Conflagration

Welcome to the Darklands

Galaxy: Darklands (dwarf galaxy)

Cluster: Backwater

Planet: SHP 242 [Unnamed]

Radcliff Elof had been a pilot with Noémie Charter Services for the better part of six years the day he died.

It had been a week since the fateful call had come in through the Flight Dispatch Office. Someone was looking for a pilot who could fly an off-books flight out to some unnamed world, pick up some cargo, and take it wherever it needed to go. Everything about the job sounded shady as the back side of an ice moon. So of course, Rad (as he was more commonly known) had used the full sway of his seniority to ensure he was assigned the flight. There was a lot of money a pilot could make for himself taking these off-book charters. More importantly, they could be exciting. You want to fly safe? Go to the Milky Way. You want exciting flying? Welcome to the Darklands.

Officially, in the company's computer, this plane was flying on a routine maintenance flight out in the Cable's End Cluster. In actuality, Rad was in the Backwater Cluster, a totally different region of the galaxy. He was flying without a flight plan, without a company brevity code, and without a safety net. Now, he was about to drop out of transtachyonic flight at some unnamed system. While in transtach, he was completely safe, but once he dropped out of transtach he would be vulnerable. That was what drew men like Rad to this kind of flying: the danger, the unknown, the rush. Not to mention the status it all afforded him. Chicks dug a hardpointer pilot and dudes envied guys like Rad.

Rad was nearing the dropout point. He ran through the checklists as he watched the unnamed solar system rapidly approach. The only thing he could really make out at this speed and distance was the star, significantly brighter than all the other stars. Technically, he and the big freighter he flew were already inside the solar system. They had passed through the heliosphere a minute ago. But solar systems are large, mostly empty things and planets are far smaller than most non-pilots realized. The planet designated SHP 242 was still way too small and too far away for Rad to see with the naked eye. All he could see of it was the HUD waypoint projected onto the windshield.

The checklists were complete. The proper frequencies were dialed in on the radios. The nav computer was standing by in deorbit mode. Rad made one last glance at his Transtachyonic Field Generator status display. The TFG capacitor was charged to 86%. He needed a minimum of 85% charge to fire off the TFG. Everything was ready. Activating the TFG would dissipate the transtachyonic field and return him to normal space and to sublight speed. He disabled the safeties on the TFG control panel and held his finger over the TFG ACTV. button.

He watched the seconds count down on his nav computer. 12...11...10... He glanced out the cockpit window. Still no sign of the planet, only its waypoint icon on the HUD. He knew from past experience he wouldn't be able to see it with the naked eye until the last few seconds. He looked back at the computer. 5...4...3... Now, back out the window and the planet was plain to see. It was a blue, green, and white orb suspended in the void. Like most terraformed planets, it was designed to be like the near-mythical Earth, his species' ancestral home.

Those last few seconds of transtach he never even looked at his nav computer. He would press the button when his aviator's instincts told him it was time. A greenhorn pilot would have fired the TFG farther out and just flown sublight the remaining distance to the planet. But even though he was only 24, Rad had been doing this long enough that he considered himself an old salt of an aviator. He knew how far he could push the envelope.

In those last few seconds, the planet approached so rapidly that if Rad blinked he ran the risk of overshooting it and having to make an embarrassing sublight chug back to the planet. Rad didn't blink. At the very moment the planet loomed overlarge in his window, a half a moment before it would be gone behind him, Rad pressed the button and the TFG activated.

There was a sudden lurch as the hardpoint freighter's little pocket universe dissipated and then a rumble as the spaceplane reentered normal space. And there sat the planet, big and beautiful, filling his cockpit window. It had been a near-perfect exit from transtach and it only took a few basic maneuvers to get the plane into deorbit position. He scanned the planet and found only two human settlements. One looked like a small village on an inland lake and the other, his destination, a converted terraforming platform in the middle of the planet's only ocean.

He planned his deorbit burn so that he would come into atmosphere close to the platform. He fired up the plane's three big, sublight engines and let them idle as he reoriented the plane so that it was basically flying tail-first relative to the direction of its orbit. When the time came, he advanced the throttles on the engines and began his deorbit burn. The thrust slowed the plane and caused it to begin dropping out of orbit along his planned arc of descent. Beautiful flying, Rad congratulated himself silently.

Just as Rad was about to stop his deorbit burn and reorient the plane to drop into atmo nose first, all hell broke loose. Rad was just about to reduce the throttles when the proximity alarms went off.

"WHOOP-WHOOP! TRAFFIC! WHOOP-WHOOP! TRAFFIC!" came the computerized alert. A greenhorn pilot might be tempted to look at his Traffic Collision Avoidance System for guidance on how to avoid the nearby traffic, but Rad knew right away what was happening. It was an EMP bounce.

Someone was shooting ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons at him. They were trying to shut down his engines in an attempt to bounce him off the atmosphere and back into space. Pirates.

"Fuck you, motherfucker!" Rad shouted to his unseen assailant as he plowed the throttles full forward. "Not today, not never!" The engines roared and the plane's structure groaned under the sudden load. The plane, still flying tail-first in low orbit, now slowed drastically. The planet's gravity began pulling it down at an alarmingly steep angle.

Rad knew she could take it, though. He knew just how far he could push the envelope. Adrenaline surged through his body and his pulse flowed faster than the plane's hydraulic fluid. But Rad pushed his fear down deep inside him. He kept calm and focused on flying the plane. This is where we separate the men from the boys, he thought.

The first blue dot on the TCAS display flew past him. The EMP weapon was flying too fast and wasn't able to descend as rapidly as he was. He kept the throttles pegged as the second weapon closed the distance. This one was slowing down. Whatever A.I. was flying that missile must be anticipating his attempts to avoid it and was compensating.

He was entering atmosphere now, still falling tail-first and having a hard time keeping the plane under control. The plane was falling into atmo at a far steeper angle of descent than it was designed for. But hardpoint freighters were built tough. The plane's heat shields were protecting it from burning up and its rigid structure was holding it together under the aerodynamic strain. Rad knew how far he could push the envelope. He looked at his altimeter and his mach indicator. He was now WAY too low and too slow to have to worry about being bounced off the atmosphere. All he had to do was avoid that second missile and he'd be out of immediate danger. The remaining missile pursued him relentlessly. It was on top of him now. Rad was out of options. All he could do was hope for the best.

He never saw the missile itself, but he was nearly blinded by the light of its detonation. After a few seconds, when his vision came back, the cockpit around him was dark. The EMP had shut down every system on the plane. All the instrument displays were dark. The only dim light was sunlight which slanted in through the cockpit windows. The plane around him was silent. There was no rumble from the engines, no hissing from the environmental systems, no alarm klaxons. The throttle levers were dead things in his hand. The flight control stick flopped limply between his knees but did nothing.

He reached out in the darkness for switches he knew by heart and began attempting to restart the engines. Just one engine would be enough, yet not even the auxiliary power unit nor even the battery bus would answer his commands. He was getting really scared now. Panicked. The kind of fear that's hard to just push down and ignore. The kind of fear that wraps itself around you and feels almost welcoming, like a warm blanket. Rad had a very human instinct to give in to that panic, to let that blanket of fear wrap itself around him, to let that be his death shroud.

But that's not how pilots die.

Pilots die with their hands on the controls. Until the moment the plane hits the ground, a pilot's only instinct is to try to regain control. That's how Rad Elof died: strapped into the captain's seat of the tumbling corpse of a dead airplane, flipping unpowered switches and working useless controls. Right up until the very moment of impact, Rad flew his plane.