Planetfall, p.2
Planetfall, page 2
"Unable to execute . . . chhhhhhh . . . unknown chhchhhh - mand schhhh!"
What! Coach, initiate planetary re-entry control, NOW.
"schhhhhh chhhhhhhcic . . ."
Kiera's stomach knotted violently as the ship's main computer babbled mindlessly. Without the AI they would have to perform all of the tasks that the computer handled automatically. She just couldn't believe it! The whole starship was built around the concept that Coach would handle the myriad tasks necessary to keep operational. That was the only way the ship could operate with only three crewmembers. We're fucking dead!
Schraaaaannng! The hull stress-shriek ripped through her mind, paralysing her competence. Gravity was kicking in as smoke leached into the bridge from somewhere, bringing with it the stench of roasted flesh.
Kiera!
She could smell fear sweating from her body, her mind recoiling in horror at her own weakness. There's no fucking way we can do all that work! No Way!
Kiera . . . KIERA! Re-route the power in section eighteen and close down that bloody leak! Now!
Whaa . . . what? Impatience and anger permeated the netlink.
We need that power to keep our systems up and give me manual control. I haven't got time - so fix it NOW!
What? - I'm on it . . . , she stuttered over the link, frightened by her own loss of control.
Dexter accessed the control net and ran the manual programme, conscious as he did so of an itchy feeling in his bleeding forearm. As an after thought, he shut down the AI unit completely, and Cochise's mindless wail ceased immediately. Graphics flickered and then firmed up to display the manual control suite - drive and thruster controls, attitude and positional monitors - all of them red-lining. Oh, shit! We're rolling! His orders flowed through the netlink and over the thruster controls, triggering a roll reversal pattern. Work - fuck you! If they didn't they would be incinerated. Keaton's spine felt like ice, freezing him as time seemed to slow to a viscous crawl. Shivering involuntarily in the rising heat and increasingly hazy atmosphere, he wondered if this is what Cathy had experienced as she was thrown to her death from the back of her horse. Did she have time to think, to wonder what could have been? And he cursed the horse that had robbed him, and himself for not having been there – not light-years away in space. She had been buried a month by the time he returned.
Ionised gases blasted out of the nodes embedded in the hull and Cochise kicked back against the spiral. Dexter waited in agonised patience as the starship fought out of its roll and he wrestled with his bitter memories. Fighting against the embracing lethargy of depression, yet determination to see his crew safe steeled his resolve even as the roaring inferno outside became deafening and the shaking vibrations blurred his vision. Lights and icons flickered across the net and then stabilised as more power surged back into the systems.
Good work, Kiera, he acknowledged.
Then, as the ship's attitude monitor levelled out, he fired all of the lower hull thrusters to reduce the steepness of their dive. Come on, he urged, come on. The dive indicator clawed back from the abyss, with Dexter willing it further as the roar outside the hull diminished. Finally, as the dive stabilised at thirty degrees, the thrusters cut out and he triggered the re-entry programme as the starship plunged deeper into the night side of the planet; it's pearlescent track etched across the heavens.
"We've done it!" yelled Kiera with relief at any success.
With the re-entry roar muting and the acceleration levels falling away, speech was again possible - though all crewmembers were left gasping for breath, choking on the foul air trapped within the bridge.
"We're not clear yet, Kiera. Can you power the main drive? "
Kiera scrolled the ship's schematics, tracing the power and control circuitry to the main drive. Power was not the problem, as it was showing up green everywhere, but the control links were all severed in section eighteen. Jesus! Control for the ship's VTOL landing engines also routed through the damaged area, and they were rapidly becoming nothing more than a very expensive glider - light years from home.
"Negative, we've lost all control to both fusion and VTOL drives. We can power them but we can't fire them. "
"OK," decided the commander. "We're going to have to land. Land, patch ourselves up and get the hell out of here again."
