Arrival (4 page)

Of course, she did think about her family. She and her husband had volunteered to bear extra children after the Daedalus had lost nearly one third of its population to the Luyten Separatists over two years ago. Their fourth child had been born only one year before she had left on this mission. She hadn’t wanted to leave her daughter at so young an age, but Dr. Wagner was just too old and weak to make the journey. And Dr. Wagner’s son had joined the Luyten Colony. That left only her, and so here she was, about to ride along into history with the rest of the crew as they set foot on another world.

“
Ten seconds to aero-braking,
” Frank’s voice announced through their comm-sets.

Mac noticed Maria holding Adia’s hand. He reached over to Will and grabbed his arm. “Hold me, Will?” he teased.

“You’re a pig,” Sara commented, more as a reflex than out of real anger.

“Stop it, babe. You’re gettin’ me all hot,” Mac sneered.

“
Five seconds…
” Frank’s voice warned.

Sara’s defense of Adia was needless, as Adia hadn’t heard Mac’s teasing.

“
Four…
”

Adia gripped her armrest even tighter.

“
Three…
”

Tony shook his head in dismay at his friend’s antics.

“
Two…
”

Everyone braced themselves for the shock of atmospheric interface.

“
One…
”

Lynn braced the palm of her right hand against the butt of the control stick, not wanting to bump it during interface.

Jack clutched the armrests of his seat as he continued to scan the instruments in front of him.

Frank watched the mission chronometer as it ticked away the last second. “Zero.”

There was a slight bump. Then a distant rattling, lasting only a second or two. Then it came: a heavy thud that threw them all forward into their harnesses, nearly knocking the wind out of Jack.

“Interface!” Frank announced, the word forced from his mouth by the sudden jolt.

Jack glanced at the navigation display. A constant low rumbling followed the thud, reverberating throughout the ship. “How’s our course, Lynn?” Jack asked.

Lynn examined the navigation display carefully but quickly. “Down the middle,” she reported calmly. “Attitude is good, altitude is holding steady.”

Adia was now squeezing Maria’s hand so tightly it almost hurt.

Laura shifted slightly after the initial impact with the planet’s outer atmosphere threw her forward against her chest restraints. She decided to tighten them.

Sara’s eyes widened. She was having second thoughts.

Will wasn’t moving or reacting. He just held on tight, his gaze fixed straight ahead on the back of Laura’s helmet.

Tony watched the flight display from his seat at the front of the compartment. He rolled his eyes and smiled as he heard Mac cry out from the back row.

“Yee haw!” Mac exclaimed as the intensity of the vibrations rose.

Frank watched as the external balloot pressure and temperature increased rapidly. His eyes danced across his critical monitoring displays—from balloots, to reactor, to maneuvering, and back again. As the vibrations grew, it became more difficult to read his displays. He noticed the balloots shifting out of alignment again. This time, it stayed shifted long enough for him to be concerned before they settled back into proper alignment. Wanting to be sure that it was an instrumentation problem, he initiated a quick calibration check on the alignment sensors. It took only a few seconds. Unfortunately, the sensors reported to be in perfect calibration.

Another thud hit the ship without warning, even harder than before. It was so pronounced that Frank glanced at the collision sensors, afraid they might have actually hit something solid as they plowed through the upper atmosphere of Tau Ceti Five.

“Jesus!” Jack exclaimed. “What the hell was that?” Jack had spent a lot of time in the simulator back in training. The sim operators had rattled their bones on more than one occasion, but it was nothing like this. The ship was shaking wildly, lurching from side to side, up and down, twisting and rolling. It felt as if it would come apart at any moment.

Frank knew what Jack was asking. “Everything is holding up so far,” he promised.

Jack could hear the strain in Frank’s voice. “What’s the problem?”

“Upper port balloot has shifted a few times, only for a second or two at the most.”

“Should we be worried about this, Frank?” Jack asked, already worried.

“I’m not sure yet,” Frank confessed. “It’s not an instrumentation problem; I checked the calibration on the alignment sensors and they’re fine.”

“Is there anything we need to do differently at this point?” Jack asked the question before Lynn had an opportunity to chime into the conversation.

“Not yet,” Frank assured him. “Not as long as it keeps shifting back into place within a few seconds.”

“Keep an eye on it,” Jack ordered.

Tony tightened his harness. That last thud scared the hell out of him.
Probably even scared Mac a little
, he thought.

