chapter 36
AN INFINITY OF MOMENTS
“What do you have?” Jessamyn asked herself as she sat before the nav-screen, staring at its unwelcome message. “Come on,
Jaarda. What do you have?”
Not enough fuel for braking, that was for certain. Jess could see the ship decelerating as she descended, but she wasn’t losing
speed fast enough. The heat shield was complaining, operating at levels over its intended tolerances—not unexpected considering
she’d had to use a steeper angle of descent than was advisable. In six minutes, her first—and perhaps her only—burn order would
commence, slowing the Galleon to two hundred kilometers per hour. But she couldn’t land at that speed—she could only crash at
that speed.
Trying a few other requests for more modest thrust burns, she quickly found that the best the Galleon could do was to reduce her
speed to one hundred eighty kilometers per hour prior to impact. “Splat,” she muttered.
Fear threatened to break through her cool responses, panic hovering just behind. “Phobos and Deimos,” she said—the moons
named for Mars’s companions, Fear and Panic. But if she was going down, then by Hades she would go down like Ares—like the
warrior-god for whom her world had been named.
“You have to eject,” she whispered.
The Galleon’s landing would not be something she could survive, and that crystallized her only course of action. In a pod, she might
stand a chance. The escape pods had parachutes to slow them.
She had only minutes before impact. And now she wished she’d left fuel in one of the pods. Without the fuel, the Galleon, falling at
the same rate as a pod, would be in the way of parachute deployment. She didn’t have time to refuel the pod in order to steer it
away.
Before her mind even had a chance to catch up, she’d given navigation two final commands. The ship accepted them. Then she ran,
careening to the rations room, barely cognizant of the moment’s pause to snatch her sling-pack. Into the airlock—agonizingly slow—
down the first set of stairs, then the second, and finally she could see the row of escape pods.
She threw herself at the first in the row, pounding upon its hatch, hurling herself inside, one hand attaching the harnessing restraint
over her shoulders while the other pre-authorized launch. She paused, waiting for the slight change in angle that would tell her the
Galleon had obeyed her first order. There it was—she launched the pod.
“Launch” was a deceptive term. The pod was given only a slight assist to place it outside the Galleon. Jessamyn was supposed to
burn fuel to get farther away. She hovered just beside the great ship, much too close for comfort. And then Mars’s last great raiding
ship followed Jessamyn’s second order, pulling off to the side, giving Jess a better chance for her parachute to deploy without
smashing, useless, against the ship’s underbelly. A small window allowed Jessamyn to watch the Galleon as it drifted inexorably
away from her.
Pressing one hand to the porthole, she uttered her farewell: “Godspeed.”
~ ~ ~
“She’s coming in too fast,” Pavel said, slamming a fist on his navigation panel. Shizer! Why couldn’t it be him at the helm of the
Galleon, Jess aboard this craft? He turned his eyes over to Ethan. “Eth? What d’you got?”
“I concur with your assessment,” replied Jessamyn’s brother. “Her speed is not consistent with a safe landing.”
“Bloody hell,” muttered Brian Wallace. “Why does it have to be the lass?”
“I have obtained a visual from a satellite relay,” said Ethan. “I do not know how long I can maintain visualization, however.”
Pavel and Wallace leaned over to gaze at the picture upon Ethan’s screen. Clouds and blue sky and more clouds, and then, there it
was: the Red Galleon.
“It looks so small on that wee screen,” said Wallace.
“The Galleon is an M-class vessel,” said Ethan. “The last Mars-class ship upon our planet. It is not small.”
“Aye, lad, aye. I know it’s a grand ship,” replied Wallace.
Pavel squinted to see the ship better. It did look tiny upon the screen. Miniature and vulnerable.
When it burst into flame seconds later, Pavel couldn’t stop his heart pounding. He’d known it was coming. The ship was heat-
shielded. The flames weren’t dangerous. At least not yet. But knowing these things it didn’t help his visceral response.
“She is attempting a water-landing,” said Ethan.