Seeker coughed in the foul air, groaning as she finally managed to pull her arms down, though her stretched muscles screamed in protest. She blinked in surprise at the biting acrid fumes that now filled the bridge – surely smoke was a bad thing in space. Smoke meant fire and she knew that was definitely bad – like water leaking into a terrestrial ship. Then she became aware of how badly she was being shaken, of the violent vibrations and the incessant roar that battered her ears. What the hell was going on? Dimly she could hear the Commander and his Science Officer talking, though the words and meanings seemed to elude her, sliding past her in the turmoil like slippery eels through her fingers.
"What's happening?" she asked, her voice hoarse and ragged; lost amid the torrent of noise bombarding the bridge.
No one answered her.
"What's happening?" she repeated, forcing her voice, projecting it into the maelstrom.
"We've been attacked," Dexter told her, though his words were still distant.
"What?"
"By aliens," added Kiera, almost spitefully, though her voice seemed to quaver.
"WHAT?"
Ahhh . . Emmett resurfaced on the netlink, but the system's empathy processors translated so much pain into the link, that the rest of the crew physically and mentally cringed in response. Then he was gone again.
"Jesus! What's happened to him?" gasped Kiera still reeling.
Dexter coughed and shuddered. "Thank God he's still there!"
"I'll go . . ."
"No! First I need your help to find a landing site and tie the navigation into the re-entry suite display. I can't do that and fly this ship." Dexter had to feed a continuous stream of corrections into the thruster controls to maintain a safe re-entry path. His arm was throbbing hotly now, leaving him light-headed as the alien weapon executed the function of its design – and the inner core of the splinter liquefied and was assimilated into his blood stream. Once there an alien chromosome virus was released to infect his body with a process that used mutant adaptive polyploids to cause a massive break-down of the victim's body at the cellular level. Heat was a normal and expected by-product of the process.
Kiera accessed the navinet and examined their projected course. "OK, we've missed a major continent but we're heading straight for a smaller one, hmm . . . we can just make it. Shit, it'll be close." Kiera transferred the co-ordinates into the re-entry suite. "You got that?"
"Yep."
The hot roar from outside the starship diminished, fluttering briefly, and was replaced by the clean whistling of the wind ripping past. Gravity reasserted itself and the ship steepened its dive. The Commander triggered atmospheric flight controls and on either side of the hull slim wings unfolded and locked into position. The ship's dive flattened in response to its new aerodynamics. Sensor pods slid open to allow the arrays to deploy, assimilate data and feed it back onto the ship's main display viewer. Dexter linked the new data flow into the re-entry computer and forced it to recalculate their predicted course and display it on the main viewer.
"Shit!" he exclaimed as he struggled to hold his concentration, "that's going to be close. We can hardly reach the coast - practically no margin for error. Re-entry's burnt away almost all our velocity"
"We going to have to splash?" queried Kiera.
"Anything else and we'll sustain too much damage. We'll have to splash and surf in. Once we hit the shallows we'll pop the feet - we'll have to check the hull out. Have we've got power and control for that?"
"Mmm . . . yep - no problem."
"Hey, something works!" The Commander tensed as a strong crosswind buffeted the craft causing him to trigger another set of corrective thruster bursts. He dashed away the beads of sweat that now threatened to run into his piercing blue eyes and ran his hand through his short brown hair. "Go and check Emmett, you've got about three minutes to get him sedated and strapped into the bottom bunk. I want him secured before we splash, and I'll need you back here."
Kiera elevated her couch into a sitting position and swung her legs off and onto the floor, and then bracing herself on the back of the chair she stood up. After zero gravity, the effort left her slightly dizzy, but her concern for Emmett drove her on, coughing in the foul air. The cabin door slid open and she sent a lock code via the net to keep it that way. The last thing they would want when splashing down was to be sealed in on the bridge.
Seeker drew in great gulps of the filthy air, desperate to breath, and immediately coughed and retched as the acidic atmosphere burnt her throat and lungs. Aliens! Where? And despite her pain and fear she triggered her netlink implants to record all audio and visual input she received; even as her own vomit spewed before her and settled lazily over her chest; drawn down by the slowly increasing gravity.
"You all right?" yelled the Commander beside her.
