You might be asking "What is this, and why is it not spellchecked?" Well, long ago and far away, I had aspirations of being a novelist, and managed to complete a story or two. Thus, I present Chapter 1 of

Interim Fleet

The theory is simple- a moving target is hard to hit.

The practice is difficult. The necessity of keeping 1 billion people in a tenth as many ships moving through hyper space at a velocity 100 times the speed of light- as well as keeping them fed, watered, and protected by at least three centimeters of material from hard vacuum- is close to impossible.

We have had five hundred years of practice.

The skimmer burned bright and incandescent against the atmosphere, a fragile shell of ceramic and metal cradled in the heart of fire.

“Show-off.” Emrician muttered, watching the dancing spark skip across the atmosphere. It began a series of long, shallow curves, burning bright and dropping speed insanely, dipping further and further into the seductive embrace of the planet. A few miles further down, and it wouldn't be coming out.

Which was the game, of course. Emrician scowled, peering at his readouts. Kail'd been modifying her skimmer again- she had to've increased her power by at least 15% to risk deep-dipping the planet like that.

Not that it wasn't a gorgeous planet. Oxygen dihydrate covered nearly the entire surface, fluorescing blue under the local star's radiation. White evaporated H2O swirled through the atmosphere, a grand sweep of ever-changing abstract patterns that enchanted the eye and struck a subconscious chord, like a melancholy piper playing just out of earshot. Fascinating things, planets- Emrician could stick his thumb on the view screen and blot it from existence, but it would still be there, a vast and tantalizing trap that he was never really sure he wanted to escape.

The fiery dart that was Kail's skimmer still squirmed, swaying back and forth with huge, velocity shedding curves. Her moods must be something- she was plunging for the record, and in another kilometer or so, she just might make it.

He grinned. Kail wasn't the only one who'd been modding during Interim.

His newly installed readouts glowed smugly with a twenty percent power increase, and he'd done virtually a full-reconstruct with a new, lighter alloy and ceramics that gave him a slight- but marked- advantage with thrust-to-weight ratio. Not to mention his little surprise with the gravity slingshot. So he was only mildly disgruntled when Kail's depth reading shattered his previous record and a war-whoop boiled over the com.

“Eat That, Rishi! A new record!”

“Emrician to Kail, way to go. Now boost out of there before you go gravity, ‘k?”

“Copy that, Rishi, boosting now.”

The dancing spark grew an even longer trail as Kail lit her burners and sped for space.

“Kail to Emrician, I'm clear, go ahead and start your dive.”

“Copy dive. Diving, now.”

His reaction thrusters flared, pressing him into his seat at a full three g's. The azure planet, barely a marble seconds before began to swell on the canopy. Spirit of Space, but she was pretty.

His variometer began to show a velocity greater than his thrust alone could account for. He grinned wildly. Invisible forces were tugging at his ship, sucking her further into the trap. Gravity!

It was gravity, that strange, invisible, sucking force that made deep-dipping so dangerous. If you went too far, you'd never come out. A thrill of adrenaline pumped through him at the thought, and he increased the boost, until the planet filled fully half of the view screen.

He'd discovered, during Interim, that he and Kail'd been going about the deep-dipping business all wrong. Kail's record shattering technique relied on using the atmosphere to slow her enough for the planet's gravity to suck her in. It worked just fine, unless one misjudged the depth and forgot to carry enough fuel to boost oneself out again. It was a delicate calculation, and he'd had more than one close call diving for that extra kilometer and lofting back to space on fumes.

But he was going to pursue a different, faster, more dangerous course- not using the atmosphere to slow him down, but using the gravity to speed him up. He approached the planet at a far shallower angle than Kail- he didn't intend to dive into the planet so much as blow past it as fast as he could. In essence, he'd re-invented the gravatic slingshot- he'd burn nearly all of his reaction mass speeding toward the planet, let the gravity accelerate him even further into the well, and then trust his velocity to sling him back out.

By his most conservative estimate, he had Kail's latest record beat by at least two kilometers. “Eat my reaction mass, Kail dear.” He muttered, upping the boost. The planet filled the bottom half of the view screen, the great blue ball exploding into a broadening-what was that term?- horizon. He had perhaps three seconds to admire a strange half-world, the bottom half an incredible white-swirled blue glowing brilliantly against the overhanging star-speckled blackness of space. Then he hit atmosphere.

Several things happened at once. The space around his craft began to glow with orange fire as it hit the first particles of air. A high-pitched whistling filled the cockpit, a strange rushing sound like an air-exchange ventilator, except a thousand times louder. Then his view screen went from exterior view to schematic as the flaming atmosphere grew thick enough to obscure the outside vid pickups.

“Computer, exterior simulation.” He snapped, and the graphical course representation vanished into exterior view again, sans flaming atmosphere.

A small tone sounded, indicating barely ten percent fuel left in the tanks, and he cut boost. He kept a loose hand on the control column, just in case, but for the next three minutes the skimmer was running on auto. At this speed, the AI's super processor was in a much better position to correct if anything went wrong; he and his merely human reflexes would be dead before they knew what hit them. The thought wasn't scary- just exciting, he turned his eyes instead to the simulated view.

As a simulation, it was picture-perfect, a composite created by a mix of images from satellites he'd carefully pre-positioned along the course, a special sensor-scope secreted in the nose of his skimmer, and a compiling program that cheerfully filled any holes left in the data with its own electronic imagination.

The result was beyond description. Space wasn't black- it was blue, all shades of blue, from navy blue to azure to sapphire to sparkling electric blue. He hurtled through a blue world, wrapped in a roaring blue wind, spinning through watery wisps of whitish-blue. He couldn't breath, it was so beautiful.

A blue line curved in the distance, straightening by the second as he descend the silvery blue of water meeting the pale blue atmosphere. The horizon, the ancients had called it- the sacred place where the earth met sky. The line crept higher. He was getting closer to the ground.

The ground! Ancient place of mysteries, full of monsters, demons, gravity!

A death-trap for anyone caught in its clutches, and he was close, so close, close enough to feel an invisible hand pulling at him, at his ship, and his body where it fell against the straps, pulling him ever closer. The ground, so bright and sparkling, rushing by, close enough to reach out and brush with his hand. I could touch it. Why not?

It was lucky he was on auto-pilot. The notion took him over for just an instant, a fey light burning in a pair of eyes as blue as the planet below him. He was no longer in the skimmer- he was the skimmer, glowing in fire, a ceramic and metal finger reaching for the blue-on blue horizon. The horizon, the ancient meeting of earth and sky- touch it.

A faint tone sounded, and his senses fled back to the cockpit. It was a two-tone chord of victory, one he'd set to chime when he shattered Kail's record. Thirty seconds later another sounded when he skimmed barely five kilometers from the surface of the planet, the lowest point, the record. Gravity curved him, hugging him close to the planet, then lost it's battle with velocity and sent the skimmer slinging back toward space.

Emrician Zare spun with it, eyes wide, breath coming in gasps, dancing on the edge of hyperventilation. He barely even noticed when the view screen switched from simulated to external, when he broke free of atmosphere. He only thought to get away, away from that Siren horizon. The planet shrunk back into a sane little sphere before disappearing back behind the skimmer, and then all that lay before was the safe, star-flecked darkness of space.

I broke the record. That seemed unimportant. Bring me that horizon- an unbearable sadness flowed over him. To his surprise, he felt tears sparking in his earth-blue eyes.

The planet glowed seductively behind him.