Citadel: First Colony (3 page)

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.

S
moke.

Smoke was everywhere, and Mitch coughed outrageously as he struggled to get his bearings, blinking and wiping away tears from his stinging eyes. He was strapped to his chair but dangling against the belts, which cut painfully into his chest and ribs.

He was hanging above the open crew cabin. His chair had spun away from the controls that had been before him—a safety protocol meant to protect the crew during an impact—and now apparently he was facing the new “down.”