She spat, gasped and choked. Furious with her inability to talk, spit, breath and spew all at the same time. Frantic that she had missed key moments, minutes – shit, just how long had she been out of it? Hours even? Had she passed out – she couldn't remember. She wanted to scream her frustration.
"Aliens?" she finally managed, spitting warm puke towards the main view screen. "What the Hell's happening?"
"An alien ship attacked us," yelled back Dexter. "Hit us with some kind of missile and forced us into a re-entry vector – " He broke off abruptly as the ship lurched violently.
"What's happening now?" she badgered.
"We're breached midships somewhere." He shouted. "Power's out to the drives. Emmett got caught in the back. Shit – everything's all over the place!" He broke off again as Cochise pitched down suddenly.
"But where's Kiera?" insisted Seeker, driven, as always, to know everything.
Kiera entered the crew module and could see Emmett lying crunched up against the rear wall, half covered by the contents of the food locker. Ruptured packets and their contents lay scattered across the floor - crunching beneath Kiera's boots as she hurried across the cabin. The blood smeared and splashed across both the rear wall and the ceiling bore grim testimony to the horror that Emmett must have endured.
"Emmett!" Kiera dropped to her knees beside the prone engineer, clearing the food packages away with both hands. "Christ! Emmett!"
The engineer's craggy face was a mass of bruises and drying blood. His nose swollen and already colouring black and blue, while bits of food and worse congealed together on his skin and were matted into his short black hair. The stench hit her as she bent over the battered body.
"Ugh!" She clamped her hand over her mouth and nose and fought to hold down the involuntary retching, pinching her nose shut and fighting to slow down her ragged breathing. Gotta get a grip! she told herself, cursing. God! This is worse than anything in survival training - and she'd thought that bad enough. More deep breathing. She'd have to cope.
She finished clearing away the cartons and carefully laid Emmett flat on the floor. She felt for a pulse on his neck and found it beating irregularly and fast. Quickly she examined his limbs, checking for any obvious breaks but not finding anything except his twisted left leg. Kiera ran her fingers around his knee and could feel the dislocation. She delved deeply into her medical training memories, and then carefully she pinned his upper leg and then rotated his lower leg to realign the knee joint.
Pop!
Emmett's whole body jumped. Kiera's stomach threatened to do the same and she had to suppress the shudders that ran up her spine. Oh Jesus, this freaks me out, she thought and once again she cursed Seeker. Then she gathered Emmett up in her arms and staggered across the module to the bunks, where she deposited him in the lower one, which doubled up as the ship's medical bay. She arranged him as comfortably as she could and then triggered the restraints to hold him securely. From a drawer beneath the bunk she found clinical wipes and cleaned up his face and arms, forcing herself to do a good job and locking away emotions that threatened to disrupt her efforts. Finally, she pulled a medi-patch from the drawer, fixed it underneath the engineer's arm and sent a command via the netlink to set up a combine sedative and plasma feed - with the blood loss and shock from his injuries, he was going to need it.
Kiera accessed the netlink. Dex, I've got Emmett locked down. He's taken a real battering but looks OK - as far as I can tell. God, but it's a mess back here!
We'll take a closer look once we're down.
The starship shuddered violently as more crosswinds and turbulent air rocked it alarmingly, again forcing Dexter to compensate by firing the thrusters.
"Didn't the missile explode?" yelled Seeker, inevitably focusing on what she considered to be the most important thing in her environment. Jesus - aliens!
"Yes – no, I don't think so," shouted back Dexter "God only knows what it's done to Cochise!"
"What the hell was it?" asked Seeker. "Couldn't we see it? Didn't it register on anything? – We must have seen something!"
The ship shuddered and lurched violently, reclaiming the Commander's full attention as Kiera staggered back to her seat, and the journalist's questions hung like an accusation in the foul air of the bridge.
Kiera glared at Seeker as she regained her place and triggered medium restraints to hold her safely against the ship's gyrations. "We didn't see shit up there," she insisted defensively. "Zip. Nothing - until the fucker launched against us."
