Rene chuckled as he took a seat to the side and slightly behind Solae. He reached a hand forward and squeezed her shoulder.

“I don’t suppose I’m much in the way of arm candy right now,” he said with a grin, catching a glimpse of his grease stained face in the view screen. Dirt and grit caked his arms and most of the front of his tunic. Dirt was a constant companion to an infantryman, the only more frequent companion was mud. Rene hadn’t previously given it much thought but spending time in Solae’s company made him more self conscious, as though the woman's presence was triggering his mind to slip back into the older more fastidious patterns of an Imperial nobleman. He wondered if that was entirely a good thing. 

Although Solae’s decision was unexpected Rene was pleased that she had chosen to take the controls. During the escape he hadn’t had time to worry about it, but afterwards he had begun to worry about his performance. He had done well enough during that panicked flight, but it had been a simple powered lift without nuisance. He had spent a little time on simulators in training, but he didn’t have the right instincts for it. At his heart Rene was too aggressive, the same characteristics that made him an effective combatant on the ground were a disadvantage when it came to the subtlety of flight control. Doubt had begun to gnaw at him, doubt that had gotten worse with the sight of the storm.

“I’ll do what I can to keep us stable,” he told Solae. A slight shudder began to run through the hull as they reached the upper atmosphere. The rattle of the plates and the ping of the heating hull metal began to set up an unpleasant vibration, something that rattled at the back of the teeth, or like the whininging of inistant insects. The friction heat slowed the ship with a series of increasingly violent shocks, Rene could see trails of smoke and steam peeling back from the nose of the vessel in long greasy ribbons.  Solae worked the controls carefully, following instructions from Mia that Rene couldn’t see from his vantage points.

“I think I’ve found a landing site,” Rene said, watching the sensor data in a quarter of his view screen while the remaining quadrants displayed pitch and velocity graphs. The stresses on the hull were displayed as highlights from green to red. Rene was uncertain how far he could trust the sensors but it wasn’t as though he was spoiled for options. With a series of swift key strokes he bought up a grainy image of a storm tossed island, perhaps ten or twenty square miles. The surface of Panopontus was covered with such islands, but this one was unique for containing the remains of a volcanic caldera. The crack in the crust that had spawned the island was gone but the twenty foot high walls of compacted cinder ash remained. It was what the Marines called ‘keyhole cover’ a depression steep enough that a satellite or orbiting vessel would need to pass nearly directly overhead. 

“Sir Rene,” Mia said with the coy protest which was the closet she could come to active disapproval.

“Those coordinates take us nearly through the center of the weather system!” The hull began to slew as they dipped through the ionosphere and into the upper reaches of the sucking malestrom below. Even though they were a few thousand meters above the black storm front the air was still swirling at the top of the cyclones funnel. Rene began to fire the external maneuvering jets attempting to balance out the yaw so that Solae could focus on the decent without worrying abut the wind. It was a difficult and taxing task and it was several minutes before he felt he was able to answer.

“That is the idea, no one is going to be watching sensors in this hash, if we can get to the ground….” The Bonaventure pitched sideways violent as it hit an unexpected wind shear, dropping several hundred meters in a fraction of a second. Solae, grim faced adjusted her controls and they smoothed out. Rene put up a landing track on her screen with distance and vector information, trusting Mia to display it in a useable form.

“Once we make it to the ground, no one will know we are here,” he concluded. The external visual sensors went black as they hit the clouds, even through the pressure seals the cyclonic howl of winds was deafening. Rene furiously tried to compensate for the wind as Solae continued her grim duel with the controls. The island he selected was less than thirty miles from an inhabited island but showed no signs of settlement. The screens lit up again as Rene tumbed the display to millimetric radar. A stark black white picture but intelligible nonetheless. 

The hull ran with impacts as the descended further towards the surface. Small pieces of vegetation or shells picked up by the winds hissed off the hull like a squall of hail. On the scopes Rene could see the dark greenish seas heaving in colossal waves fifty or a hundred meters tall under the lash of the winds. There was a metallic twang as something carried away on the outside of the hull, maybe an antennae or a poorly secured hull plate. Rene clung on grimly whispering encouragement to Solae as she took both their fates in her hands.