MBGSP Chpt 180-182

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Chapter 180 - Reentry

The process for picking our landing spot wasn’t any simpler than the dynamics for orbital injection. Just like getting to the moon isn’t as simple as pointing the rocket up, landing isn’t as simple as pointing the rocket down. Especially if you want to hit a specific target, like a sleeping celestial space dragon.

Luckily we had the Midnighters in our corner, as well as, surprisingly, the dragons. It turns out the landed knights had a quick study in Dame Redfang, who picked up orbital geometry faster than even the Midnighter priestess caste. I’d checked her numbers, though she’d melted a radio at my audacity to question her calculations.

After 31 revolutions around Raphina, I gave the order to begin our reentry burn. Maintaining orbit is a bit like the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy school of flying philosophy—in that you’re constantly throwing yourself at the ground and missing. The planet always pulls you towards it, the idea is just that you’re always moving so fast that the planet isn’t there anymore when you fall. Reentry is just the opposite. Rather than aiming your rockets towards the planet, you just retro burn and let gravity do the work it’s already doing.

“Chuck, your scene,” I said, pointing to my wrangler chief. He’d made the space walk to transition aboard a few hours prior.”

“Aye, boss,” he said. The entire station protested as he engaged the maneuvering thrusters to bring the main engines around. “Starting burn.”

“Strap in, everyone! Helmets on,” I said, for all the good it would do. I twisted my own helmet on and secured the latches. Reentry was a hazardous maneuver at the best of time. And our material constraints meant that our testing had been limited. Scratch that, our testing hadn’t even been limited. It had been simulated. Testing the heat-resistant ceramic tiles that coated the underside of the station was primarily done by putting them in front of the rocket motor test nozzles. They had a failure rate of about 1 in 50. Which was actually pretty reliable for goblin work. The inherent problem was that there were 692 of them lining the underside of the modules.

The main rocket engines kicked on, rumbling through the ship. Below us, we were just passing the threshold from the decayed far side of Rava into the fresh pink and blue forests that still held life. Our orbital speed started to slow, and over the next half hour, the planet we’d been missing for the last day and a half became very much in our way again. In the viewport above us, one of the Myriad sections continued on, remaining in orbit. I hit my radio.

“See you in a few hours, John.”

“Aye, boss. We’ll be right back around. Spinefish will do ya proud.”

The other section, Eileen’s section, matched us burn for burn until the rocket motors cut off.

Speaking of burn, a pale flame licked out of my control console.

“King Apollo, I will now join the rest of my kin,” said Taquoho.

“See you at ground zero, friend,” I said.

“If the worst should happen, know that it was a privilege and honor to make this journey with you.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “We’re going to get through this.”

“I am proud to burn with you against these monsters. We Ifrit have long memories, indeed. This day will not be forgotten.”

I glanced at the side of the module, at the viewport where non-Ifrit flames were starting to lick the outside of the window. “Might not want to talk about us burning together,” I said, “Considering the very real possibility in the next few minutes.”

The flame on my console shifted through an electrical cable running aft and disappeared behind the bulkhead. Myriad started to buckle and shake even worse as we started to build up a bow shockwave against the upper reaches of Raphina’s atmosphere. My teeth chattered in my head, and the inside of the spaceship was a blur. Red flame washed out my view of the other module. System’s flight data window still showed our altitude plummeting as Raphina was finally allowed to pull us in.

The radio crackled in my ear. “B-b-b-oss, th-th-things are l-l-l-ooking good h-h-h-ere,” managed Eileen. I don’t know how she managed even that. I was bouncing around so bad I couldn’t even tell the buttons on my console apart.

I scrutinized every errant ping and crack, hoping it wasn’t the critical heat shield tile that would allow the deadly heat of reentry to melt through the cabin. But eventually, after what felt like hours (but was really only a few minutes), the descent rate on my flight screen started to trend down. We were hitting thicker air, and it was slowing us substantially.

Some of the vibration flattened out, and the black of space was replaced by the deep blue of an alien atmosphere.

“We’re right on track, boss,” said Chuck. “Little sister, you’re coming up on your mark.”