Seeker wasn't convinced, not with all the technology packed into the scout ship. Not when it's primary task was to search and discover. "Your kidding, right? With all this tech you're carrying – you must have seen something!"
"Nothing," reiterated Kiera irritably, her voice rising with her anger. "Except when I specifically targeted it with the visual array. None of the other sensors found shit up there. That was one big ugly fucker, light just seemed to . . . avoid it - talk about super-stealth - that thing was nearly invisible to the naked eye!"
"But where are the aliens now?" demanded the journalist, staring across the fully occupied Commander with an intensity that Kiera found disquieting.
"Gone!" answered the science officer, and she could quite understand how Seeker had come by her nickname – once she latched on to something she simply wouldn’t let go, searching for her own perception of the truth. Cow.
The ship shook violently in its descent, shaking the crew even within the embrace of their couch’s protective extrusions. The loud crack of the hull flexing under stress cut through the torrent of sounds that bombarded the bridge, sliding like a hot knife through butter and leaving Kiera shaking as she imagined Cochise breaking apart and spilling them out to their deaths.
"Are there any aliens on the surface?" demanded Seeker, shouting over the noise.
"How would I know," yelled back Kiera as the journalist's persistent inquisition became too much for her, "we'd only just started the survey – you know that. Jesus, there could be anything down there!"
Cochise leapt alarmingly as turbulence pitched the vessel off course, and then again as the Commander fought to regain control. Seeker screamed as her netlink crashed, but then blacked-out as her own flailing fist cracked against her skull.
Graphics suddenly started scrolling on the main view screen, grabbing Kiera's attention. "Hey, look - we're getting contour mapping on the coastline now. We're heading straight for an inlet where the hills start. Aerial mapping ties that in to a river, if we can reach that we'll get much better protection for the ship and fresh water."
"Any other options?"
"None."
"Ok," allowed Dexter, who was already laying in the course changes. The starship banked gently before settling in on the new heading.
"Jesus Christ," muttered Kiera to herself, "how did I miss seeing that mother-fucker? I've killed us all!"
Cochise sank towards the ocean beneath them, with the Commander bleeding away the height gradually to achieve a splash down offshore when the proximity radar squawked up a new contact. The object was cutting straight across their current course some five thousand metres ahead. Kiera gawked at the readouts, shook her head and tried again.
"I don't believe it - oh shit! Pull up Dex, we're not going to clear it!"
Dexter adjusted the ship's trim levels and fired all of the lower hull thrusters, not daring to change course too violently.
"More, we're not going to clear it!" yelled Kiera.
"If I try to climb too quick we'll fucking stall!" complained the Commander tiredly. "We'll just squeeze it out at this rate. If I try any harder we'll lose the velocity we need to reach the bloody coast."
Cochise rose slowly, clawing back lost height to rise barely over the top of a two masted sailing ship, similar to an old earth-side schooner, heeled over with the wind, her large sails snapped out tight and a luminescent wake streaming out behind it - and then, it was gone, left behind in the night.
Dexter and Kiera exchanged a look of shared disbelief while the unconscious journalist was rocked to-and-fro on the engineer’s couch.
Cochise settled once more towards the ocean as the coastline loomed up out of the darkness. On the view screen the altitude monitor was rapidly approaching zero as Kiera retracted the lower hull sensors to safety. Dexter eased up Cochise's nose slightly to prevent it digging into the sea as salt spray billowed up around the starship to form a trail of vortexing mist behind them. The lower hull kissed the ocean gently, sending sheets of spray flying out from each side of the starship, a translucent wake scarring the water behind them. Dexter cancelled the aerodynamic configuration for the ship and the wings folded neatly back inside the hull - their job now done.
The ship vibrated to a new tune now, with compressed water rolling under the hull and the wash jetting out in enormous arcs of salty spray on either side. The awesome speed of the craft reducing as the drag and friction of the landing increased. The coastline seemed to leap up out of the darkness. Details became clearer. The inlet widened. The river mouth appeared. Tree clad hills to the left, woods and open ground to the right. Snow-capped mountains marching behind everything.
