he tensed and pushed himself hard toward the cockpit door.
He flew through the air while the cabin twisted around him, only to crash into his target a thump. His bones rattled and his body ached from head to toe, but he grappled at the guidebars and managed to grab hold. With a tap at his harness, the hook released and he retrieved the spring loaded arrestor cable, then latched up at his new position.
His gloved hands fumbled at the door handle then pried it open with a twist, revealing the shattered cockpit beyond. He clambered through and found precisely what he feared: a destroyed windshield and two dead pilots strapped into the seats.
The next few moments were a blur of motion. He released the pilot’s belt, pulled the limp body free and climbed in to replace him. It took him a second to focus, to blot out the spinning Earth and make sense of the instrument panel in front of him. Jack was rated a Class C leviathan pilot, and this was hardly second nature to him, but he wanted to live. He would focus and he would remember.
He closed his eyes, imagined the diagrams and tried to hear his flight instructor’s commands. Reaching out, unsure if he was grabbing the right lever, he pushed one all the way forward and the leviathan’s air-baffles extended. They increased drag at the top of the craft and righted it as it fell.
The helicopter wasn’t tumbling anymore, but the altimeter was still spinning like a buzzsaw blade, and the air speed had too many digits for Jack’s taste. The speed was dropping, but not fast enough. , The rotors would shear off if he tried to extend them, destroying any chance of a controlled landing. He needed to drop a lot of weight and fast.
He flipped the cargo panel open and punched the door release, then looked back over his shoulder and watched the ramp lurch down. At half-way open, he activated the cargo ejectors and watched the two heavy pallets tumble out into the sky, where their parachutes popped and gently lowered them to the Earth.
“At least they’ll make it,” he mumbled into his mask.
With the pallets gone, the Leviathan’s descent slowed down to something reasonable, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. He leaned forward and slapped the EXTEND button, but nothing happened. He slapped it again without response. A blinking light higher up the console caught his eye, and it didn’t take an expert to realize what “JAM” meant. It meant he was screwed.
Why would it be jammed? He burned through options. The cover could be damaged, or the rotor destroyed completely. There was no hope in either line of thought. No possibility of recovery, so he abandoned them. Power cables could’ve been severed, but that would have a warning light. He was missing something. Then he remembered: the rotors wouldn’t extend without the engines running.
Jack moved the throttle and listened for an engine response, but it was impossible to hear anything over the thousand kilometer-per-hour winds whipping through the craft. There should be a STALL light somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where, and there was no time to look for it.
With the furious Earth rushing up at him, the only thing Jack could think of was the auto-rotate procedure, and it would have to do. His hands flew across the controls, flipping switches that disengaged the transmission and overrode safety protocols. Paying no mind to the hundreds of lights blinking across the console, he once again reached forward and mashed the EXTEND button. The blades unfolded and began to spin.
The leviathan wouldn’t travel far without power, but the rotating blades would make an effective parachute, and even offer minimal steering. The only thing left to do was bring his bird down to the ground.
Jack finally looked around and got his bearings, and it didn’t look good. There was no trace of the other leviathans or the tranzat, and God only knew how far he’d traveled before getting things under control. The air above was thick with those strange vehicles, now too distant to see clearly, while below there was only a thick dust cloud that stretched to the far horizon.
The barely stable leviathan dipped down into the dust cloud, and once inside, vicious winds tore at it from every direction. Jack held onto the controls tightly, and as he dropped into the darkness, he prayed that he’d seen the worst of this day.
Chapter 8:
Jonah and the Great Fish
Rumours spread through the Shackleton like a plague, and the crew were up to speed within an hour. They had found an alien vessel. What followed was overwhelming excitement and fifty-six astronauts trying against all odds to squeeze into an eight-man bridge compartment. Still, the Shackleton did nothing the first day but survey, traveling up and down the length of Zebra-One like a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo, scanning, observing and recording every strange feature of the artifact’s surface. Each new discovery elicited bursts of conjecture and heated debate.
Faulkland eventually banished the crowd from the bridge, but they wouldn’t be deterred. Instead, the lot of them crammed into the maximum-occupancy-twelve dining hall where they monitored progress by CC-TV and somehow managed not to suffocate.
It was a long day mapping Zebra-One’s surface, and at its end, Marcus didn’t sleep at all, nor did he bother trying. He knew from experience that he would have lain awake, running every possibility and contingency through his head. Commander Faulkland claimed that he could sleep at will anywhere in the universe, but he spent the whole night on the bridge with Marcus, staring in perfect silence at the sleeping giant just outside their window.
Meanwhile, Mason Shen sat off to the side and tried to solve the communication puzzle. When morning hours rolled around, he was still at his console and no closer to an answer. He was in contact with Ares Colony on Mars, but Earth remained morbidly silent for them as well.
“I’m about ready to give up,” Mason said around 0800.
Marcus was still staring at Zebra-One, now with dry and sore eyes. He asked the obvious question. “Still no luck, Mason?”
“I wouldn’t say none,” Mason replied. “I’ve been chatting with this Martian comm operator, and she sounds pretty cute. Earth, though… Boss, if I didn’t know better, I’d think everybody just packed up and moved away. There’s nothing.”
Marcus felt like that should bother him more, but he was so far away that it didn’t matter. “No worries. I’m sure there’s a simple answer.”
“Yeah,” was all Mason said, his voice lacking enthusiasm.
“Have there been any signals from Zebra-One?” Marcus asked, switching back to the important topic.
“Not a peep, sir. I’ve been cycling greetings in every language I know and some I don’t, but she’s just as quiet as the Earth. If she’s awake, she ain’t talking.”
“Just as well,” Faulkland said. “It’d be a little anti-climactic if she called us back.”
By 0915, two teams of eight were assembled, briefed and ready to get on with the show. Marcus’ team included himself, Commander Faulkland, Dr. St. Martin, and a handful of the eager miners. The second team was Rao’s, and included Crew Chief Hector Pacheco, the paleontologist Professor Caldwell, and their own team of miners. As much as Marcus pretended there was some deep strategy to the team rosters, they were actually divvied up based on personality. He knew who got on well with whom, and he preferred his teams not be at each other’s throats until after a mission started.
Like Marcus, hardly anyone slept the night before, and they were running on a mixture of high octane coffee and lipid bars. Combining stimulants and sleep deprivation never added up to a level head, and Marcus had a sneaking suspicion that most exploration had begun in a similar fashion. It would explain why so few natives survived first contact.
He was about to say a prayer for whatever natives they might encounter, when he realized his own people were completely unarmed. The tone of his prayer changed very quickly.
With the Shackleton stationed fifty meters from Iris Charlie, the exploratory teams entered the EVA module, which housed a dressing room and airlock. The pressure suits were skin tight, as close as a human could get to naked in space, and the only clothes worn beneath were thin thermals that left little to the imagination.
It took the team less than ten minutes to suit up. Then, with everyone helmeted, sealed, checked and