“Copy loud and clear, Chuck! Pufferfish deploying. Good luck down there!”

I twisted my neck to look out of the viewport, where Eileens section of the station burst apart. Panels and parts of modules shot in every direction, some still red-hot from reentry. In their place, oblong shapes began to inflate—massive gas envelopes made from the sailcloth taken from the Midnighter ships. Beneath each one hung a wide platform.

“Separation successful! Good hunting,” said Eileen.

The buoyant gas envelopes held a half-dozen floating platforms high above us as we continued toward the ground.

“Drogue chutes ready,” I shouted.

“On your call, boss,” said Chuck.

I hit the switch to deploy the massive parachutes. “Chutes out!”

Our view of the inflating airships was replaced with canopies of thick, white canvas, and I felt the pull of the parachutes twist the ship. There was a horrible shriek of shearing metal, and several of the warning lights on my console lit up.

“What the heck was that?” I asked.

Armstrong twisted in his seat to look around the frame of the window, then back at me. “That’d be the back quarter of our ship, boss,” he said. “Their chute is out, they just ain’t attached to us no more.”

I grit my teeth. That module probably had close to 200 goblins in it. There was never any way we’d be getting everything to the ground safe. But at least we still had most of Myriad in one piece.

“Uh, boss? We got a problem,” said Chuck.

I glanced at my flight data menu, which had begun to glitch and display weird symbols.

“Boss, incoming!” came Eileen from the other station. “Right below you!”

Uh oh

Someone seemed to flip the world from color to monochrome, and then something hit us from below. Myriad bucked, twisting us around with such force that my straps bit into me. The back of the compartment tore away, spilling material and goblins out into daylight by the dozen as the cabin depressurized. Our drogue chute ripped away and we started to plummet again. As the module spun, I caught flashes of a coal black body and broad, obsidian wings swinging around for another pass.

“Abandon ship!” I shouted.

My console burst into flames. I held my hand up against the blaze and struggled to loosen my straps with the other. A stronger hand knocked mine out of the way, and Armstrong tore the buckles off. Loose in the spinning module, we quickly found ourselves drifting towards the opening.

“Taquoho!” I shouted into the radio, “Deploy, deploy!”

Armstrong and I tumbled out of the wrecked module and into the open air, still miles above the surface. The air was filled with falling debris and goblins in space suits. We were high enough up that we’d asphyxiate before hitting the ground. Luckily, most of the goblins were in sealed space suits. Most. And I wasn’t going to get notifications of how many we lost with  null devils jamming up the System. I managed to get myself level in time to see the middle module above, chute torn, spilling out dozens of sleek, delta-winged jets on rocket-assist launches.

“King Apollo, we are deploying as requested, but our altitude is too high for the engines to cycle. We will attempt to correct this deficiency.”

Our fourth-generation jet fighters were smaller and sleeker than the generations before—owing to their lack of an internal cabin. These lightweight deltas were operated entirely and exclusively by Ifrit union pilots, and each glowed with a different combination of colors as they dove, trying to get  to air dense enough to feed their turbine engines.

Above, the winged null devil leveled out for another pass. It had stubby claws front and back, and a jaw disproportionately too large for its head. If I had to describe it, it looked like someone had tried to draw a dragon starting with the head but made it too big and ran out of room on the paper. But those deadly, gnashing jaws already had twisted metal debris sticking out. However ridiculous the thing looked, it was still an incredibly deadly predator capable of sheering through metal like cardboard.

“Got a fix, boss.” came Eileen’s voice. “On the way!”

Before the null devil could attack the rest of the Ifrit still disembarking from Myriad, a starburst streaked down from the platforms high above, curving towards the giant creature. It struck at the root of one of its wings with a massive explosion, knocking the null devil off course and severing one of the wings entirely. The null devils ate magic, so they must have been the highest concentrations of it. That made them a prime target for the magic-seeking missiles launched from our high altitude missile platforms—platforms manned by wranglers and scrappers with the new sub-job that pumped up their skills and accuracy by a factor of distance from their birth. And we were a long way from home.

