Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1)(19)

“Atmospheric entry in five minutes,” the computer chimed. The window shutters slid closed, leaving us with video screens. I tried not to think about how long it had been since this ship had received routine maintenance. Landing was hard on ships.

The screens showed a bleak brown planet. A line of white-capped mountains marched across the border between light and dark. No greenery or oceans broke up the monotony.

We were close enough to tap into the planet’s information network. I pulled up the depressingly short wiki entry. It was dated a month ago. TSD Nine used to be a Yamado mining planet. Then the ore ran out. The miners and the diplomats moved on to the next planet, leaving behind the seedier elements that were all too happy to take over.

The wiki warned that the dark side of the planet was best avoided. Smugglers had taken over the abandoned mining shafts, and outsiders were unwelcome. Those who wandered in often went missing.

Lovely place, this planet.

The light side wasn’t any better, as it was rife with mercs. Every so often they’d go bounty hunting through the smugglers’ tunnels. The largest city, Gamamine, sat in perpetual twilight on the border between the two worlds.

Getting a better ship was going to be tricky. Usually I’d just book passage on the first ship off-planet, but I had a feeling the options were going to be few and far between—this wasn’t exactly a booming tourist location. I could afford to buy a new ship, but throwing that much currency around after landing in an escape shuttle would raise some eyebrows.

“Atmospheric entry beginning,” the computer chimed.

Loch settled into the captain’s chair and clipped in. The planet filled the video screens. After time in space, it was always weird to realize that you were intentionally hurtling yourself at the ground in order to land. And that there was ground at all.

It’d been over a year since I’d set foot on a planet, because I mostly bounced around between space stations. Stations always had flights available at the last minute and weren’t always the strictest about checking documentation. And the biggest stations were larger than surface cities anyway, so it was easy to get lost in the crowd.

The escape ship shivered as it decelerated. We had to slow down before we slammed into the atmosphere or we’d end up in itty-bitty pieces spread over half the planet. All of the data on my screen showed our entry was proceeding as expected, but the next ten minutes were the hardest on the ship.

A few minutes later, the telltale buffeting of atmosphere vibrated through the ship. The turbulence got worse as we descended. Thankfully these seats had shoulder harnesses. I’d landed in a subpar ship with just a lap-belt before and came out bruised for my effort.

We were on course to land at the small spaceport in Gamamine. The city was both our best chance of getting off-planet again and our best chance of getting caught. If the mercs caught wind that the two highest bounties in the ’verse had just landed in their backyard, we wouldn’t have a moment’s rest.

Loch’s hands moved across the screen and the ship blared a warning. Before I could ask him what he’d done, the ship dropped like a rock, throwing me into the shoulder harness. Blood rushed to my head and I fought the redout that lingered on the edges of my vision.

If I didn’t know better, I’d assume we were accelerating toward the ground.

Another alarm went off before Loch silenced it. The uniform brown landscape shifted into hills, valleys, and fields as we descended. We were coming in way too fast.

My hands flew over my own console as I tried to slow our descent, but he’d locked me out. “What are you doing? We can’t come into the spaceport like this; they’ll shoot us down.” When it came to casualties, spaceports defaulted to protecting the assets already on the ground unless they had a really, really good reason to do otherwise.

“We’re not headed to the spaceport and we’re sitting ducks in the air. The faster we’re on the ground, the safer we are.”

“We won’t be safer if we hit the ground at this speed—we’ll be splattered.”

He grinned at me with a flash of white teeth. “Trust me, sweetheart. I know what I’m doing.”

Trust was earned, and so far, Marcus Loch had done some, but not nearly enough to earn mine. I debated trying to override the lockout on my control panel while I watched the ground hurtle closer. But trust was a two-way street and I didn’t think Loch was suicidal, so I clutched the edge of the control panel and did nothing.

Giving up control of my fate was harder than I anticipated. Even though I knew Marcus must have a plan, doing nothing went against everything in my nature.

Proximity alarms blared to life. Loch was laser focused on the control panel. I dug my fingernails into my palms and said nothing. Distracting him would not help us land.

We were coming down in a gently rolling area gouged by deep canyons. Flat areas big enough for the ship were few and far between. As we got ever closer, I realized the canyons were both deeper and wider than I first thought.

And we were aiming directly for one.

We were nearly even with the ground at the lip of the canyon before Loch fired the thrusters to slow our descent. The ship shuddered and groaned under the strain, but Loch only cranked the thrusters higher. We were nearly at the thrust level that would be used for takeoff and still we descended deeper.

The engine whine ratcheted up a notch and our descent slowed. My screen showed our landing location to be a relatively flat spot at the bottom of the canyon, still a hundred meters away. At fifty meters, the engines screamed as Loch pushed the thrusters to their maximum output.