Rolling Thunder (25 page)

“Go see what you can do for the injured,” I told Slomo and Nigel, and they took off. “Try to get them to the middle of the bus. I may be slamming us around a bit.”

I cleared the control panel in front of me. It was the driver’s side, the port-side windshield panel, that was spiderwebbed with cracks; the one on my side was intact. I could see out, and what I saw was the churning surface of Europa, moving upward in front of me, then the horizon upside-down, then deep space, then the slowly shrinking bulk of Grumpy overhead, then blackness, then the horizon right-side up, then moving ice again. Repeat as needed, until impact.

How high was I? Still rising? At what velocity?

The control panel wasn’t a lot of help. Big areas of it weren’t working, and there were so many red warning lights I had a hard time sorting them out. But I saw something out the right-side window that was not very encouraging. The bus had four sets of double tracks, all steerable, one at each corner. Floating out there was the right-forward set, still attached to the bus by a few electrical cables but clearly torn away from the undercarriage. I could see hydraulic lines that had been severed. My panel told me the front-left pair were gone, too.

That wasn’t a problem if I could just set us down someplace where the ground was stable. But as long as those tracks were still attached to us, any maneuvering I did was likely to set them thrashing about dangerously.

Systems status report:

Internal power: good. Pressure integrity: critical, but intact. Oxygen supply: good. Radio: malfunction. Who needs a radio, anyway? Emergency beacon: on, and sending. Tracks: right rear, okay; left rear, okay; left front, not reporting; right front, hydraulic pressure zero.

External power: stern main engine, testing, testing … AOK.

Bow main engine … not reporting.

I had a nasty feeling that the bow main engine was floating somewhere out there with the left-front track assembly. And that was not good news.

All these buses had two bubble-powered engines, mounted underneath, one in front and one in back. They enabled vertical takeoff, and could swivel in any direction. Aim them to the stern and you went forward. Aim them forward to decelerate. A child could do it, and I had, since I was twelve.

But if the front engine was gone and I applied power from the rear engine, all I’d do would be to increase the spin.

Carefully, I engaged minimum power to my remaining engine, just a whisper, as I turned the stick to the left. Slowly, the ship began to turn, through 180 degrees, until my rear engine was facing the direction of spin. The loose track out there to my right swung around and banged into the side of the bus, and I winced, but no new pressure alarms sounded. Now power up … slowly …
whang
goes the track assembly as it tries to wrap itself around the bus.

I stopped the spin in about twenty seconds. We were now falling weightlessly, along with a hell of a lot of spinning icebergs, but at least we were all heading in the same general direction, which was …

Down. We’d reached the top of our powerless trajectory and Eu-ropa’s mild gravity was pulling us slowly back to her icy bosom. My remaining instruments were stuttering and flashing erratically, but it was clear that the surface was getting closer. We had about three minutes.

What to do, what to do?

How long had it been? It seemed an age, but I reckoned it had all happened in less than ten minutes. My knee and my shoulder were in agony, and now that I was here, now that I’d stopped the spin, I couldn’t seem to think straight. I turned around.

“How’s it going back there?”

“Not good,” Slomo shouted back. “I’ve stopped Baruti’s bleeding, but he’s in a bad way.”

“Is there anything we can do, Podkayne?” Senator Wu shouted.

“I’m open to suggestions. We really need to set down, but I’ve only got one engine, and if I use it I’ll just set us spinning again.”

“Why land?” came a faint voice.

“What’s that? Tina?” She had been all the way in the back, but with the spin gravity gone she’d made her way to the front. She didn’t look good, with her twisted leg and the inside of her helmet almost totally covered with blood.

“Can you boost us up again? Maybe into orbit?”

Well, jeez, why didn’t I think of that? Was my brain turning to jelly? It wouldn’t be easy, but landing with only the rear engine seemed impossible, and to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how difficult, is what you’ve got to try.

“Strap in tight, everybody,” I said. “I’m going to get the nose up with the attitude jets, angle the aft engine as far back as it will go, and try to nurse it into orbit without spinning again. If anybody’s got a better idea, or any suggestion at all, say it now, because we’ve got about a minute and a half to impact.”

