Ilika emptied the last of the porridge grains into the cooking pot, and Kibi managed to find a little dried fruit in the back of a cupboard.
Others appeared one by one after getting baths and scrounging for clean clothes. For the first time in two weeks, Kibi announced she would start a load of laundry after breakfast.
While they ate, Rini displayed pictures of little Sonmatia Twelve on the screen over the steward’s station, and shared what he knew between bites of porridge. They peered at frozen landscapes with a pitch-black sky even at mid-day. In places, vast level plains were covered by ice and snow.
Elsewhere, jagged mountains stood like sharp teeth on the horizon. The ice, Rini explained, wasn’t water ice, but frozen gasses that would be an atmosphere somewhere slightly warmer.
However, Rini didn’t know the answer to the most burning question.
“Boro, would you brief everyone on the landing procedure?” Ilika asked as he began to collect dirty dishes.
Boro stood a little hesitantly, then drew himself up to his full height and took a deep breath. “This is going to be a little different than anything we’ve ever done. I’ve asked Manessa three times, and she swears it’s okay.”
Kibi, Mati, and Rini still looked clueless.
Boro continued. “Our problem is getting to the planet before we run out of food . . .”
Several people chuckled nervously.
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 201
“. . . and then slowing down enough to land. We’re saving the last of the old thruster fuel for take-off. There’s no air, so we can’t use atmospheric braking. We’ve got some tricks we’ll use on approach to minimize the relative motion, like coming in from behind the planet in it’s orbit. Luckily, parts of the surface are smooth, or this wouldn’t be possible.”
“What wouldn’t be possible?” Kibi butted in, unable to contain herself any longer.
Boro grinned. “The final deceleration will be done with friction between the ship’s hull and . . . um . . . the ground.”
With twenty-two hours and several course adjustments before arrival at Sonmatia Twelve, those who had not already done so had plenty of time to ask Manessa for themselves.
Kibi asked from the utility room when she got the clean laundry.
Mati asked from a bathtub later that day.
Rini asked from the crawlway under the lower deck where he was pretending to inspect his sensors.
“The landing procedure will not harm me in any way,” the ship assured each of them. “It is rarely done, as more elegant methods of landing are usually available, but it works. It is, of course, necessary to have complete inertia canceling.”
“What would happen if something went wrong with inertia canceling?”
each of them asked in slightly different words.
“All of the crew members would die . . .” Manessa began.
After a moment of reflection, Rini, Mati, and Kibi, at different times and places, each shrugged.
“. . . and any cooking pot on the stove would spill,” the ship added.
After rolling with laughter, which brought tears to all three crew members, they each went back to preparing for the strange approach and landing on the icy little planet.
Everyone managed to get a nap that day, but excitement was high, and Rini, Sata, and Mati all had duties at each course adjustment.
Repeatedly, during the hours of waiting, Ilika was asked if there was
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 202
anywhere else in their home solar system they should explore. He soon realized what they were feeling. Satamia Star Station was far, far away, accessible only with the mysterious star drive, and they all knew it.
Boro settled the issue when the entire crew was at the table getting a snack before the last course adjustment. “If we explore anything else, it’s gonna be on empty stomachs.”
Several heads nodded slowly.
“Stations,” Ilika ordered.
After checking all his sensors and sending displays and graphs to the other crew members, Rini quickly located the little planet. “It’s hardly moved since the last time we checked.”
“Because it’s so far from the sun, right Ilika?” Boro asked.
“Right. Remember your orbit velocity equation? When orbital radius is large, velocity is low, and the other way around.”
Boro made a selection on his console and looked at the equation and diagram for a moment, then nodded. “I can picture that.”
“Sata?” Ilika inquired. “How do we look?”
“Just a tiny adjustment, and we should nail the . . . what do you call it?
Landing? Belly-flop?”
Everyone laughed, releasing some of the tension in the air.
Ilika smiled. “Mati?”
“We just need a little puff from the maneuvering thrusters, Boro.”
“All warmed up.”
Mati approved the course adjustment, and Manessa did the work. Rini
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 203
and Sata rechecked, and declared the course perfect. “Twenty minutes to . . .
um . . . landing,” Sata said with a somewhat-twisted smile.
As they approached the small, airless world, Kibi appeared at Ilika’s side.
“It’s about time I got some command practice, isn’t it?”
He looked at her with surprise. “This is the first time you’ve asked to command a maneuver!”
“Yeah. And it’ll be our first landing since you-know-where.”
“The slave market?” Ilika asked with raised eyebrows.
“That was the you-know- what,” Boro corrected without turning around.
Ilika laughed as he stood up.
As Kibi got comfortable and looked over the displays on the main bridge screen, Sata started squirming. A moment later she stood, and stepped beside Mati. “This landing doesn’t need any great piloting skill, right?”
Mati looked up at her friend. “Just a little maneuvering as we make contact.”
“Want to . . . let me try?”
After a moment of thought and a glance at Ilika, who nodded, Mati reached for her crutch. “I’ll give flight commands and talk you through it.”
Sata refreshed her memory of the basic piloting controls as Mati strapped herself into the navigator’s chair. “Eleven minutes,” Mati announced, “and the navigator’s station is closed.”
“We already have the only useful chart,” Ilika said, putting on his inertia straps at the steward’s station. “Make sure Manessa has the right shape, Kibi.”
