Redemption Ark

She was mindful of this as she backed in towards Tangerine Dream, the largest Jovian-type planet in the entire Epsilon Eridani system. She was coming in hard at three gees, Storm Bird’s engines straining at maximum output. The gas-giant world was an ominous pale orange mass that bulged towards her, heavily pregnant with gravity. Counter-intrusion satellites were sewn around the Jovian, and these beacons had already latched on to her ship and had started bombarding it with increasingly threatening messages.

This is a Contested Volume. You are in violation of…

‘Little Miss… are you certain about this? One must respectfully point out that this is completely the wrong trajectory for an orbital insertion.’

She grimaced. It was about all she could manage at three gees. ‘I know, Beast, but there’s an excellent reason for that. We’re not actually going into orbit. We’re going into the atmosphere instead.’

‘Into the atmosphere, Little Miss?’

‘Yes. In.’

She could almost hear the cogs churning away as antiquated subroutines were dusted off for the first time in decades.

Beast’s subpersona lay in a cooled cylindrical housing about the size of a space helmet. She had seen it only twice, both times during major strip-downs of the ship’s nose assembly. Wearing heavy gloves, her father had eased it from its storage well and they had both looked at it with something close to awe. ‘In, did you say?’ Beast repeated.

‘I know it’s not exactly normal operational procedure,’ Antoinette said.

‘Are you absolutely certain of this, Little Miss?’

Antoinette reached into her shirt pocket and removed a shred of printed paper. It was oval, frayed and torn at the edges, with a complex design marked in lambent gold and silver inks. She fingered the scrap as if it were a talisman. ‘Yes, Beast,’ she said. ‘More certain than I’ve ever been of anything, ever.’ ‘Very well, Little Miss.’

Beast, obviously sensing that argument would get it nowhere, began to prepare for atmospheric flight.

The schematics on the command board showed spines and clamps being hauled in, hatches irising and sliding shut to maintain hull integrity. The process took several minutes, but when it was done Storm Bird looked only slightly more airworthy than it had before. Some of the remaining bulges and protrusions would survive the trip, but there were still a few spines and docking latches that would probably get ripped off when it hit air. Storm Bird would just have to manage without them.

‘Now listen,’ she said. ‘Somewhere in that brain of yours are the routines for in-atmosphere handling. Dad told me about them once, so don’t go pretending you’ve never heard of them.’

‘One shall attempt to locate the relevant procedures with all haste.’

‘Good,’ she said, encouraged.

‘But might one nonetheless enquire why the need for these routines was not mentioned earlier?’

‘Because if you’d had any idea what I had in mind, you’d have had all the more time to talk me out of it.’

‘One sees.’

‘Don’t sound hurt about it. I was just being pragmatic’

‘As you wish, Little Miss.’ Beast paused just long enough to make her feel guilty and hurtful. ‘One has located the routines. One respectfully points out that they were last used sixty-three years ago, and that there have been a number of changes to the hull profile since then which may limit the efficacy of…’

‘Fine. I’m sure you’ll improvise.’

But it was no simple thing to persuade a ship of vacuum to skim an atmosphere, even the upper atmospheric layer of a gas giant — even a ship as generously armoured and rounded as hers. At best, Storm Bird would come through this with some heavy hull damage that would still allow her to limp home to the Rust Belt. At worst, the ship would never see open space again.

And nor, in all likelihood, would Antoinette.

Well, she thought, at least there was one consolation: if she trashed the ship, she would never have to break the bad news to Xavier.

So much for small mercies.

There was a muted chime from the panel.

‘Beast…’ Antoinette said, ‘was that what I thought it was?’

‘Very possibly, Little Miss. Radar contact, eighteen thousand klicks distant, three degrees off dead ahead; two degrees off ecliptic north.’

‘Fuck. Are you certain it isn’t a beacon or weapons platform?’

‘Too large to be either, Little Miss.’

She did not need to do any mental arithmetic to work out what that meant. There was another ship between them and the top of the gas giant; another ship close to the atmosphere.

‘What can you tell me about it?’

‘It’s moving slowly, Little Miss, on a direct course for the atmosphere. Looks rather as if it’s planning to execute a similar manoeuvre to the one you have in mind, although they’re moving several klicks per second faster and their approach angle is considerably steeper.’

‘Sounds like a zombie — you don’t think it is, do you?’ she said quickly, hoping to convince herself otherwise.