What! Coach, initiate planetary re-entry control, NOW.
"schhhhhh chhhhhhhcic . . ."
Kiera's stomach knotted violently as the ship's main computer babbled mindlessly. Without the AI they would have to perform all of the tasks that the computer handled automatically. She just couldn't believe it! The whole starship was built around the concept that Coach would handle the myriad tasks necessary to keep operational. That was the only way the ship could operate with only three crewmembers. We're fucking dead!
Schraaaaannng! The hull stress-shriek ripped through her mind, paralysing her competence. Gravity was kicking in as smoke leached into the bridge from somewhere, bringing with it the stench of roasted flesh.
Kiera!
She could smell fear sweating from her body, her mind recoiling in horror at her own weakness. There's no fucking way we can do all that work! No Way!
Kiera . . . KIERA! Re-route the power in section eighteen and close down that bloody leak! Now!
Whaa . . . what? Impatience and anger permeated the netlink.
We need that power to keep our systems up and give me manual control. I haven't got time - so fix it NOW!
What? - I'm on it . . . , she stuttered over the link, frightened by her own loss of control.
Dexter accessed the control net and ran the manual programme, conscious as he did so of an itchy feeling in his bleeding forearm. As an after thought, he shut down the AI unit completely, and Cochise's mindless wail ceased immediately. Graphics flickered and then firmed up to display the manual control suite - drive and thruster controls, attitude and positional monitors - all of them red-lining. Oh, shit! We're rolling! His orders flowed through the netlink and over the thruster controls, triggering a roll reversal pattern. Work - fuck you! If they didn't they would be incinerated. Keaton's spine felt like ice, freezing him as time seemed to slow to a viscous crawl. Shivering involuntarily in the rising heat and increasingly hazy atmosphere, he wondered if this is what Cathy had experienced as she was thrown to her death from the back of her horse. Did she have time to think, to wonder what could have been? And he cursed the horse that had robbed him, and himself for not having been there – not light-years away in space. She had been buried a month by the time he returned.
Ionised gases blasted out of the nodes embedded in the hull and Cochise kicked back against the spiral. Dexter waited in agonised patience as the starship fought out of its roll and he wrestled with his bitter memories. Fighting against the embracing lethargy of depression, yet determination to see his crew safe steeled his resolve even as the roaring inferno outside became deafening and the shaking vibrations blurred his vision. Lights and icons flickered across the net and then stabilised as more power surged back into the systems.
Good work, Kiera, he acknowledged.
Then, as the ship's attitude monitor levelled out, he fired all of the lower hull thrusters to reduce the steepness of their dive. Come on, he urged, come on. The dive indicator clawed back from the abyss, with Dexter willing it further as the roar outside the hull diminished. Finally, as the dive stabilised at thirty degrees, the thrusters cut out and he triggered the re-entry programme as the starship plunged deeper into the night side of the planet; it's pearlescent track etched across the heavens.
"We've done it!" yelled Kiera with relief at any success.
With the re-entry roar muting and the acceleration levels falling away, speech was again possible - though all crewmembers were left gasping for breath, choking on the foul air trapped within the bridge.
"We're not clear yet, Kiera. Can you power the main drive? "
Kiera scrolled the ship's schematics, tracing the power and control circuitry to the main drive. Power was not the problem, as it was showing up green everywhere, but the control links were all severed in section eighteen. Jesus! Control for the ship's VTOL landing engines also routed through the damaged area, and they were rapidly becoming nothing more than a very expensive glider - light years from home.
"Negative, we've lost all control to both fusion and VTOL drives. We can power them but we can't fire them. "
"OK," decided the commander. "We're going to have to land. Land, patch ourselves up and get the hell out of here again."
