Ishtar Rising (Book 2) - Michael A. Martin [1]
Seated beside Pattie, Lieutenant Commander Tev lifted his gaze from a tactical display and spoke toward the cockpit. “Commander Corsi, make sure you approach the force-field boundary at exactly the calculated angle. Miss it by the smallest margin and you could bounce us off the field lines and back into space.”
“Or it could be even worse,” Pattie said, clattering her mandibles for a moment and making a strange sound that Gomez translated as her version of splat! “To coin a phrase, we might be squashed like a bug.”
Gomez smiled at the self-deprecating humor, but Corsi only grunted in response, obviously concentrating on her flying. A little humor certainly didn’t hurt, given the unrelenting grimness of their current situation.
One of the project’s technicians had provided them with the vibrational frequencies of the force fields, so that they could penetrate them and try to get down to Aphrodite Station before the approaching lava flow destroyed it. If that hasn’t happened already, Gomez thought. Recent sensor readings had revealed that the lava was moving toward the ground station far more quickly than had originally been apparent. And the Kwolek’s passage through the topologically complex, interlacing force-field network was bound to be tricky, even with the vibrational frequency data. And once down, they might have only seconds to effect any sort of rescue, most likely a hastily improvised one.
“Aphrodite Station, this is Shuttlecraft Kwolek. Please respond.” Gomez keyed several panels on the touchscreen, modulating back and forth across the gamut of usable frequencies, but all that came through was a crackle of static. There wasn’t even an amplitude spike to imply that anyone might be trying to respond. This rescue mission might be completely in vain. But there’s no way of knowing that for certain except by making the attempt.
“Sensors still show nothing,” P8 said. “But I’m reading some very strong subsurface rumbles, with shear waves, compression waves, and crust motions I’ve never seen before.”
Great, Gomez thought. “What do you make of it?”
“I think the lava inundation could accelerate even further,” P8 said. “We’re running out of time.”
“Doing my best,” Corsi said through clenched teeth. The forward windows revealed only noxious yellow and brown gases that confounded any sense of direction. If one tried to measure the Kwolek’s motion by the available visual cues, the shuttle might as well have been standing still.
Judging from the feel of the inertial dampers in the deck plating, Gomez knew that Corsi had slowed the shuttle considerably in the last few seconds. Tev checked a panel and announced, “Three hundred meters to outer force-field boundary. Two hundred fifty. One seventy-five. Seventy-five. Fifty. Twenty-five.”
The atmosphere outside the forward windows had grown so dense, thanks to Project Ishtar’s force fields, that they had the look of a solid wall. Gomez reflexively checked her shoulder harness as Corsi and Stevens flew the Kwolek toward that apparently impregnable barrier at a steeply decelerating rate.
“Make sure our shield frequencies still match Project Ishtar’s,” Gomez said.
“Checking,” Pattie said, tapping at her console with multiple extremities. “We still have a positive match.”
“Confirmed,” said Tev. “But we still don’t know exactly how passing through multiply interleaved force fields will affect the shield-frequency compatibility.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” grumbled Corsi, turning to glance at Tev.
“Eyes on the road, Dom,” Stevens said.
“Force-field boundary now ten meters from ventral hull,” Pattie said, then continued counting down quickly. “Now!”
For a moment, the Kwolek was suspended in the air, like a fly caught in amber, and then it was pushed downward with tremendous force. Gomez grabbed the edge of her console even as her body slammed upward against the harness. The shuttle’s engines and inertial dampers both let out a sharp whine before the ship wobbled, then finally steadied and quieted.
“Now