Chapter 149 The Reverse Burn
"The math doesn't work. It is not simply a trifle away, Ryker, it is impossible physically.
Vane threw a grease-streaked wrench on the mahogany desk of the Command Center. He resembled what you would call an insomniac. Like the mugs of chicory coffee that lay empty round his datapad, it showed a fast spinning 3-D representation of the Valkyrie.
The Valkyrie is a heavy drop-ship in the air, of the atmosphere, I told you," said Vane, his hands falling down his face. It is designed to fall down the sky, and shoot things, not to shoot back up. We do not have the fuel to leave the Aether at its orbital velocity without the orbital launch boosters of the Aether and the space elevator we had destroyed at Station Zero. When we lift the snout up and strike the throttle, we will run out of propulsion halfway through the stratosphere, and drop back to the earth like a forty ton rock.
Somehow there must be a way, Ryker thought. He was bending over the desk with his golden eyes following the digital timer clocking in the corner.
T-MINUS 36 HOURS, 14 MINUTES.
We must have a localized burst of momentum, dr. Sato said, walking the room. She was biting the end of a stylus. We do not have to make engines of the ship do everything. It will only require us to have something that will kick us around such that the last orbital insertion will only require that the engines deal with.
"Throw us?" Jaxon spoke probingly in the doorway with an arched eyebrow. "With what? A giant slingshot?"
"A railgun," Ferrous rumbled.
The old warlord walked in the room. He had a heavy canvas coat on to keep off the cold of winter, but his scarred face which now was human was keen with knowledge.
Ferrous sank a thick finger into the map of the Iron City and pointed with it. They transversed molten steel before the rust consumed it... before the machines came to life... Massive vats of it. They employed the magnetic linear accelerators. Giant coils."
Sato stopped pacing. Behind her glasses her eyes were opened. "The Mag-Lev conveyors! Ferrous, are the coils of magnet in the main smelting shaft at all?
The blue fungus choked them, and that was the reason Ferrous nodded. The copper wiring is broad as the waist of a man. They are fitted into the prime smokestack. Pointing straight up."
Improvised mass relay, A said, and looked at Sato. and by removing the metal armor plating and the cargo winches--all unnecessary weight--of the Valkyrie, and filling the hull with a sabot sleeve of conductive fabric....
The Foundry has its power grid, which can be used to electromagnetically launch the ship out of the smokestack, Sato completed, her fingers racing over her datapad as she calculated the numbers. It would be like a bullet in a rifling-barrel. The magnetic rings propel one above the other and the ship between them goes to Mach 10 even before it is even free of the top of the stack. The atmosphere will have cleared before we reach the point where the thrusters of the ship can give us a push to bring us home to the end.
"Mach 10?" I inquired, holding my left hand with much bandaged space hidden in my breast. "Inside the atmosphere? The friction by itself will burn off the hull before we get into space.
Not unless we have an aerodynamic buffer, said Ryker. He turned to look at me.
No, Ryker, no, said Sato, and he glanced at my hand. Elara has second degree burns on her palm and has a severe nerve fatigue. Should she direct the Origin Stone to make a wind-shield to the friction of Mach 10 against the atmosphere, there is the possibility that it might destroy the nerves in her arm forever.
"I can do it," I said quietly.
Ryker's jaw clenched. He turned to me with his big shoulders in front of the rest of the room. I will not ask you, Elara, to cripple yourself. We will have the means of protecting the ship in another way. Ablative plating--"
The ablution is too cumbersome. It spoils Vane his math," I countered, and looked directly at his hard-driving gaze. Valerius is falling down on our heads with a city-sized space station. Without the Stone, everyone burns. The planet cracks in half. I'm doing it."
Ryker looked up at me a long and heavy way. He read the steel in my eyes, the complete unwillingness to yield. He put his hand out, and stroked my face against his coarse hand.
You are the manliest man I ever met, he said to himself.
The Alpha returned and looked back to the room.
"Vane, strip the ship. Ferrous, I must have all the able bodied men and women of the Iron Guard down at the Foundry to straighten out those magnetic coils. Sato, figure out the direction. We must have half a day to make a ship.
The Cannon
The Iron City labored frantically and desperately together.
We had passed through the White March, and it was he who was in the shadow of the dropping Aether like a guillotine.
With the Iron Guard led by Ferrous, the Valkyrie was dragged out of the Train Yard and into the snowy streets to the foot of the giant Foundry. They cut the heavy terrestrial armor of the ship off with plasma torches, leaving the matte-black monster bare with its smooth, silver bones.
The engineering departments within the Foundry operated 24/7 bypassing the rusted safety regulators and connecting the giant magnetic conveyor rings directly to the geothermal electricity network of the city. They fished the huge track upwards until the track became the barrel of the greatest gun ever made.
It was completed by half past thirty-four.
