Citadel: First Colony (2 page)

He arrived on the bridge and pulled the hatch closed behind him. For the first time since the alarm had sounded, he allowed himself to relax a bit. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, ignoring the shaking stutter of his breath. He was alone here. The rest of the waking crew was bleeding out of the main body of the spacecraft, the segment that would for a time make up the orbital platform, and Alonzo would soon find himself the last waking soul aboard. Once the two extension modules were loosed and safely on their way, he could work on awakening Beta crew. He could organize them into repair teams and get the orbital platform back to full function, then deal with the problem of getting back to civilization.

He checked the monitors and took note when the crew was fully loaded into the Citadel landing module. The Colony module was firing up for entry, too.

“Captain,” First Commander Marcos called over the wired video intercom. “We’re loaded here. What’s the status of the Colony module?”

Alonzo checked a status screen and frowned. “Still locked, First Commander,” he said. “It looks like you’re going to have to do a simultaneous landing.”

“
Simul
... are you saying the Colony module is going down
with us
?”

“Affirmative, First Commander. No way around it. We’re too close to the atmosphere, and if I don’t get both of you off of my belly, the whole ship’s going in. I’m disengaging all docking clamps now. The orbital platform should settle in to geosync once I rebound off of the two landing modules.”

Despite the confidence in his voice, Captain Alonzo had no idea if this plan was going to work. He was relying on a pretty rudimentary understanding of physics—equal and opposite reactions—to justify what he was about to do. In theory, the orbital platform would be pushed out towards open space, and he could maneuver it into geosynchronous orbit using thrusters. In reality, if it didn’t work ... well ...

“Get an engineer to the module junction to start the manual release. We’re still feeling the effects of the lightrail. No radio or wireless yet, so once the physical links are broken, we’ll be out of contact. By the time you get to ground and get the wireless set up, we should be in orbit and back online. Report in as soon as you can.”

Marcos nodded, “Aye, sir.” He paused, then said, “Captain, just in case this goes bad ... I want you to know it was an honor serving with you.” He snapped a salute.

Captain Alonzo smiled. Marcos, his First Commander, was a good man, and they had served together for a very long time. He was honor-bound and duty-driven. When he offered an honorable salute of any kind, he meant it. It was one of the reasons Alonzo had chosen him as his second-in-command, even though there were higher ranked crewmembers on board at the time. Good men, as the
cliché
goes, are hard to find. Alonzo returned the salute with just as much respect. “Get those people on the ground, Commander. That’s an order.”

The
crew was boarded and in the process of strapping in.
Marcos was gripping the sides of the console before him, staring at the smiling, slightly haunted image of Captain Alonzo on screen as he let his salute fall. “Get those people on the ground, Commander,” the Captain said. “That’s an order.”

“Aye, Captain,” Marcos said. The image blinked off, and the screen went dark. Marcos turned to face the crew, most of whom were still struggling to lock themselves into place. There were more people than chairs, unfortunately, and many were forced to snap into the emergency straps lining the module walls. Marcos shook his head. Some of them were going to have a rough time going down.

He spotted one of the White Collar medical personnel. “Doctor,” he said, “when we’re down, there are going to be a lot of injuries ... ”

“Got it,” the doctor interrupted. “You concentrate on getting us to the surface in one piece. I’ll worry about patching up the wounded.”

Despite himself, Marcos smiled. He was a fan of no-nonsense. He nodded and turned back to once again survey the crowd.

One man immediately stood out—his skin naturally hued a light and organic green. “Captain Somar?” the First Commander asked, pushing through the settling crewmembers to stand before the alien. “I figured you’d still be in stasis.”

The alien captain was an experiment of sorts. He was one of the first participants in a crew exchange between Earth Colony Fleet and their former enemies, the Esool. Until recently—within the past few years actually—humanity had been engaged in a bitter territorial war with the Esool. The fight had been long and scarring, and humanity in general was having trouble letting it go. But the leaders of the Earth Colonies—a relatively new, poorly organized, and only occasionally unified government of humanity—felt it was time to put differences aside and share the gaping expanse of space with the only other sentient species they had ever encountered.

