The Cause of Death (20 page)

There was no point in trying to confirm that the orders given in the Thelm's name were being obeyed. There was no end to the tricks and the deceptions that Flen could have committed while pretending to obey. His call could have been as phony as her own commlink camera stunt. He could have called a quick-witted accomplice who had the sense to pretend to be the all-points channel and give a false acknowledgment.

She looked up into the darkening sky, toward the incoming ship--and instantly wished she hadn't. It was in even more trouble than she had thought.

THIRTEEN
FIRE

Jamie barely noticed when the guns stopped firing. They had too many other problems to worry about. Hannah had just explained the landing plan in as few words as possible. He had a half dozen urgent questions to ask, but there was no time for any of them. He could see the thruster-power reserve indicator sliding down toward zero just as well as she could.

"Okay, double-check all your seat restraints," she said. "Make good and sure you're strapped in."

Jamie did as he was told, tugging on all the belts and buckles, wondering just how much good they would do. "Belts okay," he reported.

"Good," said Hannah. "Ready?"

"Yeah, all set." A lie, of course. How could anyone get ready for a thing like this?

"Here we go," Hannah said. "Just pray that it all works." She throttled the main thruster down, and let the
Lotus
drop faster toward what would be her final landing. "Stand by for evac hatch jettison," she called out. She flipped yet another safety cover off yet another for-emergency-use-only control, armed the system by twisting a knob, and then stabbed her finger down hard on the jettison button.

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM
and four fat triangular sections of the control cabin's hull, spaced at ninety-degree intervals from each other, suddenly blew off and were arcing away into the gathering darkness to crash onto the landing field. One jettisoned section contained the main viewport, and Jamie suddenly found himself with nothing but his pressure suit between him and the wind whipping past outside, howling and roaring at the frail and dying spacecraft that was going down for the last time.

They needed all four evac hatches blown off for a very simple reason. With no landing gear to hold the ship upright, they knew the
Lotus
was going to topple; but they didn't know which way. With all four hatches gone, the odds were good that at least one hatchway would be clear enough for them to get out.

The ship continued its powered fall, dropping straight down at a steady rate that conferred an odd stateliness on the crippled ship, even though they were still moving far too quickly for anything like a survivable crash landing. At a bare hundred meters altitude, Hannah throttled up as hard as she could to max power, and the engines screamed to life one last time. Jamie watched the altimeter and braced himself for an impact that didn't come--at least, not at once.

The
Lotus
came to a halt a bare eight meters above the ground. Hannah immediately throttled down hard to hover, before the ship could pogo back up into the sky. The ship lifted by only the slightest amount, not more than a meter or two. Hannah held the
Lotus
there, floating all but motionless, just above the ground, dumping the last of the system's thruster power, rather than risking its being released on impact in the form of a large and unpleasant explosion.

The ship hung there, hovering, for a handful of seconds that seemed like hours--hours in which yet another system could fail, or another faceless enemy could take a potshot at them, or something else could go wrong with their snakebit arrival.

One last alarm began to beep, then to blat, and finally to howl. Warning panels flashed on in blood-red letters, blinking with the warning THRUSTER POWER DEPLETION. The main engine cut out, then lit again just for a moment before dying completely. Then the
Lotus
dropped, and dropped hard, smashing stern first into the landing field with a resounding crash and a horrible shriek of metal tearing itself apart.

The tortured little ship hung there, teetering on its rounded base, for a second, for five seconds, for ten, until Jamie thought it was going to stay that way, balanced upright, for good and all. But then came another bang as something gave way, and the elongated cone that was the
Lotus
began to topple over backwards.

The ship fell slowly over with a long, horrible, grinding, crashing noise that seemed to go on forever, gathering force and speed as it went, until finally the cabin level smashed into the ground with a deafening roar. Jamie and Hannah were flat on their backs. The forward evac hatch, where the main viewport had been, was suddenly over their heads. Cracked and grimy sections of the landing pad's concrete were visible through the two side hatches. A geyser of dust and debris and bits and pieces of wreckage engulfed the cabin, mixing with the clouds of smoke and gas and steam billowing out from a half dozen wounds on the ship.

"Time to go!" Hannah called out, and Jamie needed no further urging. He undid his restraints and half fell, half climbed down from his perch and climbed down onto the control panels and displays that now formed the floor of the cabin. He stumbled backwards through the smoke and dusk to the rear lockers of the cabin, knelt, and pulled them open, stopping for a moment to kick clear a pile of debris that was jamming one locker door.

He pulled out the emergency packs, the weapons packs, and the two small personal packs and dumped them at his feet, then turned around to see Hannah's feet just disappearing out of the forward evac hatch, directly overhead, the only one of the four that was completely clear of wreckage. Her head reappeared a moment later, and her arms reached out for the big, awkward, heavily padded containers. Jamie grabbed them by their handles, one after another, and heaved them up to her.

"That it?" she asked after the last one came up.

