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Except for security, however, the
rest of the port personnel were still asleep at that early hour
 
and when Park
 
started toward Ronnie’s lab, deep beneath the old Van Winkle Base, Iris
stopped him. “We need to pack for the expedition to the Atackack lands, Park.
Marisea and I can manage that, but I think we had better bring a couple
representatives of that species on this trip.”

“That’s a good idea,” Park
nodded. “I’ll go to my office and see who’s in port and available for
assignment. After that I’ll…”

“You’ll take a nap until
sunrise,” Iris told him.

“Arrange for the ride to Keekah,”
Park corrected her. “If I don’t, we could end up on foot.”

“How about an ocean liner for a
change,” Iris suggested. “I missed out sailing on the QE II.”

“I don’t think anyone sails a
large ship on the Sink,” Park replied. “The Mer cities are all on the outer
coast line of Pangaea the only settlements facing the Sink are Atackack ones
and they avoid the sea. I suppose we might think of building a resort town near
the mouth of the Zontisso River, though. It’s pleasant and in easy proximity to
both mountains and sea shore.”

“The Sink has a higher salinity
content than the Ocean,” Marisea pointed out.

“All the better,” Park told her.
“That makes it exotic. People will delight in noticing how much higher in the
water they float.”

“Long exposures to Sink water can
be irritating to Mer flesh,” she told him.

“Plenty of fresh water showers
should be built too then,” Park added to his mental list.

“It’s not a bad idea, but I
really think we ought to put off building a new resort until we’re sure the
Premm aren’t going to want to cleanse it with their atomic fire,” Iris told
him. “Should we meet you at your office?”

“No, let’s meet at the port,”
Park told her. “I see both
Growing Boy
and
LLH
are in port. I need to find
out who’s flying out today.”

“
LLH
?” Marisea asked, not recognizing the ship’s name.

“
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
,” Park amplified. “I’ll
explain the reference another time, but the crew decided to shorten it to a
trio of initials. Can’t say as I blame them. It’s a long mouthful and you can
practically get to Luna before you finish saying it. Anyway as soon as Ronnie
wakes up I also need to see if she has that new toy ready for us.”

“Want me to take Cousin with me?”
Marisea offered.

“No need,” Park told her. “The
poor dear is still sleeping on my shoulder. Let’s let her stay there for now.”

It was several hours before they
could be underway again – time enough for a big breakfast, a quick conference
with Park’s section heads and to arrange for one of the Exploration Corps
buggies to be fully stocked.

“Where’s the buggy?” Iris asked
as they strolled out onto the tarmac. She and Marisea looked all around, but there
none of the Mer-built terrain-independent vehicles were in sight.

“Inside the
LLH
,” Park told her. “Did you know Paul Gonnes is her captain now?”

“He has been since she rolled off
the line in Questo,” Iris nodded.

“Oh, by the way, our party is a
bit larger than expected,” Park went on as he led the way to the ship. “Dannet
and Sartena have insisted on joining us. They felt that as ambassadors from the
Alliance, they ought to be on this mission.”

“Mission?” Marisea questioned the
term. “It’s probably just going to involve a lot of talking to local Atackack
officials.”

“Then the more voices to share
the load the better,” Park shrugged. “Oh, and I co-opted Tragackack and Tegack
to serve as our Atackack emissaries. I’m planning to have them as crew on the new
ship, so…”

“I wish we could get Okactack to
go with us,” Marisea commented, as they reached the bottom of the stairs that
led to the
LLH’s
hatch. “He’s a
shaman and a mystic and more likely to be taken seriously by the Atackack in
the trade towns.”

“Trag and Tegack are shaman-class
too,” Park maintained.

“But we are scholars,” Tragackack
told him from the top of the stairs. “That’s a very new sort of shaman and one
that is likely to be mostly unknown in our homelands. We do not even have
traditional robes yet.”

“Make something up then,” Park
advised.

“Make something up?” Trag echoed
uncertainly.

“Sure,” Park nodded
encouragingly. “You and Tegack get together and decide what sort of gear to
wear as scholars and tell people that’s what scholars wear. No would know the
difference.”

