Strange Company by Nick Cole (best way to read ebooks TXT) 📗

with paranoia and xenophobia. A dead civ, on the other hand, meant something had wiped them out. And if that something had wiped them out then why wouldn’t that something just wipe out old Amos out here trying to stake a discovery claim?

A month out, his scopes were getting a good look at the surface and he was seeing nothing that looked like civ. So, what was the nuclear signature, he must’ve wondered. Volcano with a vent deep down into the crust? Perhaps even way down into the magma of the world’s core? That might do it. He got a good look at the target site five days out as he set up for the orbital insertion glide path to take him straight down through atmo, then go to thrusters for supersonic flight direct over the target area.

Those old scouts like the Comet 301, a delta wing strapped around a big old jump drive engine, didn’t have a-grav. If Amos made a landing it was gonna be rough. Chances were, he wouldn’t walk away from it, much less even be able to take off afterwards. But Amos had ridden White Lightning, his Comet 301, down-planet on a dozen prior roller-coaster rides to surfaces on other undiscovered or barely discovered worlds. He was wily, and an addicted gambler. Two requisites for being a good scout. A good scout was someone who survived at least one world despite the risk to ship and life, and even the risk of permanent stellar castaway status. But discovering a world before anyone else was worth the danger. And the rewards were fantastic. First Holder rights, with direct payments set up by the Monarchs going forward. Add in an unusual world with something interesting, and you’ve got a hundred times the going rate. Enough to live like a potentate for the rest of your life on one of the pleasure rings.

So what Amos wanted was a good look at this supervolcano, or whatever it was, from at least as low as ten thousand feet during a flyby right over the top. His camera gear and sensors were all set up in White Lightning’s starboard wing stacks to record everything. As he came over the curve of the world, dropping down from orbit, he could see in the distance on the horizon that the target was obscured by black smoke. Even at one hundred ten thousand feet.

Probably just the volcano getting ready to explode, he must’ve thought, as he fired up the supersonic engines and redirected a power bleed from the jump drive to the forward ram shield to cut down on atmospheric chop, which was heavy. As he came in against the planet’s rotation to slow his groundspeed and get as much time as possible over the target before making his decision to find a landing area or go to thrusters full and try to reach orbit once more, he began to spot some of the more unusual features on this strange and undiscovered world.

There were three continents.

Two supers. Southern and northern hemispheres. The supervolcano, or whatever it was, on the northern continent. There’s also a third polar continent that extends out into the Chaotico Ocean. The island chains are there. But on this insertion, he was obsessed with the target area and the nuclear signature on the northern continent because even though he told himself in his heart it was some sort of natural phenomenon like a fissure that tapped the magma-filled core, he wasn’t convinced it was.

He had a feeling he was on to something unexpected. And he had to make sure.

Those unusual features were starting to reveal themselves by star-rise over this bizarre and undiscovered world as the Comet 301 streaked across the upper atmosphere, bleeding speed and altitude to make insertion over the world. If the ship began to burn up, he couldn’t even eject. He’d ditched that gear for more important sensors to help him thoroughly establish his claim.

A core fissure would have earned him the highest rate from the Monarchs. Or the corporations. The near-unlimited energy from a direct core tap would have turned Crash into an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse like Hella, the first of the Bright Worlds.

But like I said, he had a feeling there was something else going on as he saw the first of the fractures in the surface near the nuclear heat signature. Something amazing. Coming in against the rotation with as much sunlight as he could use, he spotted the first features upwards of two hundred miles away from the actual Crash. Massive cracks, rents, and fractures in the world he was racing over.

Before all that though was the feature he was just beginning to understand was the most bizarre. The supercontinent contained some kind of vast gentle crater, a huge depression in its central plain. And at its center, directly, was the nuclear signature source. This crater stretched thousands of miles across the northern continent. Within that crater the main landform type was alkaline salt desert. Wasteland. Typical of major impact strikes, but nothing the scout had ever seen or heard of had reached this level of destruction. The impact must’ve been huge. This crater was so vast, and as has been said, gentle, that it absorbed the entire central section of what must have once been a plateau that covered much of the continent. Sharp mountains and forested coastlands formed a line of demarcation all around its edges.

Some of what I’m putting down here was conjecture on the part of the author of a book I read about the whole thing. I was reading chapters here and there during the early days of the war here. Just to learn more about the world we were fighting on. Like I said, history is my jam. My happy place. It was a biography of Amos Ferragamo and the early discovery mystery surrounding Crash. When I got to this part, the flight over the Crash, I finished the rest of the book, which I’d been