Nobody said anything, but I could hear seat belts being buckled and tightened.

“Hang on,” I said. “This ain’t going to be pretty.”

I eased the nose up to about a forty-five-degree angle, which gave me a view of Grumpy again, still looming but visibly farther away. It seemed clear the thing was headed out and into an orbit around Jupiter.

I eased on the power. The bus wanted to lift its tail because I couldn’t angle the engine
directly
backwards. Every time it started to do that I increased the thrust from the downward attitude jets in front until the nose started to lift again. Those jets were simple chemical rockets, never intended to have much of a punch, just there for fine-tuning when you landed the bus. Their combined thrust was pitiful. I watched the acceleration gauge and the altimeter. Still falling, but the rate of fall was slowing. At this rate, it would take me five minutes to kill our downward vector and start a forward one. What was orbital velocity on Europa? Math was never my strong suit; I couldn’t work it out. I had the attitude jets on full power and was glumly watching the fuel gauges sinking as the thirsty little engines burned. I set the computer to start calculating the velocity I’d need, when there was a roaring, clanging, scraping sound, a hard impact that came from the rear … and the power went out.

We started to spin again, and I cut off the thrusters. What the hell?

Emergency strip lighting came on in the floor. Just enough light to move around. I looked back, and saw someone at the back, looking out the rear window. He turned around, and I saw it was Slomo. His shoulders sagged.

“The loose track is back there,” he said. “And I think—”

We didn’t get to hear what he was thinking just then, because the spin had started everything moving again. It wasn’t heavy, like before, only about a quarter gee … but it was too much. The driver’s body hit the battered windshield in front of him, not very hard, but just hard enough. With an odd ripping sound, a hole opened under his head, and tore across the shattered surface until the whole sheet of high-impact plastic popped out. In two very chaotic seconds, everything that wasn’t tied down flew out of the huge square hole in a diminishing shriek, including the driver’s body, along with all of our air.

Some days you just can’t catch a break, you know what I’m saying?

My suit had been loose; now it expanded. My ears popped, my knee was twisted, I screamed in pain. It became very hard to move. Those e-suits weren’t designed for anything more than keeping you alive. They are just bags, and when they fill up with pressurized air they are very hard to move in.

And what was the point of moving, anyway? Slomo’s voice came over the radio, sealing our fate.

“That track knocked off the rear engine,” he said, quietly.

Which I already knew, as the ship drew its power from the slow release of energy from its two bubble drives.

We were now a battered, airless tin can, running on batteries, at the mercy of gravity, with as much control of our fate as a batted baseball.

So, here’s my plan …

Well, Poddy, you really screwed that one up.

I didn’t have any prayers to say, or anything like that. I figure a creator who keeps score of sins and wants to be worshipped like an insecure little boy isn’t worth my time.

There was an odd
spang
sound from the back of the bus. I turned and saw a featureless black ball wedged between the seats near the back. I say wedged … what happened was the stopper bubble engulfed everything within a certain radius of the generator. That included parts of some seats, some of the floor, and a bit of the ceiling.

Slomo was looking at me from the middle of the bus. He had the KYAG unit in his hand, his thumb on the button, which was glowing red. He wiggled his fingers at me and smiled, and was replaced by another black bubble.

Senator Wu hugged his daughter and they became yet another. There was one all the way at the back.

I reached into my suit pocket …

Which was hanging open. I distinctly remembered closing the little Velcro patch, knowing how things are apt to get lost in weightlessness. It wasn’t closed now, and there was no little black box inside.

Most likely location for it: a mile in front of us, and receding fast.

I glanced at the panel in front of me, still working fitfully on batteries. Fifty seconds to impact.

I started a halfhearted search of the area around me. I mean, what were the chances? Had the pocket been pulled open as Slomo and I descended to the front? Could have happened. Probably what had happened.

