Arrival: Chapter 26
“There they go…” Neil said as he watched the landers leave from the ship on the shuttle’s heads up display. The three simulants were in the shuttle, with Wiremu and Neil in the front seats, and In-Su between them looking over their shoulders as he leaned against the backs of their chairs. They could all see the same thing, so Neil was more idly commenting than actually informing anyone of anything. There wasn’t much any of them could think to say at a time like this, so they just watched.
Neil had successfully linked up the industrial atmospheric separator to the shuttle, and its cryogenic oxygen and hydrogen tanks were now almost full. It was still a slow process, but now they expected to be fully fueled and ready to ascend to orbit within the hour. It was impossible to try to launch any earlier, since even with all of the auxiliary fuel tanks bulging full there was only just barely enough fuel to actually achieve orbital velocity; there wasn’t much margin for error.
The three morosely watched the image being projected onto the flight deck window as all ten lander drones were ejected from the New Horizons’ launch tubes in regular succession, one after another. Whether deliberately or by oversight, Asari and Aset had still neglected to block their actions from being monitored over the network which linked together all of the mission’s shuttles, landers and scrolls via the ship.
From his seat to the right of Wiremu, Neil with a thought took control of one of the New Horizon’s four mounted telescopes and directed it towards the landers as they entered the atmosphere. After he put the feed up on the HUD, the three watched as one by one the landers gradually became engulfed in energetic plasma as they were slowed down from their orbital velocity by their frictional interaction with the planets’ atmosphere. Finally, the last one streaked over the planet’s horizon and out of sight of the ship’s telescope. The landers were similarly cylindrical in shape like all of the other drone landers, but they didn’t unfurl to a larger shape and were simply hollow inside with two levels. Five people could be uncomfortably shoehorned into each level creating an emergency descent vehicle for ten people.
They were hoped to never need to be used, and were expressly for emergency departure from the ship in the case of some kind of disaster. Mission protocol called for everyone to be ferried down in the shuttles, especially since they could take far more people down with them on every descent trip than they could ever take back on an ascent to orbit. The landers only existed in case there was some kind of catastrophe, like if the New Horizon itself was doomed or both shuttles were somehow destroyed or otherwise rendered incapable of ferrying passengers down to the planet, whether en-route or after their arrival.
“Wii?” In-Su asked, “I don’t um… I don’t know what to hope for here. I don’t know… who I want to win, or… or if I really want anyone to win. Part of me doesn’t want either side to be… to be rewarded for what they’re doing.” Kim In-Su had always been an eminently peaceful man. He’d never been an explicitly avowed pacifist, but in his life he’d never encountered a situation where violence had been the only, smartest, or best option. He understood on an intellectual level that in some extreme situations and circumstances violence can be left to one as their last recourse, but such cases and examples had always been so academic to him. A line from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ book series had always stuck with him, that ‘violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ The sentiment had never failed him to date, in fact it had never revealed itself to him as being anything other than perfectly accurate.
“I know In-Su… I know.” Wiremu replied as he brought up a stylized terrain map on the interior of the shuttle’s window, and then waited for icons representing the landers to reappear once they passed through the dangerous burn phase of their descent. He knew that it was long odds that every one of them would survive the inferno.
“I have far too much experience with just this problem from my Peacekeeper days… You go into a conflict zone, and all you see are bad guys… both sides are usually clearly in the wrong somehow. Don’t misunderstand me, sometimes there really is a clear aggressor and a clear victim, but too often… too often it’s just a bloody mess, just like this… Too often it’s a situation where the question of who’s guilty and who’s innocent… become a nonsense question a long time ago. Far back in time, further back than anyone can usually remember, one side had to be the first to wrong the other sure, but… but by the time we showed up there were always enough atrocities committed on both sides to make it not really seem to matter anymore.” He sighed heavily, now lost in very painful memories, and in deep dread that this situation was as intractable as some of the ones he could all too clearly remember.
“What I can tell you though In-Su, is that nothing productive can ever happen until the destruction finally stops, until one or both sides finally decide to pull back from the brink and realize that they have nothing to gain from keeping the cycle of violence going anymore… that was after all the whole idea behind peacekeeping missions in the first place. Sometimes you’ve got to kill a few more people who refuse to get the message, but the whole point is to grind the killing to a halt overall and prevent either side from being able to gain anything by committing any further violence. Once it’s started… it quickly doesn’t really matter who started it in the first place or who is right or wrong anymore. Once the violence starts, nothing matters but ending it. Only when the fighting stops can thinking and talking resume… My advice In-Su, is to not even try to find a side to root for, just hope for as few deaths as possible before the killing finally stops.”
“They’re coming out of the clouds now,” Neil observed. Together the three counted the landers as their respective infernos dissipated and the signals of their transponders could reach the satellite network again. One by one they counted as their icons showed up on the map of the planet’s surface. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… and that was it. They waited and waited in agonized anticipation, but the last two landers never reappeared on their screens.
“Oh no…” In-Su uttered with tears in his eyes.
“Twenty people…” Neil uttered in shock.
Wiremu only winced, and calculated in his head that overall, their expected lander failure rate was now at par. “Touchdown in thirty minutes.” he grimly observed.
Although somewhat intermittent, between the ship’s telescopes and satellites, they often had real time video of the landers as they tracked them down to the surface. When video was unavailable, the image on the HUD switched back to the stylized map with their transponders locating them on it. Although direct video was intermittent, the system was designed to be able to provide an exact location for every piece of mission equipment at all times.
The three watched in horror as the landers attempted to come down through the canopy of the jungle several kilometers away from Halley’s landing strip. Between the intermittent video feed and the locating transponders, they were able to tell that three of the landers didn’t make it through the canopy and instead became lodged within it, and just being stuck that high up was going to be dangerous enough to the crew inside. There was a good chance that the thick tree tops would block the hatches on the landers from fully opening, and there was no easy way for anyone to climb down from that height since the bottom four meters of the trees’ tall trunks were quite bare of any branches to climb down on.
At one point while an overhead satellite provided direct imagery, the three simulated men had to watch aghast as two of the three stranded landers burst into flames. The rocket halos which were built to set them down gently on the surface in a clearing, instead ignited the drier parts of the canopy around the lander. They could see a few people emerge from the flaming capsules, but as they exited they were all engulphed in flames themselves, and they either quickly became motionless in the burning canopy, or they fell out of sight. Those that disappeared presumably fell all the way through the tops of the trees and down to the ground far below after hitting other branches and trees on the way. The only luck they could be said to have, was that the jungle was lush and damp enough that the fires didn’t grow into a much larger wildfire. They continued to burn in the area around the landers, but the fires blessedly did not spread. The three simulants were silent as they considered the fate of the men and women trapped in those landers, squeezed tightly into small metal boxes, and then roasted alive for so ignominious a cause.