Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (31 page)

The answer popped up when he checked the astrographic plot and position logs. They had been pretty good up to an hour ago. Then, right in the middle of a data-line, the positional reporting feed went haywire and stopped. And now that he was looking at it, all the other failed systems had gone down at the same second.

The reason for that simultaneous failure became clear: the external sensor archives showed a more or less normal electromagnetic and radiant soup outside, until an hour ago. Then the readings went completely off the scale for the better part of twenty minutes. The peaks of the rad and solar wind readings were like nothing he’d ever seen. And so he knew: he’d been caught in a coronal mass ejection. The worst ever recorded. He was lucky anything was still working, but was damned unlucky to be auto-deployed right into the biggest solar storm on record.

But no, he realized: it might not just be a matter of bad luck. This immense coronal mass ejection was probably the result of something big and fast crashing into the sun at near-relativistic speeds. Which might be a fast STL craft from Earth, since there wasn’t much else he could think of which would approach at such speeds, and since that would also be the logical means whereby humanity would respond to the kzin attack upon Wunderland.

Great. So he had visuals, manual guidance controls, and thrusters. Not much else, but then again, those were all he really needed to land.

Well, those and a whole lot of luck. Eyeball guidance would be hard enough in terms of getting near the preferred pre-planned drop zone. The real challenge was making sure he came in at the correct angle. Too steep and he’d burn up. Too shallow and he’d bounce off, without enough juice left to counterboost, come about, and push in for another try. So the learning curve on this task, for which he had received not quite one hour of simulator training, was fairly daunting: one strike and you’re out.

Which reacquainted him with the adrenaline-fueled truth that nothing focuses one’s mind so much as imminent mortal danger. Luckily, he didn’t need to tumble his rock into a counterboost position: the automated attitude adjustment system had taken care of both that and the braking thrust sometime yesterday when he was still in cold sleep. But about an hour ago, the computer watchdogging that system had gone down for good, which meant that he now had to counterthrust immediately and hard in order to compensate for the lost hour.

He brought the plasma engine online, taking note of the rate of volatile consumption and the time. Then he shifted over to the viewscreen again, pinged the planet with a laser, pinged again after five seconds, and a third time after yet another five count to confirm range, his initial rate of closure, his absolute velocity, and the rate of its decrease given the current counterboost setting.

And in performing these tasks, he got his first bit of good news: he had enough fuel left to make a clean deorbit at a survivable speed, and still retain a sizable reserve. Which meant he could afford to spend a little main thruster fuel to selectively vector the exhaust for gross corrections to his descent attitude, and thereby save the dedicated but short-duration attitude control thrusters for terminal, detailed adjustments. If he was any judge of such things—and he really wasn’t—he guessed that the probability of his making it to the ground alive had just jumped from unpromising to pretty good.

And that happy change had come just in time: grain-sized debris started buffeting his pseudo-rock, requiring brief corrections, and leading him to wonder: where did this debris field come from? This was clean space on the charts, and there was no way regular use could have—

The answer to his question came in the form of moonrise: one of Wunderland’s two, very small satellites came around the terminator. Suddenly bathed in the yellow glow of Alpha Centauri, it showed a markedly different reflection pattern. Even its shape looked different, as if—

Then he understood. Whatever had arrived in this system, and had probably caused the coronal mass ejections, had savaged planetary bodies as well. The moon’s new, somewhat lopsided shape was evidence that much of it had been blown free, and that the lighter debris was beginning to migrate out into various orbital tracks surrounding Wunderland. Such as the one he was traversing now. The planet itself was flickering at the poles—probably impact sites—and wreathed in dark, slowly expanding clouds.

Cheating the nose a little closer to the planet, he held the rock more or less on course, noting two bright flares ahead of him. What? Counter fire? Kzin interceptors juicing their afterburners? But no, he realized after another moment: it was simply a pair of meteorites, glowing and flaring as they entered Wunderland’s atmosphere. As he watched, he saw almost half a dozen other descending streaks of light, bright against the dark clouds below. Chunks of the moon, those blown inward or close enough to quickly succumb to the planet’s gravity, were being pulled in to their fiery death. Which was good news: his own falling rock would not even be an anomaly under these conditions, and thereby, warrant no special investigation. Presuming that there were any kzinti down below who still had the operational leisure to investigate just one more shooting star.