The Valkyrie was raised into the bottom of the stack, and was standing upright on the launch clamps.
I was in the temporary locker room of the Foundry bottom. I now had a scavenged Purist high-altitude flight suit on. It was stiff, insulated, and tight.
Sato was painstakingly making a hole in the left glove of the suit, exposing the broken Origin Stone on my ring finger, and keeping the rest of my burnt hand covered with the protective thermal gel.
The G-force, I said to her, is going to be brutal, and her voice shook a little. When the magnets move in each other you will think you have an elephant on your chest. You must not lay the pressure shield off until you get the top of the smokestack, or the wind movement will blow the Foundry apart internally.
Depower the stack, load the air, I said, my throat parched.
You are going to zero-gravity, Elara," Sato said and he drew me in to his sudden close embrace. "Bring him back. Bring them all back."
I walked out to the launch pad.
Ryker, Vane and Baron were standing already at the gantry elevator. In his baggy flight suit Baron appeared pathetic with his ears tacked against his head. Wolves were to be in the woods, and not tied to a rocket.
Ryker didn't wear a helmet. His Star-Metal sword was in his hand, fresh grip-taped.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Let's go shoot a ghost," I said.
We took the elevator and sat into the vertical seatbelt of the cockpit of the Valkyrie. Vane sat down at the pilot chair, his hands going through the pre-flight check list. I was seated in the co-pilot seat and my hand, the left hand, was heavily resting on the armrest. Ryker and Baron buckled in at the jump seats.
Vane called in on the comms, All systems green. Control of the grid is in thy hands, Ferrous. Pour the geothermal taps into the main capacitors.
Ferrous broke in with his gruff voice: "capacitors charging, and so on.... It has been a pleasure to have fought with you, Exodus. Give the sky hell."
A groan of agony started rumbling through the ship hull. The huge magnetic rings that surrounded the smokestack, which were out of view, started glowing with an angry blue-white energy. My hair stood on end on my arms and the electromagnetic field was charging.
The Aether, get at, Vane said, his voice contracting with the increasing vibration. "Trajectory locked. Ferrous... light the candle."
"Firing in three... two... one."
THUMP.
The launch clamps released.
The world became an indistinct mass of crunching oppression and metal tears.
The G-force struck me as a physical blow. My sight blurred at the periphery. I had to squeeze my chest in order to get my breath out. The Valkyrie flew up the interior of the smokestack, which was accelerated by the huge magnetic rings.
Ten, twenty, fifty Gs.
"We're clearing the stack!" Vane screamed, but he sounded a million miles distant.
The blackness of the industrial pipe was replaced immediately by the blinding grey of the winter sky, as viewed through the viewport.
Now.
I strained my burning bandaged left hand. A shot of pain was surging up my forearm as I drove my will into the broken Origin Stone.
Part the sky!
A cone of hyper-compressed air was formed direct over the nose of the Valkyrie. At Mach 5 we entered Mach 10, and the atmosphere banged into us as a solid brick wall. But my wind-shield caught it. The friction of air ignited and it became an inferno of red and orange plasma, but the hull of the ship was cool.
I screamed in agony. The ring was scalding my flesh, the magic retaliation a frightening experience. The sterile gauze started bleeding, and the blood evaporated under heat of the stone.
"Hold it, Elara!" Ryker clanked off behind me, struggling in the G-force to come round and catch me by the shoulders. "Just a few more seconds! The air is thinning!"
We blasted through the stratosphere.
The violent shaking of the ship had suddenly started to become smooth. The storm-fire of the airplasma beyond the window became no longer orange, nor even blue, but the pure, naked black of the nothingness.
"Atmosphere cleared!" Vane clenched with a slap of his hands against the console. "Main thrusters engaging!"
The engines of the ship came to life, and drove us the remaining distance.
The crushing weight lifted. The horrifying grating was stopped. I fell back on my left hand, choking at the loss of air, and with tears streaming my eyes. The Origin Stone was flickering and went absolutely dark, exhausted to the point of weariness.
But we were alive.
We were in space.
I undone my harness, drifting one inch above my seat in the microgravity. I peeped through the fortified view-port.
We were suspended over a huge, silent, marble cloud of twisting white clouds and grey infected continents.
And right in front of us, filling in the horizon, was the Aether.
The giant, silvery ring-station was no longer rotating in an orbital path. It was on a tilt, and the city-sized structure on its continuous tractor-head, the continual firing of its main propellers, were driving it on an unalterable course toward the planet beneath.
We have visual," said Vane, his hands gaining control on the yoke. "He's dropping fast. He has perhaps three hours before he reaches the upper atmosphere, and burns the world.
Ryker undid and transferred himself into the air at my elbow. He stared at the crashing station, his jaw frozen in a line.
"Take us in, Vane," Ryker ordered. We have an online god to switch off.