“Oh, yeah. Manessa, round like a ball, please.”
Sata chuckled. “That’s called spherical.”
“Yeah, that word,” Kibi replied with a grin.
Boro ran every possible diagnostic on his inertia canceling system, each one several times, during the remaining few minutes. The little planet, gray on the sunlit side, black on the night side, began to fill their screens.
“Sata will need both maneuvering thrusters,” Mati informed the engineer.
He announced them ready and in tip-top shape.
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 204
“See that light area just north of the equator?” Mati asked her friend in the pilot’s chair. “That’s the level plain we’re aiming for. The flight plan will put us down near this end, and we’ll have a hundred kilometers to slow down.”
Sata magnified her flight plan display. “I have a three-degree glide slope right down to the ground.”
Mati studied the same view on the navigator’s display. “We just need to be ready for things too small to see on the chart.”
Kibi took one last stroll around the bridge.
“Rini,” she said from over his shoulder, “be ready to cancel the visual display as soon as Mati says.”
He
nodded.
“You see anything else we should worry about?”
“Looks like some rough ground on the edge of the level plain.”
“I see it,” Mati said.
Kibi moved on. “Sata, Mati has flight command, so if she speaks, you listen.”
Sata nodded. “I may be ready to die, but that doesn’t mean I want to!”
“No one talks during this landing, except Mati, unless it’s really important,” Kibi said to the entire bridge.
Ilika smiled and nodded.
Kibi stepped beside Boro. “Do we have a back-up plan?”
“Two of them. Old space thruster fuel, and the forbidden anti-mass drive.”
Kibi thought for a moment. “Warm them both up. I’ll decide which, if it comes to that.”
“Two minutes,” Mati announced.
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 205
The bridge was very quiet as they watched the dimly-lit planet grow larger and larger — no clouds, no weather, no air, just gray rocks and white ice.
Soon jagged mountain peaks became visible as they swooped lower.
Sata followed the glide slope on her flight plan with white knuckles and tense muscles, determined to do a good job.
“Okay, here comes the fun part,” Mati began. “We’re going to come very close to that last row of pointy mountains. Forget the flight plan . . .” She reached up and canceled that part of the display. “. . . just follow my lead.”
“Okay,” Sata promised with a shaky voice.
“Nudge us a little higher, and aim for the largest gap between those peaks.”
Sata worked with the flight control as sweat started forming on her brow.
“Good,” Mati said. “Keep us up, don’t let gravity get us yet.”
The last of the jagged rocks swished by just a few hundred meters below the ship.
“Follow the curve of the land down, but not too closely until we pass those rough hills.”
Kibi was concentrating on the visual display with her eyes, and Mati’s words with her ears, when she suddenly saw a green light off to one side. It started flashing, as if trying to get her attention. “To the left! About twenty degrees! Now!”
Mati didn’t see the green light, but she knew that tone in Kibi’s voice, and gave Sata about half a second before yelling, “Do it!”
With sweat dripping into her eyes, Sata jerked the flight control and quickly banked the ship.
“Good,” Mati continued more softly, “now steady your flight . . . come back right about four degrees . . . keep your altitude up just a little longer . . .”
Sata tried to blink away the stinging water in her eyes as the broken hills quickly passed beneath the ship.
“Okay, there’s the ice,” Mati pointed out. “Take us down, pilot!”
Sata wanted to smile, but was too close to tears to accomplish it. She tried to nudge the flight control downward, but her hand seemed unwilling to move.
“Don’t be afraid of it. Either get us down, or I’ll have Boro cut your maneuvering thrusters.”
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 206
The engineer brought his hand close to his control board.
With a supreme effort of will, Sata jerked the flight control downward. A second later, the little ship hit the ground at a sharper angle than Mati would have liked, but in a pinch, it would do. “Visual off!” she ordered.
The entire crew saw the scene on their displays begin to tumble for no more than a second, but it was enough to bring moans and voices begging for bowls.
“Sorry,” Ilika said as he gripped the arms of his chair tightly against the vibrations that were getting through. “No one moves until we come to a complete stop.”
Deep Learning Notes
A planet far out in a solar system (like our Pluto), or in deep space, would receive too little sunlight to keep anything in liquid or gaseous form. Also, a small planet would have little internal heat (caused by internal pressure).
Even the lightest element, hydrogen, would therefore be in a solid state, existing only as ice. Deep space is 3°K, and hydrogen freezes at 14°K.
In any equation of the form A = B / C, A varies directly with B, and inversely with C. In other words, as B goes up or down, so does A in the same direction, but as C goes up or down, A goes in the opposite direction. Notice the place in the orbit velocity equation of R, the orbital radius. Does V vary directly with R, or inversely?
If the “you-know-what” was the slave market, what was the
“you-know-where”?
What combination of circumstances caused Kibi and Sata to both feel brave enough to do a different, more challenging, job?
Why did Boro run lots of diagnostics on the inertia canceling system?
NEBADOR Book Five: Back to the Stars 207
A 3-degree glide slope is what most airplanes use. Helicopters use a 10-degree glide slope for a normal landing, but can use almost any angle.
What do you think of Kibi’s command technique during the landing? How was it different from her previous attempts at command?
Sata’s landing was very similar to what happens to inexperienced pilots: a tendency to lose altitude too soon, and then a fear of contacting the ground.
