Transference Station by Stephen Hunt

crash field stopping Calder being sent flying across the bridge and dashed against the hull. A maelstrom of colours erupted outside the ship, tachyons and other exotic particles flaring as they were half-dragged into normal space, mad glimpses of the dark velvet star-scattered reaches of normal space interspaced with the alien vaults of hyperspace.
    ‘Hold us steady,’ ordered Lana over the ship matters’ screaming protest, ‘hold us steady…’
    Calder gritted his teeth. He didn’t know if the professor was scared, but right now, he sure as hell was. He felt his body torn between two states of existence, his hand shaking with primeval fear, the crash field unable to compensate and blinking ruby warning alarms as though it shared his rising panic.
    ‘Dive, dive, dive!’ called Lana, just as the prince thought that the vessel was going to break up and be scattered across both universes. Calder’s vision flared, a cascade of Higgs boson particles burning across the back of his retina – his own body suddenly fully reassembled, jolting in the cold, harsh grasp of reality. He slouched forward, trying not to retch, as the seat field caught his limp body.
    ‘Now I know why your ship’s so big and your crew’s so small,’ coughed Sebba, kicking her chair angrily down towards the deck. ‘You’ve hit your natural limit of all the crew in the Edge actually crazy enough to fly with you.’
    ‘Any landing you can walk away from, professor…’ grinned Lana. She glanced out towards the reach of space.
    They had made a short drop, all right. Outside the Gravity Rose , the massive sphere of a new world filled the heavens. But even to Calder’s relatively untutored eyes, the world looked, well, wrong. It squatted there, a dull uniform crimson colour, matching the dead red light of the sun beyond, whirls in its atmosphere slowly twisting as lightning bursts lit it up from below. This is a gas giant, surely, not an actual planet?
    Lana was obviously thinking the same thing. ‘Professor, these are the co-ordinates you gave us, so what the hell is that? Jungle world, my ass?’
    ‘Well then,’ smiled Sebba, ‘it seems I know something you don’t after all.’ She sounded satisfied, as though the natural order of things had been restored. ‘What you see before you is Abracadabra. It has an exotic troposphere, a top layer of gas that interacts with the sun’s residual solar winds. That’s an interplay of energy discharges you can see down there. The world is exactly as described… only, below its gas layer.’
    Calder watched the mesmerising sight of energies chasing each other across the world’s whirling gas coating. It was no wonder that DSD had the planet to himself. Most ships passing through the system wouldn’t give the place a second glance, and a dying sun was enough to put off any would-be colonists. The system’s eventual star death and supernova might lie many millions of years in the future, but humanity was superstitious about such things. Hell, just looking at the unwelcoming sight of the baneful sun beyond, Calder realised that he was superstitious about such things.
    ‘Skrat,’ said Lana, ‘what do we have on the sensor logs?’
    ‘No pings,’ said the first mate, his lizard-like tail whipping thoughtfully in the hole formed for it in the command seat. ‘If we were being pursued, any following vessel was too far behind us to track our dive.’
    ‘Outstanding,’ said Sebba. ‘You nearly broke the ship in half to scan for a damned sensor ghost.’
    ‘I wasn’t even close to breaking the Rose ,’ said Lana. ‘She can surprise you like that.’
    Calder sighed. The ship was a lot like the captain that way, too.
    ‘Mister Polter,’ said Lana, ‘you and the chief have the con. Skrat, Calder, Zeno, you’re with me. We’ll take the control shuttle down to the camp, set up homing beacons, and guide our cargo landers in one-by-one.’
    ‘I’ll take my own ship and meet you at the camp,’