Operation Starseed

Part 4-1

Part 4

Dylan takes us in low and steady, keeping

the Semper Fi above the spotty cloud cover until Vallery

patches in the landing coordinates. Then he plunges into the

planet’s atmosphere, into a steady, driving drizzle that fogs up

our external screens and leaves us flying blind because he’s going

too fast. “I hate it here already,” he mutters. The Semper

Fi is small and the nav deck is merely an extension of the

cockpit, so I’m sitting where a co-pilot would on the carrier, all

my nav screens right here in front of me, but we still wear

headsets and when he speaks, I hear his words echo deep within me.

Parker and Shanley are strapped down behind us, in the tiny

corridor that leads from the cockpit to the crew quarters. Twin

benches line the walls back there, and rigging keeps the shocks and

bumps of a landing to a minimum. As we hit a pocket of turbulence

and I feel the seat beneath me jolt suddenly, I wonder why whoever

made this craft didn’t put that rigging in the cockpit, as well. “I

can’t see where I’m going—”

“Slow down,” I tell him. I’m not

looking out the window, I can’t see s**t through the thin fog and

rain, but on my data screen I see we’re nearing the landing strip

that Ellington told Vallery would be open for us, and the way we’re

flying, we’re going to skip right over it. “Dylan, you have to slow

down a bit—”

“I’m the damn pilot,” he reminds me.

“Don’t tell me how to f*****g fly.”

I ignore that. He’s tense, we all are—we

don’t know what we’re flying into, Johnson was right, those files

told us nothing, and when Dylan gets like this, he’s

irritable and says s**t he doesn’t mean. He’ll apologize later, I

know he will, and he’s so much a part of me, of my soul, that I

can’t be mad at him for long, not when he’ll be holding my hands in

his tonight and kissing me and saying he’s sorry. He’s my weakness,

I hate to admit it but it’s true.

And he knows he’s flying too fast because I

feel him cut the throttle and the engines whine as the Semper

Fi starts to slow down a bit. Told you so, I think, but

I’m not going to say that. It’ll make him madder still and then

I’ll have to be the one to apologize, and I don’t want that.

This mood of his isn’t my fault.

Vallery’s clear voice comes across the

intercom. “I’m going to switch the channel over,” she announces.

“Ben says he has you on his screens. He says you’re coming in too

fast so rein it in some, boys. You’re going to shoot right past the

colony.”

“I never have that problem,” Dylan

mutters, and I grin because at least he’s joking now. He pulls the

yoke in and slows down even more, until it’s just a few klicks a

minute and that’s where I need him to be. “Ask Neal. I never miss

when I come.”

“I so did not need to know that,” she

says. He laughs and winks at me, and see how easy that was for him?

He hasn’t even said the words and I already forgive him. “I’m

switching over now. Try not to say anything to scare these kids

off, okay? Please?”

“Whatever you say,” Dylan mumbles.

Leaning across the space between our chairs, he plants a quick kiss

on my cheek and breathes, “You thought it was funny, didn’t

you?”

Grinning, I tell him, “Yes, I did.

Hilarious.”

He studies me for a minute like he’s not

sure if I’m playing with him or not, but then he kisses the corner

of my mouth and whispers, “Come closer.”

“Dylan,” I warn. On the screen in

front of me, a little red light starts to blink. “We’re losing

altitude, babe.”

“I’m on it,” he swears, but the ship

dips away below us and from the corridor, Parker hollers at him to

watch what the hell he’s doing. Dylan straightens up and jerks hard

on the yoke, bringing the Semper Fi’s nose up, and then he

slouches in his chair and pouts. “I said I had it covered.

Jesus.”

Now I lean across to him and place my lips

against his ear, and I whisper, “I know you did,” before I kiss him

lightly. As I sit back in my seat, he turns and smiles at me and

this is why I love him, this is what I live for, these small

moments where his smile lights up my entire world. “Just keep her

steady, hon,” I tell him, opening the channel Vallery’s switched

over. “Ellington?” I ask—didn’t she say Ben was the one who had us

in sight? Not Conlan, the other guy, the older one. “You with us

here?”

“Standing by,” comes the reply. It

strikes me that these colonists are all very curt, very

professional—almost humorless. I wonder what we’re going to find

down there when we land… but look at what they’ve gone

through, I remind myself. More than half of their original

number gone, and we’re not sure why but something like that’s got

to take a toll on a person, no? Maybe what I’m mistaking for a lack

of humor is just a grim outlook. Maybe for them, there is

nothing to joke about here. “I have you on the screens,” Ellington

says, his voice free of static now that we’re in the planet’s

atmosphere. “You’re coming in a little too fast—”

I speak before Dylan can make one of his

randy comments. “We’ve cut the thrust,” I tell him, even as Dylan

lets up on the boosters. “I have the landing strip on my vids but I

can’t see it. Are we on course?”

“You’re almost on top of us,” he says,

and Dylan cuts the thrust off completely, lets the ship coast

through the rain. Locking the coordinates into the nav system, I

rise to my feet and lean down over the control panel, try to look

through the clouds to see…

The land begins to materialize below us.