Which, he realized, was what his rock was starting to become. The backup skin-temperature sensors showed a growing thermal spike: he was hitting dense atmosphere and starting to buck. He felt, more than read from the screen, that his angle was a little too shallow. Using the attitude control thrusters, he brought the nose into a steeper descent. He had allowed the rock’s descent angle to remain slightly shallow up until now, because it was relatively simple in the early reentry phases to push the ship’s vector closer to the planet’s line of gravitic attraction. Conversely, if one started with too steep angle of descent, it took a great deal more energy to correct into a more oblique trajectory. And in doing so, it was too easy to overshoot the proper point of correction and skitter off the atmosphere like a flat stone skimmed across a pond.

As the rock’s rate of descent increased, the cooling systems started making an ominous ticking which rapidly escalated into a knocking, accompanied by smoke. No, not smoke: vapor from the overtaxed condensers—overtaxed because several of them had gone off-line. The remaining units were overloading as they struggled to meet the minimum environmental demands. It started to become stiflingly hot in the capsule.

The ride became bumpier, but the pseudo-rock was well into a viselike grasp of Wunderland’s gravity, which now impeded further side-vectoring. In fact, he was fairly certain that there was hardly any further danger of catastrophe unless one or more of the drogue chutes failed, or there was a problem when—

The external ablative coating, which also served as the capsule’s pseudo-rock exterior, peeled off with a thunderous clatter, followed by a slight tug that started the nose of the capsule drifting away from its drop trajectory. Another half-degree, and the increased drag on the nose would swing it further off the descent line, which would further increase the drag, and then the capsule would start—

Tumbling meant death. He gingerly brought the best-situated attitude control thruster back on-line, ready to deliver the faintest nudge of correction. Too little and he might not have the time to try again; too much and he’d swing out of descent alignment in the other direction, and again, begin tumbling ass-over-eyeballs down to a very kinetic demise. He brushed the thrust toggle so briefly that he wondered if the system had even engaged . . .

But the nose swung slowly back into stable alignment. Two seconds later, the cooling system died with a roar, and genuine smoke started filling the capsule. Checking his watch, he sealed the helmet faceplate of his combat suit, and waited for the first drogue chute to deploy, hoping the fire in the cooling system would not spread too quickly.

The expected bump was so hard that his faceplate banged into the screen and blanked it. But it told him that yes, indeed, the first drogue chute had deployed. Two more bumps meant he was now at an altitude of 2500 meters, and moving at a paltry 500 kph.

He flared the main thruster briefly, the slaved ACTs joining in, maintaining the drop trajectory against any marginal side-vectoring. Again, he found himself slammed sharply against the capsule’s screen as his final braking burn dropped the speed to 300 kph. Ironically, the burn he couldn’t control was internal: he was pretty sure the comfort liner of the capsule was now starting to spark and flare.

Which meant that even if he survived landing, he’d do so with a live fire aboard. And he still had almost twenty percent of his volatiles in tankage. In short, he was now riding a bomb with a lit fuse down to a hard landing. Typical landing protocols dictated retaining the fuel as an insurance against terminal chute failure, but at this point, chute failure was only a dire
possibility
. A hard landing with a live fire and fuel aboard was currently a dire
certainty
. He flipped the cover back on the emergency manual overrides, and depressed the third button from the left. The fuel tanks vented with a sound like a suddenly punctured aerosol can, meaning that he was now completely in the hands of fate. And if the main chute did not deploy—

A sudden jerk and sense of sustained deceleration signaled that the main chute was out and full: the predictable, faint swaying motion was the harbinger of a gentle ride to the ground.