Pavel nodded. That would take care of any residual heat, wouldn’t it? He’d flown an M-class, but not at this speed. He loved Jess at
that moment more than he’d ever loved anyone.
And then the screen went dark.
“No!” Pavel cried.
“I am attempting to construct a visual animation via instrumentation,” said Ethan. “There. The moving object represents the Galleon.”
She was coming in at over one hundred fifty kilometers per hour.
No, no, no, said Pavel’s mind.
Time seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl as the Galleon continued its descent. To Pavel’s thinking, the animation lent an unreal
quality to the event. When finally the ship collided with the ocean, the impact shown upon the screen revealed nothing. Was
Jessamyn okay? Pavel checked his heading against the numbers on Ethan’s screen. They would arrive in less than five minutes.
Another speck moved onto the screen at Ethan’s station.
“Is that us?” asked Wallace, tapping the new craft.
“No,” replied Pavel, his voice flat. “That’s one of my aunt’s ships. They got there first.”
~ ~ ~
Lucca replayed the vid she’d just received. Watched as the enemy ship—first flame-engulfed, then cooling—crashed into the
Pacific.
“Well done,” she said to the leader of her Seattle squadron, as if he had personally brought the intruding ship to ground. “New
orders. I want the crew alive. If they have expired, prep their minds for immediate transfer. I don’t care who you have to kill to do it. I
want those consciousnesses re-bodied while there’s time.”
“Yes, Madam Chancellor,” replied the squadron leader. “Understood, Madam Chancellor. However …”
“Yes? Spit it out, man,” said Lucca.
“It is our opinion that this was not a survivable landing,” he replied.
“Your opinion?” barked Lucca. “Did I ask for your opinion? Find those bodies!”
“We have divers on their way.”
“Contact me the moment you know anything,” said Lucca.
~ ~ ~
Jessamyn watched her altimeter: Ten kilometers. Nine. Eight. At seven point three kilometers above Earth’s surface, she deployed
the pod’s drogue chute. Built to withstand the higher speeds which could shred her final descent chutes, the drogue slowed her in a
whiplash-inducing handful of seconds. Nauseous and blurry-eyed, she was still falling toward the Pacific Ocean at just under two
hundred kilometers per hour.
Her eyes on the altimeter again, she waited. The numbers ticked down more slowly now. That would be the drogue’s work. From
seven kilometers to four kilometers, she worked at regulating her breathing, clenching her abdominals. The g’s disoriented her, but
she clung to an innate resistance to failure. At three and one-half kilometers, she placed her hand, shaking uncontrollably, over the
instrument panel to jettison the drogue and launch the pilot parachutes.
As she descended at bone-rattling speeds, she thought of Pavel, of his idolization of Earth’s first astropilots. This was an old-school
landing, all right. She remembered Lobster’s saying, “La plus ça change,” which meant, “The more things change, the more they
don’t.” She thought of Ethan, her mother, her father, Mei Lo. Was this what it meant to see your life flash before your eyes?
Jessamyn saw not her life, but those she had loved.
“Pavel,” she whispered.
She sped past the three-kilometer mark and deployed her remaining chutes. Despite the crushing pressure, she felt relief at the
increased g’s because they informed her more certainly than her instrument panel (shaking unreadably) that she was slowing.
The last thousand meters stretched into a quiet infinity of moments during which Jessamyn repeated the names of those she loved:
Ethan, Mom, Dad, Lobster, Crusty, Harpreet, Mei Lo, Pavel.
Pavel. She admitted it at last.
I love him.
Falling in love and falling to Earth melted into a single experience as Jessamyn plunged hurly-burly toward the ocean. The pod
smacked water, as unforgiving as a solid surface. Jess lost all sense of up or down as the pod thrashed one direction and then
another, tumbling wildly. Was this what Mars rock felt like as it was crushed into gravel for building projects? Consciousness
became a thing separate from her, an entity bidding her farewell. This was dying, this was the end. Her stomach felt like she’d taken
a blow to the gut. She couldn’t catch her breath; her lungs ached. Spots blurred her vision and then she saw nothing.