Flash.
It was a pop of light, a burst of energy that left a little sizzle on the retinas. It was the return of light to eyes that had remained unfocused and non-functional for extreme weeks, months, even years at a time. Mitch Garrison had now experienced that flash enough times in his life that despite the fog of deep, vapor-induced sleep, his brain instantly put the pieces together. He was awake now. The long nap between shifts was over.
He tried to stretch but found himself confined. Pod, his gunk-filled brain reminded him. He blinked, which amounted to nothing but an instant of darkness punctuating the blurred light, and he managed to slide his hands up along the tight space to rub his underused eyes. Finally, slowly, things came into focus.
Something was wrong.
According to the readout just above his head, he’d only gone in a couple of months ago. He had another six months before his shift was to start.
The lid of the pod hissed, popped, and slid open. Mitch reached up and grabbed the lip of the opening, pulling himself up to a swooning but otherwise steady sitting position. The momentary grogginess of stasis was quickly replaced by sheer confusion as he looked around the Blue Collar pod bay.
Chaos was everywhere.
The rest of his shift was awake and scrambling. A few, like himself, were just sitting up from their own stasis pods, peering out at the madness surrounding them with expressions of confusion, concern, and occasionally outright fear. Mitch heard shouting and looked to see First Commander Marcos standing in the doorway to the pod bay, barking orders at the Blue Collar crew. Unsteadily, on limbs that weren’t entirely ready to function, Mitch climbed out of the pod and stumbled to the pod bay floor.
“Move! Move!” Marcos was shouting. “We’ve got to get those White Collars awake and into the Citadel module, now!”
Citadel module. The landing module? Mitch glanced at the time display again. They couldn’t be planet-side already. Could they?
He must have stood idle for too long. “Move it, Garrison, no time to screw around. We’re hitting atmo in 25 minutes!”
Atmo … atmosphere? Even with goo still dripping its way out of Mitch’s gray matter, he knew for certain that the colony ship wasn’t built to enter an atmosphere. So hitting atmo in 25 minutes meant only one thing.
They were about to crash.
Mitch shook his head, trying to jar his brain into gear, and grabbed his tool bag from the storage bin under the pod. He was thrown off balance. He had relied on these tools for most of his adult life, but they felt like dead weight as he slung the bag over his shoulder and took off at a run for the White Collar bay.
Captain Alonzo ran an orderly ship. He had to. Flight along the lightrail, at relativistic speeds, required mere mortals such as himself to sleep for long periods of time, along with a rotating chunk of the crew and every single non-essential passenger. If the order slipped, if chaos was allowed to take root, then the whole thing could spin out of control and everyone in his charge, including Alonzo himself, would be dead.
Chaos was currently everywhere.
Alonzo barked orders and directives as the Blue Collar crew—most of them still sluggish and groggy from the sudden release from stasis—began waking the White Collars and getting everyone into the Citadel landing module. The orbital platform crew was in another part of the ship. They’d have to remain in stasis for now—there had been an issue with the automated systems, and Alonzo couldn’t spare anyone to go wake them up manually.
The protocol for a crash was to awaken ground crew and operations personnel. The colonists would be safer in sleep storage, where the padded and secured stasis pods would prevent injury from the jarring ride to come. If Alonzo could get the colony module clear of the rest of the ship, a pilot could guide her down by remote. Under normal circumstances, the colony module would be guided down from the bridge of the orbiting platform, while the Citadel module would have its own pilot at the helm. But normal circumstances had been abandoned when Alonzo found himself waking early to the jarring sound of warning claxons.
No time to dwell on it, he thought.
Landing the colony module safely was one challenge, but the continued survival of the colonists hinged on getting support personnel to the ground as quickly as possible. Alonzo had taken the extra precaution of ordering his bridge crew into the Citadel module. Every man and woman would count once they were planet-side. But it meant he would be short-handed until he could awaken the Beta crew. Why didn’t they awaken with the others? he thought. He forced it out of his head, afraid that the answer would be less than helpful at best.
If the ship had been able to transition fully out of light speed, the computer systems, which became useless during faster-than-light travel, would have been functional, and the crew would have awoken automatically. That was the emergency protocol. However, the residual effect of the lightrail prevented the wireless and computer systems from functioning.
