[center][i]"Sometimes you gotta be an S.O.B.
If you want to make a dream reality
Competition? Send 'em south
If they're gonna drown
Put a hose in their mouth
Do not pass 'go', go straight to hell
I smell that meat hook smell"[/i]

-Mark Knopfler - Boom, Like That[/center]

[hr]

Daniel's stomach jumped up into his chest when his dropship was jettisoned from the yawning belly of the [i]Crucis[/i], the freighter starship that had transported him across nearly 50 light years of space to the very edge of human-explored space. He could not see it through the vessel's thick hull, but another four dropships had jettisoned from the [i]Crucis[/i] immediately after. Those four vessels tracked over and joined with Daniel's dropship to form a pentagon formation.

Daniel, already fair-skinned, felt his face go cold and pale as he dry heaved from the initial lurch out of the freighter. The dropship pilot heard Daniel gagging and turned around in his seat to see what the vessel's lone passenger was doing.

"Do not even think about throwing up in my dropship," the pilot remarked unsympathetically. "There's nothing messier than vomit in zero-gee. Wait 'til we get on the surface to toss your cookies."

"Fock off," Daniel snarled in his Afrikaner accent. "I'm paying you lot good money to ride in this shitcan and I'll puke where I damn well please."

The dropship pilot rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the crowded console splayed out before him in the dropship's cockpit. He flipped a few switches and took the vessel's joystick in his hand to make minor adjustment's the dropship's orientation in space.

Daniel took a few deep breaths to settle his stomach before turning his attention to the cockpit windshield. He unstrapped himself from the hull-mounted seat and pushed himself over to the cockpit. He braced himself against the back of the co-pilot's seat and gazed out on the otherworldly panorama through the dropship's scratched polycomposite windshield. For the first time, Daniel laid eyes upon his new home: SEVI-T3 -- Ember.

The dropship was in low orbit above the shaded half of the planet, moving rapidly toward Ember's sunlit hemisphere. The planet's orange-yellow sun was rising above the vast curved horizon, setting the hazy atmosphere ablaze with orange light. Directly below the dropship on the planet's surface, the peaks of giant hoodoos and mesas glowed vermilion against the darkness of the low-lying country that had not yet seen the first light of day. In the warm light of this alien dawn, everything on the surface looked to be on fire. Ember's first explorers had named this planet well.

"For the love of God, don't throw up in the cockpit," the pilot demanded upon noticing Daniel out of the corner of his eye. "Aerobraking is stressful enough without a bunch of vomit splattered against the windshield."

"Give it a rest with the puke. But what's this aerobraking about? What's so bad about that?"

"Aerobraking just means using air drag to slow us down to a halfway reasonable speed. We've slowed down quite a bit from interstellar transit, but we still have gobs of momentum to shave off before we can even think about landing," the dropship's co-pilot explained.

"We're about a minute away from hitting this planet's atmosphere at 26,000 miles an hour," the pilot chimed in. "You do the math."

"Relax," the co-pilot cooed mainly for Daniel's benefit. "We've done this about a hundred times before. Nothing we can't handle."

At that moment, Daniel's attention was captured by a flickering blue light to his left. Down below in Ember's skies, a monstrous thunderhead billowed high into the planet's atmosphere. The stormcloud's roiling contours flashed with bright, blue sparks of violent lightning within, giving proof to the ferocity of the storm.

"Unless we hit one of those," the co-pilot added as he watched the massive storm drift past.

A pair of dropships had passed over Daniel's vessel; two of the five that comprised Daniel's flotilla. These were larger than the one in which Daniel rode; cargo-variant dropships designed to carry heavy freight to and from a planet's surface. Reaction jets on the outer hulls of these dropships pulling ahead of Daniel's flashed here and there with small jets of blue fire - fine adjustments to the angle and orientation of the dropships in preparation for aerocapture. Daniel could only hope that the pilots of these vessels knew what they were doing, for each of those dropships contained a sizeable portion of his remaining fortune. All it would take is a load shift inside the hull of any of those cargo dropships to potentially ruin him.

//Barosensors indicate we're 30 seconds from the upper atmosphere. Making final adjustments, over,// the staticky voice of another dropship came in over the radio. The pilot of Daniel's vessel delicately thumbed the joystick in response.

//Ten seconds.//

"Hold on!" The co-pilot barked. Daniel's fingers dug into the back of the seat with white-knuckle force.

The dropship rattled slightly after ten seconds had passed, and then began to tremble. Within a few more seconds, the trembling had increased into vigorous vibration punctuated with several violent jolts. The panoramic view of Ember's horizon was engulfed in a sheet of fire roiling off the dropship's underside. Nothing but white and yellow fire could be seen beyond the windshield for what might have been the longest five minutes of Daniel's life. But when the flames of atmospheric entry eventually subsided, Daniel was presented with a view of a planet no human had seen in thirty years.

The dropships soared above an utterly alien landscape. Hills and plains covered in bright pink-red vegetation rolled for hundreds of miles, much of which crawled with teeming herds of alien wildlife. Swarms of bipedal grazers scattered across the landscape as the dropship formation screamed overhead, while lumbering browsers as large as a train car simply looked up to the human craft with disinterest. The vast array of alien life passing underneath reminded Daniel of the wildlife preserves in South Africa where he had taken girls on lavish excursions. After hundreds of years of development, hunting, poaching, and habitat degredation, the animal populations in those African preserves had been so decimated that a safari tour group was lucky to see even a single zebra or buffalo. But even from a few thousand feet in the air, stampeding throngs of alien life coursed across Ember's surface. 

The ruddy savannas gave way to a series of towering rock spires that surrounded a massive rise marked by a cliff face several hundred feet high stretching as far as the eye could see. Sinuous canyons wound through these uplands before ending abruptly at the cliff face where they discharged their water in waterfalls so tall that the water only reached the low country below as clouds of fine mist.

"We're approaching the designated L-Z," the dropship pilot declared. "Prepare to touch-down."

The thruster pods on the dropships gradually swiveled down into a vertical take off and landing configuration, slowing the aircraft to a hover above the landscape. Gradually the dropships descended toward the surface with powerful downdrafts of their thrusters buffeting the alien vegetation below. As the dropships lowered onto the surface, stocky landing gear unstowed from the underside of the vessels to meet the ground. With a brief jolt, Daniel's dropship had touched down in the first human landing on Ember in thirty years. But there was no pause or pageantry to savor this historic moment. Without fanfare, the dropships opened their cargo bays to the alien atmosphere with a hiss-puff of pressurized being released. With the door open, Daniel left his pilots without so much as a farewell and set foot on Ember for the first time.

Already, cargo crews were at work. Stevedores strapped into freight exosuits lifted hundreds of pounds of cargo off of the dropships. Much to Daniel's relief, all of the cargo seemed to have survived the landing.

"Mister Weyrich," greeted a dark-skinned fellow of Polynesian descent - perhaps Maori - wearing pressed khaki trousers with a short-sleeve polo bearing a corporate logo. "I am Spencer Arahanga, here to represent Comtois Logistics. I trust you had a comfortable arrival. Now, our crew is ready to begin, but I'd like to first confirm with you that this site satisfies your needs."

"Here," Daniel declared, pointing down to the spongy vegetation under his feet. "We build here."