Seeker coughed in the foul air, groaning as she finally managed to pull her arms down, though her stretched muscles screamed in protest. She blinked in surprise at the biting acrid fumes that now filled the bridge – surely smoke was a bad thing in space. Smoke meant fire and she knew that was definitely bad – like water leaking into a terrestrial ship. Then she became aware of how badly she was being shaken, of the violent vibrations and the incessant roar that battered her ears. What the hell was going on? Dimly she could hear the Commander and his Science Officer talking, though the words and meanings seemed to elude her, sliding past her in the turmoil like slippery eels through her fingers.
"What's happening?" she asked, her voice hoarse and ragged; lost amid the torrent of noise bombarding the bridge.
No one answered her.
"What's happening?" she repeated, forcing her voice, projecting it into the maelstrom.
"We've been attacked," Dexter told her, though his words were still distant.
"What?"
"By aliens," added Kiera, almost spitefully, though her voice seemed to quaver.
"WHAT?"
Ahhh . . Emmett resurfaced on the netlink, but the system's empathy processors translated so much pain into the link, that the rest of the crew physically and mentally cringed in response. Then he was gone again.
"Jesus! What's happened to him?" gasped Kiera still reeling.
Dexter coughed and shuddered. "Thank God he's still there!"
"I'll go . . ."
"No! First I need your help to find a landing site and tie the navigation into the re-entry suite display. I can't do that and fly this ship." Dexter had to feed a continuous stream of corrections into the thruster controls to maintain a safe re-entry path. His arm was throbbing hotly now, leaving him light-headed as the alien weapon executed the function of its design – and the inner core of the splinter liquefied and was assimilated into his blood stream. Once there an alien chromosome virus was released to infect his body with a process that used mutant adaptive polyploids to cause a massive break-down of the victim's body at the cellular level. Heat was a normal and expected by-product of the process.
Kiera accessed the navinet and examined their projected course. "OK, we've missed a major continent but we're heading straight for a smaller one, hmm . . . we can just make it. Shit, it'll be close." Kiera transferred the co-ordinates into the re-entry suite. "You got that?"
"Yep."
The hot roar from outside the starship diminished, fluttering briefly, and was replaced by the clean whistling of the wind ripping past. Gravity reasserted itself and the ship steepened its dive. The Commander triggered atmospheric flight controls and on either side of the hull slim wings unfolded and locked into position. The ship's dive flattened in response to its new aerodynamics. Sensor pods slid open to allow the arrays to deploy, assimilate data and feed it back onto the ship's main display viewer. Dexter linked the new data flow into the re-entry computer and forced it to recalculate their predicted course and display it on the main viewer.
"Shit!" he exclaimed as he struggled to hold his concentration, "that's going to be close. We can hardly reach the coast - practically no margin for error. Re-entry's burnt away almost all our velocity"
"We going to have to splash?" queried Kiera.
"Anything else and we'll sustain too much damage. We'll have to splash and surf in. Once we hit the shallows we'll pop the feet - we'll have to check the hull out. Have we've got power and control for that?"
"Mmm . . . yep - no problem."
"Hey, something works!" The Commander tensed as a strong crosswind buffeted the craft causing him to trigger another set of corrective thruster bursts. He dashed away the beads of sweat that now threatened to run into his piercing blue eyes and ran his hand through his short brown hair. "Go and check Emmett, you've got about three minutes to get him sedated and strapped into the bottom bunk. I want him secured before we splash, and I'll need you back here."
Kiera elevated her couch into a sitting position and swung her legs off and onto the floor, and then bracing herself on the back of the chair she stood up. After zero gravity, the effort left her slightly dizzy, but her concern for Emmett drove her on, coughing in the foul air. The cabin door slid open and she sent a lock code via the net to keep it that way. The last thing they would want when splashing down was to be sealed in on the bridge.
Seeker drew in great gulps of the filthy air, desperate to breath, and immediately coughed and retched as the acidic atmosphere burnt her throat and lungs. Aliens! Where? And despite her pain and fear she triggered her netlink implants to record all audio and visual input she received; even as her own vomit spewed before her and settled lazily over her chest; drawn down by the slowly increasing gravity.
"You all right?" yelled the Commander beside her.
