“Damn,” muttered Chastity as the latest map came in from a newly rising orbiter a half-hour later. Her fingers and pinky flew over the screen as she tried various other cross-sectional views. Rod came over to stand behind her to look at her display, his body swaying slightly as each pulse from Peregrine’s jets pushed them ever higher. Chastity pointed with her pinky to the place on the screen where a millistoma “cliff’ intersected Peregrine’s trajectory. The reddish-purple blinking dot labeled “Launch Point” was on the other side of the “cliff.” “That must be the outer rim of the millistoma body,” said Chastity. “The radar doesn’t report anything beyond it. But since that edge portion isn’t being weighed down as much, it’s rising faster than the central portions and forming this long rising cliff in front of us.”
“A rising bowl-like structure,” muttered Sandra. “Good design for a predator. Drives the prey toward the middle where
all
of it is eventually swallowed. No wonder whole flocks of rukhs disappear with no survivors left to tell the story.”
“Looks like the millistoma has us cut off at the pass,” said Rod grimly. “If we stay on top of Peregrine, both we and Peregrine will be swallowed. Our chances will be better if we separate and each make a run for it using our individual jet systems.” Now that the decision time had come, Rod’s commands were loud and swift.
“Dan! Make sure all connections are severed between
Sexdent,
the meta factory, and Peregrine except for the nose tether to the reactor.”
“Already done,” replied Dan quickly from the scottyboard.
Rod turned to holler down through the grating.
“Pete! Activate the dump valves on the consumables tanks.”
“Roger,” came the response from below. Soon they could hear the hiss of water and air escaping from the bottom of the capsule.
“Sandra! Tell Uppereye that we’ll be leaving shortly. As soon as we leave she should be able to increase Peregrine’s speed and out-climb the millistoma. To get us launched she needs to turn Peregrine east and switch to level flight at the maximum speed she can get Peregrine to fly at.”
A few minutes later the view from the upper windows of the capsule tilted to the level and the crew could see what was ahead of them.
“Mouths ...” said Chastity in a voice soft with fear.
“Thousands of mouths,” added Dan, his voice echoing her fear.
“A cliffside of mouths. Each ready to swallow us up,” said Rod, a brave determined grin on his face. “But we’re not going to wait around to get swallowed. We’re going to get out of here, even if the time isn’t right.” He turned to Sandra, who was still using the commander’s console to communicate with Uppereye. “How’s our speed?”
“Near the maximum Peregrine can attain carrying us on its back,” said Sandra. “Uppereye is very concerned about the rate that the edge of the millistoma is rising. She now has grave doubts that Peregrine will be able to fly over the top of the cliff even after we leave. She sang me a final farewell, since she does not expect to survive, but she hopes that we will keep our promise and come back to bring things and knowledge to her flock and to all the flocks on Saturn.”
“We’ll give her the best escape chance we can,” said Rod. “Everybody! Into your acceleration couches and strap in!”
It was less than a minute later when Rod turned sideways in his couch tp look at Chastity beside him, the pilot console suspended above her waist.
“Main rockets primed and ready for ignition,” she said, anticipating him.
Rod turned to Sandra on the other side of him. Since she still needed to communicate with Uppereye, he had relinquished the commander’s console to her.
“Tell Uppereye to roll us off and then get Peregrine out of here as fast as she can,” he ordered. “And say “Thanks and good luck’ from all of us,” he added belatedly.
As Peregrine started the long slow roll to one side, they felt the tilt on their backs first. Then the black feathers that could be seen out the viewport windows began to move. Soon they were sliding through the feather forest, the feathertops whipping swiftly by the viewports. Suddenly, the moving feather tips were gone and they were in free fall, followed by the pieces of hardware they had abandoned.
“Got it,” said Chastity as she activated the vernier jets to fly them away from the falling junk. There was a jolt as the meta factory separated and fell free. Gravity returned as she flew
Sexdent
high up above Peregrine, pulling the long Hoytether loose from the black forest top as she climbed. Verniers thrusting,
Sexdent
raced ahead of Peregrine and dropped down in front, pulling more tether loose from the orange feather forest underneath as Peregrine moved rapidly overhead.
