Minus Epsilon, page 2
part #1 of The Earth Saga Series
The windows on the ISS were some of the most advanced components on the station. Made from three-inch thick tempered glass, they were designed to give the astronauts crystal clear views, and at the same time, protect them from solar radiation. They were also strong enough to be able to handle the pressure discrepancies between the station and the outside vacuum and sufficiently large so that the entire five-member crew could get a decent view of the exterior.
Scott centred himself on the window, holding onto a support above his head. It didn’t take him long to take notice of what was racing towards them. “Fuck.” Was all he could manage, followed by his jaw-dropping.
“What?” Burke slid next to him, followed by Susan.
Susan couldn't believe what she was seeing. With her eyes wide open she stared out the window. 800 meters away and racing towards them was a giant ship, flames erupting from various points on the hull, lit up along the body by a series of red and blue lights, very similar to aircraft recognition lights.
Susan noticed Doctor Francis, staring, wide mouthed shaking his head. He looked down and removed his glasses, and removed a cotton cloth from his pocket and cleaned the lenses before putting them back on. With his gaze still averted, he ran his hands through his thick black hair, and then slowly brought his gaze to bear on the ship that was racing towards them. “Ladies and gentlemen.” He cracked a smile, ear to ear. “There is life out there.”
Smith was less impressed. “Congratulations, doctor. The greatest discovery since fire is about to kill us.” He put his nose to the glass and stared at the ship. “Looks damaged.” Everyone nodded in agreement. “I need a drink.”
Burke was all too happy to oblige and shoved his already opened flask into Smith’s left hand. “Way ahead of you.”
Smith looked down and noticed that the flask was specially fitted with a nozzle that required the user to suck the contents out so that in zero gravity the liquid contents would not float out.
Smith raised the sterling silver flask to his mouth and took a long swig.
Scott looked at Burke with a bit of a grin on his face, “You know that alcohol isn’t authorised onboard.” He turned his attention to Smith and yanked the flask from his hand, and immediately took a large drink. “But thank God you did.” He looked down and the flask, “What is this?”
“Old Pulteney.” Burke was still grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Best in the world.”
Susan, while not participating in the boys’ last minute male bonding session was paying attention to the object that was racing towards them. “Will you shut up!” Her nose was pinned against the window staring at the ship. “Its course is changing.”
She was right. The ship had started to rotate clockwise slowly.
At a distance of 700 meters, the ship began a barrel roll to the right, but it was still on a collision course that would, at the very minimum, clip the station.
"If they're going to miss us, they need to do something about it now." Scott, the veteran aviator, said. “But they’re not doing it fast enough.” He noted quietly.
"I always wondered about the first contact with an alien species," Burke said with a smile on his face. "I just didn’t think that the contact would be a collision at several thousand miles an hour."
“Well, that’s it then.” Susan said dryly, looking at Scott. Their eyes met just as she was starting to tear up.
3
Before Ranix could shout orders to Rais, the ships onboard computer illuminated everyone still conscious to the impending threat. “Collision in ten seconds!” A wailing alarm cut in.
Without waiting for instructions, Rais initiated a 360-degree barrel roll to the right.
Ranix’s eyes hadn’t left the view screen since the ship had finished the jump. The space station was filling up more and more of the view screen with each passing second. At their current speed and heading, an impact was just moments away.
“Fly this fucking thing!” he screamed at Rais.
Rais’s weathered hands danced across the control panel. With his many years in the service, he was more than capable of the task at hand. Shards of glass and broken metal protruded from his station, which had once been the epitome of elegance in design and function, even if it was six years old. “Sir!” there was no more time for a longer response.
Rais looked to his right. A large monitor showed him predictive telemetry, allowing him a clear projection of where the ship would end up based on its current speed and trajectory.
