The blizzard which has prevented Tersae attacks at Seta Point still rages, providentially, but the telemetry I receive from the CSS Vengeance includes weather-pattern projections which show the storm system clearing Seta Point within seven hours of our arrival. It is essential that we reach our duty station before the enemy can field a force to attack it. Our very arrival may well trigger the enemy into risking the blizzard to destroy the colony before we can arrive. Our descent carries us around Thule’s hulking shoulder and down into night, which is spectacular as we pass through the ionosphere. The sight draws uncharacteristic commentary from my commander.
“Damn, that’s beautiful . . .”
Curious as to what John sees, I limit my sensors to only those spectra perceived by humans. A blaze of stars backlights a sky-spanning display of aurora borealis. Wildly writhing curtains and ribbons of green and red light flicker and dance, swaying across the darkness, pierced here and there by the streaks and flashpoint bombs of a meteor shower.
It is, indeed, beautiful. I am deeply pleased, that John has noticed, leaving me to hope he will not withdraw into deep isolation again, as he did after his brother’s death. It took so long for me to break down that isolation the last time, I feared for many months I would lose him as commander and friend. I am therefore grateful to the silent dance of ghostly light across Thule’s night skies and regret the briefness of our transition through the dazzling display.
But the eleven-kilometer reading on my altimeter marks our abrupt transition into the storm-racked troposphere. We plunge into heavy cloud cover which effectively blinds my own sensors. It is unsettling to “see” clear air above me, through the eyes of the CSS Darknight, while everything around me—and more critically, everything below—remains wrapped in the dense haze of night-darkened storm clouds.
We suffer a jolting ride due to high wind speeds, with unstable wind shears and shifting gusts making lateral corrections from the lift platform’s engines a constant necessity. My commander, who loathes combat drops as much as I detest confinement aboard naval transport ships, hums tunelessly under his breath and stares fixedly at the altimeter. “Anybody down there watching us?” he asks tersely.
“I have detected no scans on any of the standard wavelengths. If the enemy has seen us, they are using a technology completely alien to our experience.”
John Weyman grunts noncommittally, using a tonal inflection I have learned, over the years, to translate roughly as “wouldn’t surprise me, if they did.” Given the information in our mission briefing, virtually everything about the enemy is unknown. It is an interesting way to begin a war. I comment, pragmatically, “Coming up on five thousand feet. Brace for braking thrusters.”
My heavy lift sled fires its main engines, slowing our precipitous plunge through the storm. Blizzard conditions leave us totally blind and rock us violently. Temperatures hover at zero degrees Celsius, plus or minus three degrees on average. Wind chill factors drop the temperature another twenty degrees, making the storm lethal to any unsheltered human on the surface.
My thoughts stray to Bessany Weyman and the unknown cause of Eisenbrucke Station’s communications blackout. I grow concerned that weather fierce enough to destroy the research station’s radio and SWIFT units will have left the inhabitants exposed to fatal temperatures. Even discounting the risks of enemy attack, there may be trouble ahead if serious damage has occurred to the physical shelters at Eisenbrucke Station—or at Seta Point.
Given the look in John Weyman’s eyes, my commander shares this worry.
The gusts ripping through my external sensor arrays are creating problems already, running the gamut from ice and slush buildup on sensor lenses, particularly those bearing the brunt of the wind, to wild harmonics that create sensor ghosts, static discharges, and false images.
I want down. Badly.
I pull in my main sensors, tucking them back into armored turtle cowlings, and deploy backup sensors instead, as a precaution. “One thousand feet,” I advise. “Scanning terrain with radar. Matching terrain features with on-board maps.” I correlate data rapidly. “We are five kilometers off target, John, north of Seta Point along the Whiteclaw River. Five hundred feet. Applying lateral thrust to avoid crossing the Whiteclaw on the ground.”
“Good idea,” John nods agreement. According to survey data, the Whiteclaw River is a treacherous chute of white water along its upper reaches and still runs fast and deep where it spills out onto its alluvial plain, directly beneath us. The settlement five kilometers to the south has been built to mine alluvial deposits as close to the rugged mother lode as possible. Given the data from our mission briefing, plus input from my radar arrays, I do not relish the thought of trying to ford the Whiteclaw in a blizzard; the energy expenditure to avoid this while still airborne is well worth the trouble. I monitor our lateral progress carefully via radar.