“But it would not be true,” Trag
pointed out earnestly. His upper limbs seemed to droop and his middle limbs,
while held in their normal neutral position seemed to want to droop too. It was
a sign of uncertainty in an Atackack. Had the middle limbs drooped it would
have meant sadness.

Park was tempted to laugh, but
the better part of him realized how important this was to Tragackack and
probably all the Atackack students, so instead he suggested. “How about your
academic robes. You know, the ones you wore for your commencement ceremony?”

“Are those what a scholar wears?”
Trag asked.

“That’s why they are call
academic robes,” Park told him. “There was a time that was the way all students
and faculty dressed while in school. Believe me, those are true scholar’s robes
and you won’t be lying to say so.”

“I kept my robe,” Tragackack
admitted, his upper limbs straightening just a bit, “but it is in my room.”

“Okay,” Park nodded. “You and
Tegack run back to your rooms for your robes. Marisea,” he called to the Mer
who was still standing nearby. “In my time a graduate got to wear a hood lined
with the colors of his school. Does that still happen?”

“No,” she shook her head. “But
all the graduates got a braided cord to be worn over the shoulders and around
their necks. Advanced degrees get thicker and more complex braids, but even the
bachelor’s braid should be impressive enough. Come on, Trag, I’ll drive you
over to your place. Are you still living in the Atackack Tower?”

“I am quite comfortable there,”
Trag replied simply, now back in his usual posture. Park noted that and relaxed
just a bit. It meant his solution had been more than just complied with. It had
been whole-heartedly accepted. “Tegack lives two floors up.”

“Then all three of us will go,”
Marisea nodded. “Park we shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

Marisea’s estimate was dead on
and fifteen minutes later, Captain Paul Gonnes of the
Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness
requested and was given
clearance to launch from runway three of Van Winkle Aerospaceport.
LLH
was one of the newest ships in
Earth’s fleet and slightly larger than the ones they had built even a year or
two earlier. Veronica Sheetz had been improving everything about Earth’s ships;
they were larger, carried more armament and their magnetic shielding was more
intense. She had studied the technologies of the Alliance and had adapted and
improved on some of them. Now it was widely acknowledged that Earth-built ships
were the finest of their kind.

LLH
was really not a vast improvement over the earlier models, like
Park’s last command,
Independent
.
Slightly larger, slightly more powerful and only a few more missiles in her
racks, but while each improvement was minor, together they made a big
difference. The
LLH
shot off the
runway at an acceleration that surprised Park as he was pressed back into his
seat. After a minute, rather than continuing upward,
LLH
leveled off and the acceleration eased up.

“Whoa!” Park breathed from his
guest seat on the bridge. “That was something. I thought the artificial gravity
was supposed to compensate for the acceleration.”

“Not at ten gees,” Paulo laughed.
“We were a bit over the ability to completely compensate. Surprising, but not
uncomfortable. We’re cruising at fifty thousand feet and will be over our
target area in less than five minutes. You’ll want to get in that buggy of
yours, although I’m still not certain this was one the brightest ideas you ever
had.”

“We’ll find out in a few
minutes,” Park laughed. “Talk you to from the buggy.”

Park found the rest of his party
already in their seats in the buggy sitting in
LLH’s
cargo bay. Iris was, as usual at the start of any trip, at
the controls. Park sat down in the shot-gun seat where there was a spare set of
controls. “We don’t normally have the copilot’s controls active,” he noted.

“We don’t normally eject from a
starship at extreme altitude,” Iris pointed out.

“It’s only fifty thousand feet,”
Park pointed out.

“Park,” Taodore protested, “the
drive of a buggy is only capable of lifting to ten thousand of your feet, and,
frankly even that is only with a good updraft.”

“We’re not trying to rise up to
fifty thousand,” Park told him. “We’re trying to come down from there.”

“Down is not a problem, Park,”
Iris told him tightly. “We can do down without a problem. I’m more concerned
that we’ll be able to stop doing down when it grows tiresome. This is not going
to be easy.”

“Stand by for ejection in twenty
seconds,” a voice told them over their radio.

“Happy landings!” Paul Gonnes
added.

“Ten seconds,” the first voice
told them and then counted down from “Five.”