With his right hand wrapped firmly around the flight control stick, Rais slammed his left hand through a pane of glass to his left and onto the emergency burn lever. Without notice, the ship lurched forward at a much faster rate and cut quickly to the right. By using all available functioning thrusters to manoeuvre the ship, Rais had guided the ship past the station with just meters to spare.
With the increased speed and jostling, the ship began to rattle even more violently. Just as the ship cleared the space station, and the collision alarm ceased, another warning klaxon began to sound. “Warning! Fuel level at five percent! Fusion reactor is failing!”
As soon as the space station was no longer taking up the centre of the view screen, it was replaced by the massive planetoid that the ship was now racing towards. Ranix dropped his gaze to his side for a moment’s respite. Rais had got them out of one sticky situation, and into another. If the fusion reactor went offline, the ship would no longer be able to produce energy, and the ship’s systems would only function as long as its remaining fuel and emergency power cells lasted, and at five percent, Ranix’s had very few options.
“Yuli!” Ranix glanced over his shoulder and noticed that she had regained consciousness. Her face was covered in blood, and she wasn't looking at Ranix straight, but he had to figure out his options and fast. Another had replaced one obstacle. The looming planet in the ship’s path had already captured the Epsilon in its gravity, narrowing any options that might still exist. “With that much fuel, what are our options?”
Ranix watched as her fingers flew across the still operational keys and pads to her front. She looked up at her monitor that was supposed to show the ships current galactic position, Star Plot and operational ranges, but the screen was blank. “Sir,” she didn’t have time to give a first response that was wrong. She only had one shot. She had to be right, now. Looking back down at her panel, she made the best guess possible, just as her top monitor flickered to life. “Based on fuel loss and hull integrity.” She looked at a digital read out of the system they were in, then double checked her monitor. Eight planets, dozens of moons. The only planet that could sustain life was directly in front of them. “And available options. I recommend landing at once on the celestial body to our front.”
Since the ship was already caught in the planet’s gravity field, Ranix knew they didn’t even have enough fuel to try to break orbit; they had no option but to go in.
“Right,” Ranix had been dealt a lousy hand. “I need a Star Plot as soon as possible. I want to know where we are in relation to both Alliance and Coalition space.” It was evident to Ranix that they were not in a mapped system. There were several benefits to that, the most obvious being that there was little chance of encountering the Coalition, but the downside was that they were about to land on a populated world, and had no means to contact Alliance Fleet. "Start a track for any ships within scanning range, friendly or otherwise."
By the time the ship hit the planets Karman line, the ship was shaking violently, and now only 100 kilometres from the globe’s surface, options were becoming more limited exponentially.
Ranix scanned the bridge, checking to see who was still at their stations, and who was out of the mix. The station at the front of the bridge was occupied by the ship's pilot, who was still in the fight. The rest of the bridge crew sat at stations two-by-two, and four deep, running along a single walkway towards the rear of the deck. Looking behind him, he knew that Demu was dead. His old station, which was opposite Demu's, was vacant. Behind his Comms position was the Detection station, where Dec Tec Jonas was situated. Next to him sat a dead crew member at one of the science stations. And on the last row were two science stations. The seats were empty, with one team member giving medical aid to another, but Ranix couldn’t tell who the injured party was. The bridges main lights were out of operation, and the smoke-filled compartment made it difficult to see clearly. Light flickered from the consuls at each station. A flurry of different lights, images and the occasional sound emanating from each one.
A violent jolt hit the ship as it started to enter the planet's upper atmosphere, forcing Ranix’s attention back to the viewscreen. The impact was followed quickly by a screech over the ship’s intercom system.
“Ship Master!” it was the ship’s chief engineer. One deck below and to the rear of the bridge, in the heart of the ship, lay the main engineering command. “We need to land immediately. We’re losing hull integrity. We need to set down at once.”
Ranix quickly thumbed the communications switch on the Ship Masters’ chair. “This is Communications Officer Ranix. Ship Master’s dead.” As the ship punched through the upper atmosphere, the screen became filled with a giant land mass, 90 kilometres away and closing rapidly. “How much power and fuel do we have left?”
