The New Terra Sagas

Chapter 3: Ship Down

Roy could feel the gravity of the planet pulling on him as he desperately tried to restart the main engines. Alarms buzzed as the fighter went into a flat spin and the atmosphere got thicker, heating the exterior of the ship to a glowing red.

"Come on! Come on!" he yelled as the engines refused to start. "Computer! Deploy wings!" The fighter extended wings, enabling it to navigate in an atmosphere. "Engage atmospheric thrusters," he ordered the computer, as the ship began to shake violently. The thrusters fired up. For a moment it looked as if he had regained control of the situation as he started to gain altitude. Then with a groan and a compressed boom, two of the thrusters blew out. He was falling again.

"Thrusters at 30%," the computer reported.

"Transfer power from weapons to thrusters!" Roy ordered. He regained some control as the fighter slowed enough to prevent it from burning up like a shooting star, but it was still falling. Clouds blinded Roy's view as his sensors were still out. His only hope was to get enough thrust to get out of the planet's pull and back into open space. The engines whined and roared as he pushed them to gain altitude. "Come on! Come on!" Roy grunted through gritted teeth. It wasn't working. With his time running out, he knew he would have to try something more desperate. "Computer, transfer power from the shields to the thrusters!" he ordered, trying to get that last bit of thrust to break out. The entire ship rattled and shook as the engines groaned, but it was working. The fighter started to climb, just a little bit at first, but he gained altitude. "That's it, baby, that's it," he said out loud to the ship as if trying to urge a beast of burden up a hill. Slowly easing the throttle up, he added more and more thrust against the gravitational pull of the planet. Roy's relief was short lived when suddenly one of the working thrusters exploded in a giant burst of fuel, knocking out the entire system and pitching the ship over to the port in a roll.

Roy kept his cool, but he knew he was in trouble. He corrected the roll but was still in a nosedive with no power at all. Acting quickly, he switched the controls to atmospheric flight allowing him to regain some control of the craft, flying it like a massive glider. The dive had dropped him below the cloud cover where he could at least see what he was dropping down towards. At first, all he could see was water as he flew over what seemed like an endless ocean. Then, on the horizon, he saw a land mass. "Thank God," he whispered to himself.

Landing in a vast ocean was the last thing he wanted, as the high waves would devour the little ship. Pointing straight for the land mass, he prayed that he had enough height to make it. If he had to eject and let his ship fall into a sea, he would want it as close to the shoreline as possible. Too far out, the ship and its systems would be out of his reach, and all chance of calling for help would be lost.

It wasn't going to be easy. Without his landing thrusters, Roy would have to find a clear and flat stretch of land, or a body of shallow water and try to put it down on its treads like an ancient aircraft. Remembering as much as he could about dead stick flying, he recalled that it required enough of a dive to keep the forward momentum at just enough to steer the craft, but not so much as to not to be able to control a landing. He had only done it in a simulator, and the last time was over five years ago. It wasn't easy then, and his life hadn't been on the line. Part of being a good pilot is the ability to keep one's cool in high-stress situations. At that moment, however, he wished he was anywhere else. The water below suddenly came to an end at a large land mass. It began with a cliff face that was at least two kilometers high. Roy found himself over a forest with nowhere to land, just trees and rocks.

Biting down on his lower lip, he calculated the rate of descent to the trees approaching ground level to guess at how long he had until he had to eject and let his fighter crash. Then, his luck finally changed for the better. A lake was coming up right in front of him. He kept his cool by carefully planning each step of his descent. If he could do it just right, he might be able to put his bird down in one piece. Because it was over water, he decided to keep the landing treads up. The idea being to use the bottom of the fighter like a flat stone and skip across the water, hopefully coming to a stop on some soft sand. Pulling the nose up just a bit brought his speed down and made the ship fall quicker. As he dropped, the water came up towards him faster and faster. Instinctively he clenched every muscle in his body knowing that even the best landing would be a rough one. With a loud thud, the ship hit the water, bounced, hit again and skipped. Roy had practically no control. He held the stick as steady as he could, and gripped the side of his seat with the other hand. On the third bounce, the nose hit the water, and the fighter tumbled. Segments of the wings and fuselage flew off in pieces. The cockpit compartment auto ejected, flying about twenty meters into the air before coming back down into the water with a violent thud. Everything went black. Just for a moment, he could neither see, hear, nor feel anything, but his mind did not stop. On the contrary, it went into overdrive. That brief moment that seemed endless, he considered that it might be the last moment of his life, that there might or might not be anything next, questioning if he should cling to life or let it go. All of that was only for the briefest of a moment. In a conscious choice to live, he forced his eyes open and shook off the disorientation. He acted quickly; knowing he only had seconds to get out before the compartment filled with water and sank. It was panic that killed most pilots in a critical situation. To forget a single step from one's training was sure death. Roy kept his wits about him, even though his heart was racing a mile a minute and he was on the verge of hyperventilating. To keep his brain focused, he did everything by the book. Grabbing his emergency pack, he pulled the lever blowing off the cockpit cover. Without hesitation, he rolled out into the water, using the pack to keep his head above water. The frigid temperature of the lake was a mixed blessing as the shock of it was like a slap in the face, making him more alert, yet it would soon chill him to the bone and freeze him to death if he didn't make land soon. The water was choppy as the winds had picked up. Bobbing his head up as the wave's cresses, he could make out the nearest point of the shore. Kicking as hard as he could and using one free hand to paddle, he swam as hard as he could towards the beach. Soon his feet started to make contact with rocks a few feet under the water line. In a mix of swimming and running, he made it to the edge and crawled onto the beach.

