The Long Road to Gaia by Timothy Ellis

join
them, such was the team's reputation for pulling off miracles, but at the cost
of losing the new people. The last of them had been Richard Allen and Dirk
Bronson, killed on the last drop when they hadn't made it back to the ship
before the habitat ruptured. Both had been original team members, and left
wives and kids behind.
    Vasquez had been right, thought Weaver. I
was listening to all of them, but the Lieutenant had the most interesting
thoughts. Vasquez had died two years before, after warning them all the team
was doomed to be whittled down to only a few, with the ones remaining wishing
they hadn't survived. Nine wasn’t a few, but Weaver could see the pattern. They
all could, but Weaver was the one most concerned about it.
    No-one carried anything at this point.
Their weapons and packs were securely stowed. The worst was still to come.
    Conversation stopped, as it does when
anticipation of something bad happening becomes the primary thought pattern.
    And it nearly did.
    Plan A nearly killed them all.
    Takai angled the Dropship towards the point
where it would enter the primary wind stream, on enough of an angle to be drawn
into the flow. There was a solid wham on the front of the ship, and suddenly it
was pin-wheeling through the storm.
    "I got this," screamed Takai, but
no-one heard him, and he was wrong anyway.
    The ship was going down. Had it had wings,
they would have been ripped off by now. It didn’t. And as such, it also didn’t
really have anything to help it out of a flat spin. The thrusters simply
couldn’t cope against the force of the hurricane.
    Takai got creative. He fired all the
turrets on the inside of the spin, hoping they would push the rear of the ship
out more. It had no effect at all.
    In desperation, he pushed the nose down,
trying to change from a spin into a loop. He ended up with a spinning loop.
    Totally out of control, and nearly in the
sea now, he did the only thing he could do. He turned the shields back on.
    Hold on, why were they off? I wound time
back to the top of the hurricane, and watched his movements closely. And there,
yes, at the top of the thunderclouds, barely through into the atmosphere, he
turned the shields off. I froze things.
    "It's in the manual," said
Twelve.
    "Huh?"
    "The manual. It's in there."
    "I know what the manual is. Why does
it say to turn the shields off?"
    "It doesn’t say. It's just part of the
procedure."
    "When was it written?"
    "The day after someone used a shield
in the atmosphere the first time, and caused an air liner to crash by getting
to close and dissolving its wing tip."
    "How long ago was that?"
    "More than two hundred years."
    "Shit!"
    "Yeah.
    I wound time forward to where I’d left it,
and a few seconds later, we hit the water.
    The ship went through the surface of the
water as if it wasn’t there. It wasn’t. The shields vaporized the water on
contact. The ship moved forwards under the water, now fully under control, and
right sides up.
    "Why did we need to go into the
wind?" Smith asked Takai. "Couldn’t you have done this in the
eye?"
    "Not the plan sir. We were supposed to
enter the water without shields not far from the habitat."
    "This is better."
    "I amaze even myself sometimes,"
chuckled Takai. "But it's going to take us a lot longer to get there now.
Even with shields up, the water offers more drag than the wind, especially as
we were supposed to be going with the wind."
    "Let me know when we get close."
    "Will do."

Three
     
    Instead of fifteen minutes, it was an hour
before we docked with the habitat. It was resting on the bottom of the Pacific
Ocean. Even down here, the water was moving fairly violently. It took three
goes to match the airlocks, and dock.
    I followed Smith down to the others.
    "Suit up people," he said.
"I don’t trust this place. If the water comes in, we should be prepared
for it, and be on suit air before our feet get wet. If we need to swim out, I
want it to be with plenty of reserve air."
    "What's