Outside the forward porthole, there is nothing but Varna: individual trees beneath a swirl of cloud, growing visibly. There is, to put it mildly, little time to waste.
Attitude control is strictly manual; Radmer throws off his safety harness and hurls himself at a set of handles mounted on the hull’s interior. They’re cold, barely above freezing, and damp enough that his fingers will slip if he doesn’t grip with all his might, which, fortunately, he does.
There’s a metallic screech and groan, brass against brass, as the outer hull begins to roll against the bearings connecting it to the inner cage, where his feet are braced. The potter’s wheel and gyros hold a fixed orientation in space while the three-meter sphere, complete with chair and storage racks, is rotated around them. Sunlight flashes briefly through one porthole; through the other, the green-white face of Lune, from whence he came.
Like most men his age, Radmer is a good deal stronger than he looks. Still, the hull’s rotation is as difficult to stop as it is to start. It’s his own strength he’s fighting, the momentum he himself has imparted. Despite the cold, the effort makes him sweat inside his coat and leathers.
He’d like to move the hull so his chair is facing backward, to serve as a crash couch. Because yes, even the best landing is going to be rough. But with the starboard charges expended, that would still leave him with one uncorrectable axis. Instead, he points the chair in the “caps” direction, ninety degrees from where he wants it, fires two charges in perpendicular directions, then points the chair forward again and quickly straps in, so he can take another sextant reading on the planette.
Perfect? Close enough? No, he’s off again, drifting somehow from an ideal ballistic trajectory. He starts dialing for another correction, realizes he’s out of time, and hurriedly stows the sextant instead, to keep it from becoming a projectile in its own right.
He’s about to unstrap again, to face the chair aft for impact, but he’s really out of time, the hull already singing with atmospheric contact. So he grabs an armrest with one hand and the parachute’s ripcord with the other, and prepares to be thrown hard against the straps.
There are prayers he could utter right now, battle hymns he could sing, but perhaps thinking of them is enough. Quicker, anyway; he runs through several in the blink of an eye. And then the sphere slaps into denser air—more gently than he’s expecting. Which could be bad, which could mean he’s cut too high, his angle too shallow. Will he skip off the planette’s atmosphere to tumble back Luneward in disgrace?
Air is squealing all around him, and for a moment, he sees Varna through three separate portholes, and hazy blue-black sky through a fourth. He sees individual blades of grass, no fooling, and then the ground is retreating again and it’s time, slightly past time, to pop the chute. The sudden weight of his arm seems to help as he yanks the lanyard; he’s looking “down” across the sphere, decelerating hard. He hears the chute deploy with a clanging of brass doors, and suddenly he is facing the right way as air drag pulls it around behind the vehicle and jerks its lines taut.
And then disaster strikes, in the form of a treetop’s spreading arms. He doesn’t hit them hard, but for an instant there are actual acacia leaves snapping across the porthole glass, and the contact is enough to set the sphere rolling around its inner cage. Which is bad, because the chute, which hasn’t fully opened, is fouling— he can see it behind him, an orange-and-white streamer, its hemp lines twirling together in an inextricable mess.
And then the blue of atmosphere is fading to black again, and after three long seconds of deceleration he’s back, suddenly, in zero gee. Having missed the planette. Having actually missed the damn planette. Through the portholes, the slowly tumbling view is clear enough: Varna shrinking away behind him.
Varna moving laterally?
Varna approaching again? More slowly, yes, but definitely approaching. Because he’s cut through a swath of thick atmosphere, because he’s hit a tree, because he’s deployed a streamer chute that, while it couldn’t quite stop him, could at least slow him down below the planette’s escape velocity.
The air doesn’t whistle this time, barely puffs, barely makes a sound at all as he falls back through it. What does create sound and sensation is the water beneath the air, which he slaps into hard, and the solid surface a couple of meters beneath that. He crashes against it and rolls; through the portholes he sees foam, blue water, blue sky, brown sand or silt kicking off the bottom in his wake.
The sphere tumbles around the screeching gyro platform for a few moments, but the platform is overwhelmed and starts to tumble along as well, its bearings frozen against the spinning hull. His chair goes with it, tumbling, and he loses his sense of direction almost immediately. Then, with a jerk, all movement stops. He’s looking upward: sky only.
He has landed on the planette. His mad scheme has become, retroactively, a perfectly reasonable idea.
To his sides he sees fish and waving grasses, sunlight filtering down in rays through the shallow water. One side of the sphere is higher, its porthole only half-submerged. The shores are hidden behind the knife-edge of water against the glass, but he does see treetops in the distance, perhaps the very ones he struck. The porthole between his legs shows a sandy bottom, a few crushed reeds.
He takes a few moments to gather himself—it was a rough landing, and he remains quite reasonably terrified—but time is short, and his business urgent. He finds the buckles of his seat harness: damp brass, warmed by his body. He’s unbuckled it a hundred times today; the action is as automatic as coughing.
Being a sphere, his carriage-sized spaceship was expected to roll a bit on landing, coming to rest in an unknown orientation. For this reason, the sphere has two exit hatches, one presently underwater, the other above it, pointing skyward at a cockeyed angle. He climbs to this one, using the potter’s wheel and gyro assembly for a staircase.
He moves carefully; it’s a small world, yes, but thanks to the planette’s superdense neutronium core, gravity here is “gee,” or about the same as at the surface of Lune. Or, reaching back a ways into the mists of time, Earth. With one hand he grasps a slick handle on the hull; with the other, the locking wheel on the hatch itself. It spins easily—no screeching or sticking—and he’s abstractly relieved by this.
Like many wise men, Radmer worries a lot, and this errand has given his imagination more than the usual to work with. But while the sphere was built in a hurry, he has to give a nod to the smiths and armorers and watchmakers of Highrock, who clearly knew their business well enough.
Having landed in one piece, this craft has every chance of taking him home again. Compared to this planette, Lune is a huge target, virtually impossible to miss; so as long as the motors ignite and the parachute opens cleanly, he should be back in the war by next Friday at the latest.
Back in the death, the misery, the collapse of nations. The people of Lune are not Radmer’s children per se, although a great many of them are, in one way or another, his descendants. And the world itself is his, or was long ago. How gladly he would die to protect it!
His hatch flips inward, clanks against the hull, then hangs down, swinging back and forth, while Radmer works out his handholds on the outer hull and, finally, lifts himself through.