The decimation of a rare and invaluable planet, one that could have supported human life, had certainly played a role in the movement toward peace.

Somar looked up from helping one of the female White Collar engineers into a seat harness. “First Commander Marcos,” he said, nodding briefly. “I was in stasis in the White Collar pod bay. I was awakened with the others.”

Marcos nodded. “I’m sorry about that. Captain Alonzo felt it was important to get all of the support crew into the Citadel module. It has the best chance of making it to the surface intact.”

“What about the colonists?” Somar asked. “Are they in danger?”

“All of us are in danger,” Marcos admitted. “But the Colony module has a reinforced hull and atmospheric thrusters. Not to mention computer guidance systems that should kick in once the light-speed effect wears off. We’re hoping that’s enough.”

“I believe the guidance systems depend upon Citadel being planet-side to guide the module to a safe landing, do they not?”

Marcos let the question hang, and after only a brief pause, Captain Somar nodded, catching on that things could go from bad to worse.

Marcos looked around and spotted one of the White Collar engineers, a man named Thomas. “You,” he said, “I need you to get to the module junction and activate the manual release.”

Thomas hesitated.

“Go!” Marcos shouted, annoyed.
White Collars
, he thought.
Always balking ... always bucking authority
. This was far from a military operation, but the chain of command had to be maintained. If it were up to Marcos, he’d have left all of the W.C.’s in stasis. But the captain’s command was clear, and orders were orders. Marcos was willing to admit that their survival might depend on one of these pampered types. Regardless of his opinions, they might need every soul they could get.

Snapped out of any reluctance, Thomas ran out into the corridor and towards the junction room.

Somar spoke up, “Our first priority must be the colonists.”

Marcos turned back to the Esool Captain and paused. He had almost forgotten the alien was there. “I’m sure Captain Alonzo thinks so too. But we can’t help them if we’re scattered all over the landscape.”

Somar reflected on this then nodded, turned away, and continued to help the White Collars into their harnesses.

Marcos turned to the module pilot, the young woman named Reilly. She was methodically working the preflight checklist and preparing for an emergency atmospheric entry. Marcos knew Reilly well and admired her a great deal. If anyone could handle a forced landing under these chaotic conditions, it was her.

They might just pull through this.

Or it might all be for nothing
, he thought.
Even if we survive
. The prospect of having to scrape by on a colony world with no way off had crept into his mind, but he shoved it back and focused on the business of saving their collective asses.

Now
this
, Thomas thought,
is just about typical
.

He wasn’t generally a fatalist, or even overly pessimistic. He was simply a keen observer of a life spent rebounding from one crash after another. True, this one would be a little more literal than most, but ironically appropriate considering how he’d found himself here in the first place.

Thomas shook his head as he ran. He didn’t believe in poetic injustice. The universe had a sadistic sense of humor, but it wasn’t that cruel.

He hoped.

Right now, he was focused on finding the manual release. In the weeks after waking up to his new life, Thomas had spent most of his time memorizing the mechanics and layout of this ship. He needed a “conversational” knowledge of how things worked here if he intended to pass for an engineer. His own specialty gave him the foundations he needed to catch up, but his knowledge of the ship’s sub-light engines and computer systems would do him little good when it came to the intricate mesh of cogs, wires, and pumps. Apparently, one of the major side effects of travel on the lightrail was that digital technology was rendered useless for the duration.

He knew how that felt.

But he’d always had a head for diagrams, blueprints, and spec sheets. And in the end, that’s what it took to come up to speed on “modern” engineering—a mish-mash of mechanics that seemed like a cross between the Victorian era and rivets-and-steel science fiction. Now, though, he had to quickly apply what was in his head to what was spanning out before him. Was this the right corridor? And what, exactly, would the manual release look like?