At three seconds, Iris activated
the buggy’s suspensors and they floated less than an inch above the cargo deck.
At “Zero,” the cargo hatch opened and the buggy was sucked smoothly out of the
hold. Its flight remained smooth for a few seconds and everyone on board began
to relax.

A moment later relaxation twisted
into panic as buggy hit the wake of
LLH’s
drive. The turbulence blasted the small craft and sent it rocking and spinning
violently. Iris and Park worked together to compensate for the random pushes
and pulls they endured, but by the time they had stabilized their flight, the
buggy was still spinning slowly on its axis and headed straight downward.
“There,” Park commented. “That’s better.”

“Speaking as a former ship’s
navigator,” Sartena retorted tensely, “I do believe your values are
perpendicular to reality.”

“How is plummeting straight down
better?” Dannet added.

“Now, at least,” Park laughed,
“we’re in a controlled flight.”

“You call this controlled?” Iris
muttered as she struggled to bring the buggy back to a horizontal trajectory.
“Park, get us out of this spin. I’ll work on slowing us down.”

Together they worked at the
controls while the buggy continued to fall. Suddenly Cousin leaped out of
Marisea’s arms and scampered playfully to the back of the cabin. “Cousin!”
Marisea called. “Come back here. Silly girl,” she laughed and got out of her
seat as well.

“Marisea, you should stay buckled
up,” her father advised.

“Why?” Marisea asked. “The
artificial gravity can compensate for Iris’s maneuvers while we fall and I’ll
be just as dead if we crash whether I’m in that seat or not.”

“You don’t know that,” Park told
her sternly. “We might only crash lightly.”

“Hah!” Marisea laughed unconcernedly.
“If you really thought we would crash, you wouldn’t have tried this stupid
stunt.”

“I can be wrong,” Park pointed
out. “It’s easy enough, but you’re right. I wouldn’t have risked
 
all of you if I wasn’t certain we could do
this.”

“The real trick is keeping us
from plummeting any faster until we get low enough that we can actually slow
down,” Iris commented.

“I’m not sure I could be that
calm if I were in your place,” Dannet told her with a nervous glance out the
window. They were still too high up to make out any ground details through the
clouds below them.

“Dannet, you were a ship’s
captain, but I’m a gunnery officer,” Iris replied. “Also I’ve seen your record.
Your service was distinguished, but we both know the only military action you
ever served in was against Earth.”

“And I lost my ship,” Dannet
admitted regretfully.

“Sorry,” Iris told him. “It
wasn’t my intention to poke at a sore spot.”

“It’s not that,” Dannet denied.
“Well, maybe a little, but I meant…”

“How often did you order your
ship to plunge headlong at the ground?” Iris asked.

“Never.” Dannet replied.

“Well, there you are then,” Iris
chuckled.

“And you have?” Sartena put in.

“Ha!” Iris barked a laugh. “Of
course not. Do I look crazy?”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Sartena
replied, her bright orange skin had dulled in intensity and grown several
shades lighter.

“There you are!” Marisea greeted
Cousin. “Let’s go back to our seat, young lady. We’re making the grown-ups
nervous.”

“So much for slowing down our
acceleration,” Park noted. “We’re at terminal velocity.”

“If only this tin box had wings,”
Iris expressed a wish, “instead of all the aerodynamics of a cardboard box.”

“What’s cardboard?” Dannet asked.
Before he could get an answer an alarm started sounding. “What’s that?”

“Nothing to be worried about,”
Iris told him. “I just programmed that to go off when we dropped below ten
thousand feet. Well, Park, let’s see how bright this stupid idea was, hmm?”

At first there was no change in
the attitude of the buggy and the velocity of its descent, but then the view
outside the front windshield began to shift upward away from the ground. “It’s
like trying to drive through a sea of Jello,” Iris complained as she continued
to bring the vehicle around until it was horizontal to the ground, but it was still
falling.

“Five thousand feet,” Park
reported. “Are the brakes working?”

“We have brakes?” Iris countered.

“I’m not sure which is more
terrifying,” Taodore commented dryly, “the inevitable plummet to our deaths or
the way you two keep making jokes about it.”