“Sam, how confident do you feel about landing successfully?” Captain Tanlier asked nervously.
I considered the question, then answered honestly. “About 90%? I’ve done over seventy attempts on the Shipnet’s simulator. Fifteen successful landings in a row. But, there are things that could go wrong that the simulator doesn’t account for.”
“You want to spend a few more days practicing? We could afford to wait.”
“Your call,” I said with a holographic shrug, “I don’t really feel like I’ll get much better at it, but I’m a little worried about the landing legs. Maybe we should try reinforcing them some more? I was thinking we could use some more thermal shielding from the other shuttles if you don’t mind losing a few more of them.”
“It’s not a bad idea, but everyone’s tired Sam, spending more time out on EVAs is asking for trouble. Especially since the electronics on everyone’s suits keep shorting out outside your tech field. It’s only a matter of time until someone gets themselves killed, we’ve had a few close calls already. Second shift engineers aren’t even pretending to pull their weight anymore, the second chief has been bad-mouthing you and dragging his heels.” Jim said with a sigh. The captain gave Jim a dirty look. He’d have preferred that Jim not tell me this bit of information.
“Wait, I thought that guy quit?” I asked, giving the captain a dirty look of my own.
“Ahem,” captain Tanlier looked guilty. “I had to negotiate with him. Elaine thought we should just stuff him in cryo, but half his crew would have mutinied if I’d tried to go through with it. Instead, we haggled. Officers get double Shipnet access as pay now, BTW.”
“How do I not know about this?” I asked angrily, didn’t I control the Shipnet?
“The captain has override codes, Sam,” Doppel whispered so only I could hear, “He overrode the ban, changed the time limit settings, then hid what he did behind his security clearance. He did it while you were asleep so we wouldn’t notice. His clearance is the same level as yours, so you could have undone the changes if we’d known about it. I’ll do sweeps for hidden changes from now on, he won’t pull the same trick on us twice.”
“That was pretty shitty of you, sir.” I told the captain angrily.
“Sam, I’m still your boss. But, I’m sorry, I should have talked to you about it. Next time, if I need to override your Shipnet settings, I’ll tell you first, I promise. Happy?” He asked grumpily.
No, I was not. The Shipnet was part of me, more than the rest of the ship, it was my domain. It ran using my brain in some fundamental way I still didn’t quite understand. But he was the captain, he’d given a half-assed apology, and now I couldn’t complain any further without sounding like a petulant child.
“I mean, it’s their lives on the line. If we crash, we all die. I can’t believe they’d risk death just to spite me, no matter how much that cyborg hates me.” I pointed out, still annoyed. I needed to be a little less trusting, I decided, especially while I was asleep. What if that jealous cyborg tried something?
“I’ll see what we can do, at the very least, we can probably change the locks,” Doppel suggested, still whispering. My brain jar had a special secure room all to itself, embedded inside the ship’s central computer mainframe room.
Jim shrugged apologetically, “Second chief told them all it’s an easy landing, and you’re being over-cautious, and that if he were Shipbrain he would have already landed this thing without the need to use up a thousand prefab houses and four shuttles. I know he’s full of shit, but he’s persuasive. I’ve been telling them your side of the story, even set up a copy of your simulations so they could try it themselves, with and without the legs and shuttle engine add-ons. But, asking them to go do more is going to be a tough sell. Truth is, the space outside spooks them, it’s creepy out there with no stars.”
Jim ran his hand over the faint fuzz on his once shaved head before continuing. “And I honestly don’t know that there’s anything we can do that would make those legs sturdier at this point. Adding more weight might actually be counterproductive. The core structural elements on those legs are just too flimsy, layering heavy thermal shielding on the outside will strain it more.” Jim sounded like he was trying to convince us both.
“Alright, then, let’s just get this over with. The longer we wait, the worse the crew’s morale will get, right?” I asked. The captain and Jim both nodded looking as unhappy as I felt.
“We can’t do more with the legs, but if you need more time...” the captain reiterated.