She spat, gasped and choked. Furious with her inability to talk, spit, breath and spew all at the same time. Frantic that she had missed key moments, minutes – shit, just how long had she been out of it? Hours even? Had she passed out – she couldn't remember. She wanted to scream her frustration.
"Aliens?" she finally managed, spitting warm puke towards the main view screen. "What the Hell's happening?"
"An alien ship attacked us," yelled back Dexter. "Hit us with some kind of missile and forced us into a re-entry vector – " He broke off abruptly as the ship lurched violently.
"What's happening now?" she badgered.
"We're breached midships somewhere." He shouted. "Power's out to the drives. Emmett got caught in the back. Shit – everything's all over the place!" He broke off again as Cochise pitched down suddenly.
"But where's Kiera?" insisted Seeker, driven, as always, to know everything.
Kiera entered the crew module and could see Emmett lying crunched up against the rear wall, half covered by the contents of the food locker. Ruptured packets and their contents lay scattered across the floor - crunching beneath Kiera's boots as she hurried across the cabin. The blood smeared and splashed across both the rear wall and the ceiling bore grim testimony to the horror that Emmett must have endured.
"Emmett!" Kiera dropped to her knees beside the prone engineer, clearing the food packages away with both hands. "Christ! Emmett!"
The engineer's craggy face was a mass of bruises and drying blood. His nose swollen and already colouring black and blue, while bits of food and worse congealed together on his skin and were matted into his short black hair. The stench hit her as she bent over the battered body.
"Ugh!" She clamped her hand over her mouth and nose and fought to hold down the involuntary retching, pinching her nose shut and fighting to slow down her ragged breathing. Gotta get a grip! she told herself, cursing. God! This is worse than anything in survival training - and she'd thought that bad enough. More deep breathing. She'd have to cope.
She finished clearing away the cartons and carefully laid Emmett flat on the floor. She felt for a pulse on his neck and found it beating irregularly and fast. Quickly she examined his limbs, checking for any obvious breaks but not finding anything except his twisted left leg. Kiera ran her fingers around his knee and could feel the dislocation. She delved deeply into her medical training memories, and then carefully she pinned his upper leg and then rotated his lower leg to realign the knee joint.
Pop!
Emmett's whole body jumped. Kiera's stomach threatened to do the same and she had to suppress the shudders that ran up her spine. Oh Jesus, this freaks me out, she thought and once again she cursed Seeker. Then she gathered Emmett up in her arms and staggered across the module to the bunks, where she deposited him in the lower one, which doubled up as the ship's medical bay. She arranged him as comfortably as she could and then triggered the restraints to hold him securely. From a drawer beneath the bunk she found clinical wipes and cleaned up his face and arms, forcing herself to do a good job and locking away emotions that threatened to disrupt her efforts. Finally, she pulled a medi-patch from the drawer, fixed it underneath the engineer's arm and sent a command via the netlink to set up a combine sedative and plasma feed - with the blood loss and shock from his injuries, he was going to need it.
Kiera accessed the netlink. Dex, I've got Emmett locked down. He's taken a real battering but looks OK - as far as I can tell. God, but it's a mess back here!
We'll take a closer look once we're down.
The starship shuddered violently as more crosswinds and turbulent air rocked it alarmingly, again forcing Dexter to compensate by firing the thrusters.
"Didn't the missile explode?" yelled Seeker, inevitably focusing on what she considered to be the most important thing in her environment. Jesus - aliens!
"Yes – no, I don't think so," shouted back Dexter "God only knows what it's done to Cochise!"
"What the hell was it?" asked Seeker. "Couldn't we see it? Didn't it register on anything? – We must have seen something!"
The ship shuddered and lurched violently, reclaiming the Commander's full attention as Kiera staggered back to her seat, and the journalist's questions hung like an accusation in the foul air of the bridge.
Kiera glared at Seeker as she regained her place and triggered medium restraints to hold her safely against the ship's gyrations. "We didn't see shit up there," she insisted defensively. "Zip. Nothing - until the fucker launched against us."
