Reel, Konrad

Reel did not hear from Captain Arcturus for three days.

It wasn’t unexpected; she’d defied him. Publicly, and worse, she had forced him to make the decision she wanted. He knew it, she knew it, and by now probably most of the crew knew it too. He would be furious with her, and she had no doubt that if she hadn’t stolen the engines from Lander Two he’d have drug her back to the Old Bug by her tail. He still might. It was going to be bad when she got back, no doubt about it, and she toyed with the idea of opening up a Link with him and trying to patch things up beforehand.

She heaved a sigh. He’d only yell at her again, she was sure. So instead, she tried to keep herself busy, ignoring him even as he must surely be ignoring her. Let him stew in it. She checked in with Yerry every waking hour, as requested, and occupied her time with thoughts of her mission, her journey to the surface and the transmission unit she’d deliver. That would let them talk in real time with the natives, where radio, even if they had a transmitter, would have hours of lag time. Why was that anyway, she wondered? Of course, no sooner had she thought of the question than the familiar warning buzz flickered to life in the back of her head. She forced herself not to wonder about it, disgruntled.

She spent most of the three-day journey in silence, alone in the cramped confines of the lander. On the third day, she spun up the engines in reverse, slowing her trajectory as she fell towards the planet’s orbit. It was still just a pinprick of light on her viewscreen when the Captain finally connected with her, his voice stiff.

"Report, Reel. Are you decelerating on schedule? And don't you dare roll your eyes at me."

She grimaced. She hadn't actually rolled her eyes, but the sentiment had carried through the Link regardless. "Yes, Captain." She said aloud. To herself, she thought: “Of course I am. You can see that from the telemetry data on Old Bug.” "Another day and I'll be there."

"I heard that thought." He growled. "Drop the communications relay and return immediately."

"Yes, Captain." She repeated, wincing and struggling to keep her thoughts neutral. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d said she would do? And why could she only transmit without speaking when she didn’t want to?

The planet swelled as she approached, expanding from a tiny, pale dot to a brilliant blue orb, swirled with white and turning slowly where it hung in space before her. She watched it hungrily, her face pressed against the viewscreen. She'd never been so close to a planet. Those white things were clouds, vaporized water just hanging in the air. Water covered most of the planet, another marvel, broken up by great hulking masses of land in shades of brown and green. The planet had a single moon, a small pale gray orb that spun a stately course around its parent.

The smears of blue, green, and white expanded until they filled the screens completely, dominating her view from one end of space to the other. The sight stirred something in her, something like what she felt looking at the stars, but better. It made her heart beat fast, and she found herself grinning at the planet like a hatchling when she should have been working.

Before long, she felt the telltale tug of the lander hitting the atmosphere. The ship rattled, and started to slow faster. Reel watched the guide lights that the computer projected onto the viewscreen, keeping the nose of her ship pointed at the targeting reticle, trusting the computer to help her steer.

The captain came over her implant again. "Entry starting. Make sure that you keep your thrust steady; we don't have any atmospheric data so you'll have to feel it out as you go. Don't-"

She cut him off, irritated. "I know! I've done this dozens of times. I'll be fine if you just let me concentrate."

"Done dozens of simulations, you mean." His tone was harsh, but she could feel worry tinging the Link. That was all she ever felt from the Captain. Worry, or frustration, or annoyance. It would be nice for him to feel proud of her, or impressed, or...Well, anything else, really.

Even his grim mood couldn’t dampen her own too much, though. She strapped in and took up the control sticks, a smile breaking across her face. The sticks felt good in her hands, the ship sliding down into the sky at her lightest touch. The atmosphere seemed to push back at her, resisting her incursion into the planet it enveloped. The viewscreens reddened, the thermal plating of the ship glowing with heat, generated by the friction of her entry. Part of her was distantly aware that if something were to go wrong at this point, she’d die in an instant, flashed to vapor before she could so much as scream. The other, much larger, part of her was just excited.

Over the next few minutes, the ship slowed from its tooth-rattling entry to a steady glide. As the heat dissipated and her viewscreens cleared, she looked out over a dark, flat expanse of water. She had come in on the night side of the planet, but the moon reflected light down onto an ocean that sparkled and shifted. She dipped the lander lower, curious. At regular intervals the water rolled onto itself, forming peaks and ripples that splashed back down out of existence as soon as they formed.

“What’s causing that?” She asked.

“What’s causing what?” Yerry’s voice chimed in her head. Arcturus had brought other crewmembers into the Link, listening in case something went wrong. Not that they could do anything from where they were. “We can’t see what you’re seeing. Describe it.”

“The water here is moving, but I can’t see why.”

“Let’s see…Those are waves. They’re caused by wind moving over the water.” There was a moment’s pause while Yerry looked up what wind was. “Wind is a bulk movement of atmosphere.”