“Damn! This is one kick-ass ride!” Mac pronounced.

Guess not
, Tony mused. But Mac was the only one of them who seemed to be enjoying himself. The others were white-knuckled and pale-faced.

The shaking grew steadily worse. Something wasn’t right; Jack could feel it. It shouldn’t be this violent, not according to the aero-braking trial reports from seventy years ago, which he had spent hours studying. “Frank, verify our altitude by radar.”

“I can try, Jack. But it probably won’t be accurate with the plasma wake out there,” Frank warned.

I should have known that
, Jack thought to himself. “Can you get through it with penetrating-Doppler?” he asked, pretty sure that Frank could.

“Uh, yeah, should be able to,” Frank replied. “Give me a minute. I’ve got to write an interface loop to allow the nav computers to read the Doppler data.”

“Make it fast,” Jack ordered. The ship rattled and groaned, the extreme force of the super-heated atmosphere blasting away at the surface of the balloots.

“On it,” Frank assured him as he began entering code at a frantic pace—a difficult task, since the ship was shaking so violently. A few moments later, Frank was ready. “Penetrating-Doppler coming online,” he reported. Frank called up the Doppler display on his left hand console. Using the auto-sequencer, he called up a series of six pulses. It was more than double what he needed, but he wanted to be sure about the results. “I’m sending down six pulses. Should be enough for the nav-com to get at least two separate readings on our altitude,” he explained as he activated the sequencer. “Pulsing now.”

At the tail of the Icarus, on her underside, the Doppler dish unlocked itself from its safe position for aero-braking and maneuvered itself to point at the planet below. At its position, well aft of the plasma wake being plowed by the balloots up front, the frequency-compressed, high-energy beams the dish projected had the best chance of getting a clear reading through the highly-charged ions being thrown off by the plasma wake.

The first invisible energy pulse shot out of the Doppler emitter, bounced off the planet’s surface, and returned to the dish. Even though the cycle was repeated five more times, the series was over in less than two seconds.

Frank’s mouth dropped open when the computer displayed the results as an expression of altitude. “The altimeter is way off! By at least a few kilometers!” Frank turned to face forward. “We are
way
too deep!”

“Shit!” Jack cursed. “How the hell did that happen?” It was a useless question at this point, and Jack knew it before he finished asking. “Lynn! Get us higher!”

“How much higher?” she asked.

“Just start climbing!” Jack ordered.

“We can’t just pull up, just like that…”

“…I know,” Jack replied, cutting her off. “I’ll get you some new numbers as soon as I can, Lynn. In the meantime, just start pulling up, slow and easy.” Jack looked at her. She was scared, and she wasn’t trying to hide it this time. “You can do it, Lynn,” he assured her in his most confident tone. “Just fly the ship.”

Lynn had never before heard such encouragement from Jack, and was surprised at how comforted it made her feel. She took a deep breath as she deactivated the auto-flight system, letting it out as she flexed the fingers on her right hand and gently gripped the flight control stick. “Pitching up,” she announced with renewed confidence.

She gently pulled the stick back, releasing it almost as soon as she had touched it. The thrusters fired, but the ship didn’t move. She looked down at the attitude thruster’s status display. Even over the rumbling of the ship, she had heard
and felt
the thrusters fire. Looking at the display confirmed it. Still, they hadn’t moved. She tried again, this time giving the stick a definite, less subtle tap. Again the thrusters hissed, but still their attitude didn’t change. “It’s not working!” she exclaimed.

Jack was busy punching in numbers for a new aero-braking trajectory. If he didn’t get the trajectory right, they would either bounce off the atmosphere and go hurtling off into space, or burn up in the steadily thickening atmosphere of the world below. “Pull her up harder, then,” he ordered as he continued to punch the numbers into the nav-com.

She tried a third time, pulling the stick back and holding it for a second. Then a fourth time, for a full two seconds. Then three seconds, then four. “It’s no use, Jack,” Lynn insisted. “The attitude thrusters just aren’t powerful enough.”

“Okay, okay,” Jack accepted as he finished entering numbers. He thought for a moment as the nav-com calculated a new trajectory. “Try the OMS pods.”

“The OMS pods?” she said in disbelief.

“Yeah, just like we were climbing to a higher orbit,” he explained. “Orbit is a matter of speed, not altitude.”

“Yes, but we’re not even
down
to orbital speed yet,” she objected. “We’ll shoot off the other side, even at our current speed.”

