Chapter 6
That took him back to the start of the crash. It was either fifty-eight seconds or ninety-seven minutes since then, depending on your frame of reference. He’d watched a pair of additional plasma bolts drift by outside the ship. At normal speed, they were just brilliant points of light that he tried desperately to avoid. From his current point of view, they were fluffy purple-pink clouds that just happened to convert anything they touched into a cloud of vapor. None of them came close to hitting him before scattering against an orbiting lump of metal. That was nice, since the only thing his safety system would do was slow it down, and chances were that something that would melt his face off at a thousand miles per hour would still melt it off at ten.
The debris was behind him now. That was the good news. The bad news was that there were only a few seconds of timeshift left, and a hell of a lot of free-fall. As the last hundredths of a second started to tick down, he made sure that everything he was going to need after the crash was strapped to his person. He clicked the seat harness off so that he could move around more freely, and went to work. The metal briefcase was the first to be locked down. It had cost him his ship; he was damn sure going to get it there. It was a matter of pride now. The only other thing inside the bounds of the emergency shield was the box he’d picked up from Blake’s. He couldn’t quite remember what was in it, but he might as well bring it along.
He’d only just gotten it strapped on when time came charging back with a vengeance. It had been difficult to tell in slow-mo, but the ship had gotten itself into a pretty vicious spin. That presented a number of problems. First and foremost, he couldn’t safely eject while it was spinning like that. There was a second consequence, too, which he hadn’t anticipated--the inertial dampener must have been hit at some point, because when time came back, it brought centripetal force with it. The rotation threw him out of his seat and pinned him painfully against the force field for a moment or two before he hauled himself back into the seat. He buckled himself back into the harness and made a mental note to never, ever unbuckle it during a flight again. He then pulled up the auxiliary controls and gave them a try.
There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of functionality left in old Betsy. There might be one engine left that was still running and had controls intact. One or two of the maneuvering thrusters was still working, too. That would have to be enough.
A little trial and error and an awful lot of finesse took the ship out of its death spin. The ground wasn’t as close as he’d expected. Gravity must have been a little weak here. A little more fighting got the ship oriented generally upright, and the time came to say his goodbyes.
“Well, girl, we had some good times, but this is where we part ways!” he yelled over the rush of wind and rattle of broken machinery, patting the arm of the chair one last time before hammering the eject button.
Nothing happened.
He hammered the button a few more times, because that’s what he knew to do when technology failed. It had roughly the same result it always did. That is to say: none at all.
“Come on, babe. It’s time to let go,” he said nervously.
There was a groan of jammed clamps, then more nothing. The ground was getting a lot closer now. With very few options, and zero time to come up with anything intelligent, Lex was forced to desperate measures. He unbuckled again, reached behind the seat to snag his Extra-Vehicular Activity pack, strapped it on, and grabbed onto the broken frame of his view window. Getting through the mangled mess of broken glass and twisted metal would have been tricky in any situation. Doing it with two bulky cases and a backpack, all while plummeting in a barely-controlled nosedive added an extra challenge. One final heave tore him free, and instantly he was caught by the wind and torn from the roof of his ship. Shaking fingers found their way to the panel of his EVA pack, and he activated its jets.
Jet packs were a fairly common thing these days. Engineers had not yet had any luck making them particularly safe, but they were cheap, fast, and exciting. In a way, they were the next logical evolution of motorcycles, and thus popular with thrill-seekers. There were models that were capable of hours of flight time, the maneuverability of a bird of prey, and more than enough speed to give the user windburn. This wasn’t one of those. The jets on his back were the kind intended to move you around during a space walk. At full blast, they had about as much thrust as a couple of garden hoses. Had his ship been disabled in space, like ninety-nine percent of freelancer ships were, this little baby would have been perfect. In an atmosphere, with a planet pulling him down, it was next to useless. All he could do was keep the nozzles pointed down and blazing, and hope that their push and the planet’s weak gravity would be enough to make the fall survivable.
