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Sail the Sea of Stars - chapter 18

 
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 4:44 pm    Post subject: Sail the Sea of Stars - chapter 18 Reply with quote




CHAPTER 18

THE STORM



"ATTENTION! ATTENTION, ALL PERSONNEL! WE ARE NOW ENTERING THE NESTRIAN SYSTEM. WE WILL BEGIN FINAL APPROACH IN TWENTY-TWO MINUTES."

Tony Thorn's voice rattle the rafters as he spoke to the ship at large. The crew had been on combat alert status for more than three hours. We had used the two month trip to prepare for this moment. The G.S.C. Candlelight was ready.

Hopefully.

Danceea and I were on the lower observers deck to watch the approach, along with a few dozen other people whose jobs were not essential to combat. Nestria came racing towards us as we shed the last of our faster-than-light speed. In the last few seconds it slowed and almost stopped as she dropped to velocity well below light speed, and it hung in space directly in front us. The crowd around me was unnaturally quiet as the planet dominated our forward view. Nestria appeared to be a dusty ball, reddish brown, almost devoid of visible clouds . . . with one notable exception.

"Is that a hurricane?" said Captain North, leaning forward in his command chair to gaze at the huge circular pattern of clouds that hugged the dry surface of the planet.

"Scanning," said Hank Leamon at the science console. He tapped at the keys on his console, and I saw his display screens depict the storm below us. It was being pictured in a variety of ways: infra-red, x-ray, and deeprange scans. The wind patterns were visible right down to the surface of the planet.

"Hurricane like storm, skipper. But it's different in enough ways to be disturbing," Hank finally announced.

"How so?" said North.

"First of all, the fact that it's over dry land. Hurricanes form over oceans. Also, the wind velocity is in excess of two hundred and fifty miles per hour. This is generating an impressive amount of electricity, especially at the center, where the `eye' should be."

"Should be?" Captain North sat bolt upright and stared the maelstrom more carefully. "You're right! Damn. It doesn't have an eye."

The crowd on the observers decks started murmuring among themselves, but Danceea and I couldn’t take our eyes off the image of that storm. At the center of the swirling cloud, a gigantic thunderhead stood above the surrounding storm, covering the center where a clear area would have normally been. Lightning pulsed within the body of the mushroom-shaped cloud, and it crawled across its pearly surface. Lightning was dancing all through the rotating storm, which was now close enough for us to see the shifting upper surface. It was awesome.

Danceea unconsciously inched over and leaned against me, putting her right arm around my waist, her eyes wide and unblinking as she stared at the the savage storm. I wore same troubled expression.

"Any sign of the Beltherians yet, Mr. Answorth?"

"No, sir," said Freeman Answorth at the tracking console, keeping his eyes on his scope screens as he answered quietly.

"Beth, where's the artifact located in relation to the storm?" said North. Beth Kellogg manipulated her navigation console controls and got a graphic of the planet on her screen. The graphic had been taken from Carrington's data. Beth was motionless for a moment.

"They're not going to like the answer," Danceea said softly, still mesmerized by the storm.

"Why aren't they going to like the — "

"Just wait for it," she whispered. Without moving her head or taking her eyes off the image of the storM, she computer tablet she had in her left hand just high enough for me to see that was displaying Carrington’s high orbit image of Nestria from MP-141, the initial probe that discovered the artifact.

From below I head Beth Kellogg whisper, "Uh oh . . . "

"What's wrong?" said North. Beth looked back up at the storm with a strange expression on her face.

"The artifact is . . . at the center."

"What?"

"Smack-dab under the thunderhead, sir."

"Mr. Leamon, do your scans confirm that?"

"I didn't scan the . . . wait a second while I narrow the . . . " Leamon trailed off while he busied himself at his equipment. Ten seconds passed before he turned back to the captain. "The scans are being scrambled somehow by the storm. It wasn't as bad a moment ago, but now it's even affecting the deeprange scans. I can't see through the thunderhead at all. If the Beltherians are there — "

"I'm more worried about Carrington's people. I don't buy this as a coincidence, though stranger things have happened. Mr. Leamon, find out everything you can about that storm, and get on-line with the science lab."

"Aye, sir."

"Mr. Kellogg, we've got to go into that thing if it's at all possible. What's your opinion?"

Gumjaw turned his head around and stopped chewing his gum as he looked at the captain with open disbelief.

"Into it, sir? Ummm . . . Do we have to?"

Captain North was not amused. "Yes, we have to. Can the ship take it?"

"Well . . . the wind, yes. But that lightning is another story," said Gumjaw. He called out to Hank Leamon. "How much electricity is . . . how did you put it . . .an impressive amount?"

Hank answered immediately, which meant he’d expected the question and he hated the answer. "Enough to fry our more sensitive circuitry if we take a hit . . . which we will. The wind friction and the conductivity of crystalsteel will cause a build up of — "

"I'll take your word for it," said North. "How long could that storm last, if it isn't natural?"

"It certainly isn't natural, so there's no telling how long it will last. It shouldn't even exist over a desert region, much less be that strong."

The planet was less than two hundred miles away by this time. Nestria's mountains and canyons were becoming naked-eye objects. As we approached the upper atmosphere we were diving straight down into the storm, though the Candlelight's artificial gravity made it look as if the storm was standing on edge like a wall of clouds before us. It filled our forward view completely. When we entered Nestria's upper atmosphere, Gumjaw slowly brought the ship's nose up as we pulled out of the dive and began a gradual descent. Lightning skipped across the top and blazed inside the billowing mass.

The people on both observers decks pressed against the guard rails and gazed out at the storm with growing concern. Danceea had two small creases between her eyebrows, indicating that she was as troubled by this as everyone else. Though the Candlelight was constructed of incredibly tough materials, the power of the storm, both physically and electrically, was not to be underestimated.