Protocol had screwed them.
How was he to know at the time? When the alarm sounded and he came out of cryo, all he knew for sure was that they were headed for the wrong planet. He did what any captain in the fleet would do. He tried to get them back on course—and protocol demanded that his first step was to maintain the connection to the lightrail, since losing it meant losing all of the lives on board to the vastness of space.
He had succeeded in keeping the lightrail going, but once that was done the ship’s systems wouldn’t let him alter course. Shifting the beam, even under the best of conditions, was both difficult and dangerous. This time, though, he’d found it was impossible. The computer systems were, of course, useless at light speed, but the mechanical systems should have worked with no trouble. Instead, no matter what he tried the beam pulled them along on the same course—toward the same planet. Only now, instead of gradually slowing from light speed, they were still heading for the planet at full tilt.
Once he had realized that their course couldn’t be altered, Alonzo began shutting down the rail. It was too late. Physics still applied, even at light speed, and the ship couldn’t finish decelerating before hitting the planet’s atmosphere. There was nothing left to do but awaken the rest of the crew and prepare for … well, at this point it was anyone’s guess. There was one, slim chance for the colony, and that was an emergency atmospheric entry at sub-light speed.
Just because it had never been done before didn’t mean they wouldn’t survive, right?
The Captain had intended to brief Commander Marcos, his first officer. Alonzo planned to stay with the orbital platform, for good or ill, and that meant Marcos would be in command on the ground. But the planet was approaching fast, and there wasn’t time to explain anything. Marcos would just have to piece it together on his own, if he survived entry into the atmosphere.
Despite the protocols established by the Earth Colony Fleet, Alonzo had his own set of priorities. It was imperative that his crew get the White Collars awake and to safety. Even more than the colonists themselves, this colony depended on these few over-educated, occasionally arrogant scientists, engineers, and administrators. If the Citadel module was the nerve center of the colony, then these men and women were the organs and arteries, the parts that made the whole organism live. Funny how these intellectuals often toed the bitter line between the ship’s Blue Collar operations crew and the mostly affluent colonists. The White Collars belonged to neither group, and the penalty for that was to be snubbed by both. But Alonzo saw the White Collars as being very much like himself—both part of and separate from the rest of the crew. He felt a bit of empathy for them, despite the fact that for years—first as a Blue Collar navigator and then as a commander—he’d felt mostly contempt for the seemingly soft, overly intellectual group. Since then, all contempt had been laid aside, especially at this moment when everything might depend on any one person aboard.
Alonzo left the chaos of the evacuation behind and made his way quickly to the operations control center on the bridge. He moved deliberately, but not slowly. He had a duty to show his crew that despite all of the panic, he was calm and in charge. Any sign of panic or worry might be enough to throw off the whole operation, and too much was riding on this. Thousands of people could die today if Alonzo allowed even a second’s worry to cross his features.
He arrived on the bridge and pulled the hatch closed behind him. For the first time since the alarm had sounded, he allowed himself to relax a bit. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, ignoring the shaking stutter of his breath. He was alone here. The rest of the waking crew was bleeding out of the main body of the spacecraft, the segment that would for a time make up the orbital platform, and Alonzo would soon find himself the last waking soul aboard. Once the two extension modules were loosed and safely on their way, he could work on awakening Beta crew. He could organize them into repair teams and get the orbital platform back to full function, then deal with the problem of getting back to civilization.
He checked the monitors and took note when the crew was fully loaded into the Citadel landing module. The Colony module was firing up for entry, too.
“Captain,” First Commander Marcos called over the wired video intercom. “We’re loaded here. What’s the status of the Colony module?”
Alonzo checked a status screen and frowned. “Still locked, First Commander,” he said. “It looks like you’re going to have to do a simultaneous landing.”
“Simul … are you saying the Colony module is going down with us?”
“Affirmative, First Commander. No way around it. We’re too close to the atmosphere, and if I don’t get both of you off of my belly, the whole ship’s going in. I’m disengaging all docking clamps now. The orbital platform should settle in to geosync once I rebound off of the two landing modules.”
