Lost in Transmission

chapter zero no quiet today "Hold on tight," Radmer says, too late to do any good. The first air pocket comes and goes like a kick on the guts. Whump! Radmer is old enough more than old enough to remember the fiery slam and tumble of entering a planetary atmosphere from orbit. The howl of plasma, the glow of radiators . . . Piercing the atmosphere of Lune is nothing like that. For one thing, he's coming in under four kps, so there is heat but not fire. For another thing his vehicle is not some graceful, gull-winged shuttle, but a crude sphere of brass, navigated by eyeball and sextant and steered with charges of dinite explosive. Inertial stability comes, in theory, from a gyroscope made of a potter's wheel, but Radmer has been too busy steering to kick the thing and wind it up. Beyond the bootside porthole, he can see the world of Lune spinning crazily. The Squozen Moon: a world crushed and greened and left to its own devices, still in orbit around the pinpoint collapsar of Murdered Earth. Lune is so much smaller than a real planet. More delicate, more precious, and yet the largest by far the largest of the habitable worlds still bathing in the light of Sol. No longer whispering, the air is dense enough now to sing and screech against the hull of the sphere. But even from this altitude, deep into the atmosphere now, this world looks small and very round. Because it is: barely 1400 kilometers across. The size of a province, an inland sea, a large hurricane. Not quite to human scale, but nearly. Nearly. In the two-hundred and first decade of the death of the Queendom of Sol, in a space capsule made by armorers and watchmakers and artillerymen, General Emeritus Radmer once the architect Conrad Ethel Mursk is preparing to land in the province of Apenine, in the nation of Imbria, on this tiny world of Lune. Or hoping to, anyway. Where exactly he comes down will make the difference between a warm meal and a ghastly With a bump and a screech, the brass sphere hits another air pocket, an eddy in the storms of the upper atmosphere, and Radmer's payloadhis most precious of cargoes is thrown hard against its restraints. The capsule whirls. Then there's another bump, and another, even harder one, and the screech of air is louder than ever, and Radmer realizes they're not in the upper atmosphere at all. They've just punched through into the troposphere. Where the weather lives. The clouds are sparse today in this particular location, but they form a definite deck, a stratum of atmosphere rushing upward with visible speed. As the brass sphere spins down toward it, Radmer cannot help worrying that the rough ride will damage the payload. That would be bad very bad for the course of the war, because this particular payload has cost lives and fortunes to retrieve from the empty tropical paradise of the planette Varna. "Isn't there a parachute?" the payload asks. "Not yet, I'm afraid," Radmer answers. The payload is a human being, yes a man with ancient and critical knowledge about the way things used to work. He is older than Radmer by several hundred years, and looks it. It seems incredible criminal! to subject his wizened frame to this jerking, hammering fall through the sky, but the world of Lune will not save itself. It is up to these ancient men, these Olders, to do what they can. Radmer cannot pop the parachute because they are still too high, and the air too thin. Even if the chute opened fully, which he's not at all sure it would, the capsule could drift on the trade winds for hundreds of miles. And if they come down outside the borders of Imbria, then Radmer and the payload are in deep shit indeed. But Radmer has got to do something about this tumbling, or when he does open the chute it will foul, and kill them both with even greater certainty. He has landed on streamers before, but in the sheltered eMcCarthy, Wil is the author of 'Lost in Transmission', published 2004 under ISBN 9780553584479 and ISBN 0553584472.