"Captain, the winds have increased to three hundred miles per hour during our approach," said Hank Leamon.

"What? You mean the blasted thing is getting worse?"

"Aye, sir. And there's a magnetic pattern and a gravity wave matrix within the storm that seems to be directing it. They're both scrambling our scans."

"Great," muttered Captain North. He ran his right hand through his grayish lion mane and scratched his jaw a few times. Finally he said, "Well, we've got to assume that Carrington's people are down there. The Beltherians may be in there too, which makes Carrington's situation twice as bad." North drew a deep breath and let out slowly. This was a tough decision and I didn't envy him for it. After a pause, the captain spoke reluctantly. "Well . . . all right. Take us down, Mr. Kellogg, steady as she goes. Mr. Leamon, what would be the safest approach to the center of the storm?"

Hank gave the question careful thought, then he gave it an honest answer. "Ummm . . . underground?" The crowd around him laughed. Captain North, however, did not.

"What's your second choice, mister?"

Hank squirmed in his seat for a moment, then he delivered the bad news. "Since the lightning is our real worry, I'd say we should go in at some point towards the outer edge of the storm and stay at a low altitude as we approach the thunderhead. The wind will be less severe if we hug the surface."

Danceea startled the crowd by speaking out to the Captain below her. "That's not going to be possible, sir."

North quickly turned in his chair and looked up her. "Why not, Miss Aberron?"

Danceea held up her data display to show that she had been studying Carrington's detailed maps of Nestria. "The surface in this area is similar to an Earth region called Monument Valley in the Southwester United States, Captain. Tall buttes and stone spires jut up from a flat plain. The flat land won't slow that wind much, but those buttes will stop us in a jiffy if we hit one of them."

North got the point. He turned back to Gumjaw. "Visibility will be zero inside the storm, Mr. Kellogg. Can you fly the ship at a few hundred feet off the deck by using instruments only?"

Gunjaw suddenly wore the look of man being ordered by the king to spin straw into gold. "Uh . . . no sir. Not if the scans are being scrambled."

North nodded slowly, thinking through the situation before he answered. "Then I guess we'll have to go down into the storm as close as possible to the artifact, just outside that thunderhead at the center. What do you think, Mr. Leamon?"

Hank clearly didn’t want to answer the question, but he had not choice. "We're back to the problem of the lightning, sir. It's impossible to go under it, and it's dangerous to go through it. Dangerous might not be impossible, but it's still no picnic."

It wasn't an answer Captain North liked, but it at least it was honest. He took a deep breath and blew it out so hard it lifted his mustache for an instant. "Alright." He turned to the helmsman. "You heard the man, Mr. Kellogg. Take us in."

Samuel Kellogg took hold of the control yoke slowly and with obvious reluctance. He spoke in a voice so low we could barely hear him from above.

"Aye, sir." He had a sickly look on this face as he reached up and tugged his bright blue Mack hat a bit lower, then he eased the control yoke forward. The Candlelight's nose dipped down, and the ship dove towards the storm. Gumjaw banked the stellacruiser gently until we were running parallel with the flowing clouds. Since the stellacruiser didn’t fly like an conventional aircraft, it could move long with the wind without stalling out.

The closer we got to the upper surface of the clouds, the more ominous the lightning looked. A bolt arced up from the clouds and seemed to reach for us. It instantly curved back and then went walking along the top of the misty sea of clouds for several miles. In an eye-blink it was gone, leaving the crew to finish the gasp they had started when it first appeared.

"We're taking on a charge already, sir," said Hank Leamon. "The air is absolutely alive with it."

I saw the hairs on my own arms stand up, and I felt a tingling sensation on my skin. A young woman wa standing to the right of me on the observers deck, and her short blond hair lifted eerily away from her scalp.

"Instruments are being affected, sir," said Beth Kellogg. I could see the readouts on the bridge consoles flicker from the rogue chargers that were passing through the conductive material of the ship.

"Can't you ground this equipment, Mr. Leamon?" The captain’s voice was showing the frustration he felt.

"I'm trying to, sir, but it'll take a second to tell the computer about this crazy — "

A bright blue flame leapt from the lower track on which the big display screens rode, and it lanced into Hank Leamon's console. Hank's muscles convulsed and he pitched sideways into the aisle next to his station. At the same instant a ghostly luminescence engulfed the metal surfaces of the bridge area, outlining the consoles, flitting around the inner framework, dancing along the guardrails of the observers decks.

"STAND CLEAR!" bellow Captain North. "TOUCH NOTHING METAL!"

The bridge personnel scrambled out of their chairs and sprawled into the aisles as the darting glow boiled across their consoles. It raced around the bridge area, meeting itself at the corners and jumping across small gaps. Gumjaw leaned back away from his control yoke with his hands held high. The control yoke was alive with the ghostly fire. Freeman Answorth at the tracking station caught three bright arcs on his hands as he fought his way out of his chair. Each shock produced a high-pitched yelp of pain.

"Medics to the bridge!" shouted North into his headset mic. "Attention, all personnel, stay clear of exposed metal! Stay clear!"

On all the gunnery decks, the men and women rolled out of their saddle-like chairs as the static charge enveloped both their consoles and the plasma cannons outside the windows on the platforms along the ship's hull, turning every gunnery deck in a surrealistic world of sculpted light. Ernie Fields wound up on his hands and knees looking up at his gun control station, outlined in dancing fire. He smiled like a kid on Christmas morning and chuckled at the surrealistic sight.

In the engineering section, Jimmy Lewton and his men clung to the insulated catwalks and gazed with wonder at the huge expanse of glowing machinery, awash with the glittering energy that chased itself in and out of the complex pieces of machinery.

