar Crater. And there’s very little to pirate. Generally speaking, pirates don’t work that close to Ius Prime, anyway. The star port frightens them. They like remote areas, where they have no chance of getting caught.
Counsellor: So you do not believe the Gabriella was attacked by outside agents in orbit or on the ground.
Gerhardt: I know they were not attacked in orbit. We would have seen the readings. I have no idea what happened to them on the ground.
Counsellor: In other words, they could have been attacked.
Gerhardt: I don’t speculate. I don’t have the evidence.
Counsellor: Did you attack them?
Gerhardt: [angrily] Hell no! How could you even suggest that? We have logs, records—
Counsellor: Which could have been doctored.
Gerhardt: They’re not doctored. I gave them to you people for certification.
Counsellor: Not to us.
Chief Judge: To the court. We have certified the Decker’s logs, and found no evidence of tampering. Move along, counsellor. This line of questioning is wasting the review board’s time.
Pirates sounds romantic and terrifying at the same time, as do poachers, but the chief judge of that inquest, and the judicial review boards of later inquests, continued to find the Decker’s logs credible. Those logs show no record of outside activity from unidentified vessels.
Besides, if such vessels had existed and attacked from the ground, the maelstrom that ultimately enveloped the Gabriella would, logically, have taken them too.
But the Decker does not see all. There is a scanner dead zone on the far side of Madreperla, at least from the Decker’s location. To get a full reading from the entire moon, the Decker would have had to orbit as well, and Gerhardt decides not to. He does not want to call attention to himself.
It seems that he was successful in that. There is no record of communication between the Decker and the Gabriella during the hours after the Gabriella’s arrival.
As far as we can tell, the crew of the Gabriella believe they are alone. The frantic contacts to other captains have eased, and the Gabriella settles into her orbit. Once the trajectory gets established, the Gabriella pings W&D.
The notification system is primitive by design. Apparently Ferguson’s paranoia is infectious. Even the location tracking is vague. Rather than sending detailed coordinates from the ship, the ship sends one set of coordinates and describes the maneuvers it has entered into.
According to the information in W&D’s files, the Gabriella slips into orbit around Madreperla at 02:34 that Wednesday morning. (All times and dates from here on out will follow the Old Spacer system for consistency.) The orbit lasts twenty hours, which some experts in the various inquests considered too long, while others considered it too short.
If the slide into orbit around Madreperla goes the way it went for Orion Newbawer’s ship, the Vista on her final visit, then the Gabriella is on full alert, with the entire crew active.
The first orbit usually establishes systems. Ferguson will be focused on the orbit itself and the challenges it poses to the Gabriella. His bridge crew monitors the readouts, makes slight adjustments, and keeps track of the pressure on the ship herself.
This is the first test of the Gabriella on this journey. As a space-to-land vehicle, she needs to make adjustments before she enters Madreperla’s gravity.
In order to land, the Gabriella must deploy her landing gear, add even more protections to her large engines, and activate the land engines. She can do none of that as she enters the atmosphere.
This is one of the design flaws that led the military to retire the infinity design, at least as a space-to-land vehicle. Ferguson has dealt with this quirk of the Gabriella for his entire captaincy of the ship and is used to the problem.
If Ferguson follows his usual practices, he will not even suggest making the landing adjustments until he is certain the ship can land.
That means he must complete his scans and decide if he is going to complete the most dangerous part of this mission before he gives the order to send the ship into Madreperla’s atmosphere.
On the second orbit around Madreperla, the crew probably watches the light change across the moon’s surface. Madreperla, named for its luminescence when viewed from Ius Prime, is even brighter from orbit.
The dirt on the surface of the smaller land mass on Madreperla reflects light. The moon’s inherent brightness causes problems for any ship attempting to scan.
The Vista had to adjust its screens so that the crew could see the surface all the way around the moon. Other ships alter their portals with a built-in shading so that the light off that dirt does not hurt the eye.
Even with the protections, the light traveling across the surface is beautiful. It illuminates certain geographical features, like the three greenish oceans, and leaves others in shadow, like the mountain peaks around Nájar Crater.
In the previous century, an orbit around Madreperla was considered one of the Sixteen Wonders of the sector, and was a specialty of View Tours run by some of the cruise ship lines. But once Ochoa issued its warnings about Nájar Crater, the orbit became costly and prohibitive. Each passenger had to sign off on the special permits, and few agreed to do that.
Still, crews that got to see the light travel across Madreperla felt lucky. Everyone who served on a ship that orbited Madreperla knew they were seeing one of the most unusual sites in the sector.
Every crew member I spoke to who traveled to Madreperla described that moment—usually on the second pass—where they crowded around the portals and ran to the view galleries to catch a glimpse.
Ferguson is not a sentimental man, nor one with much appreciation for natural beauty. He’s probably ignoring his crew’s enthusiasm, or raging against it. If he’s watching the surface at all, he’s trying to see what’s around the mountain range and Nájar Crater itself.
