Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

“So now what?” he asked.

Keflyn paused and turned so that she could see him, curious about the desperate tone in his voice… and in his mind. “Now we go home. I will have Quendari contact the Methryn, and we will have carriers here in a matter of days.”

Addesin said no more on the subject. At least the lifts were still in operation, and they returned to the surface in a matter of minutes. Addesin maintained a calm facade, but Keflyn sensed that his thoughts were on the very edge of exploding in both fury and fear. She thought that his mood would improve once he was out of the claustrophobic suit, but it did not. And during the long journey back, her own thoughts were increasingly overshadowed by the feeling that something was about to happen. She could not completely dismiss such premonitions out of hand, since a certain clairvoyance did run in the family.

“Solar activity is up,” Addesin explained as the shuttle orbited down, already biting into the upper atmosphere. They had been watching an unusual amount of sheet lightning during the entire trip home. “That always plays havoc with the planetary magnetics.”

“Induction shields over the poles would get rid of that, and supply you with a tremendous amount of power in the bargain,” Keflyn mused.

“It would be a shame to see it go,” he reflected, leaning back in his seat. “But I suppose that it would have to go, if you were trying to conduct serious business here.”

Addesin was so distracted by his own thoughts that he had never noticed that Keflyn had taken the controls of the shuttle upon their return. He sat in the copilot’s seat, still brooding furiously, as Keflyn flipped the little ship over to use the engines to slow the shuttle, allowing gravity to draw them down. He was staring absently out the window when the sky outside suddenly flashed blinding white. He had been unfortunate enough to have been staring directly at the sheet lightning at the moment it hit, and the searing glare left him blinking like an owl and unable to focus.

“What was that, high-altitude sheet lightning?” He rubbed his watering eyes on his sleeve. “That was close.”

“It went right over us,” Keflyn told him. “All of our main power systems are going down.”

“I never felt it hit,” Addesin protested.

“Lightning is not like a bolt from a ship’s cannons. Unless there is an explosive discharge of electricity, which is not going to happen in an ungrounded spacecraft, then it just quietly fries your electronics. How do I get main power back up?”

“If the regular generator startup procedure does not work, then you just ran out of options.”

Keflyn was beginning to get the idea that they were in a lot of trouble. The atmospheric shields were not much, but they did protect the shuttle from more than half of the heat of entry. They had also been down for the better part of half a minute, and she had no sensor information coming in to tell her how the ceramic alloy hull plates were handling the matter. Ships were not built to take the heat of entry directly against their hulls; it was much too inefficient, requiring extensive heat shielding, insulation, and bracing, and far too risky. At least the shuttle had a fair amount of ceramic shielding to take the heat that bled through the atmospheric shields, or they would not have still been contemplating the matter. The question now was whether or not the shuttle would survive the rest of the trip down.

“You should go get back into that suit of yours,” she said; she was still wearing her own armor. “It would be good protection against the heat, and I cannot promise that we will keep our atmosphere.”

From the curve of the planet emerging just under the nose of the shuttle, she guessed that they still had the better part of sixty kilometers to go. At this altitude, she thought that most of the sheet lightning had actually passed far beneath them. She suspected that they had only been caught in a discharge arc, bringing additional energy down from the magnetosphere.

In any case, they were not going to survive unless she did something to slow this ship. The shuttle was beginning to hum and buffet slightly, an indication that they were beginning to bite into denser air. Getting as much response as she could from the atmospheric control surfaces, she brought the nose of the shuttle up sharply, not to present heavier belly shielding to the heat — which she doubted they had — but to simply present a larger surface to the air to act as a brake. Then she noticed a series of switches in the bank of emergency controls, four to provide added thrust and four for brakes. She assumed that these would be either solid or liquid fuel boosters, and she triggered the first shot of braking thrust. There was a small explosion somewhere in the nose of the ship as access covers were blown away, then perhaps half a minute of muted roar as the small engines burned.

At least it had some effect. Keflyn had precious few emergency readouts for her use; all of the monitors were down, and the airspeed indicator had already burned away. By the time Jon Addesin returned, again wearing the bulky suit, she was firing the third braking shot.

“There’s some smoke coming up from beneath the cargo deck,” he reported. “It’s a good thing we have suits. The ship must be full of toxic fumes.”

“Are there any water tanks on board this ship?” Keflyn asked. “If anything like that gets too hot, steam or other expanding gasses can cause the container to explode like bombs.”

“No, nothing like that.”

Long, tense minutes passed, and the cargo hold became so filled with smoke that Keflyn was given to wonder if she might find some way to vent it before it ruptured the hull. The tires of the left main landing gears exploded, to judge from the distant thuds she felt through the fabric of the ship, and she could only hope that the blast had not ripped open the doors. Then they were down in the widely-scattered clouds, losing speed quickly in the heavy air. They were about twenty thousand meters up, in a shuttle that had no engines and was starting to burn.

“We need off this ship as soon as possible,” Keflyn announced. “And it seems that the closest place we can get off is straight down. I think that I should get us there in as direct a path as I can manage. I think that you should get yourself into the passenger cabin and strap yourself into one of the seats with its back facing forward. When we hit, that should keep you from being thrown.”

“When we hit what?” Addesin asked.

“The ground, I should imagine. We will have no landing field, and I doubt that we have any landing gear anyway. All I hope is to hit something soft.”

She certainly did her best, but she had her doubts at first. As she came lower, she could see that her earlier guess was correct. The landscape below was rugged and heavily wooded, but there were several grassy meadows to be seen. She fired the remaining braking charge, dropping the shuttle’s speed to perhaps half that of the speed of sound, then she turned the rudder in one direction and the ailerons in the other, causing the huge machine to crab sideways, slowing even more in the sideslip.

She reached in the open chestplate of her suit, switching her communication channel. “Quendari Valcyr, do you hear me?”

“I hear you quite well,” the ship answered immediately.

“I am about to crash this shuttle in the middle of nowhere,” Keflyn explained quickly. “Could you send a message to Derrighan at the Feldenneh settlement and have him come in Mr. Addesin’s van to fetch us? We will be coming down about eight hundred kilometers short of the field.”

“I will send a probe immediately,” Quendari assured her. “And I will send another to meet you, in the event you need help. A probe may not be much, but it is the best I can do.”