Back | Next
Contents

13

Twelve hours later, after a full cycle of sleep and refreshment, Clement found himself back on the Beauregard’s bridge, staring intently at the input from the long-range radio telescope on the main wall display. All of the primary bridge crew were watching the image of the Earth Ark as it bore down on Alphus, the innermost habitable planet of the seven worlds that composed the Trinity system.

The tactical display showed the Ark as it decelerated into the gravity well of Alphus. If she was planning on making for Bellus to pursue the Beauregard, she would have to make her turn and accelerate by skipping off of Alphus’ atmosphere and then firing her main engines in a five-gravity burst to change course. If, however, she intended to stay on her original course to orbit Alphus and deploy her forces there, she would have to make a much smoother turn and continue to decelerate until she had established a steady orbit over the planet.

The bridge was tense and quiet. “Distance of the Ark ship to Alphus, Navigator,” Clement asked.

“One hundred fifty thousand kilometers and closing, sir. At this pace she’ll touch the atmosphere in twelve minutes, then she’ll pass behind the planet and out of our line of sight. After about four minutes she should reappear on the other side of the planet, then either keep to an elliptical orbit and continue decelerating, or fire her mains and accelerate toward us,” said Massif.

“How difficult a maneuver is this, Mika?” Clement asked of his pilot.

She shrugged. “I’ve never done it with anything remotely that size, sir, but my guess is they have a programmed autopilot carrying out the burn. They also have the gravity well of Alphus to help them, and although she’s not as massive as Bellus or Camus, if I was betting on it, I’d say they can pull it off.”

Clement nodded and turned to Yan. “Ship’s status?”

“Ready for anything, sir. Locked down and prepared for any order you give.”

“And if we have to go to ground?”

“We have a spot in the northern hemisphere at the convergence of three river valleys that we can set the Beauregard down on, about twelve klicks from the nearest of those settlements, sir.”

“Thank you, Yan,” he said, then turned his attention back to the display. The crew waited in silence, with Massif giving occasional updates. Finally, there was a glint of light as the Ark started her pass to the far side of Alphus.

“Atmospheric contact confirmed,” said Massif. “They’ll be out of viewing range for the next four minutes.”

Clement fidgeted in his couch, which he was finding increasingly uncomfortable as time went by.

“Is it raise or call?” said Yan absently.

Clement looked at her, surprised by the poker reference, then turned back to the screen. They’d know soon enough.

There was another flash of light as the Ark ship came around the far edge of Alphus right on schedule, then the screen lit up with a bright flash of light that temporarily blinded the screen sensors. There could be little doubt now as to their intent. They’d fired their engines while they were still inside Alphus’ atmosphere.

“How long until they get here, Ivan?” asked a disappointed Clement.

“Nine hours, twenty-seven minutes,” said the Beauregard’s tall navigator.

Clement stood up and looked around his bridge. “Then we have half that long to get this ship down to a safe haven on Bellus,” he said, then looked down at his watch. “Commencing now.”


The next few hours Clement and Yan were a flurry of motion, validating landing procedures, surveying the landing site, prepping the ship for atmospheric travel. The Beauregard was never really made for operating in an atmosphere, but she always had the capability as a backup to staying space-borne. Clement had only ever landed her twice in her Rim Confederation Navy days, once on an asteroid to hide from 5 Suns Alliance hunter-killers that were pursuing her during the War of the 5 Suns, and once on a desperate resupply mission on Ceta near the end of the war. But this was a different Beauregard from the ship he had commanded, as Clement was well aware. Doing anything like a landing maneuver was going to be a completely new experience for everyone. He was with Mika Ori, looking at her proposed landing site.

“Will this area provide us enough cover?” said Clement.

“From what? Atomic missiles? Light attack drones? Pterodactyls?” she replied.

“Observation,” he snapped back at her. “Can we find enough ground cover to hide the ship from military observation cameras, drone flybys, and the like?”

Her pretty face twisted a bit as she thought about the new problem her captain was presenting her. “We wanted to land here,” she said, pointing to a peninsula between two of the rivers. “But there isn’t any ground cover, at least not enough to cover a two-thousand-ton spacecraft. If we went inland another five klicks though, there is a river delta with a flat rocky sandbar closer to the mountains. If we come down there we’ll have ready access to a large amount of vegetation that’s taller than the ship herself. Knocking down some random trees could provide us with enough cover so we’d look like a natural formation from space. But if a drone got close, say within five hundred meters, we’d be dead meat.”