The engineer responded immediately. He had apparently run the calculations after the hyperspace jump. “After that last manoeuvre," There was a short pause before the intercom chirped again. "We’re at ten percent on the power cells, and almost entirely out of fuel.” His eyes scanned the instruments in from of him. “There is enough in the tanks for one thirty-second full burn from the thrusters.”
Ranix was a bridge officer, not an engineer, nor a math expert, he had to trust the engineer’s calculations were accurate. “Rais! Did you hear that last transmission?”Ranix was at the edge of his seat. Hands gripping the sides of the chair as the ship bounced wildly as it continued to fall, staring past Rais, eyes locked on the approaching surface of the planet, grimacing in pain.
Rais was obviously in his element. One hand never left the flight stick, while the other danced along the control panel, flicking switch after switch, knob after knob, trying in vain to optimise the ship’s descent. “With that much burn time, even using manoeuvring thrusts, we’re going to crash. The only question is how hard and, maybe, where.”
“What do you mean where?” Ranix locked his eyes on the back of his pilot’s head.
“Based on this planet's gravity levels, we’ve already reached terminal velocity. At our rate of descent, I need twenty seconds full burn from the underbody thrusters to do a hard landing. With the remaining ten, depending on when we use them, we can increase our options for a landing zone.”
Ranix looked back at Yuli. "Options?"
“Sir, we are approaching a large land mass on the lower half of the planet. Directly below our position is a coastal region with significant developments. The most desolate area is west of our current projected impact zone.”
A voice shouted out from the rear of the bridge “Sir, I have a target grid for a landing site!”
Ranix lowered his head to the left and angled his head so he could hear better. “Where?”
“Seventeen hundred kilometres to the west of the large city below our position. There appears to be an area that is unpopulated, very isolated.” The tech responded.
Rais was scanning a large display screen on the bulkhead just to his left. “I can make that.” His attention snapped back to his control panel. Elevation, speed, the rate of descent, fuel levels, every piece of data that was available to him would help in his calculations. All the information that he would need to manoeuvre the ship were on a variety of colourful dials and readouts. “At ten thousand meters, I’ll need to run a five-second burn with manoeuvring thrusters to orient the nose of the ship to the target area; then fifteen-second main thrusters burn to get us there.”
The ship was passing through 50,000 meters and dropping fast.
With her eyes transfixed on her panel and display screens, Yuli realised that the ship was falling into a busy airspace. “Sir, we have a significant amount of air-traffic under us. And Sir, we must be on their scanning devices by now.”
Rais looked down to his right to a small display screen that showed a little dot that was below the ship getting closer by the second. It must be some form of flying vehicle he thought to himself. Looking at the altimeter, he knew that if he acted to turn the nose of the ship too early or late, then their final destination could be somewhere they didn't want to land, and if he initiated the burn at too high an altitude, then the ship would fall short of its target.
Rechecking his instruments, he knew it was going to be close. Luckily the ship was falling level, and with a gentle flick of his wrist, he snapped the nose of the ship hard left with just the slightest burn of fuel from the side mounted thrusters and readied to fire the main engines.
“Final burn initiated!” shouted Rais. His eyes fixed on the data being fed to him from the console to his front. His hand steady on the control stick, fighting against the ships desire to fall out of the sky in a ball of flames.
The warship was cutting through the air like a rusty blade. The ship jolted up, down, left, right every time a damaged panel on the exterior of the ship was ripped off by the force of the wind.
Ranix was sitting in the Ship Master's chair, hunched over slightly, propping himself up with his left arm. The shaking and vibrations were causing him to feel nauseous, or maybe it was the internal bleeding, he wasn't sure.
“We’ll be reaching the landing zone in five minutes!” Rais was checking and re-checking the screens in front of him. “We have just enough fuel in reserve to slow the ship to within acceptable limits for an emergency landing.”
