The Liberation Paradox

Crash "Landing"

Danny

21:45

(on approach to the Twilight Elegance)

Danny was exhausted by the time they came in sight of the Twilight Elegance. He couldn't wait to get aboard the ship, find a quiet bar, and get a drink. Because he had no idea how the autopilot worked on the Fulmine, he'd been forced to hand fly the plane the entire way from the planet to the starhopper intercept. But now, the the Twilight Elegance was within visual range. They were almost there.

Starhoppers were generally about a tenth the size of the biggest space stations like Gonaways Station. On a ship like the Twilight Elegance, tens of thousands of people lived and worked. They made their living ferrying passengers and cargo across the vast spaces between settled worlds at transtachyonic speeds.

Like most such starhoppers, the Twilight Elegance was shaped like an oil drum turned on its side and impaled lengthwise by a rocket. The outer walls of the drum spun as the huge ship travelled, producing cheap and comfortable spin gravity for the human workers and passengers aboard. Up the center of the drum and protruding from both ends was the rocket-like, working part of the ship, known as "the spire." At the forward end of the spire, was the bridge, and at the aft end, the engineering section and the gigantic engine clusters. Along the middle of this central spire were the ship's two quantum reactors, the onboard spaceport, and the enormous arrays of transtachyonic field generators. All around the central spire and within the rotating drum were thousands upon thousands of shipping containers secured to the central spire itself and to one another, creating a vast, interlocking cluster of paid cargo bound for some stop along the ship's route.

Though it wasn't scheduled to enter transtach for another couple of hours, the Twilight Elegance was already aligning itself towards its intended destination. Its engines were still producing thrust, but soon the huge engines' output would be redirected to begin charging the ship's array of transtachyonic field generators. Without the TFGs, transtach flight wouldn't be possible.

The Fulmine's navigation computer was giving Danny a vector to fly which would align him with the starhopper's internal runway.

"Don't we need clearance to land or something?" Marcio asked.

"Yeah, probably." Danny switched the comms panel back on. He'd turned it off before they'd even left the city of Harvest Junction and hadn't given it another thought. As soon as he'd turned the comms panel on, a message came up on the panel display:

CONTACT

TWILIGHT ELEGANCE

APP CTRL?

YES — NO

The Fulmine's computer had intuited what Danny wanted. Even half destroyed, it was a nice plane. Danny tapped YES on the touchscreen display and was instantly greeted by the voice of an annoyed-sounding space traffic controller.

"—again. Fulmine six-three-one Papa Hotel, if you are on frequency, squawk ident or state intentions. You ARE NOT authorized to land Twilight Elegance."

"Is she talking to us," Marcio asked.

"I guess." Danny noticed a discreet placard mounted above the comms panel which read 631PH. Yup, she was talking to them, alright. He pressed the black XMT button on the control stick and addressed the space traffic controller. "This is six-thirty-one-P-H. We need to land on the Twilight Elegance."