As if on cue, our trajectory shifted. I lifted out of my seat. The web caught me, and I was glad Grisham had made me strap in.
I slammed into the chair when the ship slowed. Earth appeared right where Grisham had said it would.
We were directly above the North Pole. As the planet loomed swiftly larger and grew to dominate the field of view, a flowing, multicolored sea of light danced in the upper atmosphere. In places, the light curled out into space as if beckoning us.
I caught in an enchanted breath and leaned as far as my restraints allowed so I could watch the play of light and color. Sure, I knew the display was the result of photons emitted by ionized nitrogen, or by nitrogen and oxygen atoms in an excited state returning to ground. It didn’t change my sense of awe and wonder in the slightest.
Some native people called the aurora the “Dance of the Spirits”. I thought I understood why. The light moved like a living, breathing thing. The ship would drop down through the seething sea of color and the aurora would protect us. Watching the light show from space, I could almost believe in magic.
The thought made me smile.
As we plummeted nearer, the ship shuddered. First contact with the exosphere. Or was it entry into the thermosphere?
I glanced at Carrollus to find him watching me. Rippling green, white, blue and red light illuminated the faint smile on his face. My cheeks flushed.
“We haven’t seen a show this intense and vivid in a very long time.”
“If ever,” Grisham agreed with his commander.
The ship bucked.
I glanced back at Trygg, wanting to ask whether or not I’d been set up.
His feet left the floor. Or maybe the floor left his feet. I couldn’t be sure which. My stomach turned over. Fear spread a bitter chill through me.
He caught hold of a rail. It saved him from being thrown over the tier one stations.
“Commander!” Grisham thundered. “Station and secure!”
Carrollus, hand going from one rail to the next up the tiers, climbed to our position and took the chair on the other side of me.
Once he’d activated his restraints, his thigh rested against my leg. Little curls of heat reached from his body to mine as if our individual electromagnetic fields exchanged secrets while we sat strapped to our chairs.
Electricity jolted me. My awareness narrowed to Trygg Carrollus, despite the turbulence rattling the ship.
I forced myself to wonder how the ship would handle the heat of re-entry. As far as I knew, spacecraft didn’t enter atmosphere at anything approaching the speed of meteors. On purpose.
In the blink of an eye, we were in the midst of the aurora, and even though I knew the supercharged particles couldn’t penetrate the hull of the ship, pressure built inside my sternum. Was the red glow cresting in front of us the Northern Lights or the atmosphere heating the hull?
Voices rose as crew members called out information in their own language over the creaking and groaning of the craft. Anxiety and tension edged high in the clipped phrases.
It surprised me to find how much I could deduce of message content from the tone of the speaker’s voice. While I didn’t actually know what was going on, I had to give Grisham points for affording me a front-row seat for the Northern Lights and the subsequent landing.
Our descent slowed and the pile-up of red in front of us dissipated even as the jolts rocking the ship intensified. What layer was this? Mesosphere? Stratosphere? I clutched the arms of my chair tighter, as if my grip alone could hold the ship together as we hurtled through the sky of my home world.
We’d hit weather in the troposphere, the final, thickest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Did they know?
Surely Carrollus did. Could their instruments tell them when wind would present an additional challenge to navigation?
“Entering stratosphere. Eight miles above the Arctic Ocean!” Vran shouted above the clatter of the ship.
“Watch for commercial aircraft!” I hollered.
“Negative contact on sensors, ma’am!” a young woman replied.
“Leveling off,” another young officer yelled, “for glide to designated landing zone!”
“Ground station communications outages confirmed,” someone else called. “Comm silence on all channels used by native technology.”
My interest piqued. They had communications tech that would cut through the geomagnetic storm?
Good. It might be the only way to know what the Orseggans were doing.
“Tropopause and the North Slope!”
“Engines to minimum. Stand by braking thrusters,” Carrollus called.
I didn’t know how he did that, speaking so that everyone heard him, yet without sounding as if he’d bothered to raise his voice.
“Engines at minimum. Braking thrusters, standing by.”
To my surprise, the ride smoothed out as we descended. I shot a glance at Carrollus, who concentrated on a holographic panel readout projected in front of his seat.
“Fire braking thrusters,” he ordered.
“Firing braking thrusters.”
I fell forward into the webbing holding me.
The ship slid sideways in the sky, leaving my stomach far behind. Wind shear. Looked like my twenty-
five-mile-an-hour winds had increased over the mountains.
“Get us on the ground!” Grisham bellowed.
“Yes, sir!” several voices answered in unison.
We slowed. Vran counted down the distance to touchdown. At zero, we hit with a jarring crunch. The nose of the ship tipped down and we slid and spun ninety degrees.
Heart in my throat, I gasped. A few people screamed. The ship slid to a halt.
I think we’d all stopped breathing, as if afraid the slightest twitch on our part would send the ship plunging into a crevasse.
“Hull temperature?” Lieutenant Vran said.
Even though the answer was ostensibly in English, the number and temperature measurement were meaningless to me, and I had no idea whether or not we’d cool fast enough to hide.
“Permission to power down?” Carrollus requested.
“Granted, save for planet-side monitoring,” Grisham said. “Get me a feed from the ISS chip.”
Naturally, they had a sensor on the International Space Station.
“On your screen, sir!”
A piece at a time, with every system that powered down, the ship drifted into slumber. Stillness settled over the vessel.
For no good reason, adrenaline flooded my system. I hated waiting.
“Sir?” a young woman said into the silence. “The scouts are on approach.”
I glanced outside. The command center remained transparent in the power down. We’d set down on a slope. It appeared that we’d triggered at least a partial avalanche. In the brilliant glow of the aurora overhead, I could see where snow had cascaded past the nose of the ship. I hoped we were too big to be buried.
“The scouts are coming in fast, not masking their arrival,” Grisham said, his voice hushed. “Crossing Saturn’s orbit.”
“They’ll be seen by ground stations,” Carrollus replied. “They may afford us some distraction.”
Even the enchantment of the Northern Lights faded as I waited for the scout crafts’ arrival. If they weren’t fooled by our ruse, we were sitting ducks.
Grisham marked the scouts’ approach by each planetary orbit they passed. Jupiter. The asteroid belt.
As the Orseggans approached the orbit of Mars, my breath stumbled in my chest. The aurora had suddenly dimmed. Without the particle activity in the atmosphere, our last defense was gone. The scouts would see us.
Then it hit me. The aurora wasn’t dying out. It was the snow. The hull had cooled, and blowing snow had begun accumulating on the hull as hoped. I relaxed.