Chapter 1 - Gregor
All the way down through Earth’s atmosphere, the shipmen had named Hooligan, was fighting for the life of its crew.
Something had been following them throughout this mission, Gregor knew. Sitting in the first pilot’s slot on Hooligan’s crowded flightdeck, Zephyr-Lieutenant Gregor Fitz could sense the thing that followed them in the motion of the controls and the thrum of wind and energies just beyond the ship’s metal shell. An occasional flickering, right at the edge of his vision, had taunted him through the cabin’s ring of viewports. These happenings had been persistent throughout every watch he stood on this journey to the highest reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. At first it was intermittent, but as the conclusion of the flight approached and their descent began they became more frequent and dogged. A growing sense of foreboding now lurked behind the dials, gauges, switches, and levers of his control board.
Clearly, the big aerostat knew that something stalked it.
“Well, to hell with this,” he mumbled in his native Finnik from behind his oxygen mask.
As Hooligan dropped toward the 200,000 feet marker, Gregor chided himself for behaving like a trainee cadet rather than the highly experienced aeroman that everyone within the program knew him to be. Despite all his internal hand wringing the ship and crew had performed splendidly. Theirs was a hallmark mission, a capstone in the chase to extend humanity’s reach into the highest realms. And Hooligan had gotten them there. They had done it!
Something crunched in the slot behind him. There soon arose a scatter-shot tin cacophony. Gregor and the mission commander exchanged a knowing glance.
“You getting the munchies, Tank?” Gregor asked.
Behind Gregor the ship’s chief fultoneer crumpled an empty foil bag of Teeny Tastees and slid it into a trash bin. “I always get hungry during these drops,” the big man drawled.
The aerostat’s commander said, “If you didn’t bring enough for everybody then you can’t have any either.” She briefly used a voice that was likely familiar to her children when they all took vacation trips in the family wagon.
Tank frowned and patted his belly. “Mmmm. I did have enough T&T’s for you two but I somehow misplaced ‘em.”
Gregor sighed woefully. His Anglic was heavily accented and his feigned disappointment only made it more so: “Poor us, we will likely expire of hunger before seeing the ground again.”
“That will be a major disappointment for your girlfriend,” Tank said into the air.
“Which one?” the commander asked.
“All of them,” the fultoneer replied. Smiles briefly filled the cabin. Gregor’s exaggerated reputation groundside was often the fodder of jokes. Perhaps never so much as aboard this mission.
Gregor patted his control board and said with a boyish enthusiasm his grandparents might have recognized, “Hooligan is the only lady I’m focused on these days.”
Taut control cables ran from the center of the gondola’s control deck, through a sealed access port, and up to the rigidized, tsiolkovium-coated sphere a hundred feet above. The cables momentarily thrummed as the ship’s big thrusters adjusted course. Gregor smiled and took the sound as a pleasant acknowledgement from the ship he had come to love.
As it should be, little wanderer,the ship said from somewhere deep inside his mind.
The radio operator in the gondola’s wireless alcove reported with the clipped efficiency of his trade: “SKY TRACK reports our trajectory looks good. Passing through the window in one minute.”
The “window” was a point high above the Earth where the aerostat began to encounter the thickening atmosphere. 150,000 feet above the San Joaquin Sea, Hooligan’s crew worked boards and eyed gauges. Their entire job at this stage was to balance not just the ship’s aerial buoyancy, but also its delicate gravitometric charge. Within key sections of the aerostat’s grid-work of treated mesh precious tsiolkovium was decoupled and grounded. This lowered the repulsion values between Earth and the tiny microcosm of air and light that was Hooligan. Working against the rarefied air of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, the ship’s big goddard motors spurted liquid oxygen and pressurized kerosene as they adjusted Hooligan’s flight vector eastward.
A clock above Gregor’s console read “ETA” and he could hear tiny gears hum as the ship’s pandorae corrected their time-to-landing estimate against the new inputs from motors and external instruments. The goddards were putting them on a high speed path for a morning touchdown in western Nebraskah.
Home soon, Gregor thought as the ship creaked around him.