“I’m more concerned with whether a sandbar could hold the weight of the ship. What about this clearing here?” said Clement, pointing to a smaller area another kilometer inland.

Mika pursed her lips as she was thinking. “It’s a much tighter fit,” she stated.

Clement looked up, catching her eyes as he smiled. “That’s why I hired the best pilot in the fleet,” he said.

She sighed and looked at the chart again. “This is what you want, isn’t it? Make my job tougher.”

“I just want the ship to be as safe as it can be, and I know you can fit us in there.”

“Like thread through the eye of a needle, sir,” she said.

He smiled wider. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

With that he left Ori to calculate the breaking maneuvers while he made his way down to see his chief engineer. Nobli looked up from behind his wire-rimmed glasses and crinkled his nose at Clement as he came in.

“I’ve got plenty to do here to get my LEAP drive secured for a planet-side landing, Captain, so I hope this isn’t some kind of pep talk.”

“It’s not,” said Clement, “rest assured.”

The two men eyeballed each other, each waiting for the other to go first. Finally Clement spoke.

“Can we protect the LEAP drive components from damage as we touch down?” he asked his engineer.

Nobli shrugged, a noncommittal gesture. “Probably,” Nobli said. “If we can keep her level, and the landing legs deploy properly, and about nine thousand other things don’t happen.”

“Because if they do we’ll be stranded here with broken wheels and no way to drive home?”

“Close enough,” said the engineer. “What you’re doing isn’t easy, Captain.”

“I know that,” snapped Clement, wiping sweat from his brow. It had been a stressful day, and it wasn’t close to over. “If we shut down the LEAP drive, let it go completely cold, how long will it take to restart?”

Nobli leaned back, then scribbled some calculations on a sheet of paper as Clement looked on, worried. Nobli looked up then.

“About .26 seconds,” he said.

Clement let out a relieved sigh. “Remind me never to hire you again,” he said.

Nobli laughed.

“You’ve forgotten about my sardonic sense of humor?”

“I never knew you had one.” Nobli looked at his captain again. “Just don’t let your hotshot pilot ruin my engine, and we’ll get along fine,” he said.

“I take it the thrusters can get us airborne in a hurry?”

“Absolutely. The mass of Bellus is slightly less than two-thirds of Earth, so escaping should be easy enough. Firing up the LEAP drive is no problem, once we’re in space, and we have someplace to go.”

Both men knew what the next question was.

“And the weapon?” asked Clement.

“Again, you’ll have it when you need it, Captain. But we both know it’s never been fired, and using it that way is only theoretical.”

“Then let’s pray we never have to use it,” Clement said on his way back out the door.


With five hours to go until the Earth Ark had to make her initial fire to establish orbit around Bellus, Clement and his bridge crew were ready to descend to the surface. After verbally running an all-systems check with his crew and ordering all unnecessary (for the landing) personnel to their bunks to strap in, Clement turned his ship over to Mika Ori.

“Take her down, Pilot. And don’t break her,” he said.

“Aye, Captain,” said Mika. Clement lay back deep in his safety couch while the pilot took over, activating the ship-wide com to address the full crew. “Course nominal on descent. Speed also nominal for this maneuver. Atmospheric insertion will occur in one minute, six seconds.” Clement tried not to count off the seconds, leaving the calculating to the ship’s timer. “We’ll make one full orbit while we pass from the dark side of Bellus around to the light side a second time. By then our deceleration should be complete enough for me to fire the braking thrusters and take operational control of our flight.”

“Will we be visible to the Earth Ark if we use the atmosphere to brake?” asked Clement.

Ori muted the com to reply to her captain. “The first twenty seconds we’ll be visible, but it will be against the light side of Bellus. After that we’ll pass behind the event horizon to the dark side and they won’t be able to track us. When we come around again our speed should be sufficiently slowed so that we won’t be visible to even their best cameras, if we’ve guessed at their level of technology correctly.”

If, thought Clement. He hated that word. He said nothing more as Ori guided the Beauregard into the upper atmosphere of Bellus. Suddenly he wanted a drink of the Argyle whiskey badly. He suppressed the impulse, with difficulty.

When she hit the atmosphere bubble the external monitors started to flare to life, showing views of reentry plasma as the technical displays lit up with valuable data and telemetry.