Ifrit continued to pour out of the fighter module. Annoyingly, the null devil straightened out and continued its pursuit. It wasn’t using its wings to fly, of course. It didn’t need them just like the one at the City of Brass hadn’t needed wings. I still didn’t know whether they flew through some biologic organ, a rejection of physics, or just sheer will-power. But fly they did, and this one wasn’t down yet. But magic seeking missiles weren’t our only toy to play with.

A railgun shot followed up after the missile, punching through the gut of the null devil as it opened its jaws to clamp down on the Ifrit module. The supersonic report of the gun put a crack in my helmet glass. The Null devil howled and sank several hundred chooms from the impact. Most of its guts sank even lower. The black smudge of the null devil’s aura winked out. My radio exploded with cheers from the goblins in free-fall.

“It’s not over yet,” I said, looking at the nonsense on my flight data screen. I spotted a trio of black shapes coming at us from the forest on the horizon.

We hadn’t won yet. We’d just rung the dinner bell.

Chapter 181 - One Small Step

A high-pitched whine began to mount. Falling alongside us, several of the jets’ engines started to glow.

“King Apollo, we have reached sufficiently dense enough atmosphere. My kin and I will now take flight.”

The Ifrit fighters began to pull out of their dives and turned their noses toward the approaching devils. Without crew or life support equipment, the nimble deltas could exceed the limits of a human (or goblin) pilot. The G-forces of such a maneuver would have probably made a goblin’s head collapse. But to Ifrit, it was nothing.

The formation of Ifrit fighters split into three groups, each one headed for one of the approaching null devils. In response, the devils shifted their own courses, angling to pursue this new source of magic that had so willingly served itself up. Missiles shot out of the fighter groups, blasting against the armored hides of the null devils. The creatures roared, surging towards the fighters.

At the last second, the Ifrit banked hard, peeling away from the null devils and circling around the less-nimble leviathans, pouring on throttle in the opposite direction. The creatures snapped and swiped and hissed in frustration before turning their massive bulks and giving chase to the fighter wings.

“We have their attention, King Apollo! We shall endeavor to hold it as long as possible.”

“Thanks, Taquoho!” I answered into my radio. Below us, the ground was coming up quick. The spot I’d studied with Cla’thn was directly below. It was a depression in the landscape between two sites of unusual volcanic activity, and I could see the steaming geysers north of the site and hissing vents far to the south. To the west, the diminished inland sea continued to drain into underground cavities, leaving a deep set of chasms in the landscape each at least as large as the Grand Canyon. We were landing at the eastern edge of those chasms where the terrain was still flat. Though I suppose landing was maybe not the right word.

The first bits of debris started to impact the landing site, kicking up pink dust clouds. Larger pieces started to hit, and then those of us goblins thrown free from the falling modules began to impact. I landed on my head, losing my helmet as I bounced several times before coming to a stop. My first breaths of Raphina’s atmosphere were mostly comprised of dirt.

I pushed myself upright. I didn’t have time to savor my first steps on Raphina or the completion of my life-long goal of walking on the moon (or a moon, in any case). Debris was still raining down, and Armstrong immediately tackled me out of the way as a piece of module the size of a truck crashed into the dirt where I’d been standing.

“Got ye, boss!” he said.

I coughed out even more dirt and scrambled back upright. Holding a hand against the sun, I stared above us. The sky was a sea of white canopies and small gliders as the rest of the modules continued to descend. 15 rockets worth of preparations and planning—less Eileen’s high altitude airships and the small station, Spinefish, that we’d left in orbit.

Thump-thump

I felt a vibration through the ground, resonating up through my prosthetics and rumbling in my bones. I waited, and a few seconds later, another one subtly shook the ground.

“Armstrong, you feel that?”

“Wot was it?”

Thump-thump

A grin spread across my face. “It’s a heartbeat. Come on, let’s focus. I raised my voice to the nearest sparker. “Do we still have contact with Pufferfish, Spinefish, or Mission Control?

