“It’s okay. You’re right. She would have been freaking out right now. It’s just a shame she isn’t here to see this.”
“In a way, she is,” Bayorn said. “As long as you carry her with you, she will see what you see, Letho.”
“Thanks, Bayorn,” Letho said.
Though he tried to lie to himself, he resented Bayorn’s platitude. How could Bayorn say such a thing? He had been there when Letho had decapitated the first woman he had ever truly cared for. Hell, she was the first being of any gender or species with whom he had ever felt such a strong connection—with Deacon a close second, of course. If Letho was going to carry anything with him, it would be the image of her head rolling across the floor, eyes staring at nothing, her body slumping and falling with a sickening thud like a sack of ground meat hitting the floor.
Letho shuddered, and he noticed that Bayorn was watching him with concerned eyes. He offered Bayorn a false smile.
The ship continued on its computer-controlled trajectory. It reversed itself to reduce its velocity, and orbital maneuvering engines pushed the the ship out of orbit, toward the planet. It turned so as to point its blunt bottom downward, then began the plummet into the upper reaches of Eursus’s atmosphere. As Letho looked out the window, the black was replaced, first by a warm pink, and then by fireball-red and orange. Heat began to sear the interior of the ship, and Letho began to panic as he realized he was looking from the inside of a fireball outward. The friction of Eursus’s atmosphere against the hull of the ship was setting fire to the air all around them.
Other than this horrifying turn of events, the ship was relatively calm and free of jostling or buffets. Some of the Tarsi were praying in their musical language, and the sweet sound of it brought some peace to Letho. He had no deity to pray to, so he chose to clench his teeth to the point of shattering and grip the straps of his safety harness until his knuckles turned bone-white.
“We are all sure to die!” Maka sang in unapologetic Tarsi-speak. Letho would have placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he was two paces away from Maka, strapped into a harness. The Tarsi were much too large to fit in the Eursan harnesses and were merely holding on for purchase. He felt ashamed of his security under the thick straps that held him in place.
“Have no fear, Maka. These ships are designed to withstand such forces!” Bayorn said.
“Re-entry sequence completed. Manual control initiated,” the ship said.
“This is incredible! I never thought I’d get to do this in one of these things!” Deacon shouted, a madman’s leer on his face. He ran his hands over the nav-orbs like a prodigy at a musitron keyboard.
At last the skies transformed from the flames of Infernus itself to the muted blue-white of Eursus’s upper atmosphere. A collective gasp rose as the craggy brown skin of Eursus appeared beneath them. Great landmasses swam in dark seas, monolithic shapes that Letho had only glimpsed in vids. He was simultaneously horrified and transfigured with joy as he saw his home for the first time with his own eyes, his brain attempting to manage opposing images.
The vids had shown a verdant planet with sapphire seas; the truth was much drier, covered in a shroud of apparent death and waste. Letho knew the planet had been ravaged, mined for every last drop of fuel, every last resource consumed past the tipping point. Still, it was his home, and what he saw below resonated in his gut, a kind of recognition that went down to the cellular level. He tried to speak, but he knew the words would come out in an exhilarated gush, overpowered by emotion. He was fighting the urge to cry at the tragic beauty of his ruined planet, though he did not know why.
He was saved from the embarrassment of weeping from an event that could only be described as the worst thing that could possibly happen at that given moment. Deacon, bursting with pride at his perfect execution of a re-entry that he had only completed on simulators, suddenly lolled back in his chair, his hands falling from the nav-orbs, and his face sagged as if all the muscles beneath the skin had been robbed of their tensility. He looked like a man who had recalled a grave memory from the subterranean place where such memories dwell.
He then began to buck with seizures.
“Deacon!” Letho shouted, but the body at the controls was unresponsive, continuing to shake and palsy like a mad dancer. Letho detached himself from his harness and was at Deacon’s side in a blink.
Deacon groaned, clutching his stomach. Letho grimaced as fear began to well up, rising up through his body as though the ship had plunged into the ocean and was now filling with frigid water.
Deacon’s posture set off a chain reaction of remembrance in Letho. He saw himself falling, tearing his leg open on a jutting pipe as he tumbled. He could practically smell the sour sweat, could see the stained gray mattress that smelled of dirty hair and body stink. Bayorn looked at Letho, and they exchanged a knowing glance. Deacon fought against the shakes, trying to return his hands to the nav-orbs, but the ship rocked from the instability of his fingertips.
“He has the drug sickness,” Bayorn said. Letho muttered a few choice Tarsi expletives, to which Maka raised an eyebrow and chuckled. The laughter died quickly, however, stifled by Deacon’s screams.
Letho kneeled by Deacon and placed a hand on his forehead. It was soaked with clammy sweat.
“Letho,” Deacon said through clenched teeth. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Warning: please adjust trajectory,” the computer said.
The ship rolled, slamming the unstrapped Tarsi into the walls, splitting lips and opening red seams on foreheads. The ship was buffeted by an unfeeling wall of turbulence, and the sound of metal tearing and the smell of circuits sizzling filled the confined space. The ship continued to tumble.
“The ship is tearing itself apart! Do something!” Thresha shouted. She was speaking directly to Letho.
“What am I supposed to do?” he shouted back.
The view through the portholes rolled from clear sky to dark earth. The ground was getting closer. The ship’s computer listed a running tally of system failures in a detached voice. One of the Tarsi vomited a column of grey paste into the air, and it promptly splattered back onto his terrified face.
“Sir, my calculations indicate that prolonged inaction is dramatically reducing your chance of survival,” Saladin said.
“That’s great, Saladin. Thanks for the update!” Letho shouted. Deacon continued to do the detox shuffle, trying to regain control but unable to keep his hands on the nav-orbs.
“I am patching in to the system, engaging auto-pilot,” Saladin said, in the matter-of-fact nature of one reciting a grocery list.
“Why the hell didn’t you do that before?” Thresha shouted.
“I did not wish to impugn the honor of my master, Letho Ferron. In your parlance, I believe one would say: ‘All he had to do was ask.’”
Letho had a momentary vision of breaking Saladin over his knee.
“The autopilot service is currently functioning at forty percent. I am attempting to re-route controls to my computing systems. One moment…” Saladin said.
“That’s one hell of a sword!” Deacon said between bouts of seizures.
The ship at last began to right itself, but through the portholes, they could all see the smoke pouring from the re-entry boosters. The air around them roared and bellowed as the ship continued its fall from the sky, occasionally buffeted by the wind, showing no indication of slowing.
Letho closed his eyes. He knew what was coming, but somehow not looking at it, not seeing his friends as they attempted to show bravery in the moment of their deaths, made it not real, somehow more manageable. Still, he couldn’t keep his eyes shut. He had to know, had to see it unfold. He opened his eyes again and looked at Bayorn, and they nodded at one another. Bayorn’s eyes were, against all odds, completely free of fear, filled with a tranquility that soothed Letho’s restless soul.