Yes, little one, the ship said. Home and safety.
An alarm pinged and Gregor checked a strain gauge panel. A few tiny telltales glowed amber. These indicated that portions of the grid-work above were in a higher level of tension than advised by Hooligan’s designers. The descent stressed the 3000-foot wide tsiolkovium net that encased the massive helium-filled cell. This made descent a somewhat more dangerous prospect than ascent. Loads on the surface and the potential for the gondola to pendulum beneath the balloon were carefully controlled. One means of doing this was with an adjustable thrust goddard motor. Housed within the rigid structure of the balloon, it provided control for yaw, pitch, and roll.
“Passing down,” the radioman reported. “Altimeters all at one fiver quadruple zero. Repeat one fiver quadruple zero and check.”
“Verified!” the commander replied.
Gregor activated an external lamp and checked the stabilizer cables. Six lines led upward into the night. These eventually gripped steel linkages that held fast to a woven metal interface ring on the underside of the aerostat’s grid-work. Dials built in to the control deck’s ceiling showed tension levels. All looked good. He jogged a note into his log and switched off the outside lamp. It was then that something caught his eye.
An odd flickering of phosphorescence had insinuated itself between the aerostat’s linkage ring and his eyeball. It was barely perceptible and seemed more a product of imagination than anything definable. Yet it was persistent as it winnowed across the net of light-weight carbon-whisker tubes and the skin of the aerostat. The vision looked like a static discharge seen in the dark of winter.
Gregor frowned and said. “Switching off gondola running lights.”
The tiny lanterns on Hooligan’s hull blinked out and the pilot peered intently at the wide curve of the aerostat. A ghostly, ragged shape moved along the netting. It was a dull greenish-blue and was barely visible. Yet as it moved he could track it and he decided then that it was a definite physical presence. As he watched, it seemed to alter shape, flattening from a ragged orb to an elongated smear. Two ends of the smear stretched outward. These wrapped around a spar and then pulled the trailing smear toward it. For all the world it looked like an arboreal animal working its way up the limbs of a tree. Gregor shuddered.
“What is that?” the radioman asked.
Something had been following them throughout this mission, Gregor knew. Sitting in the first pilot’s slot on Hooligan’s crowded flightdeck, Zephyr-Lieutenant Gregor Fitz could sense the thing that followed them in the motion of the controls and the thrum of wind and energies just beyond the ship’s metal shell. An occasional flickering, right at the edge of his vision, had taunted him through the cabin’s ring of viewports. These happenings had been persistent throughout every watch he stood on this journey to the highest reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. At first it was intermittent, but as the conclusion of the flight approached and their descent began they became more frequent and dogged. A growing sense of foreboding now lurked behind the dials, gauges, switches, and levers of his control board.
Clearly, the big aerostat knew that something stalked it.
“Well, to hell with this,” he mumbled in his native Finnik from behind his oxygen mask.
As Hooligan dropped toward the 200,000 feet marker, Gregor chided himself for behaving like a trainee cadet rather than the highly experienced aeroman that everyone within the program knew him to be. Despite all his internal hand wringing the ship and crew had performed splendidly. Theirs was a hallmark mission, a capstone in the chase to extend humanity’s reach into the highest realms. And Hooligan had gotten them there. They had done it!
Something crunched in the slot behind him. There soon arose a scatter-shot tin cacophony. Gregor and the mission commander exchanged a knowing glance.
“You getting the munchies, Tank?” Gregor asked.
Behind Gregor the ship’s chief fultoneer crumpled an empty foil bag of Teeny Tastees and slid it into a trash bin. “I always get hungry during these drops,” the big man drawled.
The aerostat’s commander said, “If you didn’t bring enough for everybody then you can’t have any either.” She briefly used a voice that was likely familiar to her children when they all took vacation trips in the family wagon.
Tank frowned and patted his belly. “Mmmm. I did have enough T&T’s for you two but I somehow misplaced ‘em.”
Gregor sighed woefully. His Anglic was heavily accented and his feigned disappointment only made it more so: “Poor us, we will likely expire of hunger before seeing the ground again.”