Reel’s next question would have been “What moves the air?” but her implant buzzed in the back of her skull, forestalling further questions. It did, however, have the words in its memory. As soon as Yerry had said them, Reel got a sense of what they meant. She’d just never had a reason to use them before.

“Wind,” Reel said, rolling the word around her mouth. “Waves.” She grinned, delighted by the novelty.

She turned to a secondary viewscreen and pulled up a map, built up out of thousands of pictures taken by the probes. With the probes in orbit, the ship could place itself on the map with near perfect accuracy, so long as at least two of them were above the horizon. She’d come down over the deep ocean between England and America, not very far from the coast of Ireland. They weren’t positive about the borders of all the polities, but they’d projected them onto the map all the same. Not bad, she thought to herself. She’d meant to come down right into Germany, but she wasn’t too far off, all things considered.

Twisting the sticks forward, she turned the ship and pointed it towards Peenemunde. The ship’s computer even drew a line for her on the map, showing her trajectory and helping her to correct the angle of approach.

Flying the ship in atmosphere was completely different from flying in space. In space, the ship would float forever with just a touch of thrust. Here, it felt like it was always dragging to a stop. The air pushed back on it, gravity pulled it towards the surface. She’d known it would be like that, but there was something visceral about it that the sims didn’t quite capture.

The lander’s gravity systems had turned off when she entered the atmosphere, letting the planet take over the job of keeping her feet on the deck. It seemed lighter than standard gravity, and it always pulled down towards the planet rather than towards the deck plating. She experimented with it, pushing the ship from side to side, and up and down. It did odd things to her stomach, sending it climbing into her throat when she pushed the craft into a dive.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Reel, we’re getting some weird flight readings.” Arcturus said. “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

“Just getting a feel for things.” She lied hastily. She’d have liked to try a loop, but instead she throttled up the engines and leveled out, pushing on to her destination.

She passed over Ireland, and then England in the course of a few minutes. She wandered off course to get a better look at one of the cities, earning another reprimand from Arcturus in the process, but in the dark she couldn’t see much. A few reflected patches of moonlight showed regular, rectangular structures, but little else.

Minutes later the land fell away, leaving her back out over open water, waves darting by beneath her. She flashed over land again, Germany at last, and started to slow the ship for her approach to Peenemunde.

The research site was unlit, a cluster of square buildings surrounding a central field path. She was pleased to see a long, flat field of land not far from the buildings. A landing strip, she knew, for the “planes” that these humans used for air transport. That would work for bringing the lander down. As she turned the ship to hover over the field, she saw small figures spilling out of some of the buildings and running into others, moving fast in the dark. Lights flicked on, the research station coming alive as she settled onto the field, touching down with a thump.

“They’ve noticed me.”

“How are they reacting?” Captain Arcturus queried.

She watched a group of them, featureless in the shadows, come running in a line towards the ship. “I can’t make any details, but they seem excited.” She knew she was.

The computer pinged for her attention, and she turned towards her secondary viewscreen, tapping it. “I have the atmospheric analysis results.” She scanned them, skimming over the technical details in favor of the conclusion. “It’s breathable. Good oxygen and nitrogen mix, a little heavier on the nitrogen than what we breathe. That’s great, I won’t have to put on a pressure suit.”

There was a moment’s horrified silence on the Link. “You weren’t wearing your suit on the way down?” The captain demanded.

Reel fought down the urge to roll her eyes again. “If something went wrong on entry, a suit wouldn’t have helped.”

“Okay, that’s not according to protocol….” he sighed, and she caught a brief mental impression of the captain massaging his temples. “You have the German language module loaded. Go introduce us, drop off the transmission module, and get back up here.” The Captain’s voice in her head was strained with worry. “Do not dawdle.”

“Yes, sir.” She grabbed the transmission unit and lugged it to the door. It had handles and wheels to help maneuver it, but it was an awkward, boxy shape, and it came up nearly to her chest. Wrangling it into position at the top of the ramp, she turned to grab a planetary surface survival kit from where it hung alongside the hatch. She wouldn’t be out there for long, but she thought she should bring it, just in case. She cinched the pack’s strap through a loop on the waist of her coveralls and hit the hatch button.

The airlock released with a hiss as the pressure equalized, her ears popping, and nervousness welled up beneath the excitement, pushing its way to the surface of her thoughts. She caught her first whiff of the planet’s atmosphere; it was damp, and full of interesting, earthy smells that she couldn’t identify. The hatch rolled back, and the ramp slid down, revealing the dark shapes of the humans, arrayed before the ship in tight lines. Many of them held lights, which they pointed at her.

She realized that she had no idea what to say to them. She scrambled for something appropriate and came up empty, but the ramp was down and they seemed to be waiting for her, so she put on her best smile and stepped out onto it, dragging the transmission unit behind her.