The sparker pulled his helmet off and fanned his whiskers out, tilting his head one way and then the other before vigorously shaking it.

“That’s priority one. Priority two, salvage anything we can from these crashes.” I looked around until I spotted Buzz. “I want your boys getting every piece of equipment we can set up. Dig in.”

“Aye, boss,” he said.

I turned to Chuck and Armstrong. “Neil was going to organize the defenses. With him gone, it falls to you two. Can you get this site defensible?”

Armstrong flexed his arms, though the effect was diminished somewhat by the bulky space suit and his wide face being squashed into the bubble helmet. “You can count on us, boss,” he said.

Chuck nodded, pulling off his own helmet and replacing it with his lower skull mask. “Poachers are itching to bring down some devils.”

Promo finally joined us on the ground, having scrounged a scrap of drogue chute to soften his descent. He waddled over.

“Promo, the rest of the modules are coming down. I need you to gather your team and get prepped. As soon as everything is set up, we’re starting. Will you be ready?”

“Count on it, hoss.” He saluted and ambled off, stripping out of his bulky space suit as he went.

I looked up at the sky. So far, it was clear. Of the null devils who had come to investigate, we’d killed one and lured the others off. But they wouldn’t be the last, and they wouldn’t be long in coming.

As the intact modules started to land, my taskmasters and their teams went to work. Hatches were cracked open, spilling forth more and more goblins that had been trapped in the modules. Equipment, gas vehicles, tools, and building supplies were pulled out. Within the next hour, we had a bivouac going up with several gas-powered cranes starting to assemble our defensive measures. Eight smaller, Mark-II railguns rested on rotating platforms, each with a bank of capacitors powered by a gas turbine generator and with a crew of poachers to man them. The scrappers and wranglers with the subjob had their stat bonuses turbo-charged by over 100,000 kilochooms between us and Bluff Apollo. They were each the equivalent of a creature five times their level, by my math.

Inside the defensive perimeter, a balloon was being inflated to loft a radio antenna and racks of surface-to-air magic seeking missiles were primed with goblins waiting for targets. what was left of the command module after the null devil attack had been torn apart and repurposed to act as a comm station. And inside that, yet a new modified version of the Big Hoss Rig. Still with its tilting, telescoping payload, this one contained a high-torque screw drill that we’d be using to excavate a tunnel down to where System slept beneath the surface. So, ok, yeah, it was like that movie. Only, we weren’t dropping a nuke down the hole. We were trying to keep the moon from exploding. We’d brought something else, instead.

I’d only been on Rava a few months. Maybe as much as a year. But I already missed the voice of System in my mind and the reassurance of its menu and messages, its notifications, and even its occasional snark that seeped in around the edges of the rigid protocols with which it bound itself. The silence was deafening, in a way. It had been replaced entirely by the slow-paced heartbeat reverberating through the hard-packed dirt and dust beneath my blades. What would the creature do if we managed to wake it up?

Not every piece of equipment made it to the ground intact. Two of the railguns, several tanks of fuel, ground equipment, a kilochoom of foodstuffs, the redundant air supply, and more had been casualties of the sudden attack during our landing. But we would make do. Just us. I looked around the base camp. Surrounding me were several hundred goblins. Just goblins. No Ifrit, no orcs with their shamans or Midnighters with their sorceresses. Inert goblins and their inert tech tree devices using that one principle to mask ourselves from the notice of the null devils as long as possible. But it wouldn’t last.

Armstrong jogged up to me with Buzz in tow. “Big guns are up an’ chargin’, boss an’ the buggies are fueled. Chuck’s runnin’ the show, so I’m looking after you.”

Buzz nodded along. “Everything we could pull out, we pulled out. This is wot we got.”

“Alright, good job,” I said. “What about comms?”

“Coming online soon as we float the wire. Trust.”

I scratched a hand through the blue fur atop my head. “What about Promo?”

“His team’s ready.”

“Alright then,” I said. I rubbed my hands together. “No time to waste. Let’s reboot the System.”

Chapter 182 - Drill, Baby, Drill

“Easy, easy!” I called out.