“That will be a major disappointment for your girlfriend,” Tank said into the air.
“Which one?” the commander asked.
“All of them,” the fultoneer replied. Smiles briefly filled the cabin. Gregor’s exaggerated reputation groundside was often the fodder of jokes. Perhaps never so much as aboard this mission.
Gregor patted his control board and said with a boyish enthusiasm his grandparents might have recognized, “Hooligan is the only lady I’m focused on these days.”
Taut control cables ran from the center of the gondola’s control deck, through a sealed access port, and up to the rigidized, tsiolkovium-coated sphere a hundred feet above. The cables momentarily thrummed as the ship’s big thrusters adjusted course. Gregor smiled and took the sound as a pleasant acknowledgement from the ship he had come to love.
As it should be, little wanderer,the ship said from somewhere deep inside his mind.
The radio operator in the gondola’s wireless alcove reported with the clipped efficiency of his trade: “SKY TRACK reports our trajectory looks good. Passing through the window in one minute.”
The “window” was a point high above the Earth where the aerostat began to encounter the thickening atmosphere. 150,000 feet above the San Joaquin Sea, Hooligan’s crew worked boards and eyed gauges. Their entire job at this stage was to balance not just the ship’s aerial buoyancy, but also its delicate gravitometric charge. Within key sections of the aerostat’s grid-work of treated mesh precious tsiolkovium was decoupled and grounded. This lowered the repulsion values between Earth and the tiny microcosm of air and light that was Hooligan. Working against the rarefied air of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, the ship’s big goddard motors spurted liquid oxygen and pressurized kerosene as they adjusted Hooligan’s flight vector eastward.
A clock above Gregor’s console read “ETA” and he could hear tiny gears hum as the ship’s pandorae corrected their time-to-landing estimate against the new inputs from motors and external instruments. The goddards were putting them on a high speed path for a morning touchdown in western Nebraskah.
Home soon, Gregor thought as the ship creaked around him.
Yes, little one, the ship said. Home and safety.
An alarm pinged and Gregor checked a strain gauge panel. A few tiny telltales glowed amber. These indicated that portions of the grid-work above were in a higher level of tension than advised by Hooligan’s designers. The descent stressed the 3000-foot wide tsiolkovium net that encased the massive helium-filled cell. This made descent a somewhat more dangerous prospect than ascent. Loads on the surface and the potential for the gondola to pendulum beneath the balloon were carefully controlled. One means of doing this was with an adjustable thrust goddard motor. Housed within the rigid structure of the balloon, it provided control for yaw, pitch, and roll.
“Passing down,” the radioman reported. “Altimeters all at one fiver quadruple zero. Repeat one fiver quadruple zero and check.”
“Verified!” the commander replied.
Gregor activated an external lamp and checked the stabilizer cables. Six lines led upward into the night. These eventually gripped steel linkages that held fast to a woven metal interface ring on the underside of the aerostat’s grid-work. Dials built in to the control deck’s ceiling showed tension levels. All looked good. He jogged a note into his log and switched off the outside lamp. It was then that something caught his eye.
An odd flickering of phosphorescence had insinuated itself between the aerostat’s linkage ring and his eyeball. It was barely perceptible and seemed more a product of imagination than anything definable. Yet it was persistent as it winnowed across the net of light-weight carbon-whisker tubes and the skin of the aerostat. The vision looked like a static discharge seen in the dark of winter.
Gregor frowned and said. “Switching off gondola running lights.”
The tiny lanterns on Hooligan’s hull blinked out and the pilot peered intently at the wide curve of the aerostat. A ghostly, ragged shape moved along the netting. It was a dull greenish-blue and was barely visible. Yet as it moved he could track it and he decided then that it was a definite physical presence. As he watched, it seemed to alter shape, flattening from a ragged orb to an elongated smear. Two ends of the smear stretched outward. These wrapped around a spar and then pulled the trailing smear toward it. For all the world it looked like an arboreal animal working its way up the limbs of a tree. Gregor shuddered.
“What is that?” the radioman asked.
