"What makes us believe that the Matriarchy is the only advanced, sentient species we'll encounter? Hubris. We don't feel that we can suffer the same indignity twice. Perhaps that's true; perhaps in the next encounter we will look down upon another race and our superiority will be absolute."
(from Tumbling Down the Food Chain) Simon Villiers
Knife was readying to lift. They probably thought I was dead. Looking back at the two scaly creatures keeping pace with the bike - big eyes, sharp claws, wicked teeth – I could see how that would be the obvious conclusion.
I'd really been hoping the Universe had stopped trying to kill me...
The electrostats had begun to howl. That was never a good sign. I scanned the data. We were brushing the outer fringes of the Coattails, encroaching on the first wisps of nebulae matter. Our destination lay in dust-rich space, but the electrostats should have coped with the grain-size and density. Something was wrong – the feedback through the shunt had gone from an irritation to actual pain.
I left the technical stuff to the rest of the crew, concentrating solely on getting us down.
Mankind hadn't made it this far out and I was told the matriarchy had only been through on scouting missions. They knew there were ruins on Coma – our destination, to gather more information on a species that seemed to have disappeared from this arm of the galaxy. It was a planet of contrasts, dense equatorial jungle; vast savannas over a full quarter of the surface; ragged but low mountain ranges. Lacking a moon, the numerous shallow seas were tide-locked. S'tur had told me the matriarchy had considered a colony, but Coma was too far out to be easily re-supplied, and self-sustaining colonies took a while to establish themselves. The war with mankind had disrupted their plans.
Down into thickening atmosphere I could feel the gases shredding the weakening dust shield, abrading the bow. Power output from the drives was dropping steadily – we weren't going to be achieving a stable, powered descent! You didn't worry about this happening when you flew in-system haulers. Biggest potential problem was scraping paintwork when you docked. Or maybe bumping a derelict satellite.
All in blues and greens, with an overlay of ever-deepening red, the ground was getting closer. Emergency sirens already had the crew strapped in. The turbines fed hungrily on the air we dropped through, but you need the drives to pump fuel into the ignition chamber. We kept getting flame-out as the supply of fuel fluctuated below ignition pressures.
Deciding subtlety wasn't an option, I diverted the decreasing power into the lifters and prayed the generators wouldn't die on our way in. The AI kept telling me we were crashing – it used distracting technical terms about power ratios and velocity, I just poured what energy the Knife had left into the lifters – I wasn't sure if the synaesthetic glow I was experiencing was my shunt burning out or the ship catching fire. Either way it hurt. It hurt a lot. I think I was screaming.
I'm still fuzzy on the fine detail, but the Knife held together, survived Coma's atmosphere to set, not-so-gently, upon red rock and blue lichen within a wide, irregular circle of trees. Felt like I'd been flayed. Pain reached as deep as my heated, glowing bones... Then I passed out.
Slept for two days. Might've been drug-induced, to give my brain time to deal with the neural overload. I certainly woke in the infirmary. Next to the guy I'd smashed in the head. I'd woken up, he hadn't. Still working on the sympathy, but it's not coming easy.
S'tur caught me up on events, while I sat an ate a solid meal. Near-death experiences leave me hungry.
They'd checked the ship systems for sabotage. It's a laborious process as starships are complex beasts - multiple redundancies on all systems, numerous interconnected parts that form a mind-bending machine. I don't understand the physics behind space travel, I just point the thing where we want it to go. Ship, the AI, oversees the difficult bits. She helped point technicians at systems that seemed to be acting-up; which was quite a few. But we were groundside, so we had the luxury of time; time for me to sleep and for the others to repair the numerous failures blighting the ship.