…

Someone tore Konrad out of his chair and dumped him onto a rough plank floor. He landed there in a heap, flailing weakly, confused. Where was he? He caught a flash of the legs of his desk, where he’d drifted off some hours ago. “What?” he cried out, his thoughts muddled with sleep. “What is it?”

“Get up, you damn fool!” Dr. Lusser pulled on his shirt, trying to yank him upright. “Don’t you hear that?”

He did hear it, as he half staggered, half was dragged to his feet. The banshee wail of the air raid siren screamed through the station, a horrible screaming pitch that rose and fell in waves, impossible to ignore now that he was awake. Lusser headed for the open door, his voice shrill with fear. “We need to get to the shelter. Radar picked up something coming in incredibly fast, impossibly fast.”

Konrad staggered after him, his thoughts bleary. He grabbed his grimy lab coat off the hook on his door, slinging it on. “How fast?”

“Faster than any plane ever made,” Lusser spat. “Thousands of miles an hour. You know what that means?”

The blood drained from Konrad’s face. “A rocket. How? How could they be so far ahead of us?” he whimpered, following Dr. Lusser through the darkened hallways.

They burst out the doors of the office, and Konrad saw something flash by overhead. Ahead of him, Lusser moaned, a hopeless animal sound. “Oh, God.” They were dead men.

But whatever it was did not wipe them all out in a fiery explosion. Instead it slowed, stopping on a dime over the airfield and hovering there as it turned in midair. Konrad got a good look at it as spotlights came alight around the compound, highlighting a sleek, gray form.

It wasn’t large, as far as aircraft went. Maybe sixty feet long, and half as wide. The nose tapered to a blunt wedge beneath a wide windscreen, a figure silhouetted behind the glass. Two small wings that couldn’t possibly provide enough lift for the thing to fly jutted out of the sides, and four stubby protrusions extended from the base of the ship. It hovered over them without making a sound, turning as if to take them all in before descending the rest of the way down. As it settled onto the airfield, landing legs folded out alongside the protrusions to grip the earth, propping the craft up a few feet off the ground.

Konrad stumbled to a halt, grabbing at Lusser’s arm. “What in God’s name is that?”

Lusser tried to shake him off, but he was too busy gaping to put any real effort into it. “I don’t know.” He mumbled. “Some other clever piece of Wunderwaffen that Hitler has just decided to reveal?”

“No.” Konrad pointed at it, his finger shaking. “Did you see how it moved? I can’t even tell how it was staying in the air.”

Another voice spoke up, brisk and entirely too chipper. “Definitely not one of ours.” Konrad spun. Von Braun strode forward with his eyes locked on the craft, and two soldiers flanking him, clutching their rifles. “No swastikas. And if that were English or American, the war would be over. If it were Russian, we’d all be dead.”

Konrad and Lusser traded an uneasy look before falling into step behind von Braun. “Then what does that leave?” Konrad asked.

“I don’t know.” Von Braun’s eyes sparkled in the night, and a hint of smile curled his lips. “But let’s go find out, shall we?”

More men streamed out to join them as they made their way across the field, the token force of soldiers scrambling to get out in front of them and surround the craft. The air above it wavered in the spotlights.

Heatwaves. Konrad realized. It was moving so fast, its plating has heated up hot as a frying pan. His gut clenched. What was this thing?

A sharp hissing noise sounded, prompting the soldiers to yell and shoulder their rifles, fingers on triggers. An errant shot cracked out into the night.

“Hold your fire!” Von Braun bellowed, pushing his way forward. He stopped short of the front line of soldiers. “Anyone who shoots without being told to will be strapped to the next rocket we test!” The air raid siren fell silent at last, and a deep hush fell across the field.

He cut off as a section of the hull slid back into the craft. A ramp rolled down to the ground as the hatch slid back, as smooth as butter onto hot toast. The pilot stepped out onto the ramp, dragging a tall rectangular box on wheels behind them.

Konrad stared, bug eyed. It was six feet tall, with thick, wide set legs, a broad low-slung head, and green, scaly skin. A shell covered its back, and it wore a loose, gray coverall that wrapped around its shoulders and down to wrist and ankle, leaving the clawed hands, feet, and heavy shell bare. It stopped when it saw all of the soldiers standing before it, swinging its scaly head from one side to the other to take them all in. If it was the least bit perturbed by the guns leveled at it, it gave no sign.

It’s a turtle. Some part of his brain gibbered, and perverse laughter welled up inside him. It’s a six-foot tall turtle!

The thing blinked at them, the whites of its eyes round with what might have been wonder. It opened its mouth, and perfect, if oddly accented German, said:

“Wow! You’re not nearly as weird looking as we thought you’d be.”