“Approaching the Whiteclaw River. Two hundred feet—”
Violent wind shear topples me turret-side down. We plummet like a stone, tipping and tilting crazily as the lift’s engines scream, trying to right us again. I yank all retractable small-caliber weapons systems inboard to protect them. I can do nothing about fixed systems, including my Hellbore and mortars. I am canted at a one-hundred-six-degree angle when my turret plows into something solid. One corner bites deep, digging a jagged trench. I slam into the ground like a flipped beetle, stunned by a momentary overload from my pain sensors. A howl bursts from my stolid commander. We plow across frozen ground in a slide I can neither control nor halt. Top-side external sensor arrays—ignored in the rush to protect my weapons systems—rip loose from their mountings, scoured away by the wild skid.
The sickening slide ends abruptly when the ground vanishes beneath my turret. My war hull teeters, tips, and plunges downward, half rolling and half somersaulting as we fall straight into the foaming Whiteclaw. We strike the water like the Titanic diving for the deep. Water pours in through holes where backup sensor arrays have been torn out by the roots.
I close emergency hatches on the flooding conduits, desperate to minimize electrical damage to my systems and to keep the water from pouring through interior spaces by means of cable conduits and access crawlways. Another slam against a solid surface jars my war hull, then I come to rest on the river bottom, canted mostly on my back and deeply shaken.
John gasps into the comparative silence, his breaths ragged as he hangs upside down in the command chair, cushioned by the protective webbing used during combat drops. The hiss of a hypo-spray sounds from the autodoc built into the chair, feeding medication into his system. As the medicine takes effect, he begins to swear monotonously, spitting blood from a bitten mouth. He struggles to wipe his eyes clear as that blood trickles down past his nose and into his eyes and hair.
Hand shaking, he reaches unsteadily for the med-console, which pops open. Supplies have been webbed in as snugly as my commander, with commendable foresight on the part of my designers. He fumbles an elastobrace loose while muttering creatively at Thule’s inimical weather, then laboriously wraps a swollen elbow in the brace. I monitor his vitals, fearing shock and internal injuries, while attempting to ascertain damage to myself.
We have, at least, reached the ground without encountering enemy fire.
“How bad is it?” John mutters, fumbling the med-console closed again.
“Your vitals are holding at acceptable levels—” I begin.
“Not me, you loveable idiot,” John mutters, “how bad is the damage to you?”
Oh.
“Performing damage assessment. I have lost backup external sensors across the entire upper surface of my turret. Portside sensor cowlings are showing red-line. There is warping damage to some of the sensor hatch covers. I managed to retract small-caliber weapons systems before we hit. Checking outboard, larger-caliber systems. One rank of turret-mounted infinite repeater snouts has sustained minor deviations from true, measured down the long axis, although the deviations are well within battle-damage tolerances for continued operations.”
My commander blinks, then asks, “Your guns are bent?”
“Not all of them,” I prevaricate. “A rank of portside, nonretractable fifty caliber gatlings snapped off completely. They were my least robust external weapons, however,” I hasten to add, “and their loss should not materially affect my ability to carry out our mission. The remainder of my nonretractable weapons have not been affected.”
“Huh. Including your Hellbore?”
I scan, performing a pre- and post-crash comparison of angles and tolerances. “There is no deformation in the Hellbore barrel,” I am pleased to report.
“Well, that’s something.” John sighs. “All right, next step. How badly jammed into this river bottom are we? Among other things, the human body wasn’t designed to hang upside down for long periods of time.”
Indeed, my commander’s face is already turning an alarming shade of red as blood pools under the weight of gravity. I turn my attention rapidly to my predicament, since the sooner I solve mine, the sooner I will solve my commander’s. I scan my surroundings, using what sensor arrays have survived the crash, mostly nestled in the protected spaces along my prow, starboard side, and stern. “The river bottom is narrower than I would like,” I relay, “but there should be sufficient room to maneuver, if I am very careful. I am still locked into the lift platform, which should be of considerable help. The engines are still functional.”