If he remains true to past practice, he’s also running scans of every inch of the surface, as well as more than a dozen scans of Nájar Crater. He will then huddle with his senior researcher, as well as his science and engineering staff to see if his scans line up with the scans the Gabriella got before the ship left Ius Prime.
That will take hours, which is probably why the Gabriella’s status in orbit is so long.
“I think they found problems,” Imelda said. “I think there were just enough inconsistencies to make Giles worry. Because normally, he would have taken an hour or two to review everything before heading to the surface.”
But there are a lot of problems with that surface that Ferguson and the Gabriella have never encountered before. There’s no good landing area near Nájar Crater. The mountains are too steep, and the ice shelves around the crater are very unstable.
“They probably had a place to land mapped out ahead of time,” Orion said. “I would guess it was on the northwest side of the crater, where the foothills form a kind of flat land.”
But it is possible that a closer scan of that landing area proves unsatisfactory. The Gabriella is like no other ship that has tried to land near Nájar Crater, at least according to the records kept by the star port.
The Gabriella is larger in general, and that infinity shape makes her longer than most ships. The landing gear is on one of the outside edges of the shape. Meaning if you were to look at the ship from the ground, you would see the entire infinity shape facing you, rather than the edges of it, lying flat. The placement of the landing gear protects the bubbles around the engines, by keeping them high off the ground. It also allows the landing gear to be short, instead of long enough to accommodate the width of those bubbles.
If you only look at where the landing gear touches the ground, then the footprint of the Gabriella is small. But if you take into account the width, with the bubbles around the edges, the Gabriella is quite large.
If the Gabriella lands too close to the foothills, they will brush up against the engine bubbles. If the Gabriella moves closer to Nájar Crater, then she risks putting too much weight on a shelf rather than a solid piece of land.
Ice shelves surround the rest of Nájar Crater. The ice shelves are wider, but much more dangerous, given what happened to the Maria Segunda and the ships that followed.
It is possible for the Gabriella to land in front of those foothills, if the scanned and recorded measurements are correct. But it is distinctly possible that there has been erosion or that there are boulders or other debris that make landing the Gabriella difficult at best.
She has hovering capability, and perhaps Ferguson decided as he got closer to Madreperla to hover, instead of land.
That decision might explain why he contacted other captains, asking them to back him up, if possible.
There is some evidence that the backwash from a traditional hover is one of the things that triggers a maelstrom. Hovering near Nájar Crater is not recommended.
Still, some of the spacers I spoke to believe it’s possible Ferguson made this very decision. The Gabriella’s engines are different than all of the others that came before her. They vibrate at a different frequency.
The Gabriella is the first (former) military vehicle that will get this close to Nájar Crater, that we know of, anyway. And a lot of experts believe that the differences in the engines will make it safer for the Gabriella to attempt a hover rather than a landing.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Orion told me, “but then I wouldn’t do half the stuff that Giles did and got away with. Still, just because the engines are different doesn’t guarantee that the ship is safer. There’s a distinct possibility that the differences might have triggered a worse maelstrom, like the one from the…whatsis? Maria whatever?”
“Maria Segunda,” I said softly, not wanting to interrupt an interview subject but wanting him to move forward.
“Yeah, that one. How come that ship experienced a worse maelstrom than any other? Was it the engines? Has anyone checked?”
I did not know the answer, and said so.
“Exactly,” Orion said. “There are too many risks associated with Nájar Crater. I might specialize in risk, but there’s a difference between doing something risky with the possibility of a great payoff, and doing something risky that will have no good payoff at all.”
Either Ferguson’s calculations of risk are different from Orion’s or Ferguson knows of mitigating factors that Orion isn’t aware of.
Because, after twenty hours, the Gabriella breaks orbit and heads to the surface of Madreperla.
Images the Decker took of the Gabriella before her descent into the atmosphere show that she has deployed her landing gear. However, the Gabriella can hover with the gear activated.
The hover command activates the same engines that the Gabriella uses to land. These engines are smaller, and placed at six points around the infinity shape. They are useless in space, although some military captains have used them as thrusters to change direction in the middle of a battle.
These six small engines take over the propulsion of the ship once she enters Madreperla’s atmosphere. The large main engines shut down—again, something best done in space—and for half an orbit, the Gabriella will float while the smaller engines prepare for their part of the mission.
Eventually, when the captain or the chief engineer decides the moment is right, the smaller engines will thrust the Gabriella out of orbit and into the atmosphere.
The ship literally dives out of orbit. Once she leaves space, her rotations cease. The smaller part of the infinity shape leads, with the larger part following. The main bridge is located where the two shapes cross, a protected point in space, but almost a bullseye once the ship tips up on its end on land.
All of that factors into where the Gabriella will stop, but most likely, none of it goes through Ferguson’s consciousness as he gives the orders to dive into the atmosphere. By then the landing location is chosen, and every contingency has already been planned for.
Or so one would hope.