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  “Yeah, Cap?”

  “Window’s opening now. Time to go, double-time.”

  “I’m on the way,” Anise replied. “Fifteen.”

  “Fifteen minutes it is,” Toliver responded. Then he switched off his com, headed for a dorsal port, and climbed down into his ship.

  ~

  By the time Hunter and Goldie reached their Wasps, a technician was already directing the detachment of the power lines and umbilicals. Goldie called out when they were in earshot, “What’s up?”

  The technician looked up. “Orders to get you on post. An opening in the ash cloud has appeared, and we’re gonna get some traffic.”

  “All right!” Hunter clapped his hands together, and jogged around Goldie’s Wasp to get to his own. Goldie just nodded, took the duty pad the technician offered, and reached for the ladder to her own cockpit.

  ~

  “Yeah, I heard the window had opened up,” Julian was saying to his daughter’s face on his workstation screen. “You’re heading out now?”

  “As soon as I get to the bay,” Anise replied. “Say ‘bye to Reya for me. Love you, Daddy!”

  “I love you too, Ani,” Julian smiled. “Have a safe trip. Remember, in case that window closes, keep enough reserve to re-orbit yourself—”

  “We will, gotta go!” Anise cut him off. She was already moving away from the camera, before the image cut off as well.

  Julian’s smile remained a moment longer, as he reflected with pride on the dedication of his daughter to her job. Then he tapped the com for the weather station in CnC. “Parker, keep an eye on Central America weather conditions. Let me know if that opening does anything it shouldn’t.”

  ~

  The bay opened underneath the El Capitan twenty-five minutes later, suspending the freighter during the last few seconds of its warm-up.

  Toliver assisted Anise in going through the final checks, though it was just to speed things up and make it easier on her. “Weather’s still holding out, right?”

  “Seems to be,” Anise replied. “The opening has closed up a tad from this morning, but not that much.”

  “Good,” Toliver nodded. “With a little luck, I’ll be home with Kenna by lunch.”

  “Have you called her? Does she know we’re—”

  “I haven’t called,” Toliver replied. “I’d rather she didn’t worry. And you know Kenna… she’ll worry.” After a pause, he asked, “Did you call Sergei?”

  Anise shook her head. “But Sergei’s not my husband.”

  Toliver gave her a wry look. “Wouldn’t stop him from worrying.” Once they were done with the systems checks, Toliver took his seat and tapped the shipwide com. “Okay, guys, it’s time to go. We’re weightless in ten.”

  Anise confirmed that the engines were ready, and set them for their drop, while Toliver listened for last-minute calls from the crew. None came, indicating they were all ready to go. He gave Anise a quick confirming glance, and Anise counted down the last few seconds aloud. “Three… two… one… drop.”

  When she hit the release control, the numerous supporting arms in the bay simultaneously snapped open. Instantly, the El Cap began to fall, propelled by Verdant’s rotation, towards Earth. As it left the bay, the sense of weight dropped away, and Anise felt her harness going snug and holding her down in her seat.

  “We’re away,” Anise announced when they had cleared Verdant’s bay. “On-course for our re-entry slot.” She worked over her controls, watching the outboard monitors as much as her internal readings, to confirm that her systems were ready to perform as designed. “Everything’s behaving itself,” she finally said for Toliver’s benefit, and Toliver nodded from behind her. The Captain actually had an office adjacent to the flight deck, with its own workstation and harnessed chair, from which a Captain would usually ride out a flight. But Toliver was the kind of Captain who spent as much time on the flight deck with the pilot, so he was a regular in the Captain’s chair behind the pilot’s station. And as Toliver and Anise both got along well, and they were both good at their jobs, Anise felt no additional pressure from knowing he was watching her as she worked.

