Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [18]
That’s because it is a sandstorm, O’Neill thought as she struggled simultaneously with the shuttlepod’s pitch, yaw, and trim. “I’ve been through worse,” she said, though she hoped Reed wouldn’t ask her anything specific about the circumstances. “I’d better keep our approach on manual.”
“The computer can react faster if we end up crossing contrails with another ship inside this mess, Lieutenant,” Reed said.
O’Neill grinned. “The computer can’t ‘feel’ its way out of a storm. Besides, if any other ships come too close to us, we should get enough warning from the sensors to avoid them. We only have to miss them by the width of a paint job, and this is a big planet.”
Reed looked at her with mock surprise. “Oh, you think you’re that good? We’ve only got maybe a forty-meter sensor range inside this mess.”
She grinned at him. “I’m that good.”
Almost as if on cue, three shapes smashed into the forward window, their fist-sized feathered bodies splatting messily. O’Neill and Reed jumped, startled.
“The sensors certainly didn’t see those coming,” Reed said, nervousness coloring his voice. O’Neill couldn’t help but wonder how much faster those birds would have had to be moving in order to crack the front window; after all, not even transparent aluminum was completely indestructible.
“I don’t think the birds saw us coming either, if it’s any consolation,” she said. “Now quit bothering the driver.”
Reed lapsed into an unhappy silence. As the heavy winds scrubbed the carcasses of the fowl from the window, O’Neill quietly hoped that this little incident hadn’t been an augury of worse to come.
Ensign Ravi Chandra stared out the forward window at the panorama below them as the shuttlepod sped over the landscape. The surface of the planet was mostly desert, though there appeared to be some kind of hardy scrub vegetation that grew in patches. They were still too far from the surface to see any of the local fauna, though he could make out a number of tiny settlements dotting the mostly flat, cinnamon-colored topography. Studying the terrain that steadily unfurled below, Chandra began to suspect that Archer had chosen him for this mission based on the geography of the region on Earth that he called home.
He had grown up in Patna, the capital city of Bihar, in northeastern India’s Gangetic Plains, and was used to a much more lush and fertile climate than Kaletoo’s. But India’s Thar Desert contained dry, desolate vistas that closely resembled those that now rolled past below the descending shuttlepod. He recalled visiting the dunes just west of the Aravalli hills, before his family had made their way to Barmer and Jaisalmer on business.
Chandra’s father, Kamal, was a senior vice-president of Patna Air and Space, the company that owned the lion’s share of continental and extra-planetary shuttle facility contracts on the Indian subcontinent. It was through him that young Chandra had gained an appreciation for the stars, and from him that he had inherited the determination to one day reach them; after all, Kamal’s great-grandmother Abhirati Indrani had been one of the patient thousands whose steadfast exercise of passive resistance had eventually driven the tyrant Khan Noonien Singh from power at the end of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. Grandmother Abhirati’s actions had bestowed upon each subsequent generation of the family a sense of forward-looking resolve. Strangely, Kamal Chandra himself had never traveled beyond Earth’s atmosphere, telling his son instead, “You will be the first from our family to travel the heavens.”
Chandra realized with a start that it was almost Dussehra, the Hindu holiday celebrating the victory of Rama over the evil Asura king Ravana. Five years ago, the festival had marked his departure from home to join Earth’s burgeoning Starfleet; now he would be observing