Once out of the water, Roy took a few moments to catch his breath as he laid face down on the beach that was more pebbles than sand. The air was cold, but the water had been like ice. His body shivered as the two suns overhead provided some warmth, but not enough. Digging his fingers into the pebbles, he took a deep breath through clenched teeth to gain mental control over his pain. "Okay," he said to himself, "need to build a fire, get dry, make sure there's enough food in the pack for a few days, and check the water to see if it is drinkable. Then, I'll see if any of the repair bots on the ship can receive a radio signal and retrieve the main communicator from the..."

A low growl caught his attention. There were many fears he had learned to overcome as a pilot, such as the fear of falling, suffocating in open space, and burning alive in his cockpit, but the fear of an angry animal was one he carried over from childhood. When he was twelve, he had stumbled upon a mother bear and her cubs. In a panic, he ran, and the mother bear gave chase. He ran for at least 90 meters until he got to a tree he could climb and get out of her reach. Ever since that day, he had carried an underlying fear of all large animals in his gut. The fear seemed very distant once he joined the space defense force.

Roy looked up to see a large animal about ten feet away. Its head reminded him of a mountain lion without the ears or whiskers but was large, larger than a polar-bear, and scale-like spikes ran down its back, protruding through the orange and red fur.

"Oh, Crap!" Roy said to himself, "I never thought I would have wished it had been a grizzly."

Slowly he reached into his pack and pulled out a survival bar. Peeling back the wrapping, he lobbed it in front of the animal. It wasn't interested. Instead, it growled louder, showed its teeth and crouched like it was about to pounce. "That's what I was afraid of," he said as he grabbed his sidearm with his other hand.

In one motion, he swung his arm forward and fired. The shot struck the ground in front of the animal, kicking up rocks and sand, startling it. Roy took the opportunity to jump to his feet and run the other way. The woods were thick, and the ground was more rock than dirt.

He knew that the animal would be able to overtake him with ease, and he could hear the huffing noise of the beast as it was running towards him. Stopping hard, he turned, fired at it, and then ran again as fast as he could. The effort did little to slow the animal down, and Roy was quickly running out of options. Coming to a ledge of a small canyon, he took a chance and jumped to a large branch of a tree growing out of it. For a moment he thought he was safe, but the large animal was hungry and did not want to give up the chase. Without even slowing down, it jumped onto the same tree, just below Roy. Clinging to the tree with its hind legs, it lunged and scratched up at Roy, trying to claim its meal. Its size was too much for the branches, and with a couple of snaps the top part of the tree, the animal and Roy plummeted to the river at the base of the canyon.

The water was shallow and running fast. It didn't do much to break Roy's fall adding gashes and broken bones to his already beaten up body. In the roar of whitewater, the rushing river tossed him around every which way. If he hadn't grasped onto an old log that was part way across the river with his good arm, he would have drowned. A voice rang out in his head. "Don't Give Up! Don't Give In! It's not over until you decide it's over." It was the memory of his father coaching him in the Mile High Marathon when he was seventeen. "It's not over until you decide it's over." The words referred to life as much as anything else. With a desperate determination to live, he pulled himself along the side of the log to the shore and got himself mostly out of the water before collapsing on his back.

Unable to move his neck more than a few inches, he looked around the best he could. The animal was nowhere to be seen. He figured it was either killed in the fall or gave up the chase. Either way, for the moment, the danger was over. Trying to collect his thoughts, he thought about what he needed to do next to survive.

"Okay, I dropped my gun. That's going to make it hard to hunt for food or start a fire." The pain was intense, but talking through it helped him to focus. "Dropped the emergency pack, so I don't have any food, med equipment, palm computer or communicator. Need to find some..." he couldn't stay focused. The pain was too great; he was bleeding internally and losing feeling in his legs. Unable to sit up, or even roll over, all he could do was look up at the sky. The binary suns shown through the trees along with a large half-moon and two smaller half-moons. Despite the multiple objects in the sky, it reminded him of home. The lush green forest and the sound of the river were very familiar. A shortcut through Bear Canyon Park, he used to take on his way home from school as a boy. Taking a bit of comfort believing that his last moments would be looking up at a blue sky through green trees, he then thought of his father's words trying to encourage him to go on, but he didn't have enough strength left even to lift his head.

"Sorry, Dad. I tried. I really did."

Then, everything went black.