Wind whistled past his helmet as he fell. The landscape drew closer and closer. As it did, he scanned madly for something that would break his fall. There was nothing. The surface of the planet was an endless gray moonscape, pockmarked with craters and scattered with mounds of wreckage and slag. No convenient mound of cardboard boxes. No building with nice flimsy awnings. Hell, even though wispy clouds high up the sky suggested there must be rain at least occasionally, none of it had seen fit to accumulate into so much as a pond. The jet pack was slowing him down, but not quickly, and not nearly enough.
If he didn’t come up with an idea soon, he was going to splash when he hit, whether it was in water or not.
Nearby, a wrenching metallic screech erupted as the mooring of one of Betsy’s engines tore loose and she went into a series of screaming loops. At least he knew that abandoning ship had been the right decision. He watched the trusty vessel draw pale blue spirals in the air above him for a moment before tearing his eyes away from the sight to try again to find something that might slow his landing. There was a jagged peak below that dropped off into a steep slope. With no better options available, and time just about up, Lex guided himself toward it. Jets worked a lot better if they had something to push off of. If he could match his descent to the slope, the additional lift might take him down to some velocity not likely to leave a crater.
The peak shot up beside him, and where there had only been icy sky, there was now a sheer wall of stone, blurred by speed. Gradually, he nudged himself closer to the wall, then turned his jets toward it. The exhaust washed against it and he felt his speed decrease, but he also was launched away from the wall. Again the nozzles adjusted, again he edged up to it, and again he lost speed and was hurled away. Lex managed to bob back and forth, slowing his fall each time, and it was starting to look like this might actually work. It probably would have, too, if the slope had remained steady for another three or four minutes of fall. Instead, it turned just a bit gentler and he misjudged a return, bashing against the wall and damaging the jet pack.
A moderately-controlled decent turned into a sliding, rolling tumble down a mountain of gravel and debris. The flight suit he wore was a lot of things. It was made of high-strength synthetic fabric that was air-tight, water-tight, flame-resistant, and acid-resistant. It was not, however, padded. Even in slightly reduced gravity and his reduced speed, the fall hurt. A lot. By the time he slid to a stop on a pile of sharp rocks, he looked like . . . well, like he had fallen down a mountain.
He waited a few minutes, until it no longer felt like he had been riding in a cement mixer for the last two weeks, then assessed his situation.
The trip down the mountain had left him about halfway up a sloping mound of rocks at the base of the sheer wall, which, for some reason, he managed to remember was called scree. Evidently the fall had knocked some of his high school geology loose. At the base of the scree was a long, wide plain with scattered dips and dents, craters of various ages and sizes. Now that he knew where he was--in a general sense, at least--he checked himself over. It didn’t feel like there were any broken bones, amazingly. One particularly sharp stone had managed to puncture his suit and dig into his thigh. It was a nasty sight, but not too deep.
His helmet h
ad absorbed more than one potential concussion, and the clear visor was a spider web of cracks. Before he removed it, though, he had the presence of mind to check the environmental readout on his forearm. The gravity was 0.6-G, the pressure was 0.9 atmospheres, and the atmospheric gas mixture was a little high on the methane and carbon dioxide, but breathable. Good enough.
A half-second before he removed the helmet, he heard the familiar scream of ailing machinery. An instant later, the out of control wreck of his ship came crashing to the ground a mile away. It skipped and skimmed toward him along the loose slope like a stone on a stream. Each time it touched down, a cascade of stones was slung aside. The old girl managed to get aloft one last time before the final active engine disconnected entirely, slicing into the sky like a javelin and dropping the rest of Betsy down into a cartwheel. Rocky ground crunched beneath the wrecked ship as its roll took it directly at Lex. He spat a series of curses and gathered enough of his wits to make a mad lunge aside. The ship’s momentum finally gave out, creaking it lazily up into a nose-stand before pivoting and rocking to a rest on its belly.
When the dust settled, Betsy had managed to come within five feet of turning her former pilot into a leaky bag of broken bones and flattened organs.
Between the pain and the amount of rattling his brain had done, Lex decided it would be prudent to sit still for a few minutes. He propped himself up against the wreck of a ship and let the specifics of his surroundings seep in.