On the bridge, Benny Hart pulled his shirt off and wrapped his hand in it. He reached over to Hank Leamon's console and finished the programming that instructed the computer to deal with the rogue charges which surged through the ship. For a heart-stopping moment all the power aboard the Candlelight was shut down. The blue luminescence ceased when the lights when out and the consoles went dark. Even the artificial gravity went off. The ship and everything in it fell towards the storm below. On the bridge there were screams of alarm as vertigo gripped our frightened minds.

But the power resumed a few seconds later and we all dropped roughly to the deck. Gumjaw hauled back on the control yoke and slowed our fall to its former rate of descent.

"Mr. Sloan to the bridge, on the double!" said Captain North. "Damage

control, report." He listened to his headset while the bridge crew crawled back to their vacated stations. After several seconds he keyed himself into the PA.

“Attentoin, all personnel. Get the injured people to sick bay as quickly as possible. We’re going into the storm in moment, so be ready for a rough ride.”

A medical team rushed onto the bridge and went to work on the motionless form of Hank Leamon. Within seconds they had him hooked up to a portable respirator and heart-action machine. Then they rolled him onto a null-weight stretcher and dashed out, guiding the floating stretcher with little effort. Bobby Sloan came into the bridge area and assumed Hank Leamon's unmanned console.

"Mr. Sloan, what's going to happen when we take a really bad hit?" said North.

"Well, what we just experienced was a build-up of static over the whole ship, sir. A direct strike will be different, and I think we can take a few bad ones, but . . . " He trailed off as he saw that we were nearing the upper surface of the storm, because it was obvious to everyone that we were going to take a lot more than just a few bad strikes.

And even as Sloan finished speaking, the first lightning bolt reached up and stung the underside of the ship. The lights flickered and the deck trembled beneath our feet, but the charge was being carefully channeled away from the equipment. This close to the storm the lightning was blindingly bright as it erupted inside the boiling clouds. Another eye-searing bolt hit the left wing, out near the end.






A double strike on the Candlelight's two prow projections left us all blind for a moment from the brilliant flashes. Our sight came back just as we reached the upper cloud layer. The Candlelight sank into the moving mass, and the bridge dome was obscured by the dimly lit fog. The few moments of reduced light only made the lightning worse when a collasal bolt struck the center of the bridge dome. Everyone cried out as the light drove needles of pain into our eyes. I heard shouting from the bridge crew below, and I began to smell smoke. As my sight slowly returned I gazed down on a hazy scene. Smoke poured from two consoles, and the lights of several others were dark. Bridge crewmen were groping around blindly, fumbling open the access panels and spraying the smoldering circuits with fire retardant.

I turned and hurried towards the bridge area, followed closely by Danceea.

The dead consoles were being quickly repaired as the crewmen pulled out the damaged modules and slapped in new ones. I arrived in time to help with the last one, then I had to help Barry Curtis back into his console chair. Barry had taken a severe electric shock from his console when the lightning struck. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely manipulate his controls.

"Let the captain call a replacement for you, Barry."

"I can manage," he said in a strained voice. "At least I wasn't looking right at it. Neil, seems to be blind."

I looked over at Neil Barnes, whose station was located across the center aisle from Barry's. Neil was peering down at his console while he alternately squeezed his eyes closed then and opened them as wide as he could.

Another searing flash hit the bridge dome, and several consoles went dark. One by one I pulled the flat sheets of modular circuits out of the Neil's console and quickly discarded the ones that were half melted. Barry needed help too, and I darted back and forth on the stairway that divided the slanting bridge floor in half. Everyone was working frantically to keep the delicate equipment operating between —

WHAM! Another strike. We were fighting a losing battle. That much electricity simply could not be controlled. Exhaust fans roared overhead as they tried to clear the smoke. People shouted back and forth, and various alarms filled the room with racket. Gumjaw pulled his shirt off and wrapped it around the control yoke. It would provide very little insulation, but I didn't blame him for trying. Nobody was touching their consoles when they didn't have to, and nobody was risking a peek through the bridge dome.

When another bull's-eye struck the dome, the transparent crystalsteel actually discoloring at the impact points.

"Okay, that's it!" shouted North. "Get us out of here, now! GO!"

Gumjaw obeyed with great pleasure. He hauled the control yoke back towards his gut and slapped the throttle forward with the heel of his hand. The artificial gravity must have been way out of sync, because the acceleration threw me to the floor and pressed the bridge crew down into their chairs. I saw the whole crowd on the observers decks go stumbling back away from the guard rails.

We took six more hits before we finally burst up into the sunlight, and we used up every spare module on the bridge to fix the damaged consoles. The G.S.C. Candlelight shot up into the clear air above the storm and kept right on climbing until we were many miles above it.






Captain North called for a casualty report and learned that there were injured people all over the ship. Three people were dead. After hearing from all sections, Captain North keyed himself into the PA.

Attention, all personnel. We've got plenty of damage to repair, so get to it. If it's any consolation to you won't be trying to enter the storm a second time. If anybody is down under that storm they're either protected by something more durable than the Candlelight or they're dead. So for now, we're going to back off.

Cruising high above Nestria, we went to work putting our ship back together. If God had wanted man to fly . . .

The ship's scanning systems had been badly damaged by the lightning, so we had no way of knowing if the Beltherians were in the area except by telescopic cameras. About thirty minutes after our suicidal dive into the super-tempest, the captain was approached by Randy Henson and Bill Jenkins, who had Dr. Joseph Gilliam in tow. Dr. Gilliam was the Candlelight's resident meteorological whiz. The poor doctor looked decidedly unhappy because Bill and Randy had literally dragged him away from his studies of the freak hurricane.

"Skipper, we've got a proposition for you," said Randy as they approached the captain. "Dr. Gilliam has come up with a great idea."

