Fall of Angels

V

NYLAN WENT THROUGH the manual controls a third time, as well as through the checklist once more. Then he studied the rough maps and the readouts again. He had one of the two landing beacons, and his was the one that the other three landers would hone in on-assuming he managed to set down where he planned, assuming that he could find the correct high plateau in the middle of the right high mountain range without getting spitted on the surrounding needle-knife peaks.

The second beacon would go down with Ryba-in case he ran into trouble.

“Black two, this is black one. Comm check.” Nylan watched his breath steam as he waited for a reply.

“One, this is two. Clear and solid.”

“Good. You’re cleared to break orbit.”

The engineer took a deep breath. “I’m not quite through the checks. About four units, I’d guess.”

“Let us know.”

“Will do.”

In the couches behind him were the eight marines assigned to his lander. The craft wasn’t really a lander, but a space cargo/personnel shuttle that could be and had been hastily modified into a lifting body with stub wings for a single atmospheric entry in emergency situations. Only one of the four landers carried by the Winterlance was actually designedfor normal atmospheric transits, and it had far less capacity. That was the one Ryba was bringing down with the high-priority cargo items.

Although Nylan had more experience in atmospheric flight than Saryn or even Ryba, he wasn’t keen about being the lead pilot through an atmosphere he’d never seen, belonging to a planet he suspected shouldn’t exist. Because he was even less keen about dying of starvation or lack of oxygen in orbit, he continued with the checklist. Still, the business of trying to hit mountain plateaus bothered him, even if it were the only hope for most of the crew. “Harnesses strapped and tight?”

“We’re tight, ser,” responded Fierral from the couch beside him, the blue-eyed squad leader, who once had been a brunette, but who now had become a fiery redhead as a result of the Winterlance’s strange underjump. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to be floating around here anyway, would it now?”

“No,” admitted the engineer. He took another deep breath before flicking through the remainder of the checklist.

He scanned the screens, then thumbed the comm stud. “Black one, this is two. Breaking orbit this time.”

“We’ll be tracking you.”

“Thanks.” Nylan pulsed the jets, amused as always that it took energy to leave orbit, then watched the three limited screens as the lander slowly rose, then dropped, although neither sensation was more than a hint with the gentle movements. He knew those movements would be far less gentle at the end of the flight.

The first brush with the solidity of the upper atmosphere was a dragging skid and enough of a warming in the lander that Nylan’s breath no longer steamed.

The second brush was longer, harder, like a bareback ride across a fall-frozen stubbled field just before the snows of a Sybran winter began. And the lander warmed more.

Nylan studied the screens, not liking either the temperature readouts or the closures.

“Make sure those harnesses are tight! This is going to be rough.”

“Yes, ser.”

With the third and last atmospheric contact, the lander bucked, stiffly, and then again, even more roughly, as the thin whisper of the upper atmosphere slowly built into a screaming shriek.

Whhheeeeeee …

The lander was coming in fast … too fast.

Nylan flared the nose, bleeding off speed, but increasing the heat buildup. Then he dropped it fractionally.

Whheeeeeeeee …

The lander bounced, as though it had skidded on something solid in the upper atmosphere, then dropped as if through a vacuum. Nylan’s guts pushed up through his throat, and he could taste bile and smell his own sweatedout fear.

“Friggin’ pilot … not made of durall steel …”

“Does … best he can … wants … to live, too …”

“Don’t apologize for an engineer, Desinada …”

Nylan tried to match geographic landmarks with the screens, but the lander vibrated too much for him to really see.

The sweat beaded up on his forehead, the result of nonexistent ventilation, nerves, and the heat bleeding through the barely adequate ablative heat shields, and burned into the corners of his eyes, as his hands and mind worked to keep the lander level.

The buffeting began to subside, enough that he could see ocean far below and what looked like the tail of the fish continent ahead.

He checked the distance readouts and the altitude. He’d lost too much height. After studying the fuel reserves, little enough, he thumbed on the jets and flattened his descent angle.

At the lower speed, though, the effect of the high winds became more pronounced, and the edges of the stub wings began to flex, almost to chatter. With little enough power,the engineer could do nothing except hold the lander level, and wish … He tried to imagine smoothing the airflow around the lifting body, easing the turbulence, soothing the laminar flow, and it almost seemed as though he were outside the ship, in a neuronet, a different neuronet, almost like smoothing the Winterlance’s fusactor power flows.

The chattering diminished, and Nylan slowly exhaled.

Another hundred kays passed underneath, and he thumbed off the jets, hoping to be able to save some of the meager fuel for landing adjustments.

Far beneath him, the screens showed what seemed to be a rocky desert, a boulder-strewn expanse baked in the sun. Ahead rose the ice-knife peaks that circled the high plateau that was his planned destination.

He thumbed the jets once more, again imagining smoothing the airflow around the lander. Surprisingly, the lander climbed slightly, and Nylan permitted himself a slight grin.

The DRI pointed to the right, and the engineer eased the lander rightward, wincing as the lifting body lost altitude in the maneuver.

