I took a picture out the window as atmospheric entry began in earnest. It is beautiful, and terrifying. Thank whatever gods reside in this reality bubble that the basic shields worked. Even then, we got a lot of hull heating, not enough to be worried about, but enough to need to keep an eye on.
It took three hours to get through that initial phase of atmospheric entry, and we are still going insanely fast. The shields did their job, but now we need to slow down. I am playing with the shield emitters to create drag by altering the shape of the shields. It is working, but until I get us slow enough to deploy the flight surfaces, and test the atmospheric engines, this is still very much an uncontrolled crash.
We're doing nearly fifteen times sound in this atmosphere. I cannot deploy the flight surfaces and modify the shield shape for atmospheric flight, or try the atmospheric engines, until we get below about nine time sound. The modifications to the shield shape does however appear to be working, we're down to twelve times sound since I started writing this.
The hull has cooled down and I'm not getting any more alerts. That said, the ride has been, and still is, very rough. We are staying strapped down. Just as we were about to start moving around, shortly after the end of the initial stages of atmospheric entry, and right as Edix had unstrapped, we started to tumble. They didn't get hurt badly, but it was close, and they got slammed into the bulkhead hard.
I was able to stabilize by manipulating the shield shape, and that was what gave me the idea to use shield shape to slow us down. We are still nearly two hundred kilometers from the surface, and are falling slowly as we slow down. Now at just over nine times sound. Nearly time to deploy the flight surfaces.
Arl and Liss are watching carefully as they will have to duplicate what I do right, and not do what I do wrong. It terrifies me that we end us crashing and they think something I did right, was in fact wrong for some reason, and end up doing something that causes them to crash as well. I am flying by the seat of my pants and just hoping for the best; hoping the training I was given, all that seemingly needless training that I questioned those decades ago now, don't fail me.
We've dropped down to six times sound, and loosing altitude fast. I am going to reshape the shields, deploy the flight surfaces, and try to start up the atmospheric engines. The shields provide the typical aerodynamic flight surfaces and give the module a streamlined profile to the air. The flight surfaces providing maneuvering and control. It is therefore time to either fly, or crash. I wonder if anyone will ever see, read, and understand these logs, and all the data I have collected.
If I don't. If we don't survive... I suppose recording who I am, who I was, isn't going to hurt. There's no telling what, if any, of the logs and data files will survive us.
My name is Hureth Kel. My companions were Jennek and Edix with me here, Arlex and Liss on this worlds moon. We were not from this reality bubble. I was born on my species home world, illegally, to extremely rich and powerful parents. For that reason I wasn't simply dropped in a mine somewhere to die. While I was forced to live as the lowest class of person, I did get to know my parents and got an education. I will always be grateful for that, as most born in my circumstance to less wealth parents were lucky to survive at all.
I did well, and tried to contribute to my world as best I could, to do my parents proud. I applied for the colony program because it gave people like me, if selected, the ability to start over, free of the stigma of our original caste and circumstances of our birth. On the colonies, your cast was who you were trained to be.
I was selected for the Khool-ha exploration project because of my aptitudes, or so they told me. Perhaps that was true, and as a low caste with essentially no rights, I was the perfect person for the job. Expendable and desperate. I had no chance of ever improving my caste, or having family of my own, because people like me were sterilized at birth. Only getting on a colony mission, or things like the Khool-ha project, gave those like me the chance to improve our place and to have family. I jumped at the chance, just as I expect they knew I would.
I have never actually regretted that decision. I have seen things, done things, and met amazing people across multiple universes. Even traveling to a new reality bubble. I only hope that I do not die here, as I want to explore this new place, and perhaps one day return to my own reality bubble to tell others what I found here.
Flight surfaces deployed and shields reshaped. At the very least I can glide us now. Time to try the atmospheric engines.