Lucky 13 (NaNoWriMo 2017)

Chapter 15: Out of the Woods...

I consider the situation. I've spared their lives, but if I abandoned them now, how is that any different from me killing them. My mind begins to run the numbers. Hours spent, travel times, fuel consumption, anything and everything that might be relevant to the situation. My mind settles on a single number. Forty thousand, the crew complement of our own Neptune battleships. I estimate this ship to be similarly populated.

That number is massive. Some may say it is an ocean in which each person is but a drop. But I know the truth, the number is big, but it's not as big as it can be. One more, just one more is too much.

I pull away from Connor. I push my mind to become the captain my starship needs. The commanding officer my crew needs. The person I need. I stand straighter, force my ears up, take a deep breath, and narrow my eyes.

"Is it possible to pull them free?" I ask. "Get them to a higher orbit or something? Anything?"

"Nope," Ren says, "We're too far away and they're to low in the atmosphere."

"Then we're going to have to land and rescue them."

"And here we go, getting heroic and..." Lexi grumbles.

"Well, I approve," Ren says.

"As do I," agrees Nyan. "I can not believe that all of them are so dedicated at converting us to space dust as they make it seem. There is almost certainly someone at the top pulling all the strings. These people are surly innocent, not deserving to face death."

We all stare at them, taken aback a bit by their rant. "I meant we should capture some to interrogate," Ren says. "But your idea sounds good to."

"You sound like a Myren," they comment. "Alway thinking about intell instead of ethics."

Ren plotts out our course and talks at the same time. "Sounds like a fun race. You must be really lucky to have them as allies, especially with your ethics handicapping you."

This goes on for the entire landing, constant bickering between the two of them. Like an old married couple, one of them talking about the glories of the Council and the concentration on stability and peace through nonviolence, and the other about the superiority of the ITA with its dedication towards peace through assured destruction with every other party at the table. The longest thirty minutes of my life that I can never get back. Almost makes me wish we had just left the shikes to die.

Almost.

As we hit the atmosphere our engines kick in along with our energetic airfoils, specially shaped shields that act as lifting surfaces in lieu of proper wings. Now properly suspended above the ground we begin our sweep of the surrounding area.

The Shike shuttle is easy enough to find, it is afterall a superheated chunk of ceramic, you could see its infrared signature from orbit. The problem is not with finding it, it's with landing. The forest is dense here, and while the Shike ship had cleared itself a landing strip, we can not do the same.

I briefly toy with the idea of dropping a rope down and hoist them up, but this isn't a helicopter, it's a spaceship. It doesn't use spinning airfoils to generate lift, but rocket engines that turn the nearby air into an oven. I'm sure that we could perform the maneuver, but I don't want to try it for the first time with these sort of risks.

We fly in a circle for a few minutes till we find a nearby lake. We lower down, our thrusters begin vaporizing the water. We've been taught not to perform landings on lakes, boiling an aquatic ecosystem tends to cause bad things for its inhabitants. But us landing on their lake is going to be the least of the disasters that befall these fish today, especially when a twelve tonne superheat irradiated chunk of ceramic displaces all the water.