The back of BHR Jr. tilted down and the head of the drill-bit began to turn. The augur shaft was tipped with the hardest substance we’d managed to find on Rava: the black carbon-dense skull-plate of the whistler.

Promo leaned out the side of the rig, trying to eyeball the angle. Dozens of goblins waited at the ready with spades and buckets and wheelbarrows. “Alright, hoss, settin’ the stops,” he said.

Three telescoping feet extended from the drill rig module on hydraulic legs that locked the whole thing into place. The head of the drill started to spin. Promo began to extend the telescoping drill and the bit carved up dirt and dust, churning the soil and rock beneath it. As soon as we broke ground, I felt the pulse under us quicken, reverberating up through my running blades. A pressure wrapped tight around my chest, and I dropped to my knees, struggling to breathe.

“I think it knows we’s here, boss,” gasped Armstrong.

“No kidding,” I said through clenched teeth. It was like the extra layer of attention I had felt from System while flying, only magnified by about a thousand times. The pressure was almost as much as the rocket launch, only pressing in on every square inch of my body. It lingered for a what felt like half a minute before beginning to dissipate. I sucked in a deep breath and looked around at the rest of the goblins picking themselves up off the ground where they’d collapsed. The pressure hadn’t vanished completely, but it was no longer enough to crush the air out of us. How powerful was this creature that by just looking at something too hard, it could kill?

“Keep going,” I said.

The drill continued to churn until it had buried itself in the ground, at which point the BHR payload pulled back and began to spool out the control cable. Several of Buzz’ builders went into the hole to navigate the drill head, while the goblins with shovels and buckets moved in, attacking the churned soil like they had a grudge against it. It reminded me of my first days on Rava, blazing trails through the jungle with a rolling blue tide of gnashing teeth and swinging cleavers. The little blue maniacs began hauling away dirt and mud by the bucket, and then they were in the hole, daisy-chaining crushed rock and debris out while other builders with shoring material went in.

While I watched, one of my secretive service came back to me with a handset radio. “Boss, we got Pufferfish and Spinefish back.

“Fantastic,” I said, taking the handset. “This is Apollo, go ahead.”

“Sir,” said John, voice still somewhat broken through the connection to his module a hundred kilochooms above us. “I don’t know what you just did, but that bug priestess is all up in fits about a magical flare-up that she felt all the way up here.”

“Cla’thn felt us start to drill?” I asked. “From orbit?!”

Eileen interjected. “She  ain’t the only one, boss. Ifrit are saying they felt it too. And they’re miles away. Said it felt like the most powerful magic wellspring they’d ever sensed.”

On a planet of super-predator magic devourers. I clenched my teeth. “Are the null devils still chasing the Ifrit?”

“One of ‘em is, the others turned back around. I see closer ones coming out of the forest, too. Not just flying ones. I got eyes on a big one and more of the nyphs. They’re all crawlin’ on the ground. Hundreds. They must have forgot how to fly!”

“Great,” I said, “This is great. We just hung out the buffet sign at our dig site.” I lowered the handset and shouted. “Incoming to the east! Watch the ridge line!”

The dig site burst into a frenzy of activity as the railgun muzzles and self-cycling turrets twisted toward the ridge on the east side. Scrappers and wranglers repositioned with weapons and light vehicles. We couldn’t see anything yet.

“Hoss, Spinefish has that rabble in sight,” said Promo. “On the way, now.”

“Good copy,” I said. “Eileen, support at your discretion.”

“Got it, boss.”

I handed the radio back to the sparker. “Stay close,” I said. My eyes shifted from the ridge to the drill rig. It was already starting to build up a dirt mound faster than the goblins could haul it away, even with two small bulldozers under the control of Buzz’ builders pushing the mounds away from the hole. The drill was powerful and durable, but I had no idea how deep the sleeping creature was. We’d set up in a lowland valley, but would it have been better to go down in the canyons? For all I knew, every null devil on Raphina was now heading straight for us.