  There was no other good reason for a visitor to be on the flight deck during a flight: If you weren’t a pilot, watching someone pilot a large ship using the keypads, toggles, sliders and menu boards of a fully-electronic control panel was hardly interesting or exciting; The heart-racing sounds of thundering engines were damped by counter-sonics, leaving only the beeps and tones of the electronics to listen to; and as there were no viewports in the protected space, only monitors oriented specifically for the pilot’s benefit, there was no view. Still, Toliver felt that his presence could at least save a second or two, for instance in communications between the ship and flight monitoring services, and especially in a critical situation like flying through a shifting ash cloud. And as he had piloted a ship or two in the past, he could at least follow what Anise was doing.

  Anise kept her eye on the weather feeds from the GAA as she angled the thrusters for their re-entry angle. So far, the window had shown no signs of closing, although it had apparently shrunk since it was first reported. But in this case, “shrunk” meant that it was only three hundred square kilometers in size… hardly catastrophic. It was altering in shape, however, which would bring El Cap’s flight path very close to its northern wall.

  “Boss,” Anise said after spending a few more moments examining the ash cloud, “I’d like to swing us a bit more to the west, in order to give us a bit more clearance to the north.”

  Toliver unlocked his chair from its spot on the floor track, allowing him to slide forward and examine her screens. After a few seconds, he nodded. “Double-check for any other traffic first. We don’t want to crowd anyone else coming through that window.”

  “No prob.” Anise examined her boards for any other ships that were scheduled to fly through the window. When she saw the specs on one ship, her eyebrows went up. “Hey… did you know the Aztlan was going to Verdant?”

  “No,” Toliver said, leaning over to see the text Anise pointed to on one screen. The Aztlan was an RPI corporate ship, a small orbital jet used exclusively by the company executives. “Does it say who’s on it?”

  Anise examined the flight codes on her screen. Then she looked at Toliver. “It’s Gordon.”

  “Walter?” Toliver slid his chair back. “What’s he doing going to Verdant now?”

  “I don’t know,” Anise muttered. “But for the record: I’m glad we’re headed the other way.”

  ~

  Gordon had flown on enough corporate jets to know when one was not behaving itself. The Aztlan was not behaving itself now. The air-breathing engines were laboring, the airspeed seemed slow, and the entire ship seemed to be vibrating as if under a severe load. It had also hit quite a number of severe air pockets, leaving Gordon gripping his armrests tightly more than once, and often glaring in the direction of the cockpit.

  “If I find out someone didn’t properly service this crate…”

  At one point, the flight seemed to smooth out a bit, and almost immediately afterward, the intercom clicked on. “Sorry about the flight, Mr. Gordon,” the pilot announced to its sole occupant. “Despite the GAA data, there’s still a lot of ash and debris out here, and it’s really fouling things up. Reportedly a few other flights that were scheduled for the window have turned back once they reached it. We should still be able to get through, but we’re going to have to go to rockets sooner than usual because of the drag. That means the flight will get a lot louder soon. But it’s either that, or turn around and go home.”

  Gordon thumbed the intercom switch on his chair arm. “Don’t care about the noise. Cut the rockets in right now if you have to. Just get us up there in one piece, understand?”

  There was the slightest pause before the pilot replied, “Understood. I’ll let you know before we switch over.”

  The com clicked off, and a few moments later, the Aztlan began a slow turn. The cabin
had no portals, but there was a large monitor screen on the forward wall. Gordon keyed the screen to the nose camera, and the screen showed a reddish sky above, and a dark layer below, with the jet seemingly flying between the layers. The screen bathed the cabin in a deep copper hue, giving the distinct impression that they were flying into Hell itself. Beyond was a slightly brighter (or, really, less red) region, tracking towards the center of the camera. As they neared the clear area, the color in the cabin lightened to a dark-pinkish shade, a color somehow just as oppressive as the hellish copper before it.

  Abruptly, the Aztlan leaned back, pushing Gordon into his seat. At that moment, the pilot came back on. “We can’t wait any more. Switching to rockets… now.”

  A roar began to fill the cabin, with an intensity that defeated the efforts of the counter-sonics to quiet them. The ride got rougher, too, as the jet was buffeted by a hurricane-force gale of ash and rock. Gordon gripped the sides of his seat, his knuckles turning yellow, then white.