He wondered briefly how First Commander Marcos would react if he knew that this particular “White Collar” had never been on a modern space craft before.

The corridor opened up into a large room with walls made of overlapping bands of metal. From small portholes, Thomas was able to peek out at the blackness of space. They were still riding the lightrail, a beam of near-solid energy that stretched to infinity, as far as Thomas could tell. Streaks of light, distant stars seen from a sliding vantage point, were starting to shrink toward points. The ship was slowing down.

Thomas could see the landing module to the left and the orbiting platform to the right. The only thing holding both together was the docking tube in which he now stood. Far away, attached to another part of the ship, was the colony module. The design hadn’t changed much since the first vessel, appropriately named "First Colony" more than 150 years earlier.

Thomas shuddered at a not-distant-enough memory and turned back to face the contents of the junction room.

Along one wall was a series of cabinets and lockers. A communications panel was wedged in among these. And there, in a large gap made between two banks of lockers, was a metal wheel and a sign reading “Manual Release” in large, red, and (to Thomas, at least) beautiful letters.

He ran to it, placed both hands on the wheel, and gave it a tug. Nothing.

He rolled through the details of the release in his head. There was nothing that should prevent this wheel from turning ... except ...

He ran his hands along the base of the wheel, which was hidden from view. There it was—the cotter pin. It was attached by a small chain to the wall behind the wheel. Thomas grabbed the chain and tugged. It was in there tight, but it did move slightly. He pulled harder. The chain felt as if it were cutting into his hand, and in seconds, it pulled free and clinked against the wall.

He shook his hand briefly, then firmly gripped the wheel again. After two deep breaths, he gave it a turn, putting all of his weight into it.

The manual release clicked and clacked as he turned the wheel. Finally, after what felt like an alarmingly long time, it gave one final click and stopped turning. A buzzer sounded from somewhere behind him, and when he’d turned back from glancing around for it, Thomas put his shoulder to the wheel for one last go. He pushed hard, put all of his weight into it, but the wheel would budge no further. Satisfied, he picked up the cotter pin and pushed it into the hole at the base of the wheel. Now that it was in the open position, the holes in the shaft lined up again and the pin slid in much easier than it had come out.

Thomas quickly made his way through hatch of the junction room, closing the large, heavy door behind him, and into the corridor connecting the junction bay to the landing control module. First Commander Marcos was barking orders at the Blue Collar crew, each busy with last-second preparations for the launch. The Commander turned to Thomas. “The green light just came on. Good work,” he said.

Thomas nodded and made his way to one of the handrail-studded walls at the back of the module’s crew bay. The alien captain ... Somar ... was busy working straps and hooks, fastening people to the handrails. Many of the White Collars still seemed dazed and confused by the events they’d awoken to, and they offered little in the way of help. Thomas stepped in beside Somar and began helping the alien to strap people in.

“Thank you,” Somar said, nodding to him slightly.

Thomas nodded in return and clipped the remainder of the White Collar and Blue Collar crewmembers to the walls. He and Somar then secured themselves and prepared for what promised to be a very bumpy landing.

––––––––

M
arcos
flipped open the control panel’s switch-guard.
One at a time, he flipped the switches that activated the explosive bolts and thrusters. One by one, each bolt exploded, and each thruster fired. Soon they would pull free of the orbital platform and hit atmo ... probably way too fast. But they had a chance, and Marcos was going to follow orders and get these people to the ground. Safely if it was possible.

The landing module jarred heavily, throwing Marcos to the floor.

“What ... ?”

Another wrenching quake, and the screeching sound of metal on metal resonated through the hollows of the module.

“Commander!” Reilly, the pilot, shouted over the din. “The release clamps are still engaged!”

Damn it! The White Collar—Thomas. He must have screwed up. Marcos stumbled to the man, who was being buffeted between crew members on one of the handhold walls. He grabbed Thomas by the collar. “The release is still closed!” he shouted.