Chapter 2 - Ezra crash-lands on Samothea
The power on Ezra's spaceship failed immediately it emerged from its final hyperspace jump. The lights, engines, navigation system and central computer were all down. Ezra was in a dark dead ship travelling in who knew what direction at who knew what speed with no means to arrest his motion.
Suppressing his urge to panic, Ezra punched every button on the piloting console, seeking to regain control, begging the emergency power to come on. At last! The computer display flickered, some buttons lit up and Ezra's ears and eyes were suddenly assaulted by wailing alarms and flashing lights.
After he had cancelled the alarms, Ezra found his hyperspace engines would not come back on, whatever he did.
"It's no real problem for the moment," he encouraged himself, pressing buttons and waiting for the response, "just so long as I'm not headed toward anything solid;" but the navigation system gave no reading.
Ezra had already wasted many minutes with the engines; he could not waste time with navi-comms. Cursing his ship and himself, Ezra decided to navigate the old-fashioned way, by looking at the stars.
He slid down the ladder into the forward observation bay, a perspex bubble with an optical telescope. It turned out he didn't need the telescope. When he turned around at the bottom of the ladder, his entire visual field was filled by a blue, white and green planet, Samothea for sure.
"Fuck!" Ezra exclaimed and rushed back to the piloting consol.
"Fuck!" he repeated. Now he knew where he was - in a crippled ship, heading at high speed to a hard and messy impact on a planet only a few hundred miles away.
If his engines would not work, and he could not power up the rocket thrusters, then Ezra knew he was dead.
"Work, damn you! Work!" he repeated like a mantra, punching the control buttons, hoping to awaken some driving power. It was no good. The rocket thrusters were dormant. Ezra tried again. Still nothing. The third, fourth and fifth attempts were also fruitless. Again and again Ezra adjusted dials, pulled levers and thumped switches until, at last! he felt a kick as the starboard rocket lit and began slowly to spin the ship around. Five seconds later the port rocket also ignited. Not powerful enough to escape the gravitational pull of Samothea, Ezra could use the manoeuvring rockets to slow his descent and possibly come to a safe landing.
After three good burns on the rockets, Ezra had slowed considerably and, from the smoothness of his trajectory, judged he was still above Samothea's atmosphere. He made another long burn and rested the rocket motors again for a few seconds. Now the buffeting began. He had breached the atmosphere and was slowing down even more but the ship was harder to control. A half-minute burn and the ship was hurtling through clouds, maybe five miles from impact. Ezra prayed the clouds would not descend all the way to the surface and, to back up his prayers, risked a longer burn on the rockets.
The clouds dispersed to reveal a blue-green ocean with a coastline about ten miles to the East. He was descending under control with half burn on the rockets, hoping they would last long enough for him to touchdown on land rather than crash into the sea.
With about two miles to fall and six miles to the shore, Ezra steered his craft steeply in, slowing under power as much as he could. It seemed to be working. She was gliding gently. In another minute, he was at two thousand feet and a mile from the shore. A good final spurt on the rockets and it looked like she would make a gentle touchdown, right on the beach.
Ezra slapped the piloting console a last time and shouted in relief.
"You beauty, I knew you wouldn't let me down!"
It was the wrong thing to say, of course. A second later the over-heated starboard motor coughed and gave up, the ship turned on one side and fell spinning out of the sky. It hit the sea hard, throwing Ezra sideways against the rear of the bridge, where his head hit a spar. He passed out.
The ship floated for ten minutes before it began to sink. Water was pouring into the bridge. It woke Ezra, who felt excruciating pain in his left arm when he tried to push himself up. There was blood on his shirt and he felt light-headed; but he knew that, if he wanted to live, he must get out of the flooding ship. Drowsy and weak, nursing his arm, Ezra sloshed his way to the airlock and grabbed at the escape lever. The mechanism worked and the hatch opened, letting in more water and pushing Ezra out with a bubble of air.
He swam one-handed toward the beach, which was only a hundred yards away but took a lifetime and all his energy to reach. Forcing himself to go on, he felt relief when his feet touched the sandy sea-bottom, after which he half-swam and half-scrambled onto the shore, where he fainted again from exhaustion, pain and blood loss.
Some hours later, while Ezra was lying on his side in the surf, he was woken by hands gently lifting him, pulling him up the beach. He screamed in pain as someone pulled his left arm. The pairs of hands shifted to his shoulders. A minute later, he was lying on his back, the low morning sun on his face, his rescuers kneeling beside him.
They were two girls: a skinny wraith, who looked to Ezra about ten years old, and a more substantial girl who on Earth would have been about thirteen. The wraith offered Ezra a bladder of water, which he gratefully accepted but he found he could not drink it lying flat. The older girl knelt behind him and helped him sit up. Ezra greedily drained the bladder. The bigger girl pushed her backpack behind Ezra and gently helped him lie down again. He tried to say 'Thank you' but fainted again.
Next time he awoke, the skinny girl had been talking to him.
"Uh, sorry. I didn't catch that," he said.
"I said, my name is Tamar, Madam. What's yours?"
"Um, Ezra, Ezra Goldrick."
Ezra was feeling stronger, though he ached all over. His left arm hurt like hell and the bright sun was in his eyes, but he was alive.
"Thank you both for rescuing me. Am I on Samothea?
"You are, Ezra. How did you get here? Why were you in the sea?"
"I crash-landed here last night or this morning. My ship is on the sea-floor somewhere over there," Ezra said, indicating the sea with his good arm.
Tamar stared out to sea but the older girl grunted at her. She turned back to Ezra.
"What kind of ship?"
"A space-ship."
"Oh!" Tamar said, addressing the older girl, "You were right."
"What is your friend's name?" Ezra asked.
Tamar started to speak but the other girl shushed her.
"It's OK," Tamar assured her. "I wasn't going to say." To Ezra she said:
"My friend doesn't use her name. I talk for her."
In fact, Ezra had only heard the older girl grunt or hiss, never speak words. If this was strange, Ezra was too tired to wonder at it.