This statement served to increase the sickly look on Dr. Gilliam’s old face. The captain noted the doctor's expression, as well as the fact that Randy maintained a firm grip on Dr. Gilliam’s arm, as if the doctor might bolt and run.

"Let's hear the doctor's great idea," said North. He had to speak above the noise of in the bridge area. Repair work had the bridge two-thirds disassembled. There was shouting and machine noises and the clutter of repair work everywhere. The aisle looked like a junkyard of high-tech components.

"The good doctor has been studying our storm," said Bill Jenkins, "and he's come up with some pretty interesting ideas. Right, doc?"

"Well, yes. I've — "

"He says there's an area near ground level that isn't getting nearly as much wind or lightning as the higher altitudes." Bill paused and looked at Dr. Gilliam for support. "Right, Doc? That's what you said?"

Gilliam looked at Captain North and nodded. "Yes. You see, Captain — "

North didn't let him finish. "Is it big enough for the Candlelight to get through?"

Bill was off again. "Nope, no good. It's only an area about sixty meters high. But it would be enough for a couple of stellascouts to get through. Naturally the pilots would have to be . . . chosen very carefully."

This last remark was delivered with enough emphasis t make it plain that Randy and Bill were proposing a volunteer mission for a small group of people who would enter the storm in two of the Candlelight's small scout ships. The idea sounded insane, and North said so.

"You saw what that storm did to us. You can't possibly be serious — "

"Why not, sir? If we could just go in for a quick look — "

"No! You must have a death wish, Jenkins. No ship could possibly — "

"Captain!" Dr. Gilliam blurted out suddenly, surprising the other three men. "It could be done! I'm not just talking about normal wind drag near ground level, I'm saying that the storm is apparently being controlled by complex magnetic fields and gravity waves. Close to the ground the wind speed is unnaturally low."

Captain North was so awed by the doctor's intensity that when he spoke again his voice sounded almost timid.

"Oh. Well . . . then the stellascouts would be safe?"

"Safe? Heavens, no! But if they stayed below sixty meters they just might — I repeat, might — get through."

"What about the lightning?"

"Still a danger, but less so than what we experienced earlier."

Captain North still looked skeptical as he studied the faces of the three men. "So, you're saying that if Carrington's party didn't try to fly out of the storm, they may still be alive down there."

"A distinct possibility, yes," said Gilliam.

"Okay, but the navigational aids of our stellascouts won't work because of the magnetic pattern. It scrambled our scans, remember?" said North. "They'd be flying blind."

"Perhaps not. I'm almost certain that the scans will be much less affected in the less violent region near the ground," said Dr. Gilliam. “This is not a natural phenomenon. This storm breaks all the rules of normal meteorology.”

Captain North furrowed his brow and did a little more mental debating. Finally he heaved a weary sigh. "All right. If this storm goes on for weeks we might have to get Carrington's people out by stellascouts, a few at a time. Even if you guys just go in and come right back out again, you'll at least be able to tell us what's going on down there." North paused for a moment, studying the faces of Randy and Bill. Then he squared his shoulders and used his very best command voice when he said, "Gentlemen, pre-flight your ships while I round up some volunteers with a death-wish."

"Aye, sir." said Randy and Bill, grinning hugely. Randy slapped Dr. Gilliam on the back. "Thanks, Doc. I knew you'd convince him!"

And off they went — to play tag with a hurricane.

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Mon May 07, 2018 1:59 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Bud Brewster
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 9:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CHAPTER 18 — continued

Don't ask me why, but I volunteered. I had been helping with the bridge repairs during Randy and Bill's pitch to the captain, and I decided to offer my services as a repair technician aboard one of the two smaller aircraft going into the storm.

And as soon as Danceea found out, she told the Captain that she needed to be part of the mission, too. Her reason for going was even better than mine: she was our resident expert on the alien artifact, so if the entire scientific team was dead, she would be most qualified to evaluate it and report to the captain if the stellascouts made it to the site.

Her arguments for going had me so outgunned that if one person ended up being left behind, it would probably be me . . .

The stellascouts would hold twelve people each, and the captain elected to send a few medical personnel along with the combat crewmen. A repair technician for each ship was an obvious requirement in view of our previous experience with the storm. And that's how timid young Lt. Newcastle became part of a suicide mission.

I grabbed as many replacement modules for the electronic components on the stellascouts as I could carry, and then I headed for the flight deck. Danceea, however, was packing light. All she needed was her handy-dandy computer tablet, which held ever shred of data Dr. Carrington had collected on the alien artifact. It occurred to me that, under the present circumstances, her computer tablet was probably the most valuable hand-held device in the galaxy. And she was about to fly into a hurricane with it. Life is sometimes too ridiculous for sane people to contemplate.

The launching bays for the stellascouts exited the Candlelight from the front end of the big pods that were located about a quarter of the way out along each of the Candlelight's slender wing-like projections. The back ends of the two pods contained the sublight and hyperdrive engines.

Each of the two flight decks held three of the Candlelight's six stellascouts. Deck A was now the scene of furious activity as Randy and Bill got ready for their mission into the storm. Combat crewmen (seven per ship) were carrying their gear aboard. Medical personnel (three per ship) were examining their supplies, spreading the stuff out on the deck and checking it against a list. Glen Davies had volunteered to be the repair tech for the other stellascout, and I saw him toting armloads of replacement modules aboard one of the ships.

The stellascouts were long, sleek, streamlined craft, designed to be flown in both dense atmospheres and the vacuum of space. They were built to go fast and fight hard. Plasma guns on remote controlled swivel-mounts stuck out on each side of the fuselage. The whole front end of each ship was made of clear crystalsteel, giving the pilot and copilot a view that only a jari-cari could beat. On this mission however there would be no copilots. The right-hand seats in each cockpit would be occupied by Glen Davies . . . and me.