“Don’t want to give Lowereye a ‘wedgie,’ “ said Chastity, verniers flashing as she made sure the unraveling tether didn’t get hung up on Peregrine’s trailing waste appendage. They were soon a number of kilometers away from the giant bird because Chastity was keeping the tether under tension as it unwound. They could now see all of the creature they had resided on for so long. Chastity kept
Sexdent
moving in its great arc until they were high overhead and in front of the leading edge of Peregrine’s wing.
“Reactor falling free,” reported Dan from the scottyboard.
“Then let’s get out of here!” said Chastity, punching the main engines icon with her pinky and lifting the joyball controller with her right hand. The twelve giant magnoshielded meta engines at the base of
Sexdent
burst into a roar and they were pressed into their seats by the acceleration.
“Good-bye and thank you, dear friend,” said Sandra through her link to Uppereye. “Now go! As fast as you can!” She closed down the video link to the mechbot and pushed the command console over above Rod. The first thing Rod noticed when he scanned the console was that
Sexdent
was still attached to the reactor through the tether. Its drag was tilting the capsule to one side, causing Chastity to use both the main engines and the vernier jets to keep them on course.
“Cut the tether, Chass!” yelled Rod. “You’re costing us apogee!” He started punching the icons on his commander’s board to switch control of the tether cutter to his console. “I’ll get it for you!”
“No!”
yelled Chastity. “I’m going to use it!” She turned the other way and hollered at Dan at the scottyboard. “Dan! Pull out the safety rods and bring that reactor up to meltdown! I’m going to give that monster ahead of us something that’s too hot for it to swallow! That should take its mind off catching Peregrine!”
Now that he understood, Rod removed his hands from his board and let Chastity take them on up. The main engines roared at full thrust, driving them ever faster toward the distant horizon in their almost horizontal escape from the gigantic planet. The minutes passed, the gee level in the control deck built up as the fuel load the rockets had to push diminished, and they were all pushed into their seats. Sandra looked out first one viewport above her, then the other.
“My god ...” she whispered softly. “It’s filling up the sky!” Ahead of them, the millistoma cliff edge was rising rapidly, as the monster used its jet propulsion to augment the rapidly rising column of air driving the rise of the Great White Spot. The rising cliff looked like a sped-up movie version of the buildup of a thunderhead cloud—except this was the horror movie version where the cloud consisted of thousands of maws, slowly opening and closing, swallowing everything in front of it.
“There are mouths everywhere!” said Sandra, starting to panic. “We’re going to be eaten! There’s no way we can avoid them!”
“That’s right!” replied Chastity cheerfully. “See that big mouth right in front of us just below the clifftop? I’ve been timing it and we should fly right into it just as it’s wide open!” Twisting the joyball slightly, she shifted their attitude slightly so she would hit the mouth dead center.
Sandra turned to look at Rod. “Stop her!
Do
something!”
“It’s our only way through the enemy lines, Ms. Ruby,” said Rod, laboriously turning his head away from the horrifyingly gripping scene out his viewport to give Sandra a smile and a wink. “You forgot these creatures are all air. Chass is giving us our best shot by flying through an open mouth, so we avoid hitting the front skin of the creature. We’re going so fast now we should have no problem busting through the backside of the mouth and out the other side. The ride may be a little rough, though, so hold on tight!”
“The reactor is starting to melt,” reported Dan. “I can see it glowing below me out the lower viewport windows. It’s almost reached the mouths down below us.”
“Good!” said Chastity, cutting loose the tether by tapping on the icon with her left-arm pinky. The reactor, dropping glowing molten drops of metal behind it, smashed into a half-open mouth, pulling the trailing tether behind it. The kilometers-long tether sawed its way through one mouth after another. Spreading away from the widening wound was a slow rippling of the inflated flesh that connected the mouths into one gigantic creature. Reacting to the pain, the millistoma started to collapse in on itself, its mouths automatically closing as the pain message was passed on to the rest of the body so it would avoid eating another painful morsel.
