The Nexus Colony Read Online Free PDF

appeared in all its splendor, fanning out before them toward the horizon just a mere five hundred feet below.
    The LC-130 lumbered along as the pilot reconnoitered the prospective landing area. The initial pass over the area showed it to be a promising site for touchdown. Not for Grimes and his meteorite hunters, but promising as a runway for the especially ski-equipped aircraft. Like everywhere else on the Antarctic continent, there were no airports, no airfields, no constructed runways per se. Everything was ice. Airplanes made their own runways.
    When the transports took research teams into the interior, the pilots looked for flat, lengthy areas along the ice fields. Then they flew over them once or twice to get a preliminary look at the potential runway to see if it was smooth enough to attempt landing. The skis attached to the wheels had a large surface area, and it really wasn’t all that difficult to land one of these babies. As long as the ice was relatively smooth and there were no crevasses. You hit a crevasse, and you and the plane were goners.
    What the pilots did was make a ski drag —affectionately call the downhill run . They came in as if to land, but instead of setting the plane all the way down, they kept the throttles open just enough to get airborne once the skis dragged across the ice field, making deep, distinctive tracks through the shallow snow covering. Then they throttled back up and got airborne again, circling the area to look at their ski tracks.
    It was no big deal for a pilot. It was very similar to performing routine touch-and-goes practiced by every pilot in the world. When the plane gets airborne after the run across the field, they look closely at the pattern created in the ski tracks. If the line is straight and uninterrupted, the runway has potential. If the line looks broken like a series of dots and dashes, it’s an indication that there are crevices hidden just below the crust of snow.
    Crevasses are the pilot’s bane. It could mean instantaneous destruction of the plane if you hit a crevasse on landing. If the pilot had even an inkling that the ski drag might be showing crevasses, they wouldn’t take you in no matter how promising the ice field looked to your research. For that matter, you couldn’t even get a bush pilot to take you down, and some of those guys were real kamikazes. Antarctica was a dangerous place. If you didn’t respect that, you didn’t last very long.
    The long stretch of ice directly ahead of the plane came up to meet them quickly as Daniels backed off just enough on the throttles to allow the plane to touch the surface of the ice. The plane slowly dropped out of the sky, and Grimes realized he had been holding his breath when the massive bulk of the LC-130 Hercules hit with a pronounced thump against the solid ice surface. The vibration started immediately upon touchdown, and Grimes could feel the rumble coming up through his feet right into his chest cavity. The pitch of the powerful engines changed as the pilot throttled up and commenced plowing his way straight across the ice field.
    Nervously, Grimes held on tightly as the plane shuddered and rumbled, bouncing him sideways back and forth in the poorly-secured trainee seat. He noticed that the pilot and co-pilot, along with the flight engineer, were strapped securely in their shoulder harnesses while all he had was a seat belt holding him down to the canvass pad. Great ergonomics for the poor bastards being trained. Grimes often wondered if these Navy flyboys did this as a joke on the wimpy scientists, asking them to come up front to observe. They probably got a good laugh watching the observer getting his brains and his balls knocked all around. But anyway you looked at it, it was something that had to be done. Grimes hated it, the pilot and co-pilot seemed indifferent, and his team colleagues sitting in the back end thought it was like an amusement park ride.
    It seemed like the pilot had been doing