Lost In Transmission

chapter zero

no quiet today

"Hold on tight," Radmer says, too late to do any good. The first air pocket comes and goes like a kick on the guts. Whump!

Radmer is old enough -- more than old enough -- to remember the fiery slam and tumble of entering a planetary atmosphere from orbit. The howl of plasma, the glow of radiators . . . Piercing the atmosphere of Lune is nothing like that. For one thing, he's coming in under four kps, so there is heat but not fire. For another thing his vehicle is not some graceful, gull-winged shuttle, but a crude sphere of brass, navigated by eyeball and sextant and steered with charges of dinite explosive. Inertial stability comes, in theory, from a gyroscope made of a potter's wheel, but Radmer has been too busy steering to kick the thing and wind it up. Beyond the bootside porthole, he can see the world of Lune spinning crazily.

The Squozen Moon: a world crushed and greened and left to its own devices, still in orbit around the pinpoint collapsar of Murdered Earth. Lune is so much smaller than a real planet. More delicate, more precious, and yet the largest -- by far the largest -- of the habitable worlds still bathing in the light of Sol.

No longer whispering, the air is dense enough now to sing and screech against the hull of the sphere. But even from this altitude, deep into the atmosphere now, this world looks small and very round. Because it is: barely 1400 kilometers across. The size of a province, an inland sea, a large hurricane. Not quite to human scale, but nearly. Nearly.

In the two-hundred and first decade of the death of the Queendom of Sol, in a space capsule made by armorers and watchmakers and artillerymen, General Emeritus Radmer -- once the architect Conrad Ethel Mursk -- is preparing to land in the province of Apenine, in the nation of Imbria, on this tiny world of Lune. Or hoping to, anyway. Where exactly he comes down will make the difference between a warm meal and a ghastly--

With a bump and a screech, the brass sphere hits another air pocket, an eddy in the storms of the upper atmosphere, and Radmer's payload -- his most precious of cargoes -- is thrown hard against its restraints. The capsule whirls. Then there's another bump, and another, even harder one, and the screech of air is louder than ever, and Radmer realizes they're not in the upper atmosphere at all. They've just punched through into the troposphere. Where the weather lives.