Caliphate

Flight Seven Nine Three, 24 Muharram,

1538 AH (4 November, 2113)

The shoreline swelled before him, all rocks and trees. The airship was in ground effect now, and still half a mile from shore. The pilot really didn't know if they'd make it. His control panel had become a Christmas tree of red lights from punctured gas cells and damaged or failing engines. Even if they did make it across, though, the airship wasn't going to land; it was going to crash.

But there are degrees of crashing, Lee reassured himself. Some are worse than others.

Calmly, or as calmly as one could expect anyway, the pilot brought the airship in closer and closer to shore. About a thousand feet out, he flicked a switch to dump the fuel. A sudden slight ballooning upward told him that had worked. He'd not been sure that it would, with all the damage the ship had taken.

He killed the main forward rotors, causing the ship to slow considerably. What little fuel remained in the system would go to the vertical thrusters.

Slowly . . . slowly . . . slowly the shore edged closer. The nose touched and began to crumple. There was still a lot of mass in the airship, and a lot of inertia. It was enough to half crush it. That mass drove the ship inexorably forward to ruin. At the last second, the pilot threw Ling's arms over her face.

And that was the last thing he remembered for quite some time.