The Cause of Death (17 page)

"Lock lost," Jamie said. "Site One still has us above their horizon, but not by much. The real question is how closely they're working with Site Two."

"We'll find out," Hannah said. Site Two was the one that had worried Jamie the most. The
Lotus
had to do an almost direct overflight of the site, and it was one of the pair of known military installations specifically designed for shooting down hostile spacecraft, with defense responsibility for a whole continent. If Site One passed on all its data to Two, and did it fast enough, then Two would have ample time to reaim their weapons--whatever those weapons might be. The out-of-date fourth-hand intell that was the ultimate source for their planning data hadn't gone into too many details on that point.

Hannah checked attitude one more time and shifted in her flight chair. This second entry was going to be the trickiest part of the whole operation. As expected, the skip-out entry had thrown off their whole preprogrammed flight plan, and tossed a heap of complications into the mix.

In order to make it to an on-target touchdown, they were going to have to stretch their high-altitude flight path as far as possible. That meant no fun and games with maneuvers in the next phase. Later, if they got that far, Hannah could throw in some evasive action. For the moment they would have to fly arrow-straight, right on down the line, just begging the bad guys to get in some target practice. So maybe it was time to stop worrying about an on-target touchdown.

"We've lost line of sight on Site One," Jamie announced. "We should be over the horizon for Site Two in thirty seconds."

Unless they weren't. Suppose they got there a little bit sooner? The whole idea of their entry plan was to be unpredictable, to do things that a race of careful and conservative beings would not expect. All right. They were supposed to be slowing down and descending in order to make their entry, and the techs watching their screens at Site Two knew that as well as Hannah did. So why not speed up and go higher?

Hannah grabbed at the controls, swung the ship around through ninety degrees, and gave the main engines a good swift kick of thrust directly toward the zenith, then another ninety-degree pitch-over to point their nose straight toward the horizon, and pulsed the engines again for another short sharp jolt of power. Then she swung the ship about one more time, putting the
Lotus
back into her proper stern-first attitude for atmospheric entry. Anyone using the last tracking data to take a potshot at them was going to be aiming in what had just become the wrong place. Maybe she had just saved them--or she had just doomed them by setting up a entry profile the ship couldn't survive.

She looked over at Jamie. He was staring at her in wide-eyed, speechless shock. Hannah silently dared him to protest. Instead he nodded, once, very slightly, then turned back to his tactical plots.

"We've got a debris cloud rising toward us," he announced. "Many targets, all sizes from off-scale low to a meter across, radiating out from one point at about eighty-three kilometers altitude, and almost exactly over Site Two."

"Great. What's all that mean?"

"They loaded a pile of junk--bits of metal, chunks of concrete, even just plain old rocks--into some sort of canister. They launched it straight up at suborbital velocity, so it would go up, then drop back down. They blew the can up while it still had lots of upward momentum. The debris cloud will get up high enough to hit us, then all fall back into the water. They're hoping we'll fly into the junk and hit something. They're trying to get us with a covert, deniable weapon. It'll look like we rammed into a piece of orbiting junk instead of being deliberately shot down."

Hannah's gut went cold. "And will we hit something?"

Jamie studied their tactical plot. "Thanks to that last stunt of yours, I don't
think
so. We're going to skirt the upper limit of the cloud, instead of flying right through the center of it."

What was the greater risk? Boosting again to fly a bit higher, but fouling up their entry path even more--or staying as they were and hoping to dodge between the outer fringes of the debris cloud?

Higher seemed safer to her--if she could bring the
Lotus
about to the right attitude fast enough and then get her back to the proper entry angle again in time.

She pitched the lander's nose back toward the zenith and started the setup for another quick burn to boost them just a trifle higher and dodge the top of the debris cloud. At best, she had only a couple of seconds to do what--

BLAM-BLAM!

Cabin lights died and the ship was tumbling, pitching, lurching in all directions. Alarms started hooting. There were crashes from the lower deck. Smoke spewed into the cabin, blinding them. Emergency lights cut in but they were dim and hard to see in the blue-black smoke.