First off, it was cold. Very cold. Nothing life-threatening, but every surface that hadn’t been churned up by his crash was covered in a thin layer of frost. The flight suit was fairly well-insulated, but the ripped section was letting in the cold at the puncture in his leg, which wasn’t terribly pleasant. As far as he could tell, it was daytime, too. The temperature might get dangerous when the sun went down.
The second thing that struck him was that the sky was gray. Not the hazy, cloudy gray that would come before a bad storm. There weren't more than one or two clouds in sight. It was the sky itself that was gray. The color was very slightly granular, like hazy static viewed at a great distance. Here and there, the sky twinkled and flashed. It took him better than a minute to realize that he was looking at that debris field from the other side. Vast clouds of metal blocked most of the sun’s light, and the shinier pieces reflected the odd rays downward as they turned in orbit.
No wonder it was so cold--most of the light wasn’t making it to the surface.
The ground around him looked like a war zone. Deep gashes marked the landscape in thousands of places. Every few hundred feet, there was another, giving the surrounding plain the look of a poorly-made golf ball. Most of the divots were fairly shallow, maybe a dozen or more feet across, but some looked like they were a quarter-mile or larger. A lot of them still had a very jagged, fresh look. Whatever was pummeling the surface of the planet didn’t seem like it ever took much of a break . . . probably he should get mobile before the next impact.
He pulled out a roll of duct tape from its pouch in his flight suit and started binding up his injured leg. There was absolutely nothing more crucial in a space emergency than duct tape. Spare oxygen, emergency food, and weapons all came in handy, but if his suit sprung a pinhole leak in a vacuum, Lex knew all of the freeze-dried ice cream in the world wouldn't save him. As current circumstances proved, it made a decent field bandage in a pinch, too. With the hole in his leg sealed up, more or less, he decided to give it a test drive.
Standing on it hurt like hell, and walking hurt worse, but neither was so bad that it could distract him from the final noteworthy aspect of the crash site. In the distance was a dust cloud, tracing its way along the ground, and it was moving quickly toward him. In less than a minute, it was close enough for him to make out the vehicle kicking it up, but he continued to blink and shake his head in attempts to focus more clearly on it for far longer. He popped the helmet off, letting the cold hit him like a slap in the face, in hope that it would sharpen his senses somewhat. The icy air had a hell of a bite, and the sort of industrial stench that lingered around factories, but it didn’t help much.
What his eyes were telling him he saw didn’t agree with what his admittedly mistreated brain suggested was likely. Finally, it was close enough that it couldn’t be denied. It was a school bus, one of the earlier hover models that couldn’t get more than a few feet off of the ground. It pulled up to him, came to a stop, and settled down onto rubber supports.
“Uh . . . I must have hit my head much harder than I thought,” he muttered.
The thing had seen better days. A faded yellow paint job bore black letters that read “Ruane Girls Academy.” One headlight was completely missing, and the second looked like it had been replaced with one from a much larger vehicle. A flashing red stop sign flipped out from the side and the doors creaked open. A few seconds later, the PA system crackled to life with a familiar voice.
“On the off chance that there is something alive at the crash site, I suggest you climb inside,” said the same voice that had been cursing at him before the crash.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but--”
The voice cut him off. “If you are looking for motivation, take a look at all of those craters. Then look up. That mess you came crashing through is none too stable on a good day. There are about two dozen impacts per minute, so if you haven’t seen one, that means you’re overdue. The chances of you getting hit are pretty low, but one of those hunks poking a hole in the planet tends to make the area inhospitable. Also, if you’re outdoors come nighttime, I hope you brought a parka, since last night it hit negative forty.”
“Uh . . . okay. But how do I know--”
“If you are dead, I’m going to salvage that ship, assuming there’s any of it left. Hell, if you’re alive I’m going to salvage it, too.”
“Hey, that’s my ship you’re talking about, you--”
“Also, in case you haven’t figured it out, this is a recording. This is the only chance you’re gonna get to partake of my hospitality, so I suggest you step aboard. Doors close in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”
Lex hopped inside just as the doors closed. Regardless of who this guy was, or where this bus was headed, it couldn’t possibly make his situation worse than it was now . . .
Could it?