Seeker wasn't convinced, not with all the technology packed into the scout ship. Not when it's primary task was to search and discover. "Your kidding, right? With all this tech you're carrying – you must have seen something!"
"Nothing," reiterated Kiera irritably, her voice rising with her anger. "Except when I specifically targeted it with the visual array. None of the other sensors found shit up there. That was one big ugly fucker, light just seemed to . . . avoid it - talk about super-stealth - that thing was nearly invisible to the naked eye!"
"But where are the aliens now?" demanded the journalist, staring across the fully occupied Commander with an intensity that Kiera found disquieting.
"Gone!" answered the science officer, and she could quite understand how Seeker had come by her nickname – once she latched on to something she simply wouldn’t let go, searching for her own perception of the truth. Cow.
The ship shook violently in its descent, shaking the crew even within the embrace of their couch’s protective extrusions. The loud crack of the hull flexing under stress cut through the torrent of sounds that bombarded the bridge, sliding like a hot knife through butter and leaving Kiera shaking as she imagined Cochise breaking apart and spilling them out to their deaths.
"Are there any aliens on the surface?" demanded Seeker, shouting over the noise.
"How would I know," yelled back Kiera as the journalist's persistent inquisition became too much for her, "we'd only just started the survey – you know that. Jesus, there could be anything down there!"
Cochise leapt alarmingly as turbulence pitched the vessel off course, and then again as the Commander fought to regain control. Seeker screamed as her netlink crashed, but then blacked-out as her own flailing fist cracked against her skull.
Graphics suddenly started scrolling on the main view screen, grabbing Kiera's attention. "Hey, look - we're getting contour mapping on the coastline now. We're heading straight for an inlet where the hills start. Aerial mapping ties that in to a river, if we can reach that we'll get much better protection for the ship and fresh water."
"Any other options?"
"None."
"Ok," allowed Dexter, who was already laying in the course changes. The starship banked gently before settling in on the new heading.
"Jesus Christ," muttered Kiera to herself, "how did I miss seeing that mother-fucker? I've killed us all!"
Cochise sank towards the ocean beneath them, with the Commander bleeding away the height gradually to achieve a splash down offshore when the proximity radar squawked up a new contact. The object was cutting straight across their current course some five thousand metres ahead. Kiera gawked at the readouts, shook her head and tried again.
"I don't believe it - oh shit! Pull up Dex, we're not going to clear it!"
Dexter adjusted the ship's trim levels and fired all of the lower hull thrusters, not daring to change course too violently.
"More, we're not going to clear it!" yelled Kiera.
"If I try to climb too quick we'll fucking stall!" complained the Commander tiredly. "We'll just squeeze it out at this rate. If I try any harder we'll lose the velocity we need to reach the bloody coast."
Cochise rose slowly, clawing back lost height to rise barely over the top of a two masted sailing ship, similar to an old earth-side schooner, heeled over with the wind, her large sails snapped out tight and a luminescent wake streaming out behind it - and then, it was gone, left behind in the night.
Dexter and Kiera exchanged a look of shared disbelief while the unconscious journalist was rocked to-and-fro on the engineer’s couch.
Cochise settled once more towards the ocean as the coastline loomed up out of the darkness. On the view screen the altitude monitor was rapidly approaching zero as Kiera retracted the lower hull sensors to safety. Dexter eased up Cochise's nose slightly to prevent it digging into the sea as salt spray billowed up around the starship to form a trail of vortexing mist behind them. The lower hull kissed the ocean gently, sending sheets of spray flying out from each side of the starship, a translucent wake scarring the water behind them. Dexter cancelled the aerodynamic configuration for the ship and the wings folded neatly back inside the hull - their job now done.
The ship vibrated to a new tune now, with compressed water rolling under the hull and the wash jetting out in enormous arcs of salty spray on either side. The awesome speed of the craft reducing as the drag and friction of the landing increased. The coastline seemed to leap up out of the darkness. Details became clearer. The inlet widened. The river mouth appeared. Tree clad hills to the left, woods and open ground to the right. Snow-capped mountains marching behind everything.