Despite the confidence in his voice, Captain Alonzo had no idea if this plan was going to work. He was relying on a pretty rudimentary understanding of physics—equal and opposite reactions—to justify what he was about to do. In theory, the orbital platform would be pushed out towards open space, and he could maneuver it into geosynchronous orbit using thrusters. In reality, if it didn’t work … well …
“Get an engineer to the module junction to start the manual release. We’re still feeling the effects of the lightrail. No radio or wireless yet, so once the physical links are broken, we’ll be out of contact. By the time you get to ground and get the wireless set up, we should be in orbit and back online. Report in as soon as you can.”
Marcos nodded, “Aye, sir.” He paused, then said, “Captain, just in case this goes bad … I want you to know it was an honor serving with you.” He snapped a salute.
Captain Alonzo smiled. Marcos, his First Commander, was a good man, and they had served together for a very long time. He was honor-bound and duty-driven. When he offered an honorable salute of any kind, he meant it. It was one of the reasons Alonzo had chosen him as his second-in-command, even though there were higher ranked crewmembers on board at the time. Good men, as the cliché goes, are hard to find. Alonzo returned the salute with just as much respect. “Get those people on the ground, Commander. That’s an order.”
The crew was boarded and in the process of strapping in. Marcos was gripping the sides of the console before him, staring at the smiling, slightly haunted image of Captain Alonzo on screen as he let his salute fall. “Get those people on the ground, Commander,” the Captain said. “That’s an order.”
“Aye, Captain,” Marcos said. The image blinked off, and the screen went dark. Marcos turned to face the crew, most of whom were still struggling to lock themselves into place. There were more people than chairs, unfortunately, and many were forced to snap into the emergency straps lining the module walls. Marcos shook his head. Some of them were going to have a rough time going down.
He spotted one of the White Collar medical personnel. “Doctor,” he said, “when we’re down, there are going to be a lot of injuries … ”
“Got it,” the doctor interrupted. “You concentrate on getting us to the surface in one piece. I’ll worry about patching up the wounded.”
Despite himself, Marcos smiled. He was a fan of no-nonsense. He nodded and turned back to once again survey the crowd.
One man immediately stood out—his skin naturally hued a light and organic green. “Captain Somar?” the First Commander asked, pushing through the settling crewmembers to stand before the alien. “I figured you’d still be in stasis.”
The alien captain was an experiment of sorts. He was one of the first participants in a crew exchange between Earth Colony Fleet and their former enemies, the Esool. Until recently—within the past few years actually—humanity had been engaged in a bitter territorial war with the Esool. The fight had been long and scarring, and humanity in general was having trouble letting it go. But the leaders of the Earth Colonies—a relatively new, poorly organized, and only occasionally unified government of humanity—felt it was time to put differences aside and share the gaping expanse of space with the only other sentient species they had ever encountered.
The decimation of a rare and invaluable planet, one that could have supported human life, had certainly played a role in the movement toward peace.
Somar looked up from helping one of the female White Collar engineers into a seat harness. “First Commander Marcos,” he said, nodding briefly. “I was in stasis in the White Collar pod bay. I was awakened with the others.”
Marcos nodded. “I’m sorry about that. Captain Alonzo felt it was important to get all of the support crew into the Citadel module. It has the best chance of making it to the surface intact.”
“What about the colonists?” Somar asked. “Are they in danger?”
“All of us are in danger,” Marcos admitted. “But the Colony module has a reinforced hull and atmospheric thrusters. Not to mention computer guidance systems that should kick in once the light-speed effect wears off. We’re hoping that’s enough.”
“I believe the guidance systems depend upon Citadel being planet-side to guide the module to a safe landing, do they not?”
Marcos let the question hang, and after only a brief pause, Captain Somar nodded, catching on that things could go from bad to worse.
Marcos looked around and spotted one of the White Collar engineers, a man named Thomas. “You,” he said, “I need you to get to the module junction and activate the manual release.”
Thomas hesitated.
“Go!” Marcos shouted, annoyed. White Collars, he thought. Always balking … always bucking authority. This was far from a military operation, but the chain of command had to be maintained. If it were up to Marcos, he’d have left all of the W.C.’s in stasis. But the captain’s command was clear, and orders were orders. Marcos was willing to admit that their survival might depend on one of these pampered types. Regardless of his opinions, they might need every soul they could get.
Snapped out of any reluctance, Thomas ran out into the corridor and towards the junction room.
