Instead they had to contend with a very stable surface rising up to meet them much faster than was necessary. Thankfully, Jax was completely silent for the time being. No screaming about how they were sure to die, no yelling at Runstom to do something. He just sat there and let the officer do his job. He either had complete faith in Runstom or just realized there was nothing he could do to help the situation except shut up and stay out of the way.

Runstom didn’t exactly have a lot of faith in his own piloting abilities. He actually rarely flew spaceships these days. He’d spent a lot of time with the one- and two-man patrol ships, of course, but his experience with anything larger than that was mostly via simulation. Docking with other ships in space was pretty easy, no matter what the ship – the computer could handle most of the maneuvering in that case. Landing on the surface of a planet was generally not recommended. Your typical planet had all kinds of waystations and orbiting docks and the like that spaceships could come to. Transportation to and from the surface of the planet was handled by sub-orbital shuttles and strato-elevators and whatnot. It was much more efficient to build Warp/Xarp-capable vessels without landing gear, tons of retro thrusters, huge take-off thrusters, or even wings (in the traditional sense, made for lifting and supporting a craft in an atmosphere).

They had only one advantage: the personnel transport was designed to be flexible enough to have the ability to make a surface-based attack. It didn’t have any of the taking-off components, of course; the idea being that a cluster of these ships could land hard and fast, blitzkrieg-style. If the soldiers on board were able to dominate their objective, then another shuttle could come down and retrieve them later. If they failed in their mission, there was no going back.

Runstom fussed with the controls, trying to find the switch that would extend the shock-system at the bottom of the ship. Finally he found what he was looking for.

“Surface-landing sequence initiated.” The computer’s voice was barely audible over the sudden rush of wind. Some lights came on, turning the whole cockpit yellow. A steadily increasing beeping sound began to pierce through all the white noise. Runstom guessed that was an indicator for the distance to the ground.

They felt the vessel shudder as it attempted to right itself, keeping level so the shocks on the bottom would hit the surface squarely. Runstom let go of the controls. There wasn’t much he could do from here, except let the ship do its thing. He looked at Jax, who just nodded and checked his seat restraints for the umpteenth time. The beeping got faster and faster. It was the only warning they had before they hit.

It took them a few minutes to recover from the impact. They’d both probably experienced multiple mini-heart attacks during the descent and had to work hard to control their breathing. Jax dry-heaved a couple of times; since they hadn’t eaten much of anything during the Xarp trip, there was little matter to vomit.

Finally Runstom unstrapped himself. “Take your time, catch your breath,” he said to Jax, his own voice coming out haggard and weak. “I’m going to look around.”

He opened the cockpit door and stepped into the main bay of the vessel, closing the cockpit behind him. Guns, armor, ammo, packages of food and water, everything was all over the place, like it’d been hit by a tornado. The whole ship sat at a funny angle, not exactly level. He carefully stepped through the mess and approached the outer hatchway. He reached for the switch, then instinctively bent down and picked up a nearby rifle instead. He checked to see that it was loaded, turned off the safety, and opened the hatch.

They were in the middle of a field of blue-green ground vegetation. It was mostly quiet, the only sound being the crackle of something underneath the ship, the hiss of air as the retro-thrusters vented something, and the flap of something that sounded like plastic above him. There was a distinct smell of burning plant matter mixed with the unnatural smell of melted metal and plastic. There was no sign of life in the immediate area, so he stepped out. Holding his rifle, he stalked all around the landing area and scanned the horizons. Other than some taller, tree-like vegetation in one direction and hills in another, he didn’t see much of anything. A few small, avian-type creatures flew about the blue-gray sky in the distance.

He turned back inward, toward the ship. The grass-like stuff on the ground was all scorched and blackened in a rough circle around the vessel. The shock system was exposed and he could see the pneumatic columns, asymmetric in their lengths, accounting for the lopsidedness of the transport. A couple of white parachutes hung from small hatches somewhere out of the top of the ship and flapped about in the light breeze.

Runstom slung the rifle over his shoulder and came around to the back of ship just as Jax was coming out of the rear hatchway.

“Hey,” Jax said, his voice rough. He had a couple of boxes in his hands. “You hungry? I’m starving.”

“Yeah,” Runstom said, smiling. “We’re alive. This is going to be the best-tasting meal you’ve ever eaten.”

A few hours later they were trekking through the wilderness. Most of the electronic equipment on board was damaged in the rough landing, but there were a few packs of low-tech survival gear. Compasses, maps, ocular-zoom-scopes, flares, fireboxes, hatchets, blankets, and even a couple of tents.

Jax knew everything there was to know about Terroneous because Runstom knew it and recited it as they prepared to set out. As part of his ModPol training, he was required to learn the minimal stats of every inhabitable rock in the Barnard system. Jax wasn’t sure why he was getting the whole spiel, but he thought the officer might have intended to make him feel safe in the emptiness and relative silence of the wilderness.

So Jax learned that Terroneous was pretty hospitable to life as far as celestial bodies go. That it had an atmosphere made up of a lot of nitrogen and a fair amount of oxygen. Not as much O2 as you get in most domes, which tend to overdo it a little, but enough to sustain humans, especially if they stick around long enough to get used to it. Gravity around 8.2 meters per second squared. Most importantly, a magnetic field and magnetic poles at either end of its rotational axis. It was large for a moon, but quite a bit smaller than the average non-gaseous planet.

According to Runstom, the roughest part about life on Terroneous was the lack of sunlight. He explained that while the moon rotates on a nice steady basis, resulting in the same effect of night and day that you’d get on a regular planet, it also revolves in its orbit around the gas giant Barnard-5, causing it to get blocked from the sun altogether for several days at a time. Fortunately, Barnard-5 radiated enough heat to keep Terroneous from becoming inhospitably cold, despite the extended lack of sun exposure. But even with the comfort of heat, the prolonged darkness could be taxing for some people.

They had a map of Terroneous. They’d pulled it out of an aging military-issue paper atlas, so it wasn’t exactly up-to-the-minute accurate, but it showed them the handful of locations with any civilization. They managed to get a vague geo-location out of the ship-board computer before the power died completely. The solar panels were damaged beyond repair, along with just about every other feature of the personnel transport. It was just as well, because the sun was disappearing behind the edge of B-5 and they had no idea when it would be back. They took survival supplies and a rifle for each of them. Runstom said it’d be wise to have some weapons in case they had to hunt for food or fight off indigenous predators. Also there was some mumble about Terroneous being a fairly lawless planet. Jax hadn’t quite caught the words exactly, and wasn’t sure he wanted to.