The grasshopper skittered greasily on the cables, the frame groaning as it took the stress. Sabatine fed more power to the turbines, the howling fans blowing a vast rooster tail of coral dust out into the western ocean. Her eyes flicked constantly from the instruments to the lagoon below. The blast from the turbofans hammered the surface into a chaos of ripples that robbed her of any visibility. She pulled the googles down over her eyes and engaged the milimetric radar, her vision swimming into a wireframe composite of the returns. The assault transport hadn't shifted, though judging from the return she had succeeded in kicking up a fair amount of silt.

"Hold on," she advised and banked over the lagon, gaining height as she took up the slack in the cales until they ran down in an extended triangle with the grasshopper at the apex. She began side slip left and right, brining each engine up to full power to conter the altitude lost. The blows resounded through the frame of the air craft as she rocked left and right, jerking the submerged shuttle in alternating directions. The engines were heating up fast under the strain and Sabatine would have been surprised if she wasn't inducing stress fractures in the grasshoppers airframe. The scream of the engines grew and grew, almost defeaning even through the sound baffles of the cockpit.

"Its not going to work!" Tiber called, but Sabatine wasn't listening. She thought she had felt the slightest give in the line and she increased her savage manuevering. With shocking suddeness the grasshoper lurched sideways as the suction of decades of silt broke. Sabatine shoved the throttle through the gates. She hurled on the yoke and began to bank slowly towards the shore. There was a sound of ripping metal but Sabatine was commited now. The shuttle below was lifting in a storm of silt and she hauled it sideways, moving at a torturously slow rate, only a few feet a second. The water below them boiled under the down draft and the scream of distressed metal grew worse.

"I can see it!" Tiber shouted and Sabatine risked cutting her radar enhanced optics. The ventral fin was breaking the water, a spike of gray metal encrusted with the beginings of coral growth. It was only twenty meters from the shore when there was a sudden bang and the high pitched whine of metal being thrown at high speed. THe grasshopper dropped suddenly, cables going slack as they lost altitude. THe port engine seized, boomed and then flamed out, spewing black smoke shot through with flame.

"Detatch cable," Sabatine shouted, flipping switches to free the aircraft from its burden. THere wre two explosive pings as the cables parted, falling away to splash into the water below. Sabatine fed power into the remainging engine even as she reached up and pulled the handle the port fire suppresion system. White foam exploded from the six suppression ports, smothering the flames and dripping gobbets suppressent gel into the lagoon. Tiber was gripping his seat, his face set in the neutral but determined expression of a combat soldier who has long accostmed himself to the possibility that a drop could go wrong and there was nothing he could do about it. Sabatine powered the remaining engine down, dropping them percipitously towards the beach. At the last moment she hammered the throttle open again and the engine screamed to full power, slowing their decent into something between a landing an a controlled crash. Sabatine felt the blow up her spine as the hit, but managed to hit the emergency shut off before the engine ripped itself appart. The sudden silence was shocking, broken only by the scream of sea birds and the ping of cooling metal.

"That didn't go so badly," Sabatine remarked, pulling off her goggles.

"If you say so," Tiber said, though it wasn't exactly agreement. Sabatine made a guesture to the lagon. The top half of the assault transport was visible above the waterline, resting in ten feet of water, its nose, central hull and ventral fin all visible. It was encrusted with coral and starfish, but the plastel armor beneath looked none the worse for wear.

"We really should take some footages, Equestrian Areospace should make a commercial," Sabatine observed.