Gentle, but hardly a relief: the flame in the capsule was now steady, working its way up the liner and causing further short-outs. The heat in his combat suit suddenly increased, became intense, soared toward unbearable—

—just as, with sudden thump, the capsule jarred to a rough halt. In the same second, there was a creaky wheeze, and then a blast of explosive bolts blew the top of the capsule off. The flames around him roared up, greedily feeding upon the abundant oxygen in the atmosphere.

He tumbled out of the coffinlike remains of the capsule, turned about and leaned back into the conflagration, the combat suit setting up a desperate warning squall: complete failure was imminent—

Rummaging about under the control panel, he sprung open a small, armored cargo receptacle, and yanked out the four-liter secure container he found there.

Then he ran deep into the sparse scrub-lands in which he had landed . . .

* * *

A twig snapped a moment before a voice came from the bushes: “Hands up. Don’t move.”

“I won’t,” he answered. “I’ve been waiting here for you.”

Two men and two women emerged from the thick brush that lined the southern perimeter of the small clearing; to the north, sand pines shot up like feathery stalagmites into the cloud-darkened dusk. “You were waiting here for us?” asked the smaller and older of the men.

“Yep. Saw you about two hours ago, following my trail from the crash site.”

The man raised his weapon a little higher. “You seem pretty casual and self-assured for someone—some human—who just landed in a meteoritic assault capsule. You connected to today’s activities out in space?”

“Look: I’ve been gone from Wunderland for a long time. Just woke up from coldsleep today. So I’m not exactly up on the most recent news: what activities in space are you talking about?”

Long looks bounced from face to face among the four armed people. The apparent leader spoke again. “Seems Earth finally did something about the kzin occupation. Looking at that suit of yours, and the timing of your arrival, seems logical you were part of the package they sent. Arrived early this morning at nearly light speed; wreaked havoc throughout the system. We figured you must have come from Earth as part of that attack force.”

“Nope. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been further from Wunderland than the Serpent Swarm.”

The larger of the two men, and clearly the youngest of the group, brought his weapon up quickly, sighting along its barrel. “Which means you wouldn’t be alive unless the kzinti wanted you to be. Which would make this a trap.”

“Nope, not the case. When I say I’ve been asleep for a long time, I mean a
long
time. They corpsicled me three months after the ratcats showed up.”

“And so where were you all that time?”

“Can’t tell you the exact location, because I have no way of knowing. I was in cold storage, so to speak.”

“I ain’t laughing, stranger. Who put you in storage, and for what reason?”

“The who is the local UNSN command staff. The reason was to strike back at the ratcats, but only once we had an effective weapon.”

The leader of the group looked around the area, finding nothing large enough to contain the aforementioned effective weapon: just the man, his gear, his charred combat suit, a sidearm, and a small secure case. “I don’t see any miracle weapon. And why wait all this time if you’ve been in system for—what?—more’n forty years, as you claim it.”

“Yes. Forty years is how long it took to gather enough information about the kzin, pass it on to the facilities on Earth, and then back here. That meant two research labs working together with a four-point-three-seven-year message delay between them. So it took a little longer than a conventional counterattack. And the weapon they came up with is right here.” He laid a long index finger atop the secure box.

The leader frowned. The young man smiled, but it was not a friendly expression. “Well, thanks for explaining things. So either everything you say is utter bullshit, in which case you’re a kzin plant, trying to sneak into the ranks of our resistance. Or you’re not a plant, but we’ve got your miracle weapon, anyway. So the logical alternative is that we take no chances: killing you might be a damned shame, but we still get our hands on the mystery weapon, and haven’t taken any risks with our own security.” He leaned over his tangent sights. “So sorry, but war is hell and all that.”

“No,” said one of the women sharply.

The young man looked at her. “C’mon; can’t you see what’s going on here? He’s a collaborator, a traitor. And even if he’s not, we have to work as though he was. We have no way to find out if he’s telling the truth or—”

“No. We do.” She turned and studied his charred combat suit again. Returning her scrutiny, he saw she was unusually, even strikingly, beautiful. Not in a soft or delicate fashion; her face was severe, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, almost white-blonde hair, and a strangely square chin for a woman. He thought he might have seen a painting of a Valkyrie that looked like her. “You,” she said. “What’s your name?”