Somar spoke up, “Our first priority must be the colonists.”
Marcos turned back to the Esool Captain and paused. He had almost forgotten the alien was there. “I’m sure Captain Alonzo thinks so too. But we can’t help them if we’re scattered all over the landscape.”
Somar reflected on this then nodded, turned away, and continued to help the White Collars into their harnesses.
Marcos turned to the module pilot, the young woman named Reilly. She was methodically working the preflight checklist and preparing for an emergency atmospheric entry. Marcos knew Reilly well and admired her a great deal. If anyone could handle a forced landing under these chaotic conditions, it was her.
They might just pull through this.
Or it might all be for nothing, he thought. Even if we survive. The prospect of having to scrape by on a colony world with no way off had crept into his mind, but he shoved it back and focused on the business of saving their collective asses.
Now this, Thomas thought, is just about typical.
He wasn’t generally a fatalist, or even overly pessimistic. He was simply a keen observer of a life spent rebounding from one crash after another. True, this one would be a little more literal than most, but ironically appropriate considering how he’d found himself here in the first place.
Thomas shook his head as he ran. He didn’t believe in poetic injustice. The universe had a sadistic sense of humor, but it wasn’t that cruel.
He hoped.
Right now, he was focused on finding the manual release. In the weeks after waking up to his new life, Thomas had spent most of his time memorizing the mechanics and layout of this ship. He needed a “conversational” knowledge of how things worked here if he intended to pass for an engineer. His own specialty gave him the foundations he needed to catch up, but his knowledge of the ship’s sub-light engines and computer systems would do him little good when it came to the intricate mesh of cogs, wires, and pumps. Apparently, one of the major side effects of travel on the lightrail was that digital technology was rendered useless for the duration.
He knew how that felt.
But he’d always had a head for diagrams, blueprints, and spec sheets. And in the end, that’s what it took to come up to speed on “modern” engineering—a mish-mash of mechanics that seemed like a cross between the Victorian era and rivets-and-steel science fiction. Now, though, he had to quickly apply what was in his head to what was spanning out before him. Was this the right corridor? And what, exactly, would the manual release look like?
He wondered briefly how First Commander Marcos would react if he knew that this particular “White Collar” had never been on a modern space craft before.
The corridor opened up into a large room with walls made of overlapping bands of metal. From small portholes, Thomas was able to peek out at the blackness of space. They were still riding the lightrail, a beam of near-solid energy that stretched to infinity, as far as Thomas could tell. Streaks of light, distant stars seen from a sliding vantage point, were starting to shrink toward points. The ship was slowing down.
Thomas could see the landing module to the left and the orbiting platform to the right. The only thing holding both together was the docking tube in which he now stood. Far away, attached to another part of the ship, was the colony module. The design hadn’t changed much since the first vessel, appropriately named "First Colony" more than 150 years earlier.
Thomas shuddered at a not-distant-enough memory and turned back to face the contents of the junction room.
Along one wall was a series of cabinets and lockers. A communications panel was wedged in among these. And there, in a large gap made between two banks of lockers, was a metal wheel and a sign reading “Manual Release” in large, red, and (to Thomas, at least) beautiful letters.
He ran to it, placed both hands on the wheel, and gave it a tug. Nothing.
He rolled through the details of the release in his head. There was nothing that should prevent this wheel from turning … except …
He ran his hands along the base of the wheel, which was hidden from view. There it was—the cotter pin. It was attached by a small chain to the wall behind the wheel. Thomas grabbed the chain and tugged. It was in there tight, but it did move slightly. He pulled harder. The chain felt as if it were cutting into his hand, and in seconds, it pulled free and clinked against the wall.
He shook his hand briefly, then firmly gripped the wheel again. After two deep breaths, he gave it a turn, putting all of his weight into it.
The manual release clicked and clacked as he turned the wheel. Finally, after what felt like an alarmingly long time, it gave one final click and stopped turning. A buzzer sounded from somewhere behind him, and when he’d turned back from glancing around for it, Thomas put his shoulder to the wheel for one last go. He pushed hard, put all of his weight into it, but the wheel would budge no further. Satisfied, he picked up the cotter pin and pushed it into the hole at the base of the wheel. Now that it was in the open position, the holes in the shaft lined up again and the pin slid in much easier than it had come out.
