“Do you have any features around our deep return?” Cuiller asked.
“Captain, you’re looking at a billiard ball,” Jook announced. “I’m doing a navigational scan in the point one-meter range, and the spherical deviation is nil. A trifling amount of oblateness. Otherwise smooth. I mean, a rise of fifty meters would be a mountain range down there.”
“Then we can set down anywhere,” Cuiller summarized.
“Well…“Jook hesitated.
“Give me a fix on that deep radar pattern, Hugh,” Cuiller told him, “and I’ll kill the orbit.”
“You’ve got it, Cap’n. Deceleration point coming up in two minutes.”
“Sally, do you see any change in that pattern?”
“No, what you’re looking at is just what we’ve had from the first, allowing for scale change. I read the return image as just about a meter in any dimension.”
“Better all the time… You’ll have to reel in the whip now,” he told her.
Because a General Products hull blocked all radiation outside the visible spectrum, Callisto communed with her environment through a trailing string of antennas and sensors that wound on a reel in her tail section. The sensor string would not survive the buffeting of an atmospheric entry. “Aye, Captain.” Krater keyed the proper contacts.
“All right, people,” Cuiller called out, “strap in.”
He counted the whirs and clicks as the crew pulled out the gravity webbing and made themselves fast at station. Cuiller fastened himself down last.
“One minute to mark,” from Jook. “You going to take this one in manually?”
“I need the practice,” Cuiller said.
“Easier to let the computers do it…
Cuiller thought about that, looking down at the nearly white curve of the horizon. “We’ve got room to play around, surely.”
“All right… Mark!”
The commander closed a series of switches, engaging the external ion engine. The ship vibrated, and Cuiller felt his body sway forward against the retaining strands.
Callisto glided down in a long curve. Her forward quadrant glowed where the external ceramic coating- which deflected laser attacks tuned in visible light-covered the impervious General Products surface. The hull itself remained serenely clear, except for a buffeting layer of ionized air.
At 2,000 meters above the surface, Cuiller terminated the ion drive and brought her gliding around on inertial thrusters, maneuvering under his own eye-hand coordination. He glanced at the repeater from Krater’s station.
“I’m going to set down about two kilometers from that reflection,” he announced. “Not too far to walk, but not close enough to disturb it.”
No comment from the crew, which he took for agreement. As Callisto cut through the mist, the planet’s surface was revealed as a deep and startling green. Cuiller was reminded of pictures he’d seen of Ireland but then amended that. This was bright enough to be an enhanced color graphic of Ireland, with overdrive on the yellow and cyan pigments. Jook had not overstated the flatness. Even from a hundred meters up, Cuiller could not see any hill or wrinkle higher than two or three meters. No valleys either. And no boulders, trees, rivers, lakes, nor any other feature. Just a deep and rustling green vegetation.
“Settling in,” he said, killing forward motion and dropping the lift smoothly toward a steady seven-point-seven-three meters per second, just enough to counter local gravity. When the greenery-it looked like large and feathery leaves-reached up to touch the clear window in the hull’s underside, he backed the thrusters down to zero and switched them off.
“Captain!” Jook called out. “Check your navigational radar!”
“What? Oh shit!” He saw the 120-meter discrepancy immediately.
The leaves flared back around the window below and revealed lighter green strings of moss and the wet black bark of tree branches. Between them, Cuiller could see more layers of green and black strands, receding indefinitely, with nothing solid under them.
He got his hands back on the switches for the inertial thrusters and initiated a restart. But before he could key in the full sequence, Callisto’s tail, weighted down with the unbalanced mass of the hyperdrive engine, broke through the surface.
It happened too fast. Cuiller was still thrusting on the ship’s long axis, but Callisto was now falling nearly vertically. He tried to correct-and only pushed her backward into a tangle of branches and vines. Their springiness absorbed the horizontally vectored thrust for ten meters of travel, then rebounded, shoving Callisto down her own hole.
They all felt the shock when the stem contacted firm ground at last. No one cried out, but someone among the crew gave an involuntary gasp. Cuiller, glancing down the spindle into the maze of machinery, could see a subtle misalignment. Internal structures had shifted. He could also hear things falling, plink and clunk, along the hull. Not all of them were personal effects shaken out of the sleeping cocoons.
The bow and the forward band of windows, around the control yoke, were still angled above the leaflayer, exposed in misty sunlight. Cuiller’s fingers were dancing over the switches, trying to get thrust under them and lift clear. But the ship was sliding, changing orientation too fast He and Gambiel watched the world rotate and sag as the hull’s weight found paths of least resistance among the branches and vines. Callisto swung and turned, walked and slid. A green gloom rose up around their window. Cuiller quit trying with the controls and lifted his hands clear.
“Hang on, people!”
Finally, only the forward tip of the spindle was caught in the branches, and they were slipping away to the left and right, passing Callisto side to side, as they got out of the way of her mass. In two more seconds, the ship was free and fell a hundred meters at the bow along her own length.
Wham!
More clatter came up from the hull behind Cuiller, but then his ear caught a louder groan. At first he thought it came from one of his crew, until Cuiller realized that one of the weapons pods, located forward of the control yoke, was moving. Right before the commander’s and tactical officer’s widening eyes, it turned on its own axis and fell through the open space ten centimeters in front of their toes. Severed conductors in a cable tray snapped and fizzled before the automatic extinguishers kicked in with a chill cloud of carbon dioxide.
The ship rolled almost 180 degrees in settling, and the weapons pod swung back, now poised above them. It caught up on the lateral strut that braced Cuiller’s and Gambiel’s watch-keeping station, and it stopped moving.
“Everybody Sit tight till the ship quiets down,” the commander ordered. They were all hanging by their ears now.
“I got nowhere to go,” Gambiel breathed beside him. The infrastructure creaked and groaned, but nothing more came loose.
“Let’s try to get damage reports before we shut down.”
“Aye, Captain,” the crew called back raggedly.
In the space of two minutes, they had logged the ship’s status-weapons, propulsion, sensors, life support-at their various duty stations. Callisto had lost that forward weapons pod for certain, and the sensor whip was not reporting, even from its reeled-in position. Two portside thrusters were impaired, if not inoperable. The recycling system had lost function.
Auxiliary power was down by three charge cells. And the ship was oriented horizontally in a 170-degree roll- standing on their heads, as it were.
“I should try to get off a position report,” Krater said. “If that’s possible, with the antenna cable damaged-”
“Do what you can,” Cuiller told her. He swiveled around in the stirrups, hanging head down in the webbing, to observe the crew at their stations. ‘Anybody take injuries in that last fall?”
“Well… it’s my knee, you see,” Jook said. His webbing was loose enough that he had bashed his leg against the mass pointer. No damage to that piece of equipment, of course, but Jook’s knee was swelling rapidly. Otherwise the crew was shaken but unhurt. Cuiller directed Krater, who doubled as medical assistant, to help the navigator into the autodoc.
“Daff, take air samples,” he ordered. “And if it’s dean, pop the hatches. Let’s get outside and see where we are.”