Somebody had unofficially christened these two scouts the Candlewax and the John Wayne. The names were painted neatly on the sides, just above their official registration numbers. Obviously the two names were a deliberate pun (wax and wane) based on the name of our ship — the Candlelight.

Glen Davies was loading his stuff onto the Wax, so I headed for the Wayne.

"Hiya, Davey!" shouted Bill Jenkins. He was standing with a group of combat crewmen. "Are you gonna be my patch-it-up man?"

"That's me, partner. I live for danger."

"Then you've come to the right place," he said cheerfully. This did little for my growing nervousness. He made matters worse when he said, “Hey, I heard your gorgeous girlfriend is coming too! I hope she won’t stand you up.”

I stopped and stood with my hands on my hips, adopting an angry stance and smoldering glare. “Listen, Jekyll! You stay away for my girlfriend!”

He smirked with blatant lust while he was looking back over his shoulder and totting a box of equipment into the stellascout. “All’s fair in love and war, Davey. May the best man win!”

Minutes later the last of us were climbing aboard the stellascouts, including Danceea and her invaluable computer tablet. She buckled herself into one the seats in the passenger area behind the cockpit. Her face was pale, and her expression was gaunt. I hated the thought of her being here, but her expertise was needed, and she had bravely volunteered for this dangerous mission.

All these were reasons to love her and reasons to fear for her life. I wondered it either of us would ever see Tason again.

The launch bay door lowered into its floor slot. A force shield over the open bay held the wind back. The force shield distorted the view outside, like looking through a thin sheet of rippling water. Bill and I settled ourselves into the cockpit seats, and I started locating all the pull-bars for the flat, modular circuit boards in the control panels near my feet. I'd have to be very quick to replace any burned out circuits, otherwise the Wayne would lose power and drop us to the desert floor. Admittedly we were going to be less than two hundred feet high, but when you’re traveling at mach two the altitude hardly matters.

The rising whine of the two ships' engines filled the flight deck, and I saw the deck crewmen disconnect the external power lines. Then they ran for cover as the force shield over the bay door changed from a rippling sheet of water to a puddle being pounded by a rain storm. The new configuration would allow the stellascouts to pass through the force field, but it blocked most of the air from outside. Even then, however, enough wind pushed through to give the flight deck a good dusting.

On the Candlelight’s bridge, Gumjaw had slowed the ship to a paltry 60 miles an hour. The deck controller’s voice in our headsets gave Randy and Bill a brief countdown as I stared out the launch bay at the distorted image of the blue sky and the rolling clouds below. My heart was tap dancing against my ribcage, and I tasted a little drop of salty perspiration when it rolled down from my upper lip. There was no need for me to gripping the edge my seat, but I gripped it anyway. When the countdown reached three, Billed eased the throttle forward, and the Wayne strained at her deck chocks.

The deck controller’s voice in headsets finished the countdown. " . . . two, one, zero."

Bill popped the throttle all the way forward as the deck chocks dropped down into their slots and released the ship's landing gear. Both of the stellascouts surged forward and shot through the undulating force field like a diver plunging into a pool. Sunlight flooded the goldfish bowl cockpit, and we soared ahead of the cruising Candlelight.

I heard Tony Thorn in our headsets. "Candlelight to scout 1 and scout 2, how read you this? Over."

"Read you fine," said Bill. "But couldn't we come up with something better than scout 1 and scout 2?"

Tony’s voice was low and nervous as he said, "Listen, Jenkins, you know how the captain feels about the Wax and Wayne stuff." Captain North was obviously sitting just a few yards behind Tony, frowning beneath his well-groomed mustache, his brow furrowed while the entire bridge looked everywhere but at him so he wouldn't see them trying not to grin.

Randy’s cheerful voice from the other stellascout jumped in and made the situation a bit worse. "Okay, Tony, how 'bout Roy and Dale?"

Bill was fighting back his own mirth right next to me, pressing his lips together to keep from laughing. In a nearly normal voice he said, "Negative, negative! I know who'd get to be Dale! How 'bout Sky King and Jet Jackson?"

After a short pause, during which I knew poor Tony was squirming in his bridge chair, listening to Captain North roar at him about the nonsense his two pilots were spouting, Tony Thorn delivered the unhappy verdict. "Nope. Sorry, guys. The skipper says no way."

"Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers?" suggested Randy’s giggle voice.

"Laurel and Hardy?" offered Bill, wrapping his hand around his headset mike the instant he said it so Tony wouldn’t hear him laughing like a maniac.

Tony’s voiced burst from our headsets with the verbal equivalent of a man waving a white flag. "Okay, okay, okay! The skipper says he'll go along with Wax and Wayne if you'll just shut up and get to work!"

Bill looked genuinely shocked by the sudden victory. After a moment he said, "Gee, Tony, was that a direct quote?"

Tony’s exasperated reply came back instantly. "No, it was a diplomatic translation! You do not want to hear what he actually said!"

Bill looked over at me with a big grin and triumphant wink. Casually he said, "Copy, Candlelight. We'll get the job done and be back as soon as we can."

"G.S.C. Candlelight, out!" Tony said firmly.

Grinning like an idiot, I turned and looked back at Danceea in the passenger section. She and all the rest of the folks be there were helpless witth laughter because they heard the entire conversation on the speakers in that sections, thanks to Bill.

Danceea spoke above the noisy crowd. “Just to quick question, Lieutenant. Randy and Bill aren’t in a relationship at the moment . . . right? I mean, they’re free for dinner if we live through this?”

I laughed . . . .and then I didn’t laugh . . . and then I turned around quickly so she wouldn’t see that her comment made me very nervous.

Ahead of us, the upper surface of the storm was stretched out like a winter landscape. Lightning danced like elves across the lumpy white plane. We were nearing the storm's outer fringe. The bleak, brown desert below us was hazy with blowing dust and dirt.