Hit
, Hannah told herself. She felt her suit starting to stiffen around her as the air was sucked out of the cabin, leaving only vacuum behind.
We must have taken a hit
. Maybe two. She felt foolish that it took her any time at all to reach a conclusion that obvious, but the shock had thrown her off.

Hannah forced herself to be calm, to think. Never mind about the vacuum. Their suits would protect them, at least for the time being. Another danger came first. If the
Lotus
were still tumbling at entry, they were going to be burned to a crisp. She needed attitude control, fast.

She reached up to the upper right side of her control panel and flipped open the safety cover on a switch marked STOP ALL ROTATIONS--EMERG USE ONLY.

She snapped her finger down hard on the switch under the safety cover. Instantly, the ship's automatics set to work, ignoring all other problems or inputs, and simply used every possible system to stop all movement through roll, pitch, and yaw as quickly as possible. Thrusters fired wildly, slamming Hannah and Jamie around in their seats. The autos worked far faster than a human ever could, and the thruster firing steadied down in surprisingly short order, canceling out roll, pitch, and yaw within a few terrifyingly efficient seconds.

A light came on under the STOP ALL ROTATIONS light, announcing--a bit smugly, to Hannah's way of thinking--ATTITUDE STABILIZED.

All well and good--but the autos had left the ship with her nose pointed directly at her direction of travel, precisely and exactly the wrong way around for entry into atmosphere. However, it didn't stay pointed that way for long. The nose started yawing about almost at once, and the ATTITUDE STABILIZED light started to flicker, then went out. Hannah quickly switched off the tumble-stop before it could start correcting things again in the wrong direction.

They were losing cabin pressure. A hole had been knocked in the ship. It had to be the air jetting out that was causing the yaw. She took a moment to try to find the hole--and it wasn't hard to do. By craning her neck around, she could see not one, but two holes in the inner hull, directly opposite each other. One was big, maybe five centimeters across, framed by jagged daggers of metal that jabbed out into the cabin. That had to be the entry hole. Opposite it was a smaller, neater-looking hole. Some sort of opaque gas or smoke was spewing in from that hole, whirling around inside the cabin, then jetting out the larger hole. The exit hole must have punctured some sort of high-pressure gas or fluid line. Either more of the stuff was gushing out into space through a corresponding puncture in the outer hull, or else whatever had hit them had failed to smash all the way through on the way out, and the outer hull was still intact on that side, leaving that opaque gas with no place to go but into the cabin.

In a sense, it didn't matter. They were in plenty enough trouble even if there was only one break in the outer hull--and besides, for all she knew, the
Lotus
had taken half a dozen other hits in the same split second, in all sorts of places they couldn't get at. The lower deck, the propulsion system--anywhere.

But she could at least do something about their yaw problem--and maybe the smoke, too. She flipped the safety off another switch marked CABIN PRESSURE EMERG to reveal a selector switch that could be pointed to various commands, with a big red button marked ACTION under the knob. She twisted the knob to LIFE SUPPORT SHUTDOWN and stabbed down on the button. A tiny screen came on next to it and started counting down from five seconds. She had to hold the button for that long before the system would accept the command. A sensible safety feature--unless you were getting close to the top of the atmosphere, and five seconds seemed like an awfully long time. The count finally crawled down to zero, and the indicators for the ship's life support all suddenly went red.
There
, she told herself.
Now the ship wouldn't try pumping more air into the system
.

Next she had to get rid of the smoke-filled air they already had. Hannah instantly twisted the selector to PURGE CABIN AIR and punched the ACTION button again. Whatever committee of engineers decided such things had set this one to a three-second countdown. The count went to zero, then an indicator lit up saying PURGE VALVES OPEN--but she knew that already. The sudden roaring noise in the cabin, very loud at first, then fading away, told her as much. She didn't worry about making the yaw motion worse. The purge valves outlets on the outside of the ship were positioned so that the air jetting from each was canceled out by the jets from the others. There was still that opaque gas leaking into the cabin, but it was being drawn off by the air purge system.