  “Somebody’s gonna die if this gets any worse.” Gordon wasn’t sure himself whether he was referring to what he intended to do to someone upon landing, or to the fact that he didn’t expect to land at all.

  ~

  “The Aztlan just went to rockets at nine thousand K,” Anise called out to Toliver. She had to speak up, because the amount of punishment the El Cap was taking from the ash layer was still considerable. “They’re not turning ‘round.”

  “That idiot,” Toliver growled, sparing a glance around the flight deck as if he could physically see the beating his own freighter was taking on the outside. “Those corporate jets aren’t designed to take this kind of shit.”

  “Neither are we,” Anise complained. “This ash really is a lot thicker than the GAA reports said. We’ll be lucky if we get it down in one piece!”

  Toliver didn’t have to reply to that: He could feel it. El Cap was being scoured by hot rock and ash. They were in trouble. “Forget the flight plan!” he snapped. “Aim us right into the clearest spot you can find, and put the emergency beacons on full!”

  “We’ll pass close to the Aztlan—”

  “If I could flip Gordon the bird on our way past, I would,” Toliver groused. “But right now, I’m not sure I can use the bad karma.”

  “And we all appreciate that, Cap,” Anise said with a slight smile on her face. But the smile was forced, not doing a good job of concealing Anise’s effort at concentration on her job. Her left hand fingers were tense over a set of maneuvering sliders, while her right hand shot back and forth, redirecting power and thrust from one engine to the other, calling up performance specs, and monitoring the structural integrity of the El Cap. At any other time, Toliver would have admired her work… today, he was too busy praying it would be enough.

  Abruptly, her right hand shot out and hit the shipwide com. “Big air pocket—hold on!” she shouted, just before the El Cap dropped sickeningly through a low-pressure zone, standing almost on its nose as it screamed through the atmosphere. It was hard to tell from the inside, but according to Anise’s board, the freighter had come close to doing a complete barrel roll through the air pocket before Anise wrestled control back again. Then the El Cap began to level out and enter a sweeping starboard turn.

  “How are we doing?” Toliver called out.

  “Still have all our parts—” Anise was cut off by a suddenly urgent beeping on her board. At that same moment, the two of them could hear a mechanical scream, rising in crescendo, somewhere behind them. The scream ended in a muffled but distinct ka-thump, and the El Cap bucked, then tilted sharply, forcing Anise to work quickly to compensate and get the ship back on course.

  “Okay, check that,” Anise said.

  “What was it?”

  “We lost the starboard stabilizer control,” Anise replied. “Temp regulator clogged… probably the ash!” She looked over her board. “I can deal with it, but we’d better not lose too many more of those before we hit clear air!”

  “How much further?”

  “Maybe… six thousand feet. Maybe.”

  “Grand,” Toliver muttered. “Glad I didn’t waste that karma.”

  ~

  “El Capitan is on final approach now,” the monitoring technician was telling Julian, who was standing behind him and examining the workstation readings over his shoulder. “They report clear air below four thousand, and they’re telling ground that they have ninety-percent control. Looks like the starboard stabilizer was the only thing they lost on the way down.”

  “Good, good,” Julian nodded, trying not to make it too obvious how relieved he was that his daughter’s freighter was in the clear. “Keep monitoring until she touches down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Julian glanced about to see how everything else was progressing in CnC. He took particular notice of Kris Fawkes, standing out of the way in a corner, but watching the activity intently. When he noticed her, her eyes quickly found him, and she fixed him with the same intent look. She seemed to have something on her mind—and from her expression he suspected it was something she wanted to discuss with him—but was wisely saving it for whenever the present tension was over, which was probably a good thing.

  So Julian shifted his attention to Reya at the central station. “How’s that incoming look?”