“But if we increase our speed, we’ll climb up into thinner atmosphere and reduce the stress on the ship.”

“Yeah, and skip off into space!”

This time, Jack didn’t mind her comments and objections; it helped keep him focused as his mind raced, trying to take everything into consideration.

“Once we get into thinner atmosphere, the attitude thrusters should become more effective. Maybe then we can shallow out our trajectory and make this approach work.”

“Maybe?” Lynn objected.

“Better we skip off into space than burn up down here!”

Lynn knew he was right. She also knew that debating the issue would only cost them valuable time. This wasn’t like the braking-burn incident. This wasn’t a matter of ending up with just the right amount of fuel. This was a matter of life and death.

Jack saw the resignation in Lynn’s eyes. “Spin up the OMS pods, Frank!”

“OMS pods goin’ hot!” Frank answered back as he switched the OMS master arm on and spun up the fuel pumps. “OMS in three……two……one……burn!” The sound of the orbital maneuvering engines rumbled through the ship, as they struggled to accelerate the Icarus against the drag of Tau Ceti Five’s atmosphere against her balloots. “OMS pods are burning!”

“New trajectory coming up on the nav-com,” Jack announced.

The new trajectory outlines danced across Lynn’s screen, painting over the old lines. Lynn watched the flight dynamics display as the OMS pods burned, waiting for their speed to increase. “Come on,” she mumbled, “come on.” But the numbers didn’t increase, only decreased slightly as the friction of the balloots continued to drag them down.

The shaking was becoming unbearable. Even with the comm-sets, they had to yell to be heard over the intense rumbling of the plasma wake streaming past them outside.

“Jack! We’re still losing altitude! Even with the OMS pods burning!” Frank told him.

Damn!
Jack thought.
There has got to be a way out of this!
His mind ran through all possible options. “Frank? How much more of this do you think she can take?”

The question caught Frank off guard. Jack knew as much about the Icarus and her tolerances as Frank did. “If we can hold this altitude? Maybe ten minutes, twelve tops.” It was a conservative estimate, and he was sure that Jack knew it. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Frank added. “If we go much deeper, we’ll fry for sure.”

Jack searched his mind desperately, looking for some way out. But he kept coming back to only one option. “Spin up the reactor, Frank,” Jack ordered calmly. “Full power.”

Frank wasn’t sure what to say. He really wanted to caution Jack against bringing the reactor into play while the ship was being tossed about so violently. Anti-matter was a difficult thing to contain, even under the best of circumstances. A breach in the electromagnetic containment field would end their worries once and for all, wiping all evidence of their ship out of existence.
But Jack surely knew what he was doing, didn’t he?
Had they thrown this same scenario at him in simulation runs?
Still, despite his preaching about timing to Lynn only a few hours earlier, he felt compelled to remind Jack about the risk. “Uh, Jack?” he asked meekly.

Jack didn’t even let him speak, he already knew what was on Frank’s mind. It was on his mind as well. “I know,” he responded as he continued to punch numbers into the navigation computer. “I know.”

“Reactor coming up,” Frank answered back, trying to hide the uncertainty in his voice.

Lynn said nothing. This time she had no idea what to do except try to maintain some degree of control as the ship plunged through the thickening atmosphere.

“Bring the main drive online,” Jack added. He looked over at Lynn. “We’ll have to blast our way out of this, Lynn.”

Lynn silently nodded agreement. Either she understood the situation better than Jack had expected, or she was too scared to object. At the moment, it didn’t matter.

“Reactor at one hundred percent, mains are online,” Frank reported.

“Let’s do it,” Jack ordered. “Light’em at twenty-five percent.”

Frank set the main engines as instructed, braced himself, and gently depressed the main engine start button. “Firing mains.”

The main engines at the tail of the Icarus lit up in a brilliant yellow-white flash, their exhaust nozzles squeezing into a tight cone to increase their thrust. The main drive of the Icarus was quite powerful. Usually, it was not lit at more than ten percent, the sudden acceleration considered unsafe for human occupants. But their situation was desperate.

The force of the main engines pushed them all against their seats, although not as much as they would have expected. The atmosphere was fighting the ship’s efforts to accelerate, the friction of the balloots working against them. “Mains at twenty-five percent!” Lynn reported as she struggled to regain the air that had just been knocked out of her lungs. “Speed still dropping!”

“Bring them up to fifty percent!” Jack ordered.