Thomas quickly made his way through hatch of the junction room, closing the large, heavy door behind him, and into the corridor connecting the junction bay to the landing control module. First Commander Marcos was barking orders at the Blue Collar crew, each busy with last-second preparations for the launch. The Commander turned to Thomas. “The green light just came on. Good work,” he said.
Thomas nodded and made his way to one of the handrail-studded walls at the back of the module’s crew bay. The alien captain … Somar … was busy working straps and hooks, fastening people to the handrails. Many of the White Collars still seemed dazed and confused by the events they’d awoken to, and they offered little in the way of help. Thomas stepped in beside Somar and began helping the alien to strap people in.
“Thank you,” Somar said, nodding to him slightly.
Thomas nodded in return and clipped the remainder of the White Collar and Blue Collar crewmembers to the walls. He and Somar then secured themselves and prepared for what promised to be a very bumpy landing.
Marcos flipped open the control panel’s switch-guard. One at a time, he flipped the switches that activated the explosive bolts and thrusters. One by one, each bolt exploded, and each thruster fired. Soon they would pull free of the orbital platform and hit atmo … probably way too fast. But they had a chance, and Marcos was going to follow orders and get these people to the ground. Safely if it was possible.
The landing module jarred heavily, throwing Marcos to the floor.
“What … ?”
Another wrenching quake, and the screeching sound of metal on metal resonated through the hollows of the module.
“Commander!” Reilly, the pilot, shouted over the din. “The release clamps are still engaged!”
Damn it! The White Collar—Thomas. He must have screwed up. Marcos stumbled to the man, who was being buffeted between crew members on one of the handhold walls. He grabbed Thomas by the collar. “The release is still closed!” he shouted.
The man’s face went pale. “I … I turned the release until it locked in place. The cotter pin … ”
“You screwed up!” Marcos shouted.
Thomas started fumbling with the release on his safety straps. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“No,” Marcos said, pushing him back hard against the wall. “I’ll take care of it.” He stumbled away, opened the hatch to the corridor, and closed it behind him. As he made his way down the corridor to the junction room, he was buffeted from side to side. He occasionally lost his footing and had to catch himself on the handrails.
It was taking too long! By the time he got to the controls, it might be too late.
The ship held together, though, as Marcos opened the hatch to the junction room and stumbled to the release wheel.
It wouldn’t budge.
He gave it another good tug, then remembered something Thomas had said. The cotter pin? He looked, and sure enough, the pin was in place. The threads of the wheel were exposed, too. It would have been impossible to replace the cotter pin if the release hadn’t been either wide open or completely closed.
It also occurred to him that there had been a green light on the panel on the control deck. A green light meant that the clamps were disengaged and the bolts were ready to blow. The bolts had gone, sure enough, and the module should have been propelled outward by the thrusters. Instead, here they were being buffeted and shaken.
Quickly Marcos studied the onscreen schematic. He switched to exterior cameras and turned a knob, slowly. The image zoomed in on the manual release clamps. All of the explosive bolts had fired and the thrusters were active, but the release itself, the physical linkage between the landing module and the orbital platform, was still in place.
The White Collar had been telling the truth. He had done his job. Something else was preventing the release from working.
Marcos zoomed in further, focusing on the line between the control wheel and the clamps, the physical linkage that would open the clamps as the wheel turned. He saw that there was a break in the line.
No … not a break. It was too smooth—too uniform.
It was cut.
He yanked the communicator from the wall and called up to the main bridge.
Captain Alonzo’s voice, strained and tense, came back. “Marcos, what the hell are you still doing here? You’re shaking the hell out of me! Get that module off my belly!”
“Captain, we’ve got a problem. The release has been sabotaged.”
There was a brief pause on the other end, and Marcos was afraid the connection had been lost. The jarring and wrenching became more frenetic outside. Bad things were about to happen.
“Sabotaged,” Captain Alonzo repeated. “First Commander,” the Captain’s voice came through calm and collected. “You know what needs to be done.”
Marcos felt his stomach tighten. “Yes sir,” he said.
“You have your orders,” the Captain said.
Marcos nodded, took a deep breath, and said, “It was an honor to serve with you, Captain.”
