Paws and Planets (13 page)

His
communications earplug beeped.

“Engine room
here Commander. You can take her down now.”

He swallowed
and licked his dry lips; strange how one always felt thirsty when
under strain.

“Warn the
ship,” he ordered.

There were four
bursts of the klaxon. Passengers and crew braced themselves. It
felt as if every person on the ship was holding his or her
breath.

Stuart
MacIntosh caught Jim Cranston’s eye as he began to punch in the
commands. The petty officer entered his.

They sensed the
ship responding. The WCCS
Argyll
tipped her nose forward and
began her long graceful curve towards the planet’s surface.

It was as if
time was suspended. Nobody said a thing. The duty bridge crew’s
eyes flickered from visuals to consoles and then back again, torn
between watching the planetary surface getting nearer and nearer
and keeping an eye on their readings. The integrity of the hull had
been checked and found to be sound enough to allow a landing, but
the engineering officers emphasised the fact that there were no
guarantees. Many things could still go wrong.

Problem was
that there was no other option; they had to land on the planet and
make a go of it or die. It was as simple as that. If all went well
they should land right at the coast of the more eastern (as they
viewed them at this precise moment) of the northern continents.

Robert
Lutterell had the job of keeping an eye on the integrity of the
hull during entry. He knew if the heat rose above a designated
limit they would burn up. He therefore kept a very close eye on the
display, wanting at least a few seconds warning if death was
inevitable.

The seconds
ticked by. His display numerals edged up towards the danger-point.
He bit his lower lip, then seeing Kath Andrew’s strained face
looking at him, winked and forced his face into a smile. He saw her
relax.

Stuart
MacIntosh and Jim Cranston’s fingers moved on the keypads, making
infinitesimal changes to the ship’s speed and course.

The display
monitor began to flash and CPO Lutterell took a deep breath in and
held it.
I’ll have to tell them
, he thought in desperation,
we’re not going to make it.
Then the display stopped
flashing and the numerals began to decrease. He breathed a sigh of
relief.

The WCSS
Argyll
continued on her final journey. She exited the
stratosphere and entered the atmosphere, heading towards the soft
flat area designated as the landing site. There were no
problems.

“Prepare for
landing.”

The klaxon gave
two sharp toots.

Stuart flicked
the toggle on his console that turned the thrusters over to manual
control. His fingers moved over his keypad. The ship descended,
moving inexorably toward the soft marshy ground. It was not far
away.

The thrusters
fired. The manoeuvre was not as effective as it would have been in
deep space, the thruster units were not after all designed to
operate in above zero atmospheres but they did slow the
Argyll
down. Before the engines had a chance to stall,
Stuart pressed the yellow button warning the engine room that he
needed that bit of extra power for the landing manoeuvre itself.
Jim Cranston reacted at once.

Both men’s
index fingers were hovering over the improvised dual landing
buttons. The Commander nodded. Their fingers pressed down. They
could hear the engines responding, labouring mightily to keep the
ship in the air long enough for the bridge crew to achieve the
landing trajectory.

The land
appeared to be approaching so very fast, the ground rushing up to
meet them.

At a nod from
Stuart the young engineering lieutenant cut off the engines. The
WCCS
Argyll
plunged the remaining few metres to the ground,
still maintaining some forward momentum, her hull protesting. Metal
screeched and anything not securely bolted down bounced around as
she landed on their new world, ploughing through anything that got
in her way. Bushes and trees were swept aside and she left a swathe
of destruction behind her. She began to slow down as the bottom of
the sphere met the resistance that was the boggy marshland before
swaying to a stop.

There was
silence, broken only by occasional loud bangs and thumps as items
dislodged in the descent settled.

Against all the
odds, they had made it; they were safe, for the moment.

Jim Cranston
and Stuart MacIntosh’s eyes met, each mirroring the other’s relief
at a job well done.

The challenge
of getting the colonists to Rybak had been accomplished, now they
must all meet the challenge of survival.

* * * * *

EPISODE 4 –
PRISON SHIP

When the WCPS
Electra
crash-landed in the southern continent, those aboard
had an experience that was nothing like what had happened on board
the WCCS
Argyll
; not for them the cushioned drop on to boggy
soil. Their desert landing-site was hard and uneven and the
Electra
ploughed through the sand dunes, plunging up and
down and skewing from side to side, like a bucking wild horse in a
rodeo.

Captain Peter
Howard and his bridge crew fought a hard battle to keep the ship on
an even keel, hoping they would make it without killing everybody
in the process.

The crew’s
families had been all strapped in to minimise potential casualties
but not so the thousands of convicts. They
were
warned and
had taken what steps they could, but it was too much to hope that
all would escape without serious injury. The individual cells,
constructed three high and four deep in the cargo holds, were not
built to withstand landing pressures and many men were crushed to
death before the
Electra
came to her abrupt stop, her nose
wedged deep inside a particularly large dune.

Once the ship
had settled there was a tense moment as the duty crew caught their
breath; some even pinched themselves as a reassurance that they
were still alive and that the landing hadn’t been a dream. Peter
Howard let out an explosive snort. His repertoire of snorts was
legendary and this one was more loud and expressive than anyone
within earshot had heard before but when he opened his mouth to
issue his first order since planet-fall, the words came out much as
normal.

“Johannes, kill
the engines.” Chief Engineer Pederson did, reflecting sadly that
this was the last time. They were dirtside for good. Like the crew
of the
Argyll
, they knew that there would be no possibility
of returning to their own sector of the galaxy. Now they must deal
with the double problem of surviving on this strange planet and of
how to cope with the twenty thousand criminals who’d arrived with
them. At least for the moment these men were safely locked away, at
least Peter Howard hoped they were.