“Let me know when we’re out of sight of the Ark,” said Clement. The next few seconds were hell for him, not knowing if the enemy could see his ship lighting up like a flare in the daylight.

Seconds later, Ori spoke to the entire crew again as the ship started to shake. “It’s going to get a little rough for the next forty-five seconds or so, then it should calm down,” she said reassuringly. Clement glanced to his right to look at Yan. Her eyes were closed and she had a death grip on the arms of her safety couch, holding on for dear life as the ship shook ever more violently. He looked down at his own hands then and realized he was in a similar posture, and he forced himself to relax.

The bridge crew of the Beauregard rode out the remaining seconds in agony, then savored the pause as the ship stopped shaking and resumed a more peaceful ride.

“You have a thirty-second respite,” came Ori’s voice over the com. “Then I’ll fire the rockets again and we’ll make the majority of our final descent on the dark side.” Clement swallowed, wondering again why he hadn’t taken a hard drink before they started this process, then switched on his monitor to a visual view of the dark side of Bellus.

Since the planet was tidal-locked to its nearby red dwarf star (only 4.25 million kilometers away), the light side was always facing the star, and the dark side always facing away. While the light side received nearly seventy percent of standard luminosity (measured by Earth standard, of course), the dark side, technically, would receive none. But as Clement could see, there was some light, no doubt a reflection of the luminosity of the third habitable world in the Trinity system, Camus, and perhaps even the sixth planet, a larger world with a greenish, clouded atmosphere only 0.017 AU distant. What could be made out was a rocky terrain, with mountains and floes of ice all bathed in a deep ruby glow. It was a place worth exploring someday, but not just now, Clement reminded himself.

Presently the Beauregard slid deeper into Bellus’ atmosphere and Ori fired the thrusters, pushing the ship lower. This time the burn seemed to last interminable minutes, the g-forces tugging at the crew while they braked and decelerated. By the time they came around the event horizon again and into the light side, the burn had ended and the gravity relented. Clement looked up to see Ori piloting his ship from her console.

“Braking maneuvers complete,” she said over the com. “The ship is under my active control. We’re at five thousand meters and dropping quickly. Estimate nine minutes to landing sight.”

“Can they see us?” asked Clement.

“Doubtful,” said Ori over the private com, “unless they have far better sensing equipment than they should have.”

“Let’s hope for that,” replied Clement, then sat upright in his couch. The rest of the bridge crew followed suit with their captain. Clement glanced at Yan, whose eyes were red and watery, but she smiled wanly back at him without saying anything. He realized he was covered in sweat inside his navy fatigues, as likely was the rest of the crew.

Clement sat in silence as Ori guided the ship skillfully over a ridge of mountains and what looked to be green, junglelike vegetation, though Clement had only ever seen a jungle in education videos. Ceta, where he grew up, was a sparse and brown world, exactly the opposite of the Trinity worlds. Finally, as they broke through the cloud barrier, Clement could see their proposed landing sight, a land of three rivers converging in dappled orange sunlight. One of the tributaries fed into the main river via a spectacular waterfall. It was beautiful. “Do you have our landing sight, Mika?” said Clement.

“I do, sir. Setting her down won’t be problem, sir, and there’s plenty of cover. I could even put the Beauregard under that waterfall, if there’s a big enough cave behind it.”

“Not necessary, Pilot,” he said, smiling. “Our original intended landing site will do just fine.” And with that they all watched as Ori skillfully dropped the Beauregard from a hover mode, extending her landing legs and placing her right where her captain wanted her, in a clearing surrounded by trees. She landed and settled with a bump, Ori giving the final call of her narration.

Beauregard is down. I repeat, Beauregard is down. Welcome to paradise, everyone.”

At that Clement got up from his couch and started giving orders over the com. “Lieutenant Pomeroy, I want one last atmospheric check and virus scan. Middie Telco, correct that, Ensign Telco, organize a team and get some of those trees knocked down to provide us more cover, then deploy the shuttle, we might need her. Commander Yan”—he turned to his second-in-command—“prep an observation drone and get her ready to launch in one hour. I want to keep an eye on our friends up there,” Clement said, pointing to the ceiling.

“Aye, sir,” replied Yan, looking better every minute from the ordeal of landing. Then Clement looked around his bridge, as it came to life with activity.

The Beauregard was down.


Back | Next
Framed