Wildly adjusting pitch and yaw didn’t shake the port winglet loose. It was stuck to the wing where it had rested as five thousand years of space-time sculpted the spacecraft’s exterior. A bright amber warning icon pulsed slowly on the shuddering display in front of the pilot, Cyrus Paria. He swept a forearm quickly across his dripping brow. Friction froze the wing but heated the shield, the cockpit, the dialogue.
“Fix it, Cyrus!” Commander Chen Wong yelled. “We’re short of the landing zone!”
Savanna De Clercq, the copilot, threw a quick glance at the two men. “I can compensate by adjusting the flaps until you jar the wing loose.” Her edged voice was tinged with a French accent. Her short, black hair matted to her glistening face. The three astronauts sweltered in the spacious, dim cockpit, staining to land tons of ancient ship.
“Don’t help!” Cyrus jammed the joystick forward and left.
“Asymmetric lift, Cy. I have to.”
The ship dived steeper and rolled to port in response. It then rolled precipitously in the opposite direction and flared nose up. The painful shaking increased.
“Too steep, Cyrus,” Wong screamed. “We’re burning up.”
“Damn it, Cyrus! This isn’t a fighter,” Savanna muttered unheard. Rattling and rush buried it. “You’re going to damage the good wing.”
Two more bright amber lights appeared, pulsing faster. “Heat shield damage, level five,” a computer voice announced. Chen threw his hands up. “You torqued the starboard foil, Cyrus. You’re going to kill us all. Savanna, take the stick. Cyrus, copilot.” Chen leaned back, muttering obscenities.
Cyrus cursed as he threw his hands in the air, glaring angrily at Chen. “Your stick.”
“Pilot flying.” Savanna acknowledged and retracted the starboard winglet so that they had equal airfoil on each side of the ship. The shaking decreased.
Chen bellowed into the intercom. “Leila, put out the fire on five!”
“Already on it.” Engineer Leila’s voice came over the intercom from her station outside of command and control. “Xenon is flooding the compartment, and coolant is diverted to the hull at that location.”
“We need both winglets for lift,” Cyrus muttered.
“Then climb out and fix it,” Savanna spat.
“All this speed to maintain lift is burning us up.”
“Computer, display alternate landing sites within reach.” Savanna ignored his statement of the obvious.
Two sites came up on the two-meter screen. One was a desert, flat with minimal vegetation. The other was a wide bay.
“Come on!” Chen pounded his console with a fist.
“Desert,” Cyrus said.
“Water,” Savanna decided. “Give me a visual on the bay and put up the course.”
“Would you like me to land the ship?” The computer’s voice was Canadian, not that anyone noticed at the moment.
“Negative,” Savanna said.
“The water will be too choppy. It’ll rip us apart.” Cyrus glared at his wife.
“Damn it, Cy!” Chen screamed, pounding again. “Stop arguing! Savanna, why go wet?”
“We’re way too fast for dirt,” Savanna said.
“That’s what the suspension is for!”
“What if that works as well as the wing, Commander?” The ship lurched, dipping to starboard. “Are the flaps out and equal, Cy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Computer, countdown to landing.” A digital display started at two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. The control room got warmer and continued to shake as it had for the last ten minutes. “Computer, assist with landing,” Savanna requested. Another countdown appeared on screen as well as a joystick setting for a slow left turn. LED lights at the edges of the room danced like the flames of hell as they did every time the computer assist kicked in. At zero, she started the turn. The shaking increased. “Cyrus!”
He adjusted a couple of sliders. The ride improved marginally. “About a minute, forty seconds before we land.” Cyrus hesitated, bit his lower lip, and threw a glance at Cyrus. He whispered, “I would lose more altitude than the computer likes and then nose up and flare in the last ten seconds. I think that will decrease our speed a little better.”
“We could stall.”
“That’s the point.”
The image of the planet and landing zone on the large screen in front of both pilots blurred. “We’re losing visual on the forward camera. Suresh, can you fix that?”
“No.” The arrogant voice of the Suresh Parambi responded over the intercom after a delay. “Heat is warping the lens.”
“We still have the real-time schematics,” Chen said. “That’ll have to do. Christ! Can anything else go wrong?”
“Hull breach, level five,” Leila’s voice rasped over the intercom. “Level four is threatened.”
“Lucinda, Maricia!” Chen shouted into his mike. “Evacuate! Evacuate to Engineering! Now!”
“Yes, sir” came from both the medics. “What about the med-bots?” Lucinda asked.
“Get them out of there!”
“There’s no place to dock ’em on level one,” Lucinda stated.
“Get ’em out! Medical will be an inferno in seconds.”
Chen slammed his console with his fist. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“Commander! Pull it together,” Savanna called.
He stopped pounding but continued to curse. The slow port turn and descent continued. He checked his screen for the location of all eight crew members. Three including him were in command and control. The computer showed that two were one section back, and three were or would soon be in the rear compartment, separated from the rest by the breech but relatively safe.
Savanna looked at Chen, who was occupied by his screen then at Cyrus. He looked away.
“There’s the bay!” He leaned and pointed at Savanna’s display. “Now, where’s the wind?” There was no computer response.
“Show wind direction and velocity.” Savanna gritted her teeth.
The computer placed blue arrows diagonally across the display, indicating a headwind angling from right to left. “Show depth chart close to the eastern shore.” Cyrus drew a line of a proposed landing site in shallow water on his screen. It appeared on hers as well. “What do you think, Savanna?”
Savanna struggled with the controls, her arms straining. Heedless, the ship rolled to starboard. “I can’t compensate!” Savanna’s words were clipped. The roll continued. “Rockets, Cy!”
“Firing.” It did not stop the roll. Within seconds, the ship was upside down.
“Catastrophic wing failure,” the Canadian voice calmly intoned. “Structural integrity of the hull is lost—probable separation prior to impact.”
“Come on, we can do this. Cyrus, ideas?” Savanna pulled her joystick hard and leaned on three buttons.
Chen cursed continually. Cyrus kept his finger on the rocket icon. He looked at Savanna as the rain forest and blue sky cycled on the screen; her eyes in terror, locked on his until there was a deafening screech followed by a hard jerk and a deafening explosion cut short by pure silence and darkness.