“Likewise, Commander. You will be remembered. And honored.”
Without further pause, Marcos dropped the communicator, letting it dangle by its cord, and ran to the wall of storage bins on the other side of the bay. There was no time left to pull on an EVA suit. By the time he had it pressurized, the whole ship would have torn itself apart. Marcos took a deep breath as he placed his palm on an identity scanner and opened one of the secure bins. He grabbed a molecular disc gun from the locker and checked its charge and load. Full charge. Marcos took a deep breath, turned, and walked into the corridor that connected the junction bay to the landing module.
The linkage ran parallel to the corridor, and a pattern of bolts showed where the line would be. Marcos positioned himself in front of the release valve, the one that would normally have freed the module from the main body of the starship, and took aim. He knew there was no time to waste, but still he hesitated.
He had meant what he’d said. It truly had been an honor to serve with Captain Alonzo. It had been an honor to be a part of the Earth Colony Fleet. He had known that this sort of end had always been a possibility, and he had accepted it, with no regrets. He would do his duty, and he prayed that the colony would survive.
Without another second’s hesitation, he raised the disc gun and began firing in short, punctuated bursts. Metal sizzled in a way that was wholly unnatural as the molecular disruption fields emitted by each disc made quick work of the housing of the tunnel, as well as the linkage of the clamp on the other side. As the molecules of the metal split and fell away like so much dust blown from a piece of furniture, the sudden rush of atmosphere exiting the tunnel forced the emergency doors closed and pulled Marcos outward, hurling him into space.
In moments he would explode from the outward press of his own blood pressure.
For the first few seconds, Marcos felt nothing but a sense of sudden, complete silence. Never before had he been in a world so totally devoid of sound. The silence was so deep, and so wonderful, that he hardly noticed the pressure build. Then, as air and blood and bile were forced out of him, he felt the pain of his limbs swelling and his eyes bulging, and still the silence brought a kind of peace. He was dying, but it was a death on his own terms. And that made it bearable.
He closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable, and as the pressure became too much for his skin and muscle tissue to contain, one last nuisance of a thought flitted through Marcos’s mind.
The Captain had not been surprised about the sabotage.
Inside the landing module the crew was shaken and tossed all over the place. Even with the restraints holding her in her seat, Reilly felt like she was about to fly out into the open crew chamber any second. She struggled to hold herself steady as she began working the controls that would get them safely to the ground.
The crew module was actually a shuttlecraft mounted atop the Citadel module—the tower of sophisticated technology that was the brain and central nervous system for the future colony. While attached, the shuttle had a direct mechanical and electrical link to Citadel’s thrusters and propulsion systems. Everything was designed to work in tandem until the Citadel module landed safely on the planet’s surface. The shuttle could then detach and resume normal flying, acting as a ferry between the planet’s surface and the orbital platform. It would be one of three shuttles on the planet’s surface, with the remaining two coming down from the landing platform. But until then, it was the acting control deck for the entire Citadel module.
A module that was about as maneuverable as a brick.
Reilly was now forced to guide that brick to the ground using what amounted to a stiff breeze blowing against a hurricane gale. This was far from a “textbook atmospheric entry.” The lightrail was fading, so they had exited at relativistic speeds. But as normal physics kicked in once again, the entire ship was becoming inertia’s bitch. The fact that they were still attached to the larger mass of the entire vessel meant that when the release finally opened, she’d be dealing with much more inertia and momentum than the module deserved.
It was a struggle just to plot the right trajectory and prevent them from bouncing off of the atmosphere and back into space. The work was taking a lot of Reilly’s concentration, and it would be nice if someone were there to give her some direction. First Commander Marcos hadn’t come back.
Which could only mean he was dead.
The violent jarring before, that must have been an explosive decompression. Marcos would have been caught in that, hurled out into space as the landing module tore free and careened wildly away from the main body of the starship. Reilly had used everything she had to right them and control the ship’s attitude, and now that she’d finally leveled off, she wondered if it had been worth the effort. There was a better-than-likely chance that they would now slam into the atmosphere at just the right angle to shatter the hull and spew everyone into space.
Maybe she would bump into Marcos out there.
Reilly shivered, focused on the mechanical web of controls before her, and put everything she had into adjusting the ship’s trajectory.