I interrupted angrily. “And give that bastard more time to make me look incompetent? No way. Let’s go. I’m ready.”
“Sam, calm down,” Doppel urged, “Don’t get worked up. You need to focus on the landing and keep your head clear of distractions. Who cares what that asshole thinks?”
I took a deep breath, allowing myself to feel the sensation of air rushing into my lungs just so it could soothe me, even if it was fake, as I had no lungs anymore. “I’m ready.” I repeated in a calmer voice.
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In some ways, landing on the wheelworld was easier than landing on Earth would have been. It wasn’t spinning, so not only was there no need to correct for the planet’s rotational speed when descending, there was also very limited amounts of air movement. The wheelworld had no jetstreams and the clouds that it did have simply languished in place, building up during the day, then dropping their contents at night. There was a lot less turbulence.
The only complication was that we were orbiting at a pretty fast pace. We were doing better than 180,000 kilometers per hour relative to the surface, completing a circuit of the 167,000 kilometer long ribbon of land in under an hour. This was better than four times as fast as the typical orbital speed of a space station in low Earth orbit. Even at a steady 1.5 Gs of thrust, it was going to take us more than half an hour to kill that much lateral velocity. At which point I’d need to flip around and work on killing our downwards velocity so that we hit 0 speed as near the surface as possible. A suicide burn was what that was called.
It was going to be a long trip, plenty of time for something to go wrong, I thought to myself. And once we hit the atmosphere, we would be committed. The engine’s backwash would be heating up my hull the whole way down. There wasn’t much margin for error, if I tried to take it slow, or abort back to orbit, there was a good chance the hull would overheat, which would weaken it, then we’d break apart in midair.
I sighed and put my doubts aside. I’d done it plenty of times, I could do this, I told myself. Doppel’s ghostly form grinned at me reassuringly and gave me two thumbs up as I started up the main engine.
“Burn in 30 seconds,” I announced. “Prepare for forty-two minutes at 1.5Gs followed by five minutes of 2Gs as we hit the home stretch,” I told the crew. They were all already strapped into their acceleration seats. The ship’s artificial gravity turned off as soon as the engines fired, but the transition wasn’t perfect, we had a few seconds of zero-G. Margaret used that time to empty out the contents of her stomach messily into a barf bag.
“Sorry!” she apologized. But no one said anything, we were all too tense to complain. A 90% chance of success sounds like a lot, but it was another way of saying there was a 10% chance we’d die in the next hour, I thought to myself. That’s enough to make anyone feel nervous, the butterflies in my stomach were perfectly normal. Well, except I didn’t have a stomach.
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“It’s psychosomatic,” Doppel told me in a whisper, “No stomach required.”
I shook my head in amusement. You’d think not having a body would make things easier when it came to things like this. At least I didn’t feel the need to pee, I thought to myself.
The main engine turned on with a thunderous roar, venting plasma from both fusion reactors, it was basically a controlled fusion explosion pushed through a nozzle. The ship shook and rattled as the plasma pulsed unevenly for a few seconds before the complicated magnetic fields involved in controlling the whole thing stabilized and smoothed the flow.
“Engine burn looks good,” I said with some relief. The fusion drive was pretty reliable, in our own universe, here though? I’d been crossing my figures hoping whatever magic I seemed to have wouldn’t fail us at this point. “Systems all green.” The tension in the bridge went down a notch, at this point, we had forty-two minutes where nothing much was likely to go wrong. It was going to be those last five minutes that would be tricky.
“Look at the plume!” Margaret exclaimed, “It’s sparkly!” they were all in the ship's Sensor View with me, watching as I did my thing from that tiny room deep in the ship’s core. This time I was visualizing myself as the ship, so I didn’t have to turn my head to see what Margaret meant, I had a full 360-degree vision.
“What the hell?” I muttered softly. Towards the end of the half a kilometer-long exhaust, it was doing weird things, sparkling wildly as if we were burning fireworks instead of venting plasma. It looked as if the empty space we were traveling through was reacting somehow.
“That’s not normal right?!” Margaret said, excited.
