Starship Blackbeard by Wallace Michael

Author:Wallace, Michael [Wallace, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Balsalom Publishing
Published: 2014-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Captain Nigel Rutherford took Vigilant down through Albion’s atmosphere. The ship shuddered and bucked like an unbroken horse with a rider on its back. He stared out the window at the surface as it came rushing up. The continent of Britain peeled away from Australia, and soon he could see mountains, lakes, and rivers resolving themselves. Finally, the wide, fertile York Plain, golden with autumn wheat from horizon to horizon.

The plain ended at Lake Huron, the nearest of the Great Lakes. It was daytime, and there was cloud cover to the east, so he didn’t immediately pick out York Town. Then he saw the skyscrapers of the Kingdom Towers in the center of the city, the downtown area curving in an arc along the banks of the St. Lawrence, with bridges running back and forth across the river.

The royal palace and its vast estates lay between the west bank of the river and the forests stretching to a distant mountain range on the north. It was a huge wooded parkland almost the size of the city itself, thousands upon thousands of acres.

The Punisher-class cruisers were the largest naval ships capable of landing planetside. Unlike a carrier, or the great battleship Dreadnought, which was built to brawl with enemies in space, Vigilant and her sister ships Ajax and Churchill were occasionally called on to engage air forces inside a planet’s atmosphere. They could disgorge marines in the middle of a hostile city, while bombarding the enemy with cannon and missile, a laser tracing a scorching ray back and forth until the city was aflame.

But it took a hardened carbon fiber and tyrillium surface to withstand the tremendous heat of her plasma engines upon takeoff and landing. Had he attempted to land at York’s commercial port, he’d have melted the tarmac. And so Rutherford ordered them to approach from the south toward the military spaceport some thirty miles distant from the palace and fifty miles outside the city.

A strange, unpleasant sensation settled deep in Rutherford’s bones as the ship powered down upon landing, the pull and tug of natural gravity for the first time in months. In space, the anti-grav systems kept the bones from eroding, but real gravity was a different sensation. It felt like his bones were shifting in place.

You’re going to feel some serious shifting if you’re not careful.

His bones might shift right out of their sockets when they hoisted him by his wrists for a flogging. His neck bones might shift when he dangled from a rope, a noose about his throat.

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Rutherford stepped onto the tarmac, where the air was so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his lungs. It radiated through his boots, nearly cooking his feet inside. Only gradually did the crisp autumn breeze drive away the heat left by Vigilant’s engines. It carried the scent of forest, something he hadn’t smelled in a long time but that seemed so green and welcoming he thought a desire for it must be written into his very DNA.

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