Adele smiled; her ideologically egalitarian parents would’ve approved, though in their hearts they’d have viewed Pasternak as a mechanic, Purser Stobart a mid-level servant, and Woetjans as a strange and possibly dangerous performing animal.
The common mess and the very strain of an unusually long run without reentering normal space had brought the Klimovs and the Sissie’s company together. Class aside, the Klimovs had more in common with warrant officers and even common spacers than they did with commissioned officers who were almost invariably members of the Cinnabar upper classes. The Count wasn’t stupid and his wife appeared to Adele to be quite intelligent, but in terms of education and the general understanding of human civilization neither of them could match the corvette’s two midshipmen.
“We have the aircar,” Klimovna said, perhaps a trifle artificially bright. Planning a voyage to the untraveled parts of the universe wasn’t the same as watching yourself rush down toward a foggy mudhole with the ship keening a high-frequency buzz of plasma thrusters running at high power. “Surely in a fifty-kilometer radius you’ll find something to shoot, Georgi.”
The Princess Cecile paused in the air. She wasn’t quite hovering, but her rate of descent had slowed to a crawl. “Ship make ready for landing,” said the general channel. Lieutenant Chewning was speaking from the Battle Center, though Daniel had the conn. “We will touch down in ten seconds.”
The thrusters roared anew, but the corvette was settling again. “The Captain’s increased mass flow but flared the thruster nozzles,” Adele said quickly, because the dichotomy of more sound but falling faster disturbed her every time she felt it. “If he needs to lift suddenly, it’s quicker to—”
Steam billowed around the Princess Cecile, rocking the hull from side to side. We should be on land! Adele thought; but of course the bath of ions from the thrusters would vaporize the boggy soil and soft-bodied vegetation into a plume.
“—close the nozzles than to feed more reaction mass—” she continued, without a pause or even a stammer to suggest that her own heart had leapt when something unexpected occurred.
The thrusters shut off abruptly. The sudden silence was as stunning as a gunshot in a library. Adele hadn’t realized they were actually down; the feel of the outriggers compressing their struts had been lost in thumps and shuddering as the exhaust hurled baked sod against the Sissie’s underside.
“Ship, this is the captain,” Daniel said, rising from the command console to stretch his torso backward with his hands on his hips. “We’ve made a good run and a clean landing. May we make many more together.”
He turned and surveyed the bridge. Sun had already begun to unlock the dorsal turret, lowered into the forward hull to avoid serious buffeting during descent from orbit; Betts was focused on his attack board, though if he launched missiles in an atmosphere their backblast would destroy the corvette herself.
Daniel met Adele’s eyes and grinned. “Chief of Ship,” he continued, still using the general push instead of speaking to Pasternak on the Power Room channel. “Let’s open her up and see what the landscape looks like with our own eyes. I dare say more of us than just me are looking forward to being on solid ground. Captain out.”
The clanks and whines of hatches undogging merged with the hisses and bell-like notes of differential cooling within the vessel’s hull. Daniel bent close to Adele’s ear and said without going through the commo system, “Mind, I don’t know just how solid what I see outside really is.”
* * *
“Well, I’ve mucked out cowyards that didn’t stink so much,” said Hogg, sliding a pair of loading tubes for his stocked impeller down the neck of his shirt. Each tube held twenty projectiles and a capacitor charged to accelerate them down the coil-wrapped bore. “But I wouldn’t say this is riper’n the Sissie was getting after so long recycling the same atmosphere. The filters aren’t good for sixteen days.”
Daniel Leary sniffed. When he shifted his weight, the baked ground crunched beneath his bootsoles.
“Part of the way this smells is that the exhaust burned everything when we set down,” he said judiciously. “The mud’s mostly organic. Though . . .”