The Landing
08 Feb 2020Jenette Vasquez
The hull of the DBX groaned and creaked as a nearby geyser belched to life, sending a shudder through the ground and up the landing gear.Sensitive to any unexpected sound in her ship, CMDR Vasquez startled awake. She squinted out from under her black sleep mask with one eye, fighting the local sun’s glare in search of the culprit. A geyser of Sulfur ( or was it Carbon dioxide? Yellow Water ice? Whatever) was taking a drunk man’s first morning piss into the blackness above.
“OK, maybe this wasn’t the best place for a cat nap,” she muttered aloud, and started mentally arguing with herself about powering up and moving the ship a few hundred meters away. Before she could make a decision she succumbed again, drifting downward into fitful dreams. Settling into that spiraling tunnel of witch space.
Bright. Dark. Cloud. Star. Color. Seeing things in the rushing clouds and darkness… screaming faces, eyes, Vaz’s childhood toys. The glimpse of a flower-shaped star ship sent her pulse racing. That passed on to visions of creatures real and of myth. Then heat, blinding light, and the sudden lurch forward in her harness, shoulders aching thanks to the repetitive stress of jump after jump. A new star charging at her like a great eye aflame, only to stop short with a groan of the ships hull. Modules creaking, threatening rip loose and fly forward through the canopy glass.
in the real world, her sleeping hand flinched. In her dream world she was banking her DBX to the right to fuel scoop and scan the system. Her real finger twitched, and she awoke again as the scanner honked across the red and yellow garden of rock, geyser pillars, and rising steam.
“Fucking pendejo. Fuck.”
Half-lidded, her eye happened to land on another nearby geyser mouth just as it sent a blast of steam several hundred meters into the black sky above. She sat mesmerized for a moment then something caught her eye... a crystal cluster inside the lip of the geyser mouth. She slowly raised her sleep mask off her other eye as the cluster began to shake and crack from the force of the jet plume surrounding it. Then the cluster suddenly rocketed space-ward like a missile.
Vasquez leaned forward, looking up through her canopy, tracking the rising glint of spinning crystal until it’s trajectory arced behind the apex of the geyser plume.
“Huh,” she shrugged, sleepily processing what she just saw before exhaling back into her seat. Vaz adjusted the sleep mask so no light would leak in and waited for sleep.
Dreams come quick in low G.
Yup, that’s rope. Thick, frayed sun-bleached rope. At least, that’s what it looked like. The kind of thick rope used by docked cruise ships on water worlds… well-used and beyond it’s prime, it’s frayed fibers bleached gray by the sun. That was all she could make out through the fogged-up glass of the damaged escape pod.
That “rope” was once somebody’s face, Vaz mused as she turned to exit the cargo hold. “Poor bastard.”
The hold’s door closed more slowly than usual. Vaz pulled it shut and peered through the door’s small window in time to hear a loud metallic thud and see the damaged escape pod shake.
Had something hit the hull?
Another thud. Then two more at once. Then a rapid series of thuds like the start of a hail storm on a metal roof.
Vaz awoke to the COVAS, “Warning. Ship under attack.” But it was all but drowned out by the sound like hailstones on metal. She threw her sleeping mask off and checked her instruments.
Shields were lit up but holding. Taking a beating as she watched. Hull at 92%... what was it when she landed? Her mind was racing. Then she stopped breathing as she looked outside.
Through the canopy she was surrounded by a scene of chaos.
Every nearby geyser vent was like a thruster blasting its after burner. Chunks of rock were disappearing, rocketing upward, from the rapidly-widening vent openings. Rock and ice debris was also falling from those plumes and landing like hail all around and on the ship.
From perhaps 5 clicks on and all the way out the horizon, a wall filled nearly her entire view. Plume after plume of yellow gray sulphur ice, each tens of kilometers wide filled her view from left to right. The wall was slowly rising like volcanic ash into the black.
Vaz quickly shot back into her seat, tightened up her harness and fired up the thrusters with full power to engines. The ship climbed fast.
Gear up. Nose up to 90 degrees. Boost while thrusting toward orbit.
Once at a safe distance, she relaxed and throttled down. For the first time since she was a girl, Vaz swung about to see where she’d been.
…
Ask Vaz about that story today and the hull percentage starts lower and ends lower. After a few drinks, sometimes the DBX surfs a rising plume of ice all the way into orbit, and she never looked back.
Truth is, had she slept through it, she’d be dead. As it is, the geologic site did erupt. Her ship was hit by debris that rose faster than the plume. Her shields did go down under the hundreds of scatter shot impacts from that blast. But her hull never went below 50%.
That was 20 years ago. Since that day, she visits the system at least once a year just to watch the progress of the body’s new ring formation.
Buy her a drink sometime and hear her tell it. Just nod and enjoy...even if you sense she’s taking you for a ride. And pretend not to notice her hands shaking as she takes a sip of her drink.