]


"Okay, Bill, let's take 'em right down to the deck," said Randy from the Wax.

"Lead on," replied Bill.

The two stellascouts went into a steep dive that brought the barren desert rushing up towards us. It was dotted with tabletop plateaus and buttes that stuck up more than 600 feet from the desert floor. Just when I thought we were going to add two smoking craters to the bleak landscape, we leveled off with the rocky landscape flashing by beneath us, and our speed climbing past Mach 2.

I keyed one of the control panel displays to give me a rear view. The shock wave of our passage started raising a dust cloud in our wake. We were still in sunlight, but ahead of us the land was shadowed by the curved shelf of dark clouds above. I could see the sunlit upper surface of the storm, but the area between it and the ground was shaded from gray to almost black. A storm that was over a thousand miles wide . . . with a wind velocity of over three hundred miles per hour . . . and we where rushing towards it at —

"Mach 2," intoned Bill, glancing out the control panel. "Man, it's gonna be hard to dodge those plateaus when we get inside the storm. Let's see if Dr. Gilliam was right about the scans working in the calmer region near the ground."

The stellascouts were equipped with a miniature version of the Candlelight's panaramic display screen. Bill flipped a switch that brought a display screen sliding around from his left. The screen was transparent and only a few feet square, but as soon as it locked into position directly in front of Bill it turn opaque and presented a image of the landscape ahead of us — without the blowing dust, and brightly lit. With the help of this computer generated image, Bill could "see" through the gloom and avoid the tall pieces of real estate racing past.

"Are your scans working okay?" Bill said to Randy in the Wayne.

"Just great," I head Rand say in my headset. There was a touch of strain in his voice which didn't surprise me a bit under the circumstances. "Doc Gilliam sure knows his stuff. Now all we gotta do is fly through a three hundred mile per hour wind at twice the speed of sound."

Bill was shaking his head before Randy even finished. "That’s not our only worry. Sooner or later the lightning will nail us."

Separated by several hundred feet, the Wax and Wayne ripped across the dead desert at twice the speed of sound. We were raising a dust cloud behind us a hundred feet high with the shockwave of our passing. The storm's wall of blowing sand rose up like tidal wave before us. Randy and Bill fine tuned the force shields that deflected most of the airborne sand and rocks. The land was generally flat, but there were enough of those imposing buttes to keep our pilots very busy weaving us around them.

At a speed of over fifteen hundred miles an hour, the fuzzy outer edge of the hurricane hit us like a slap in the face. Visibility went instantly to nil, and Bill Jenkins was completely dependent on the display screen in front of him. They image was created by using various types of scans, such as infrared and radar to paint a moving picture of the unseen landscape ahead of us.

From my seat to Bill's right, the view through the cockpit dome was no view at all. It was darker than twilight, and what little light there was only showed sand streaking by so fast it was almost invisible. If the stellascouts hadn't had the force shields which protected them from micro-meteoroids in space, the cockpit domes would have been sandblasted until they turned frosty and opaque in under a minute, leaving us totally blind.

Bill's face was grim and hard as he gripped the control yoke and kept the Wayne a little behind the Wax, shadowing her moments. After several minutes he started muttering under his breath.

"Trouble?" I said in a quiet voice, watching his face closely.

Bill struggle between controlling the stellascout and answering my question. "David, can you give me a better view of the terrain ahead?"

I realized just what he wanted the moment he spoke. Bill needed to feel he was right there in the middle of the Nestrian landscape, keenly aware of every aspect of the terrain he was flying over at fantastic speeds. And, of course, so did Randy in the Wax, flying close by.

There was absolutely nothing to see outside the bubble-nosed canopy, so I brought out three more display screens and positioned them to surround the cockpit. Then I instructed the computer to use the data from Danceea’s tablet to create a simulation of the terrain. It contained Carrrington’s detailed topographical maps of the planet.

After I told the ship's computer what to do it linked with Danceea’s tablet, and the screens lit up with a bright, detailed simulation of the desert, looking as much like the view through the cockpit canopy as the real thing.

"Wow! Now this is more like it!" Bill exclaimed. He relaxed visibly — which made me relax as well.

"Hey, Glen!" I said into my headset. "Give me control of your systems."

"Why?" The question annoyed me, but I didn't bother to explain.

"Tell you later. Just do it."

I transmitted my instructions to the Wax. Seconds later Randy was singing the praises of his new enhanced view of the landscape ahead.

"Hey, this is great! Lovely weather we're having! Where did the storm go?"

Suddenly a lightening bolt cut a bright gash through the view ahead, just a few hundred feet in front of us. It was duplicated less blindingly on the wrap-around screens, and since the screens were now opaque with the simulated image, our eyes were shielded from the full eye-hurting brillance. The Wax veered left as Randy reacted to the near miss, but he quickly brought the agile stellascout back on course.

We had entered the full force of the strange hurricane, though we remained in the comparatively calmer region just above the ground. Even so, the wind was blowing about two hundred miles an hour. The stellascouts were flying at a sharp angle, their noses tilted into the wind, which was represented as a racing layer of clouds uncomfortably close above us. The computer had "cleared the air" in the less turbulent region around us, but the screens displayed the lightening bolts which struck the desert. For miles around us, the desert floor was being stabbed with searing lances of light.

And through it all we raced along, maintaining our precarious association with the blurred ground beneath us, sandwiched between it and the howling maelstrom above. Ahead of us, the Wax was visible on the display screen, ducking and dodging, seeking the low spots that would keep us beneath the storm. If we were to encounter a large area of high ground, we would be forced up into the lightning-filled torrent of wind and sand. A three-hundred-mile-per-hour wind could easily strip large rocks from the tops of the plateaus and carry them hurtling along for a miles before they hit the ground. If we collided with one of these stone missiles, we'd never know what hit us.