The yawing motion seemed to stop as soon as the air purge was complete, and there wasn't any significant amount of gas or smoke to jet out the hole in the hull, but Hannah didn't wait for a precision test. She grabbed the control stick and fired thrusters to bring the
Lotus
back into a more or less correct attitude for atmospheric entry. The instruments all told her she was on-attitude, but stars alone knew which systems had been damaged and which were still working. What if an attitude sensor had been knocked ten degrees out of true? Never mind. Not much she could do about it. The view out the window showed her lined up with the horizon, and that would have to be enough. She had also added an appreciable amount of altitude with her last burns before the impact. She had not the slightest doubt that the bonus altitude had saved their lives--for the moment. But it also meant they were going to hit the atmosphere coming in high, hot, and long. But by how much?

Hannah glanced over at Jamie, wondering what sort of shape he was in--and discovered that he was watching her. As best she could see through the visor of his suit helmet, he seemed in control of himself, and he had just shown the common sense to keep still and refrain from shouting unhelpful advice at a pilot during an emergency. If anything, he seemed a bit
too
calm, considering the amount of trouble they were in.

She nodded toward the back of the cabin. "Box on the back wall marked EMERGENCY AIDS," she said. "Hull patch kits in there. Patch the holes--and do the one with the smoke dumping in first."

"Ah, right," Jamie said, his voice oddly matter-of-fact. "Okay." He undid his seat restraints and lifted himself very carefully off the seat, using every handhold he could find to move himself toward the rear of the cabin. He moved out of her field of view, and she turned back toward her piloting problems, which left her with more than enough to worry about.

As best she could see from the numbers, their attitude and velocity at entry were going to be just barely within the safety specs for the
Lotus
--and that was assuming the lander was basically undamaged, and she certainly wasn't making that assumption. If they were going to have any hope of reaching the ground in one piece, they were going to have to fly as gentle an entry as she could manage.

But did they still
want
to reach the ground? She could try for an abort-to-orbit, boosting the poor old
Lotus
into some sort of minimal orbit to take stock there. They'd have the luxury of time to make decisions, and perhaps repairs.

But that could leave them marooned in orbit. Besides, they would still have to maneuver to try entry again, sooner or later, or else either try to reach the
Hastings
or have the
Hastings
reach them--thus bringing the main ship within easy range of their groundside attackers. "Jamie. How's it going back there?"

"Fine. The hardest part so far has been reading the instructions on the patch. Just about to slap it down--
now
."

She heard a grunt and a muffled thud relayed by his suit radio. The smoke and murk in the cabin began to thin out almost instantaneously. That had been quick work. But not quick enough. There was still another patch to go--the harder one, too. And they were short on time.

"Okay, that's it for the first one," Jamie said. "Once the last of that gas vents, you should probably close the purge vents again before we hit air."

Hannah had almost forgotten that. She most definitely did not went air vents open while they were slamming into superheated air at umpteen thousand kilometers an hour. "Ah, right," she said. "Get started on the second hole. But I don't think you can use a regular flat patch on the entry hole. There should be a can of expanding foam sealant in that kit," she said.

"Yeah, I see it."

"Okay, get started with that," she said. "But meantime--I'm thinking about abort-to-orbit. And we have to decide
fast
."

"No," he said. "Anyway,
I
vote no. That'll just give our friends groundside more chances to shoot at us, once per orbit for each of them--and we'd still either have to boost out, or try to land again anyway. Besides, there might be damage to the
Lotus
that we don't even know about. What if our power systems got hit? I think that smoky gas stuff was power coolant. We might not even have enough thruster power left to
reach
orbit."

"Well, I'm voting against it too," said Hannah, "so I guess it's unanimous." But if they were going to try for a landing, she was going to have to clean up their trajectory. They were going to hit the top of the sensible atmosphere very soon, but the nav displays made it clear they were going in too fast. She was going to have to put the brakes on and correct their entry angle at the same time. And she was going to have to do it more or less by feel. No time for anything fancy. "Jamie," she said. "I've got to do another retro burn. I'm going to do it low-power to keep the stresses down, so it's going to be a long burn."