A black smudge began to darken the sky over the ridge. An enormous creature pulled itself into view. Its long, spindly forelegs dragged a corpulent, bulbous bulk across the ground, shimmering with dark onyx scales as it jiggled. A circular maw at the front clacked with dozens of rows of clutching lamprey teeth. It didn’t so much climb down the ridge as tumble and slide, practically causing an avalanche in its passing. Even across the six or so kilometer distance, I could tell it was at least as large as the one over the City of Brass.

I ran to the east side with Armstrong.

“That must be one o’ the ones wot forgot it could fly,” he said.

“Must be,” I said. “Didn’t forget how to be disgusting, though.” I signaled up to the scrapper at the railgun controls. “How’s your poacher bonus?”

The scrapper vibrated in her gunner’s seat. “Like fire in my blood, boss. Gimme a cleaver, I think I could take it.

“I admire your attitude, but you got something a little better than a cleaver, don’t you?”

A wide grin split the scrapper’s face. “Aye, boss.”

“Is it charged up?” I asked.

“Charged, boss.”

“Is it loaded?”

“It’s loaded, boss.”

I pointed to the null devil. “So then what are you waiting for?”

The scrapper gripped her controls and worked the traversal wheels. She pressed her eyeball to the viewfinder. She lifted one foot and stomped it down on the firing pedal. I stuck my fingers in my ears.

The whole assembly bucked with the recoil of sending a ferrous spike toward the lumbering monstrosity descending the ridge. The air practically burned from the passage of the hypersonic spike, and I could only see the barest drop in its trajectory as it shot across the kilochooms separating the creature from the drill site. The shot took it in the mouth, exploding a wide section of the creature’s serrated, circular teeth along with a cloud of black, viscous goo. The shot emerged somewhere from its back and struck the ridge behind.

It took a few seconds for the sound of the impact and the creature’s enraged shriek to reach us. But they only lasted a moment before two more of our railguns fired. One of them shattered one of the creature’s long forelegs at the joint. The limb crashed to the ground with all the force of a California Redwood tipping. The third shot struck the creature below the jaw. It slowed, dragged itself a few more meters, and then slumped over. The black smudge it left on reality slowly faded away.

I looked back, pleased that only one of the guns was on fire. The drill rig continued churning more dirt.

“One down,” I said, “And there’s going to be more before we’re through. Reload.”

I looked at my portable chronometer that the Ifrit had given me. “Almost five minutes,” I said. The sky began to dark again just over the ridgeline. first in one spot, then several, and then the entire ridge looked like it was being viewed through a black shroud. The swarm was coming.

Overhead, a starburst blossomed, falling like a meteor in the distance. It carved a perfectly vertical path down through the atmosphere, splitting the sky. It disappeared behind the ridge for a moment, and then a bright flash forced me to look away. The ground rumbled beneath my blades, and then the sound of the impact hit us in a single, sharp CRACK that echoed off the mountains and canyon walls.

“Apollo?! King Apollo, what has happened on the surface?” I heard Cla’thn say over the radio. “I thought us to be dropping a simple iron rod, yet I have witnessed a great blast upon the surface. Are you still there?”

I took the handset from the sparker, again, grinning. “Yeah, we’re still here. Tell John his aim was perfect.”

“I shall do so. We will soon pass from the area. Know that foes still head your way.”

“Catch you on the next run,” I said, and handed the radio off.

Armstrong was bouncing from foot to foot behind me. “Boss that was the biggest explosion ever! Neil would’a loved it! I din’ know we had bombs that big!”

“Not a bomb,” I said. “Just a 900-kilochoom rod of iron accelerated to about Mach-20.”

“Wicked. Can we do another?”

I looked skyward. I could just see the bright flicker of the sun crystal powering Spinefish against the dark side of Rava. Those heavy iron rods represented a non-trivial fraction of the total payload capacity for the entire mission. But after running afoul of the nymphs outside the City of Brass, I knew I needed something more than missiles to take out densely packed swarms. We’d had to bring them up over five separate launches, but it looked like it was worth it.

“We’ve got five more shots,” I said, “but we’ve got to hold out for the next hour to get Spinefish back in position. Come on, let’s get that railgun back online.”