Minefield

MOTE Week 22, 2026

This week on MOTE, I swapped prompts with Parrish Baker, who gave me: There I was, gliding, a little ship over a silver plain, drifting a hundred miles above.

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I was just minding my own business, doing a little high-altitude gliding – for fun obviously. It’s something I do frequently all over the planet. I’ve got all the licences and documentation to say that I’m qualified and am permitted to go wherever the wind takes me.

As I was saying, I was just minding my own business. I was gliding in my ultra-lightweight glider, a hundred miles above the planet, drifting with the wind over a silver plain below. I wasn’t even sure what territory I was over. I knew roughly where I was, but where I was relative to the borders that ran through the area I had no idea.

All of a sudden, I hit an aerial minefield. Seriously! Those things were illegal outside of actual warfare, and there wasn’t a war on as far as I was aware.

These were drifter mines with proximity fuses. They were camouflaged very well, I had no idea where any of them were until after any I ended up too close to blew up.

The shockwave from the first mine buffeted the glider. I nearly lost control. I did lose control when the second mine went off, and the shockwave sent me in the opposite direction.

With hindsight, that probably saved my life. I lost height rapidly, and once I was below eighty miles there were no more explosions. If I’d maintained level flight, I’d probably have run closer to a few more mines, and my glider had limits to how much bad weather it could take.

It took me a while to regain control, and I was at about sixty miles up before I levelled off. I did a quick check, but none of the emergency circuits had been tripped, and it didn’t look as if any of the controls had been damaged to the point of not working any more. Nonetheless, the best thing to do, the safest thing to do, was to get down to ground level and perform a thorough check on my pride and joy.

Down I went, spiralling through the sky, down to where I could pick up the signals for the nearest airfield. Once I had, I turned, and headed for the runway.

“Airfield DXT-7-5, glider 8-Theta-9-Lambda requesting permission to land.”

“Glider 8-Theta, this runway is restricted to powered craft outside of emergencies.”

“Airfield DXT-7-5, glider 8-Theta requests permission to land to carry out urgent structural checks. Safe travel distance is unknown.”

“Glide 8-Theta, permission to land granted. You will need to justify the emergency to on-site security personnel.”

Of course I would. Still, I had permission to land. I proceeded to line up the runway, and went through the landing process.

It was a long runway, longer than I would normally use. Once I was down, I turned on the emergency battery power, and used that to power the glider off the runway and on to one of the taxiways. I would have preferred not to use the battery for that purpose, I only had so much charge in it, but the alternative was getting out and pushing the glider on to a taxiway, which would take significantly longer. I was an irritant to the local air traffic control as it was, better not to be more of an irritant than I needed to be.

Once safely halted, I exited the cockpit, and started my checks. I was only a short way in, when a van pulled up, and a uniformed gentleman got out.

“Can you justify the emergency?” he asked.

“Could you come up here?” I asked in response. “It’s much easier to show you than to explain.”

He shrugged and clambered up onto the wing with me.

I pointed to where the paint had been scoured off the wing surface, and where the lightweight solar panel had had its surface gouged so effectively it was practically useless. “I ran into a drifting aerial minefield. I’d prefer to confirm that this thing remains flyable than to find out when I’m fifty miles up that it isn’t.”

He got down and spoke into a communicator. There was a short conversation, which I couldn’t hear. Besides I was continuing to check the glider. It looked as if I’d got very lucky. The damage seemed to be primarily restricted to the surface. I’d have to pay for a scan of the main structural beams to be sure when I got it home, but it looked like it wasn’t going to break up on me any time soon.

“Scan has confirmed your story,” he called up from below. “You may finish your checks, after which I will need to arrange for your repatriation.”

Fair enough. The sooner I was back home, the sooner I could carry out the repairs. The sooner my glider was back in perfect working order, the sooner I could return it to the skies where we belonged.

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Feel free to join us at MOTE. I’m looking forwards to reading what everyone comes up with.