“The thrust is what it’s supposed to be,” I said, “Don't know about those special effects, maybe it’s like an aurora or something? Maybe an interaction with the wheelworld’s magnetic field...”
“There’s no magnetic field, except right near the core, Sam. That’s magic out there. God, I wish I could get a probe out there to get some readings...” Margaret said petulantly.
Oddly enough, now that I was concentrating on the sparkles, I could sort of feel what was going on. It was something to do with the free electrons in the ionized plasma, I thought to myself, they were decaying into raw magic as they left the influence of my tech field. There was a deep connection between electrons and magic in this universe, and if I knew how it worked I’d understand how to use my magic. For a moment it felt like I was on the verge of some profound insight, visible right there, in the patterns...
“Ignore it,” captain Tanlier said gruffly, “Focus on the burn, the sparkles aren’t hurting us any.” Reluctantly, I followed the captain’s advice, tearing my attention away. I couldn’t afford to be distracted right now.
“They won’t be able to miss that show from below though, we’re giving half the wheelworld a fireworks display like nothing they’ve ever seen.” Tom pointed out, sounding a little amused.
Sometime later, I spun us around so the engines pointed down to the rapidly approaching ground below. A few minutes after that, the ship began to rattle again, and I started feeling an unpleasantly warm tingle on my skin. We’d hit the atmosphere. My engine’s exhaust wasn’t sparkling now, it was blowing back up all around us as the air pushed back on the plume. Down below, I could see the lake and the island we were aiming for.
“Still on course,” I told the crew, my voice tight with strain as I focused on my task. I needed to use the shuttles and the gimbal on the main engines to keep the ship perpendicular to the ground, but the backwash wasn’t smooth, it was pushing me slightly off axis randomly. If I got pushed too far we’d start spinning out of control, something I’d experienced personally in the simulations and had no desire to repeat in reality.
I let my awareness spread to the shuttles and the engine, I could feel them now. The whole ship was part of me. I was the bird, I told myself. The engines at the ends of each landing leg were my wings, and I flapped them gently to guide me down the path I wanted. The main engine was the wind pushing me aloft, an updraft that was steady and true. The turbulence of the backwash were just playful gusts trying to knock me off balance as I glided through the air, graceful as a swan. I was in the zone. My worries began to fade away and I just let myself be fully in the moment, tranquil as a leaf in the wind.
“Five-minute mark.” Doppel reminded me gently, not wanting to disturb my focus. I’d already tuned out the noise of the crew talking, Doppel would tell me if they said something urgent. I coaxed the main engines to full power, giving the reactors as much fuel as they could handle. The rattling intensified as the backwash grew stronger.
I could definitely feel it now, painfully blistering my skin, but it was a familiar pain, I’d felt it before, and I started rotating gently, to help distribute the heat evenly across my entire frame. My wings weren’t enough anymore, the playful gusts were galeforce slaps now, I was forced to gimbal the main engine a few times, which I didn’t like, it wasn’t as graceful, the reaction time was slower.
I frowned slightly, something was starting to really sting, a bright spot of pain alerting me to a problem I’d never have noticed if I’d turned the pain receptors off. It felt like my nerves were screaming in pain at the tip of my wings? No those were my landing legs, and the pain was the control circuits we’d wired to the shuttles. They were melting. Shit. We’d not given them enough thermal insulation, I was only seconds away from losing them entirely.
“Houston, we have a problem,” I muttered, unaware of how my simple comment ratcheted up the tension of the bridge crew who heard me. But they were still on mute, so I didn’t reply to their suddenly frantic inquiries.
Ow, one of the shuttle engines went offline with a painful snap as the control circuit finally fizzled and popped. The ship swayed violently to the side, I barely managed to correct by shutting off the opposing shuttle and gimbaling the main engine hard. But the damage was done, I was several hundred meters off target now, and the ground was painfully close.
The abrupt hard gimbal and loss of two shuttle’s worth of thrust had thrown off the suicide burn I realized, at full power I was now looking at -15 meters in the ground for 0 speed. That translated to a rather rough landing, I thought to myself, but I was strangely calm.