All too soon, the high alpine meadows appeared in the screens as green dots-small green dots, but the southernmost one grew rapidly into a long dash of green set amid gray rock.

The lander arrived above the target meadow, except the meadow showed gray lumps along the edges, and a sheer drop-off at the east end that plunged more than a kay down to an evergreen forest.

From what Nylan could tell, the wind was coming out of the east, and he dropped the lander into a circling descent that would bring the lifting body onto a final approach into the wind. He hoped the approach wouldn’t be too final, but the drop-off allowed the possibility of remaining airborne for a bit if the long grassy strip were totally unusable.

As he eased around the descending circular approach, the lander began to buffet. Nylan kept easing the nose up, trying to kill the lifting body’s airspeed to just above stalling before he hit the edge of the tilted high meadow that seemedso awfully short as he brought the lander over the ground that seemed to have more rocks than grass or bushes.

He eased the nose up more, letting the trailing edge of the belly scrape the ground, fighting the craft’s tendency to fishtail, almost willing the lifting body to remain stable.

The lander shivered and shuddered, and a grinding scream ripped through Nylan’s ears as he eased the craft full onto its belly. The impact of full ground contact threw Nylan against the harness straps, and the straps dug deeply into flesh and muscle. The engineer kept compensating as the lander skidded toward the drop-off, slowing, slowing, but still shuddering eastward, and tossing Nylan from side to side in his harness.

With a final shudder, the lander’s nose dug into something, and the craft rocked to a halt.

For a long moment, the engineer just sat in the couch. “We’re down.” Nylan slowly unfastened the safety harness, trying to ignore the spots of tenderness across his body that would probably remind him for days about the roughness of his landing.

“Did you have to be so rough?” asked Fierral.

“Any emergency landing that you can walk away from is a good one. We’re walking away from this one.”

“You may be walking, ser, but the rest of us may have to crawl.” The squad leader shook her head, and the short flame-red hair glinted.

“Are you sure he’s done?” asked another marine.

“We’re done.” Nylan touched the stud that cracked the hatch. There wasn’t any point in waiting. Either the ship’s spectrographic analyzers had been right or they hadn’t, and there was no way to get back to orbit, and not enough supplies in the ship to do more than starve to death-especially since no one knew where they were and since there were no signs of technology advanced enough to effect a rescue.

The air was chill, almost cold, colder even than northern Sybra in summer, but still refreshing. A scent of evergreen accompanied the chill.

With a deep breath, Nylan stepped to the hatch on theright side of the lander and used the crank to open it the rest of the way. “It smells all right.”

“I can’t believe you just opened it. Just like that,” said Fierral.

“We didn’t have any choice. We’re not going anywhere. We can breath it, or we can’t.” Because the lander had come to rest with the right side higher than the left, Nylan had to lower himself to the ground.

“ … can’t believe him … kill us all or not …”

… least he doesn’t dither around …”

“Neither does the captain.. probably why they get along …”

Leaving the voices behind, the engineer slowly surveyed what was going to be their new home, like it or not.

The landing area was a long strip of alpine meadow, perhaps five kays long and a little more than two wide, bordered on three sides by rocky slopes that quickly rose into the knife-edged peaks that had shown so clearly on the screens. To the north was a ridge, lower than the surrounding rocky areas, almost a pass, through which he had brought the lander. The entire meadow area sloped slightly downhill from the northwest to the southeast, one of the reasons the landing had seemed to take longer than necessary, Nylan suspected. To the southwest, beyond the rocky slopes, rose a needle peak, impossibly tall, yet seemingly sheathed in ice.

“Freyja … blade of the gods,” he said quietly.

“It is, isn’t it?” said Fierral from behind his shoulder. “How did you get us down?”

“It wasn’t too bad.”

Fierral glanced back to the west, along the trail gouged out by the lander. “That’s not exactly a prepared runway.”

“No.” Nylan laughed. “Would you give me a hand? We need to set up the beacon for the others.”

“They can land here?”

“The beacon makes it a lot easier. You can lock in a direction and rate of descent.”

“I would get the hard landing.”

“We’re here.”

“Wherever that is.” Fierral wiped her sweating forehead and glanced around the high plateau. “At least it’s not too hot.”

Behind them, the other marines dropped from the lander.

Nylan looked at the track he had made. From what he could tell, most of the rocks were small, nothing that would create too many problems. Rising from the grass between the rocks were small purple flowers, shaped like stars, that rose on thin, almost invisible, stems.

Nylan forced his thoughts from the fragile flowers and turned toward the lander itself. From what he could see, the ablative coating on the belly had been largely removed by the shrubbery and rocks.

“We’ve got some work to do-quickly. We need to set up the beacon and see if we can move the lander a bit.” He headed toward the lander and the emergency beacon it contained. Fierral followed.

One of the marines walked the several hundred steps eastward from the lander, pausing just short of the sheer drop-off.

… frigging long way down …”

Nylan nodded. They had come a long ways down. He just hoped that they didn’t have to fall any farther.