Forty seconds. There was a great view out the front of the bus as we swung slowly around. My, what a lot of activity in the ice down there! What a thrill ride this would be if we could move it to Pavonis Park!

Thirty seconds.

Not down there on the floor.

Twenty. Ten.

Nowhere else to look. Might as well enjoy the show.

As a virtual reality bit, it would have been a gasser. As real reality, I wouldn’t recommend it.

We hit ass first, and I saw in the rearview mirror—still intact, still unbroken!—as the body of the bus collapsed like an aluminum soft drink can in Superman’s fist. My chair creaked and cracked, and held on, then we slammed out full length on what looked like an ice floe, and began to slide. I hurt everywhere. Just everywhere. I was amazed I was still alive.

We were going down nose first, so I got an excellent view of what awaited me, which were giant ice cubes grinding together like molars. It ought to be quick … if it would just goddam happen! I was too pissed to cry.
Get it over with!

Something slammed into my back, then slithered over my shoulder. I couldn’t believe it. It was Cosmo, getting in his last licks. Even in death he wouldn’t leave me alone! There was a rime of frost on him, but he hadn’t had time to freeze solid yet.

Which was a damn good thing, because there it was, in his hand, what he had really been going for when he attacked me: my KYAG. One will get you ten his own was buried somewhere in his luggage.

I pried his fingers away from it and took it in my palm, and that’s when the bus nosed into the grinding slush and an iceberg pinched it from my left side, squeezing the roof down like tissue paper and driving parts of it into my side and left leg.

You think you might reach a point where you’re beyond pain, but you’re not, you’re not. At least I hadn’t reached it. I was pretty sure my ribs were crushed on the left side. I wasn’t going to take a breath to see … but then slush started flooding in all around me, rising. Cold, cold, unimaginable cold that came right through my suit.

I had to concentrate. Wouldn’t it be a pisser if, after all the trouble the Hand of Fate had taken to get my KYAG to me, I fumbled it? I rotated it in the palm of my suit glove, which was now coated with ice as well as being hard to move in the first place … and got my thumb into position. I pressed, and the light came on, and I held.

Five one thousand.

Four one thousand.

Three one thousand.

Two one thousand.

One one thousand …

One
one thousand …

Bastard wasn’t working. Just my luck… .
What the… ?

Light, coming from all directions. Oh, man, fuck me, was I wrong?
Should I have been praying?
Is this that “tunnel of light,” will all my loved ones rush up to—

“That’s her! She’s alive!”

—greet me … Travis? Was that Uncle Travis’s voice? I couldn’t see much. It was still so cold, but the slush was draining away. Ice, everything was covered with ice, and it was so bright …

“X-ray!”

“Done!”

“Infrared!”

“Scanning … done!”

I coughed, and wished I hadn’t, because the pain was intolerable, and the inside of my helmet was now bright red with blood.

“Okay, put her ba

Instantly, much dimmer light. A giant metal fist moved over me, grabbed a piece of metal that had once been part of the roof of the bus, and tore it away like tissue paper. I turned my head and had just enough clear faceplate over the blood coating to see a second robot arm grab the piece of the bus that was crushing my side and rip that away, too. Which I
really
could have done without, as the pain was … you know, you really quickly run out of words to describe pain like that, so just try to imagine it, okay? Or don’t, which would be my recommendation. Blood spewed out of me like a fountain.

I heard no voices now, but all around me was frenetic activity, moving at a pace only machines can do. The remains of the bus and my seat—and Cosmo—were peeled away, and robot arms insinuated themselves in close to me and, in seconds, cut away my suit. Needles jabbed me, and something was wrapped around my chest and tightened. I felt like a chicken being shrink-wrapped for market.

I quickly began to drift. Things kept happening, but they didn’t seem very
interesting.
Is that my leg? Should it be bending that way? Oh, well.

But the pain was gone! The pain was gone! Oh, glorious day! I laughed, and coughed up more blood. Then something grabbed me under the jaw and tilted my head back and clapped something over my face, and I took a breath, and another.

And that was all it took to send me into glorious blackness.