I pushed the main engine to 110% power, 2.2Gs. The strain was palpable, I knew that I now had but a few seconds before the reactors went critical, they couldn’t sustain that much thrust for long. But the ground was so close, I could almost touch it.
Ah but it wasn’t ground, I realized. I was right over the water, steam billowed up obscuring my sight, but I calmly switched to radar. Ten meters above the waterline, but the ship was parting the shallow water with its exhaust. The shallow lakebed floor was being cooked dry in a neat circle where the water was boiled away before it could reach.
The shoreline was only twenty meters away. I could only hold 2.2Gs just a few seconds longer. I could try to fly upwards a bit then drift sideways back to where I was supposed to land? No, I decided. There wasn’t any chance the last two shuttle engines would last that long, their control lines were about to pop too, and without them, I’d never stop my lateral drift. It was here or nowhere. I eased the engines down and accepted that I was about to land offshore.
Oh well, at least the water will cool my hull faster. At two meters above the waterline, I hit 0 speed. I turned the main engine off. If the nozzle actually touched the ground while the engine was still on, it’d definitely explode. I’d have to just fall the rest of the way. In a perfect world, the legs would have kept the engine from touching the ground, but they were too flimsy, and they wouldn’t hold.
I watched the engine’s nozzle smash into the ground and break through the hard crust of flash-baked clay, sinking deep into the mud below. That’s not good, I thought to myself, soft ground was something we’d hoped to avoid. Mud flowed up the nozzle and into the engine itself, sizzling as it touched the nearly molten metal. Ah, that stung, I thought to myself, I felt things break inside the engine, torn apart as mud filled all the available space and hardened into a massive clay plug. The nozzle was now quite firmly locked into place, an anchor that would hopefully be enough to secure the rest of the ship?
Then the landing legs touched down, just as the water finally filled the void, slapping roughly against the sides of the hull. The ship swayed slightly. Ok, I thought to myself, we’re still good, the lakebed may be soft but it was pretty flat…
With a loud groaning sound, the landing leg with one of the two shuttle engines that hadn’t failed began to buckle. It was hotter than the other legs, thus softer, and the uneven way in which they’d cooled upon sinking into the wet mud hadn’t helped. A puff of steam shot out of the ground as the shuttle engine on that leg also sank into the mud, forming a bubble for the rest of the leg to bend and crumple. We were tilting more and more, the main engine fully gimbaled. We were leaning away from the shore towards the deeper water. We’d splash down in the water? Well, that wasn’t good, but maybe it was better than crashing onto the ground?
Then I felt wrenching pain as the hard-stuck engine nozzle buried deep in the mud was wrenched hard, pulled against the increasing tilt. It was going to rip free of the hull. The hull was about to break wide open right where the superheated plasma exhaust vents connected the engine to the fusion reactors. It would be a gaping wound right below the waterline. I had a sudden vision of what would come next, superheated steam racing up the length of the ship, right into the fusion reactors. Oh shit.
“No, no, no, no!” I said, panicked. I don’t know how I did what I did next. But I tried to grab hold of the heavy nozzle, pull on it, yank it free of the ground so it wouldn’t tear free. I was so caught up in visualizing myself as the ship, I was visualizing as if I could somehow yank my leg out of the mud.
Instead, out of nowhere, a massive magnetic field sprang into being. The entire ship wrenched back the other way as the nozzle became highly magnetic, an unexpected counterbalancing pull that forced the gimbal to grind into a fully vertical position. The sudden jerk was enough to right the tilting ship and it held us in place long enough for the mud to fully harden. It felt as if I’d yanked on the electrons within the metal, I realized, but not enough for it to form a current, rather, I’d simply briefly arranged them into an immensely powerful electromagnet. However I’d done it, it was enough. The ship settled into place, a new lighthouse some twenty meters offshore from the island.
I’d done a Magneto? Nudging a million tons of metal with my magic? Holy shit. That was my last hazy thought before everything went black and I passed out.