A LONG TIME AGO I LOST MYSELF
1560 4D
The retro burn started off normally. A grinding roar filled the cabin; flakes of ancient dust and metal came free, and whipped aft as the ship decelerated. Orbiting in a near-circle at a lunar distance, they had to drop enough speed from their orbit to bring the perigee of their ship’s orbit close to the planet, making their orbit into a long ellipse. They would then fire another retro burn to bring the apogee down so that they were moving in a circular orbit just above the planet‘s atmosphere. Their final retro burn would then bring them into first contact with the air of Tarnus, and commit them to entry and landing.
The ship started shuddering as the first burn went on. Dree spoke rapidly to the droids, and the shuddering increased. She called to Jeff over the blasting noise, “The engine reporting the fuel problem is not producing full thrust.”
“How bad is it?” he shouted back.
“I can’t tell yet.”
The engines finally cut off. Dree muttered frantically, stabbed two buttons on the panel in front of her, and sat back. “That’s as good as we get, for now.”
Jeff peered out at the vast receding cylinder of the Tompuso. Now he and Dree were falling toward Tarnus, in a tiny ball not designed for entering a planetary atmosphere. “I hope those… Nains knew what they were doing,” he said.
“They do,” Dree told him. “They got me back up and running with nanobots, and they did what we needed. That was easier. You got your suit on and sealed?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’ve got to go out and try to make sure the engines are working properly. If I don’t, and this thing misfires again, we could burn up on reentry.”
“Are we on course now?”
“No. We have to do a correction. That’s another reason for fixing the engine, if I can.”
“What if you can’t?”
“We’ll have trouble calibrating the correction and all the other burns we have to do after that. It’ll be like shooting pool blindfolded, with a cue a thousand miles long.”
Jeff chuckled, feeling despair creeping up in his throat. “Just a cornucopia of choices, isn’t it?”
“Hey,” Dree said. “I came back from the dead. So did you. This is just an encore.”
“Get on out there,” Jeff said. “Any way I can help? Got any more Nains?”
“We used the last of them for the ablation shield and the descent functions. Just listen to the droids in the cabin, and watch the reports. As soon as I get the air pumped down, I’m blowing the hatch and heading out.”
“Godspeed,” Jeff said.
“What?”
“Just a good wish for your success.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Dree called in several hours later. “Jeff. We need to test the engines.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing until I get inside again. Suited up?”
“Yes. Come back in.”
She bobbed up next to him. “The hatch is secured. Let’s try a tiny burn, minimum thrust for ten seconds.”
They ran the burn, and Dree smiled. “It’s working. There was a tiny piece of a Nain welded to one of the nozzles. I cut it free. Time for big burn Number One. Droids, time to get us down.”
Tarnus was big, bigger than the Earth Jeff remembered. He and Dree now sat in a tight orbit over the planet, ready for re-entry. He scanned the clouds and the seas and the continents, looking for signs of something more than just a water-bearing body. Here and there on the day side, tantalizing hints of dark lines spanned empty brown and olive-colored plains. The lines seemed too straight to be natural. On the night side, flickers and flashes of light seemed to dance away from his searching looks, leaving him with no direct clues. A thin line of red-gold in the night hinted at a vast brush fire or forest burn. Lightning seethed and roiled in the darkness, until the day side of Tarnus returned under them and he looked for lines again. He longed for a telescope.
“Where do you want to land?” Dree asked him.
“Let’s check again for signals,” he said, and they hunted through the radio frequencies, finding only some strange bursts of noise.
“Is that human-made?” he asked once.
Dree shrugged, her face serene. “It may have… it might be. There’s signal under the static. I don’t know.”
“What do you see down there?”
She peered out through the ship’s window. “There are long markings that might be roads or tracks. But they might be something else. I see a place where they come together, but they vanish before they reach it.”
“Something underground, maybe?” Jeff thought of the old cities of Earth, with their subway lines. “Let’s try to get near there, maybe near one of the lines.”
“Droids,” Dree said, “Prepare an entry burn.” She spoke reference points.
“Landing zone range of error is large,” a droid voice said. “We have no data on atmospheric dynamics and makeup.”
“Does our selected zone overlap danger areas, such as mountains or seas?” Dree looked at Jeff.
“No. The selected zone is plains, with few elevated or irregular features.”
“Then let’s go,” Jeff said. He looked out the window at the planet. What was waiting for him there? All his crewmates had to be dead by now. Akiko. He put his face in his hands.
“What is it?” Dree asked.
“Was there… Is there an Akiko Kimura from our ship?”
“There was.” Dree paused. “She never woke up from cold sleep.”
Jeff checked his suit and helmet, tightening everything down, trying to think about the countdown to the final burn. Weariness, the exhaustion of thousands of passing years of time, crept up into his gut like a dark reptile of despair. At that moment he wanted to take the controls and force the ship into a blazing meteoric end. He looked up, tears starting, and Dree was beside him.
“Jeff,” she said. “Let’s go down there first. Then there’ll be a place for you to cry for her.”
“Never mind. I’m fine.”
“So am I.” Dree‘s mouth was set, and her eyes darted back and forth, reading, checking the displays.
“Did you lose anyone?” Jeff asked her.
“I lost my best friends. And a long time ago I lost myself.” She sat bolt upright, gave the ship’s droids an order, and said, “Strap down. It’s going to be interesting.”
“When we get down there, we’ll have to do something about your leg,” Jeff said.
Her pause seemed to take too long. “First, let’s get down there. I have to concentrate now — if I miss even one millisecond of ship-attitude correction, this thing will explode in seconds. Here comes the final burn.”