“Check the
secure doors,” he ordered.

“All secure
sir,” was the reply, to his immense relief. The last thing they
needed was a prisoner breakout. The men would stay locked inside
their blocks for now. The automatic food dispensers would continue
to operate and the guards (of which there were no more than two
hundred and who were thus outnumbered a hundred to one) would not
volunteer to enter the cellblocks at this juncture and Peter Howard
had no intention of ordering them to do so.

Each cellblock
held around five hundred men, the prisoners had their own tiny
cells and all were free to move around the block’s communal area.
Basically they were left on their own to live any way they chose.
The guards only entered under dire necessity and then heavily
armed.

“Message from
the family section sir,” reported the signals rating, “no serious
casualties, just a few bumps and bruises.”

Peter Howard
took a further deep breath. “Start the evacuation procedures.”
There was no time to lose. The bridge crew had already begun the
process by shutting down the flight consoles and were picking up
their readied packs before exiting the bridge. The environmental
specialist was approaching him with data about conditions
outside.

“Atmosphere and
weather as expected sir,” reported Shelley Lambert, “and as hot as
a furnace.” A career officer, Shelley had never in her wildest
dreams expected to do anything else but spend her working life in
space. In fact, she had spent her life in space, on one ship or
another, a daughter of a Spacefleet career officer (Spacefleet
called them their ‘grandchildren’). She was doing extremely well to
transfer her energies and knowledge to an analysis of the planet
itself (having confined her expertise since graduating to shipboard
environmental issues), but the report her Captain received was top
class. Occasionally glancing at her handheld datbox unit to make
sure her information was correct, she continued, “and the riverbank
we were heading for is a hundred and sixty miles east of where we
are. We overshot the designated area, but with the tractors and
other vehicles we should still be able to reach the river by
nightfall.”

Peter Howard
smiled with satisfaction. They had been very lucky not to have
overshot the site by a lot more. He turned to his Number Two,
Commander Todd.

“Get them
started Camilla. The trailers are packed ready. We want to get out
of here and away from this ship before the prisoners work out how
to circumvent the security locks and escape from their blocks. I
know the power has been augmented and the batteries should hold out
for at least three to four days, but let’s not take any
chances.”

During the
journey to the planet both crew and guards had discussed their
situation and a plan had been accepted after much argument. Some of
the guards wanted to send the men to sleep permanently, but this
had been vetoed by the crew as being an act tantamount to murder.
The officers hoped that this decision would not come back to haunt
them.

In fact,
opinion was still divided and Peter Howard was positive that the
argument would rumble on for some time to come. As their Captain he
had tried to stay neutral and his personal preferences he kept to
himself. To cold-bloodedly send into permanent sleep some twenty
thousand men went against all that he had been taught and what he
believed to be right. The death penalty had been abolished,
finally, on Earth in the late twenty-first century. Peter Howard
believed that summary execution was not the answer to society’s
ills and he knew that there were some good men amongst the
prisoners. What couldn’t be avoided was the fact that these were
vastly outnumbered by the not so good.

Once freed,
what would the convicts do? How would they behave towards their
former guards, the crew and their families? The guards and the
majority of the crew were not optimistic. They believed that they
would be attacked and killed. They couldn’t take the chance, but
they couldn’t summarily execute the men either, that would make
them no better than the convicts themselves.

So, when crew
and guards left the ship with their families, stun-gas would be
pumped into all the convict blocks. This would give them a minimum
of two days head start before the effects wore off. Enough food for
seven days had been left for the prisoners and by the time it was
finished, it was hoped that the crew and families would be far
away.

Camilla nodded
in assent. A tall woman of thirty-five, she was an experienced
ship’s officer, had been slated for a ship of her own before the
disaster. She was also incredibly attractive. Her dark hair was
cropped short as was the norm for space-crew but the hairstyle did
not in any way detract from the classical beauty of her face. The
escape of these twenty thousand criminals was most definitely not
something she fancied staying around for. Her chances, and those of
the rest of the crew, especially the prison guards and the other
men, were not good if the prisoners managed to get their hands on
them. Twelve years incarcerated in a cellblock was not conducive to
good relationships.

Shelley Lambert
left for her duties on the surface after a last look round the
bridge and the two senior officers looked at each other with sober
expressions.

“That’s it
then,” said Peter Howard, “Good luck.” He nodded briefly,
indicating that he was leaving the execution of the evacuation plan
in her capable hands. He and another three crew-members, including
the senior engineering officer Johannes Pederson, had another duty
to perform. Knowing well that the convicts harboured in their midst
many hardened yet extremely clever men, it had been deemed prudent
and sensible to remove the power-core that powered the ship’s
engines and bury it in a ravine deep inside the desert. As Captain
he felt it was his duty to lead the team. They would set out at
once to transport the core to the chosen spot and using the
machinery available to them (a high-powered drill specifically
designed for ore mining), dig until they reached the desert
bedrock. Once the core had been deposited, the hole would be filled
in. Within days the site would be indistinguishable from any
other.

Only the team
would know where its final resting place was and only Peter and
Johannes Pederson would know its exact location on the grid-map.
The engineers had already finished the delicate process of
dismantling the casing, thanking all the stars in the sky that it
was a comparatively new model. The core was not a large object, nor
was it massively heavy. Two men could carry it easily, at least for
a short distance but in the wrong hands it could become an
incredibly lethal device. Therefore the engineers went about their
task with a caution born of wisdom, latest model of not, they were
of no mind to blow themselves and all that inhabited the
surrounding area into many thousands of little pieces. They hefted
it out to Peter Howard’s vehicle and strapped it in with due care,
only then speeding off to join the convoy preparing to leave for
the river.