The high-speed capsule beat the pain message to the mouth opening before them. Chastity flew them into the multi-story maw, the ultra-hot flames from
Sexdent
’s roaring jets melting away an ever-widening hole behind them. There was a sharp twist of the capsule cabin as the nose of
Sexdent
hit the back wall...
“Stars!” said Chastity, as they burst out the other side of the giant cloud-creature into the darkening sky. “Let’s go visit them!” Minute after minute the twelve engines in the base of
Sexdent
roared reddish-purple flame to the rear, pushing them skyward.
“Thirty klecs ... thirty-two... thirty-four...” Rod counted evenly.
“Thirty-five,” replied Chastity a short time later, as she pulled down on the joyball and the ship went into free fall.
“We’re on our way home!” said Pete loudly, echoed by sighs of relief from Sandra and Dan. But then all three noticed that both Chastity and Rod were strangely silent.
“What’s the matter?” asked Dan, turning to Chastity.
“Right speed, wrong direction,” she replied brusquely. “Rod and I need to think.” The capsule grew silent.
“I’ll check fuel level,” said Rod. “Okay to rotate capsule?”
“Yes,” replied Chastity as she brought up some alternate trajectories on her screen. “Apogee is over three days away. We’ve got plenty of time before we have to make a burn decision.”
The electric motor between the crew cabin and the fuel tank slowly started the cabin rotating one way and the fuel tank the other. Still harnessed in, they felt themselves sliding outward under the small amount of centrifugal acceleration.
“Less than three tons,” Rod finally announced. “Enough to give us just over two klecs of delta vee.”
“Just as we had planned,” replied Chastity. “That two klecs was exactly what we needed at apogee to put us into an elliptical orbit around Titan. Only when we reach apogee, Titan isn’t going to be there.”
“What happened?” asked Sandra, frightened and bewildered.
“The millistoma forced us to leave too early,” said Chastity. “We needed to wait another hour and a half until Saturn had rotated so that our takeoff point was exactly on the opposite side of where Titan will be three days from now when we reach apogee. As it is, our apogee will peak right at the same altitude as Titan, but Titan will be sixty degrees ahead of us. Our orbit will peak at the trailing Trojan point instead.”
“Isn’t the Trojan point where we want to go anyway?” asked Sandra.
“Our fuel is at the other Trojan point, the one leading Titan,” said Rod.
“It wouldn’t make any difference anyway,” added Chastity. “We can’t stop at either one of the Trojan points. Don’t have enough fuel.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” said Sandra, almost whispering in her despair.
“I’ll have Chass do enough of an apogee burn to make sure we don’t burn up in Saturn’s atmosphere when we come down again three days later,” replied Rod. “But that will just postpone the inevitable.” He looked around. “Chass and I’ll continue to work the problem. You three can unstrap your safety harnesses and take a break. Just be ready to come back in a hurry in case we think of something to do.”
“I think better on an empty bladder,” said Chastity, unstrapping her harness and floating off to the ladder leading to the toilets below.
A short time later, Sandra reported good news from the scottyboard, which she had set up as a science console.
“Peregrine escaped from the millistoma!” she cried. “I’m getting a strong signal from the telemetry transponder on the mechbot. The accelerometers are reporting regular jet thrust pulses, strong and fast, while the position indicator has Peregrine at high altitude and moving northward at high speed toward the rest of the flock.”
“How did Peregrine manage to escape?” asked Dan, who was having a squeezer of coffee down below. “We were surrounded by mouths.”
“I had Jeeves backtrack the telemetry signal,” said Sandra. “Peregrine flew out through the gap that Chastity burned through the millistoma cliff edge using the reactor and
Sexdent
’s rockets.”
~ * ~
They had three days to climb up out of the gravity well of Saturn and three days to fall. Although Rod and Chastity, indeed all of them, thought about various things they might do, none of them promised to get them out of the predicament the millistoma had put them into. It now looked as if the only survivor of the millistoma was going to be Peregrine. Sandra was able to establish communication with Uppereye through the mechbot laser link, but the communication intervals were so short because of the energy limitations of the mechbot solar power collector that there was little she could do except tell Uppereye the bad news and reassure her that humans would be coming back to Saturn even if Sandra wouldn’t be able to make it herself.