The datanet said Zanfeld was ‘colonized’ twenty years ago, but this looked more like some kind of temporary camp than a permanent settlement.
“Like I said, it’s a gypsy colony,” Mina said when I asked about it. “That’s their thing. They like to set up gray ports around the edges of established clusters, where people on both sides of the law can meet to do business. When the local powers get tired of it and try to clean things up they just move someplace else.”
“Most of their ships don’t look like they could make it into the Delta Layer,” I said dubiously. “Wouldn’t they be easy to catch? They’d need weeks to get anywhere in the Gamma Layer.”
“It’s not like they’re going to form up in a convoy and do a least-time course to their new site,” Mina said, sounding amused. “If they’re worried about pursuit they’ll scatter in all directions, and they won’t all stay in the Gamma Layer either. Some of them will hide out in nearby systems, either in the Alpha Layer or normal space. Some of them will spend a week or two hiding out in subspace before they poke their noses out, or just go dark out in interstellar space. Sometimes they’ll fab up decoy squadrons to throw off pursuit, or find a friendly colony where they can blend in until the heat dies down. Can you imagine the Federation Navy putting in the kind of work it would take to hunt them down?”
“I guess not,” I admitted. Everyone knew that the Federation Navy started out as a pirate fleet that decided it would be easier to run a protection racket than to actually chase down merchant ships. They’d grown into something resembling a government over the last fifty years, but they still weren’t interested in doing more work than they had to.
“I bet a Bastion would, though,” I pointed out. The Bastions had come out of the Clone Jihads with quite a reputation for military efficiency, and they had a low tolerance for criminals.
“Which is why you won’t find a Rom colony within twenty light years of a Mormon outpost,” Mina said. “They’ve gotten very good at avoiding interstellar powers that would actually be a threat to them. But the Bastions are strung out along the spinward edge of the sector, so that’s not a big problem anyway. Now, enough about that. Want to watch the landing?”
“Landing? You mean the whole ship?”
Kara chuckled. “Yep. People are always surprised a ship this size can land, and it does burn a lot of fuel. But it’s a lot more convenient than staying in orbit, and for a colony that doesn’t have a station it usually works out to be cheaper than messing with shuttles.”
The bridge was off-limits to a junior probationary crewmember like me, but there was an observation post in engineering that was just as good. The walls, floor and ceiling were all one giant display screen showing the view in all directions, while a holotank in the middle of the room showed a tactical schematic of our surroundings. Kara was off duty, so she let me in and watched with me as we made our descent.
Zanfeld didn’t have much of an atmosphere, so we came in steep with the Square Deal’s armored bow facing the port. Just like a combat drop. Well, I guess if this was a combat drop the locals would be shooting at us, and we’d have a screen of escort drones out. But still, it was fun to imagine. Those dinky little system patrol boats didn’t have the firepower to stop a ship this big, and I wasn’t seeing any ground defenses. Some of the other ships in port had enough weapons to be a threat, but most of them were on the ground. Pay off the pirates in that converted frigate, drop a bombardment on the port as we descend to soften them up, and then offload troops. If the ship’s holds were full of marines instead of cargo we could take this place. Rooting out those underground habs would be a pain, but once we controlled the surface it would just be a matter of time.
A sudden jolt startled me out of my thoughts. What? We’d reconfigured the ship’s deflector shield into an air brake? But we were still at twenty thousand meters. Slowing down now would just give the defenders more time to organize before we got boots on the ground.
Oh. Right. Not an invasion.
Why did I feel a twinge of disappointment at that? I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I really didn’t. It’s just, the idea of storming a target, catching the defenders napping and making them pay for the mistake, crushing all these tough guys into the dirt and making them acknowledge my superiority…
Mom, what kind of messed up antisocial instincts did you give me?
“Exciting, isn’t it?” Kara said. “I love it when Beatrice turns down the inertial compensators, so you can really feel the maneuvers. You can tell she’s going for a bounce and drop landing, too. Traffic control would have a heart attack if we did that at a real colony, but the Rom don’t care.”
“Bounce and drop?” I asked. Come to think of it, we were still coming in kind of fast. The atmospheric braking wasn’t going to be near enough, and the Square Deal didn’t have a lot of braking rockets facing forward. I knew it was designed for combat drops, where you have to come in as fast as possible and brake at the last moment, so how was that supposed to work?
I remembered how the Speedy Exit had lifted off, and my eyes went wide. “Wait, you don’t mean…?”
“That’s right,” Kara grinned. “Beatrice is a combat ace, and she always does things the fun way when the captain lets her. So hold onto your hat, because this ride’s going to get bumpy!”
The ship’s bow abruptly rose, leaving her descending belly-first towards the spaceport a scant few kilometers below. Dozens of braking thrusters roared to life, sending long lances of superheated plasma spearing out ahead of us. Forty gravities of deceleration, enough to dump half of our velocity in a few seconds. But that was, what, four or five kilotons per second of energy output? If the jets touched the ground they’d wreck the landing field, and the backblast would probably damage the ship.
Instead the jets throttled down as we descended, and cut out entirely while we were still nearly a kilometer up. The ship’s momentum exchange system went to full power as we plummeted towards our assigned landing pad, forming a huge lift field beneath the ship.
We fell for a second. Two. Then the lift field made solid contact with the ground, and our descent slowed abruptly. The field generators strained under the load, channeling the enormous momentum of the ship’s descent into the planet beneath us. For a few milliseconds I wasn’t sure there was enough field strength to handle the impact. But the Square Deal’s descent reversed itself a good hundred meters from the landing field, leaving her bouncing gently in midair.
The landing gear deployed, and the ship settled gently to the ground.
“That was awesome! I’ve got to learn how to do that,” I said.
“It is, isn’t it? Beatrice is kind of grumpy, but I’m sure we’ve got piloting classes in the library.”