I worked my the keyboard for a moment and altered the simulation a bit. The layer of racing clouds turned translucent to show the flying objects it contained. The X-ray, infrared, and radar scans the computer was using to building the simulation were registering the presence of tumbling fragments of shale and swarms of gravel. Bill caught on to what that meant and he frequently glanced up to see what might be about to drop into our path. I called Randy and Glen to tell them why the altered simulation was needed. Occasionally we saw large rocks plunge down onto the desert floor like artillery shells.

"Where's that magnetic pattern that Dr. Gillham mentioned?" said Bill.

I fiddled with the keyboard again and got a ghostly network of writhing lines that filled the clouds above us. They sheltered us from the full intensity of the storm while they powered it from within. They also prevented the scans from penetrating the clouds above us by more than a few hundred feet.

"That pattern has gotta be caused by the artifact," said Bill.

Suddenly we were surrounded by a barrage of lightning bolts that hammered the desert for miles around. We were flying through a forest of bright, crooked bars of electrical energy that extended from the clouds down to the rocky ground. Bill shouted above the roar of their assault.



]


"There must be metal ore in the ground below! If we can just get past — "

A thunderclap coincided with a blinding flash, and the control board lights flickered as smoke poured from the panel. I ripped out three circuit modules and slammed in their replacements. Bill fought to control the half-dead ship while I repaired the damage. As I pulled the smoldering modules out, I tossed them behind me, heedless of whether or not they landed in the laps of the other passengers. There was just no time.

Bill finally steadied the ship, though several times we had almost grazed the ground or plunged up into the boiling clouds. Just as we recovered, Randy Henson's ship took a lightning strike on the right wing. The Wax flipped completely over and came within a few feet of the blurred ground. The ship maneuvered wildly, but it managed to stay in the calm region while Randy fought it back under control. Glen must have still been shoving replacement modules into place when a plateau rushed towards us. Bill cut right, but Randy veered left, still fighting for control of his ship. For a heart-stopping moment Randy's ship was hidden from our sight by a twenty-mile long wall of mountains shaped roughly like a knife blade buried edge-up in the sand. Then, as the blade dwindled to its buried tip, the Wax leaped into view on the far side and banked right to join us again.

"You okay?" Bill said anxiously.

"Sure. Why?" Randy answered nonchalantly.

"Oh, nothing. I just . . . you know . . . wondered."

What a pair. I turned around to give a silly grin to the other passengers. I found myself looking at a bunch of pallid, worried faces. Gee, I thought I was the only one.

Danceea gave me an angry look and spoke in a low voice. “It you ever do that again . . . “

I mouthed the words I promise and turned back around.

Weaving, dodging, snaking around the stony tables that decorated the desert floor. Hopping over hills, ducking under storm winds, following dry riverbeds whenever they were straight enough to stay in at Mach 2. A mountain range loomed up, and Randy led us through a pass that could have dead-ended at any moment. Randy and Bill — alias Heckle and — flew like battling hawks, chasing each other through the ragged, rocky obstacle course. And above them, tearing at the top of the mountains, was the three-hundred mile per hour layer of blowing destruction.

Right after we made it through the mountain pass, the computer simulation began to deteriorate. I called Randy and Glen aboard the Wax.

"Glen? Is your simulation breaking up?"

"Yes! What's wrong?"

"I don't know. It looks like the magnetic pattern is getting stronger. It's fouling up data scans. We must be getting near that super-thunderhead at the center of the storm.

"What can we do, David?" said Glen's anxious voice. Bill squinted at the darkening image of the moving landscape as it turned increasingly fuzzy. I was working frantically at the keboard, but the computer couldn't improve the image while its probes were being scrambled.

"Do something, Dave! We're blind!" shouted Bill. The screen image was a jittery mass of distorted landscape, fading in and out.

"No good, Bill. I can't make it any — "

"All right, all right! Then just pull back screens!"

I slaped the button and spoke into my headset mike. "Glen! Pull back your screens!"

Our wrap-around screens split up and quickly slid around to the sides so that Bill could see directly throught the canopy. We didn't expect to see very much through the blowing sand.

Wrong. We saw a lot. The stellascouts broke free of the maelstrom and shot into a clear area. Five miles of desert flash by beneath us at Mach 2 before we could react to the thing which stood before us. Rising from the desert floor like the Emerald City of Oz, standing more than two miles high at its tallest point, the artifact was a stunning sight.

The cloud cover was a high, undulating dome above it, like a rounded roof made of moving smoke. The lightening played along the inside of the cloud dome, crawling and twisting and wrestling with itself.






After a long moment of wide-eyed astonishment, Bill yanked back on the control yoke. But a long moment at Mach 2 is too bloody long. The Wayne shot straight up and her belly came with twenty yards of scraping the vertical surface of the artifact's tallest structure. We went up . . . and up . . . and up . . . almost grazing the glassy surface all the way.

Meanwhile Randy Henson's ship had banked left, barely missing the same monolith as we climbed up its side.

The Wayne did a full loop that brought it right up to the lightning-laced cloud dome high overhead. Belly up, she leveled off less than five hundred feet from the electrified clouds and then curved back down towards the desert, far below. Both of the stellascouts decelerated drastically as they arced away from the huge alien complex and soared out over the surrounding terrain.

"Yo . . . Bill?" said a lilting voice in our headsets.

Bill didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice sounded shaky. "We're still here."

After a brief pause he said, "Is everybody okay?"

Bill turned around and glanced at the rest of the passengers. I looked back at Danceea and was shocked by how white her face was. Silently she mouthed the words You promised! I gave her a sheepish smile just as Bill spoke into his headset.