  Reya shrugged. “Well, it looks like hell—it must have gone through the same crap the El Cap did—but they’re still in flying shape, and setting up for approach angle.” Julian joined her at the central station, as she pointed to some images floating in the central column. “We caught this with a monitoring satellite. Mira… look at that damage.”

  Julian peered at the photos of the Aztlan, and almost whistled aloud at the sight: The passenger jet looked like it had flown out of a mudhole, or maybe through the business end of a blowtorch; its nose was black and scoured; its paint was severely faded, and its outer markings were largely worn and illegible; and the leading edges of its blended-winged body looked scraped raw. “And they report no problems?”

  “The pilot says damage is largely superficial,” Reya told him. “We have two Wasps escorting it in, and they report he’s having no obvious control problems.”

  “Incredible,” Julian said. He tried not to think of what the El Capitan must have looked like, if it had gone through that… “Let me know when they dock.”

  ~

  “Mr. Gordon, we came through everything okay,” came the voice from the Aztlan’s cockpit. “We had a relatively close moment, when we had to execute a maneuver to avoid the RPI freighter El Capitan as it passed us on a deviated course… probably due to the same atmospheric problems that we were fighting ourselves.”

  I know who owns the El Capitan, Gordon thought sourly. Almost despite himself, he keyed the com. “Are they going to land okay?”

  “From what we can get from ground, it looks like they’ll be all right… they had a stabilizer breakdown, but they should be able to land safely with just that.”

  “And what about us?”

  “We weathered through without any major equipment malfunctions, surprisingly enough… but we’ll need some serious maintenance before we can return home. We’re entering our final approach window now, on course and on time.”

  “Good.” Gordon keyed the com off. “One less firing today, then.”

  16: Damage Assessment

  “Ceo Lenz, can I speak to you?”

  Julian was actually surprised by Kris, whom he hadn’t realized had come up behind him. “I’m just about to head down to the docking bays, Miss Fawkes,” he explained.

  “I understand,” Kris nodded. She knew he wanted to meet Walter Gordon and talk to him about his freight delivery issues. “This is rather important.”

  Julian considered a moment. Then he invited, “Walk with me?”

  “Certainly,” Kris smiled graciously, and fell in step as he started down the corridor out of CnC. Julian walked briskly at first, and she found she had to step lively to keep up with him.
But in moments, Julian noticed her heels rapping out a staccato rhythm on the deck, and he slowed his pace for her.

  “Ceo,” Kris began, “I’m not sure how aware you are of some of the projects going on in your sciences sections.”

  Julian gave her a sidelong look. “There are a lot of projects going on down there. It’s Aaron Hardy’s job to keep track of them. Is there one in particular that you’re interested in?”

  “There is one in particular,” Kris said as they reached a lift that was just emptying out before them. They stepped in, and Julian pressed the button for the bay floors. Kris noticed someone approaching, clearly with the intent of catching the lift… she reached out and held the door close button, closing it on the disappointed person outside. Julian regarded her cautiously as the lift started down, with just the two of them inside.

  “It’s not necessarily the particulars themselves that I’m interested in, however,” Kris continued, seemingly ignoring Julian’s reaction to her desire for privacy. “Rather, it’s the fact that I suspect those particulars are being deliberately kept from you.”

  Her comment got Julian’s attention. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve spoken to Coo Hardy about a project he and Dr. Silver are working on. Or, more specifically, I’ve tried. He seems to believe it is a very important project, but at the same time, has been very reticent to discuss it with me. I saw Dr. Rios, and asked him about it, and was surprised to find out that he knew nothing about this supposedly important project. And based on their reactions… I’d bet you don’t know about it either.” Kris watched Julian carefully as she spoke, but he presented that impeccable poker face to her again, and she got nothing from him. “Sir,” she continued, “I realize that this project, whatever it is, could be highly classified… and I apologize if I’m stepping into an area where I have no business. But you see, being that I am a Verdant citizen, I feel the need to bring my concerns to your attention.”

  “And what concerns,” Julian asked, “are those, exactly?”