She checked the screens for a visual on the colony module. It seemed to have released without the problems or drama of the Citadel module, and it was being bounced around like a tennis ball at the moment. Thank God for gravity fiber, Reilly thought. It was the only thing keeping the sleeping colonists from being slammed all over the inside of their stasis pods and coming out like scrambled eggs.
Too bad they didn’t line the module seats with the stuff.
She was just about to flip the view back to the atmo side of the module and watch for problems on entry when she noticed the tiny white dot.
She rolled the dial to zoom in. There was too much light coming from the backwash of the orbital platform—no way to know for sure what it was. But it was definitely humanoid. She could make out arms and legs flailing, as if the figure were trying to find purchase in the black of space, to swim.
It had to be Marcos.
Reilly blinked, and hot tears streaked her face. She shook her head, letting the tears fly, and then creased her brow as she leaned into the controls. There was no time to think about it. She would grieve later.
She had a brick to fly and, hopefully, land.
They didn’t have the luxury of the usual soft descent. This was going to be a hard landing, and she would need to focus everything she had on keeping them on course. Without the aid of the computers and without time to do the math, she had to rely on instinct to find the right entry window. She had made hundreds of orbital landings, and more than a few of them had had their issues. None, however, were quite as problematic as this one. It would take a miracle of intuition and ballsy luck.
Not only was she going to have to land the crew module, she was going to have to figure out a way to get the colony module down safely at the same time. It was one of the pilot’s duties during a colony landing. Of course, the pilot was normally either on the ground or in the orbital platform when the colony module landed. Today she would have to fly two modules down at once, and it was a bit like spontaneously learning to write with both hands while riding a unicycle.
If they could reach the ground before the colony, then there was a chance they could still guide it down as usual, but with both modules entering atmo at the same time, the only chance of reaching the ground first was to push forward using thrusters. That meant building up even greater momentum—not such a desirable situation when your destination is the ground.
Reilly gripped the controls—one for each hand. She tapped the dual foot pedals—one for forward thrusters, one for breaking thrusters. Just like driving a car. Only a car didn’t have a few thousand tons of momentum behind it and come bearing the heat of atmospheric entry.
Reilly shouted to the crew and passengers, “Lock your belts, we’re going in extremely hot!”
“You’re hitting thrusters!” one alarmed crewman shouted.
“Ya think?” she whispered and jammed the forward thruster pedal to the floor.
Now that they’d broken the upper atmosphere, real gravity was kicking in and with it came real inertia. Everyone was thrown back by the sudden g-forces, and Reilly had to struggle to keep the module on the right trajectory. She worked the two attitude controls feverishly, compensating for the buffeting and redirection coming from the chaotic entry.
It looked for a moment like they were going to make it.
But the ground was coming up too fast, and they had too much momentum behind them. There hadn’t been enough time in orbit to find the right entry vector, so she’d had to guess. Now they were paying for it. They would make it down, but it wasn’t going to be a controlled landing. It was going to be a crash.
At least we’ll beat the colony ship down, she thought.
As if on cue, there was a massive, jarring impact. The landing module lurched to the side, and Reilly struggled to hold it steady. She checked the monitors and saw that the colony module had careened into them, pulled into the crew module’s draft as it moved through the atmosphere. Reilly cursed. Pushing with the thrusters had worked a little too well, putting them directly in the path of the slower-moving colony module. Now it was almost in free-fall, its thrusters useless as the automated systems struggled to right the craft. It was bouncing off of the crew module, threatening to destroy them both.
“Reilly!” one of the crew shouted.
“I’m on it!” she yelled back, then gunned the breaking thrusters while throwing both attitude controls into opposite positions. The crew module went into a sickening spin, end over end, throwing the crew module out and away from the colony.
And now we crash, Reilly thought as both modules spun wildly toward the surface. With one last effort, she pushed the controls forward with all of the force she could muster and slammed the thruster pedal to the floor. She turned on all of the attitude thrusters at once and jammed them downward. They’d still crash, but maybe she could soften the impact. She poured everything the module had, including the shuttle’s own attitude thrusters, into pushing downward against the pull of gravity.
Her last conscious memory was of seeing the colony module as it spun toward the surface, a gaping hole ripped in its side. God help them, she thought. They’re on their own.