Yuli was checking her panels. Based off damage sustained in the initial attack, and breaching the planet’s atmosphere, hull integrity was thoroughly compromised. “Sir, we have fractures all along the hull, we are venting air. We need to be ready to go to individual emergency life support systems at a moment’s notice.”
Ranix nodded in agreement. He quickly toggled the ship’s communications broadcast system. “This is Ranix. Ready for the use of emergency life support, and brace for a hard landing!”
Ranix turned his head and yelled from his chair to the engineer station at the rear of the compartment. “How long will our systems run after we land?”
The engineer sitting to the rear of the compartment responded. “Based on the ships regular energy consumption while grounded, one rotation of this planet is all we’ll have power for. Our power cells are heavily damaged. We will have to cut all but the minimal systems to last any longer, Sir!”
Ranix knew they were in trouble. No fuel, minimal power, and on a populated, unknown planet. Not the best situation to be in. “When we land, shut down all but the minimal systems.” The engineer nodded in silent acknowledgement and quickly typed a message to the engineering department at the rear of the ship.
Ranix looked down at the command chair, scanning for a very obvious key. Just where the Ship Master’s right elbow would rest was a small black button covered by a safety lid. Ranix flipped the lid and pushed the button. The ship’s claxon gave off a sharp wail, followed by a notice.
“Attention, attention! The Sentinel Commander has been activated! Attention!”
Ranix fixed his attention back on the main view screen. He could tell that the ship was slowing and losing altitude gradually as it raced towards its landing zone.
“Time until impact!” He shouted towards Rais.
“Ninety seconds, sir!”
Rais was cut off from any further communications when a dry, metallic voice came over the intercom. “Ship Master Vankens.” It was the Sentinel Commander. “SC online. Orders?”
“The Ship Master is dead. This is Communications Officer Ranix. I have taken command.” Ranix paused to consider his plan. “Download mission logs and prepare to secure ship upon landing!”
The Sentinel Commander was a hulking ten-foot-tall robot that was responsible for external ship security - an entirely autonomous robot which carried the Advanced Sinus Six Tactical Command Computer and could make its decisions when necessary. The mere thought of the machines made Ranix's blood run cold because once activated the Sentinel's did not require command guidance from the crew. The Sentinels were built to make life easier for the organic crew members and to protect them when needed, or guard a destroyed ship until the ship was either recovered by friendly forces or until all the Sentinels defending it were destroyed. Epsilon carried a total of four Sentinels plus two Heavy Crawler combat platforms.
It didn’t take long for the SC to respond with its acknowledgement. “Understood. SC out!”
The quick sprint away from the coastline sent the ship flying into the heart of the continent, and with Epsilon running out of momentum, it was about to reach its landing zone.
Communications Officer Ranix’s level of anxiety was increasing quickly. He had just jumped the ship into an unmapped system and was about to crash on a planet populated by an alien species. Shaking his head twice to regain his focus he turned in the command chair and yelled towards the rear of the bridge. “Where are we?” he demanded.
In addition to an engineer specialist, one of the science stations could interface with and translate, any communications systems that were unsecured. On Earth, the Internet was one such resource, and the officer at the station had been accessing information from it since the ship had jumped into orbit.
“Sir, this planet is called Terra, or Earth. We are in the southern hemisphere. Most likely going to set down in a land called Paraguay. Our destination is a large wilderness reserve called the Defensores del Chaco.” he reported.
“Good. I need detailed information about the level of technology and weapons that exist on this planet. I need to know what threats we could face. Search their database for any information about the region we are in and their military capabilities, and what possible resources might be at our disposal.” Ranix knew that the first contact with an alien species could go two very dramatic ways. The last time an Imperial ship had made contact with a newly discovered intelligence, a firefight broke out resulting in the death of many on both sides.