“Hold her steady,” I breathe, and behind me Dylan makes a

noncommittal noise in the back of his throat, a grunt that’s his

way of answering when he’s busy. He’s flying without the boosters

now, and the engines are only at half-cycle, I can hear them

churning through this nasty weather, and it’s going to be a touchy

landing, I can tell that already. We can’t see s**t out there, and

as I lean over the panel dangerously, trying to look down the side

of the ship and see the ground, I find there’s nothing really

to see. Just short, dried grass clinging desperately to red

clay, a muddy stream running with blood-colored earth and swollen

along its banks, a row of half-formed crops, haggard and bent

beneath the steady rain. “This is not a pretty place,” I

murmur.

“Sit down, babe,” Dylan tells me.

“You’ve got a great ass but it’s in my way.”

I laugh and plop back down into my chair.

“You’re just easily distracted,” I counter. On my data screen the

landing strip is coming right up on us. “Five degrees to the east.

Turn it slow.”

“Any slower and we’ll fall asleep,”

Dylan replies. Beneath us the ship starts to curve, and the fog

ahead grows dense, dark. As we approach, the shape solidifies into

the hulking remains of a colony craft, a huge starship twice the

size of Dixon’s station. Dylan pushes his mouthpiece up, clicking

off the open channel, and whispers to me, “I’m going to take her

around once. Just to see what we’re dealing with here.”

“Good idea,” I breathe. He flies in

close and we can see the battered hull, an ugly, dingy color, the

steel pocked and dented. Along the bottom, a tenacious vine clings

stubbornly to the landing gear, a dark, almost reddish growth like

cancer that’s spread along the lower portion of the ship. The

ship’s name stands out on the hull, the paint flecked, each

character easily the height of the Semper Fi itself.

S410. And below it, in letters that would tower over us if

we stood beside them, the words, Operation Starseed. “I’m

not believing this.” Paging the carrier, I ask, “Val? You getting

this on the backup?”

“I’m getting it,” she replies. “Nice

hunk of junk they’ve got there.”

Ellington’s voice cuts her off. “Captain

Teague, you’ve missed the landing strip—”

“No s**t,” Dylan mutters. Thank God

his headset’s turned off. “Tell him to keep his shirt on, we’re

just looking. Jeez.”

Yeah, that’ll go over big. Into the

comm-link, I say, “We overshot the strip. You were right—coming in

too fast. We’re trying for another approach.”

“Bullshit,” Dylan whispers, but he

angles around the ship and starts back towards the landing strip.

“How big you think this mother is?”

I shrug. “The stats file said what, almost

five hundred meters long? That sound about right?” Small interior

rooms, only about two hundred square feet per person, if I remember

correctly. Not much space at all, but with their reduced

population, the ship’s probably a perfect home for those who

remain.

As we come around the stern to the starboard

side, we can see the wreckage mentioned in the file—a huge, gaping

hole torn into the hull, cabling like sutures dangling from the

open wound. The rooms beyond are gray, dead, empty. Fifteen people

were killed when this happened, twenty years ago. I wonder if they

were sleeping in these rooms at the time, or if this was part of

the working area of the ship, not living quarters. And what

about the others? my mind whispers. The forty-some people

who started out on this ship and aren’t among the living now? What

happened to them?

Dylan glides past the damage, coming back to

the landing strip, and now I can see it, a patch of cleared land

where the clay is packed down in a long, narrow run. “There,” I

tell him, and he nods, eases the craft down. It shakes around us,

reluctant, and for a moment I think we’re not going to be able to

hold the position, the skids slip in the clay and we’re going to

have to lift off again, we’re not going to be able to land, but

then Dylan digs in and we touch down. The engines die and I can

hear the tap tap of rain against our hull. Beneath us the

Semper Fi settles into the clay, the ship creaking around

us, and I glance over at Dylan, flash him a quick grin. “You rock,”

I tell him.

He sighs loftily. “I know,” he says, and

when I punch his arm playfully, he laughs and pulls away.

In the corridor behind us, Parker unhooks

his riggings, stands and stretches to the ceiling, stomps his feet

as if to wake up his legs and says, “I’m flying us outta here.

You’re a hazard with that stick in your hand.”

“I got us down, didn’t I?” Dylan asks,

defensive. He tears off his headset and stretches in his seat. With

a wink my way, he asks me, “Do you think I’m a hazard,

baby?”

I busy myself with transmitting the final

coordinates to Vallery and mumble, “No comment.” Parker laughs at

that and Dylan pouts, but I’ll kiss that away later. On my screens

I see a hatch open on the S410 and then three people step out, each

covered in a plastic poncho that’s wrapped around them to ward off

the rain. “Heads up, guys,” I tell them. “Looks like the welcoming

committee’s on its way.”

Parker leans past me and squints out the

window. “We gotta go out in that s**t?” he asks softly. “Can’t we

wait til it lets up a bit?”

“I don’t think it ever lets up,” I

tell him. “What did the file say?”

From the corridor, Shanley speaks up over

the jingle of riggings as he tries to extract himself. “Almost

continual precipitation. This is probably the best you’re going to

get.”

There’s a knock on the hatch and Dylan

glances at me. “You scared of a little rain?” he asks, grinning at

Parker, “or can I let them in already?”

This is it. Dylan and Parker head to the

back of the ship, where the hatch is. Shanley follows them, and as

I finish up with the coords, I click on the intercom again. “We’re

leaving the ship,” I tell Vallery, speaking low into my headset.

“I’ll let you know when we get to their comm center.”

“Take care,” she says, and then the

connection closes and I toss my headset aside, trying to ignore the

nervous roil of my stomach as I follow the others.