“We’re all fine.” He looked around until he spotted the Wax a few miles away, paralleling our course at the same sedate speed. The city-sized artifact was behind us, no longer. The inner wall of clouds we had burst through were miles ahead of us. But the air around us was shocking clear.

We were in the eye of the storm.

After a few more seconds of conspicous silence, Randy said, "Okay . . . uh . . . what do we do now?" His voice sounded noticeably tense.

Bill actually had to think for a second before he remember why we were here. Finally he said, "Carrington. We gotta find Carrington."

"Oh. Yeah. Right."

We were all pretty shaken up from the wild ride through the storm and the near miss we'd just had with the whatever-it-was. The stellascouts were circling the artifact complex slowly, staying close to the desert floor, well below the cloud dome.

Biill turned to me and said, "Try to contact the Candlelight. Tell them not to rent out our rooms."

"Not yet, anyway."

"Right. Not yet."

The passengers behind me were gazing out the three port-side windows. We were all transfixed by the sight of the artifact complex. It covered an area of land more than ten miles on a side. The highest of the structures rivaled any skyscraper I'd heard of in the galaxy on a planet with Earth-normal gravity. The very highest one was not just some slender, reaching p — it was shaped like a rectangular slab with rounded edges, and their was a curved addition on one side that resembled a giant kid's sliding board sloping down from the top to the base. The color of the structure was a dark bluish-gray, smooth and shiny, and there was a pattern on the surface which defied description.

I used the Wayne's instruments to check my estimation of the height, which was 2 miles (3.22 kilometers). But I was wrong. The tallest structure was 4.6 miles high (almost 7.5 km), and just a fraction over a mile wide, which is just is a fraction over 1.6 km.

The gist of the matter was that these buildings were big as hell and damn proud of it.

When I tried to call the Candlelight there was no answer, which didn't surprise anybody, so I went back to examining the mysterious complex. The architecture was grand, complex, and attractive. The color scheme was damned appealing in my humble opinion. Many of the buildings were a bluish gray, relieved here and there by red stips, blue patches, black roofs (presumably as solar collectors), wandering green pipes that either connected to various buildings or zig-zagged around their bases.

We saw ample evidence that it had once been a thriving city, with walkways, thoroughfares, areas that had probably been parks, although they were now just dusty expanses of dirt with dried-up ponds, crossed by gently arching bridges. These were small details the images from MP-141 has not shown, and it answered some of the questions about the artifact was.

The scale of the place kept fooling me. It was several minutes before I realized that the "pipes" were at least five hundred feet wide. At that size they could have been an enclosed transportation system. This place was big!

The Wax had pulled into a tight formation as we slowly circling the complex. Everybody was understandably nervous, since it seemed obvious that the artifact was in control of the storm. If it could create a hurricane of this strength, how hard would it be for it swat down two puny stellascouts? On other hand, we had already performed a kamikaze dive at the artifact without experiencing any retaliation. Perhaps the inhabitants suspected what truly nice guys we were.

A gentle hand landed my shoulder, and I turned to find Danceea standing behind me. Softly she said, “No word yet?” I starred at her like a dunce for three whole seconds until he said, “Carrington? When you tried to raise him on the comm?”

“Oh, right! I was just about to do that!”

Danceea rolled her eyes and gave clear non-verbal indications that she was rethinking her opinion of my intelligence. I got busy with comm system.

"Transector stellascout John Wayne to any station receiving this transmission, please respond."

I repeated this sparkling monologue, transmitting on a wide range of frequencies, until it seemed clear that nobody was going to answer. I looked back at Danceea and saw the look of concern on her face. She was here risking her lift to rescue a man whom she greatly respected. The sooner we found him alive and well, the soon the lady could start smiling again.

I turned my scanning equipment on the artifact, just to see what I could learn. Here at the center of the storm there wasn't a trace of the magnetic interference. Such delicate control of powers so great was very impressive indeed.

Since nobody else would talk to us, Glen and I started talking shop as we learned little things about the artifact. Like the fact that there was not a trace of detectable power usage in the whole city-sized complex. Either it was dead, or incredibly well shielded, and since we attributed the creation to of the storm to powerful forces which originated right here, I was sure the latter seemed the most likely explanation.

Glen agreed with me. "What's a little perfect shielding to a machine that can whip up a hurricane?"

"Good point. So what's our next move? If there's anybody inside that thing, they aren't taking any calls, and if Carrington is in there, he isn't taking calls either. It seems silly to just start knocking on doors — "

"Wait a second," said Glen. "Maybe we're all spending too much time going ga-ga at the big whatever-it-is. Let's look around a bit."

"Look around at . . . oh! I got it. Okay, you take north and I'll take south."

We turned our instruments away from the artifact and towards the seemingly empty dessert around the complex. Less than twenty seconds passed before Glen called me excitedly.

"Pay dirt! Point your gear towards the northwest. It's way out towards the edge of the storm."

I discovered a small complex of buildings about five miles from the main complex. Glen and I found three more such complexes, arranged like the points of a compass, with the super-complex at the center. And parked next to one of them was Dr. Carrington’s three stellavoyagers. Bill and Randy throttled-up, and we streaked across the desert.

Correction: the remains of Carrington's three stellavoyagers. When we arrived at the complex of buildings we discovered that the ships had been shot full of holes. From the looks of them we could see they must have been on the ground when it happened.

I turned around and looked up at Danceea. She was gazing at the wreckage with her face filled with anger and despair. A tear rolled down her cheek. Behind her the other passengers had crowed into the doorway to view the tragic site.

No one spoke a single word.

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Sun Feb 27, 2022 7:32 pm; edited 8 times in total
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Gord Green
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Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 10:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A Descent into the Maelstrom if there ever was one!

Vivid and clear storytelling. It truly felt that the reader was a part of the action.
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