"Yeah," said Jamie, then turned and looked at the open lockers. "No. Just a second." There were two or three other smaller packs in there. They had probably been sitting in the emergency lockers since the
Lotus
was shipped from the factory. He had no idea what they held, but whatever was in them was meant for use by humans and to be useful in an emergency. He grabbed whatever had a strap he could throw over his arm or shoulder and scrambled up out of the evac hatch, Hannah hauling him up and out onto the hull.

The moment he was clear of the evac hatch and out on the chewed-up hull of the ruined
Lotus
, Hannah started throwing the equipment and emergency packs away from the ship. Jamie tossed the last two packs clear. They proceeded to scramble down off the ship, working toward the blunt nose of the lander and sliding down from there. Hannah was ahead of Jamie and hit the ground first. She made a beeline for the closest of the scattered packs, scooped up a bunch of them, and started running away from the
Lotus
.

Jamie scooted down the last section of the ship's nose, sitting down and moving feet-first, steadying himself by leaning back and putting his hands down palm first on the hull. He made his way far enough toward the nose to slide down the rest of the way and drop to the ground. He landed heavily, clumsily, falling backwards, banging the back of his helmet against the lander's nose. He scooped up all the packs Hannah hadn't grabbed, and started trotting off after her, struggling to arrange the various straps and handles as he moved.

He instantly discovered that a sealed pressure suit made a lousy runner's outfit. Still, he was glad to have it on. The clouds of undoubtedly toxic smoke and dust were still swirling around everywhere, and he had no wish to breathe any of it.

He ran after her, making the best speed he could, gaining on her slowly. He caught up with her, matched pace with her long enough to grab the pack that was the most awkward for her, then upped his pace again and passed her.

It didn't take more than a few seconds more for his sides to start aching and his suit to start overheating. He would have cranked the cooling up to maximum if he had had a free hand to reach the controls. The suit's visor started to fog up. One of the escape packs was banging into his right leg with every step, throwing him off-balance. And he must have twisted his left ankle somehow in the drop from the
Lotus
, because it was sending a jolt of pain up his leg with every step.

Jamie gritted his teeth and kept moving. A few more moments of pain and exhaustion would be a fair trade for staying alive. He leaned forward, determined to keep on going--

And fell off the edge of the landing pad, tumbling into a drainage ditch that ran along its edge. He landed hard on his left side in a tangle of arms and legs and equipment bags and straps, banging up his ankle again. Before he had a chance to unsnarl himself from his possessions, Hannah came crashing on top of him, and seemed to land with her entire weight directly on the spot on his right leg that had been slammed around already.

They thrashed around in the darkness for a moment, struggling to organize themselves and catch their breath. It was plain that it would make no sense to try going much farther in the dark over what seemed like rough ground ahead without making some sort of plan first--and it didn't seem likely they'd find anyplace that would afford better cover against a blast if it did come.

At any rate, they seemed to have gotten clear of the smoke. Jamie decided it was just about time to open his visor. They were going to have to start breathing local air sooner or later, anyway. He rolled over on his back to get both arms clear, then reached up and undid the visor's safety releases, then the inner latches. There was a soft sort of
chuff
as the pressure equalized with the outside air, and Jamie pushed the visor up.

The first thing that struck him was the smell--no, the
multiple
smells--that seemed to rush in at him from all directions. Something like fresh grass, cool night air, and a nasty cocktail of unpleasant burning-chemical smells. A patch of smoke slipped out of the way, revealing the cold and clear light of stars, strange stars, spangling the darkness overhead in a sky never seen from Earth, or Center, or any human world.

This world wasn't just new to him. It was all but unknown to humans. The gigabytes of data they had waded through boiled down to less actually useful information than would fill a modest datapad--and none of it was going to do them much good in a muddy ditch deep in hostile territory. They were in trouble--big trouble.

So it's time to start thinking about how to get out of it
, Jamie thought. He rolled over on his stomach and looked toward Hannah as she opened her visor. Jamie left her to it, and belly-crawled up to the edge of the drainage ditch to look back at the
Lotus
--or, rather, the remains of the
Lotus
.

It would have been a lovely and dramatic sight if it had had nothing to do with him. The long, tapered black-and-white cone that was the
Lotus
, toppled over on its side, was framed by the gathering darkness of night and the light of all manner of fire. There was a dim glow visible from the crew cabin, and tendrils of smoke eddying up through the evac hatches. A jet of flame spurted up now and then from somewhere on the back side of the ship, silhouetting it against the red-orange bloom of light. A smaller, steadier fire was alight in the cracked-open stern, burning with a deeper red, almost the color of dying embers.

A gouge through the hull revealed an angry, white-hot flame burning amidships. Smoke spewed forth from a dozen wounds, and the wind blew it about, obscuring and revealing the ship as a whole, and each of the separate fires, from one moment to the next. The smoke caught and blocked the light, changing its color from moment to moment as it reflected and then obscured the various patches of fire.

Hannah belly-crawled up beside him. As they watched, some pressurized tank in the aft end blew up with a loud
BANG
and a flash of light. The next time the smoke parted, the
Lotus
was still more or less intact, but with a new hole torn in the stern. The whole ship had been rocked sideways by the blast.

"I wouldn't want to bet on it, but I don't
think
the whole ship is going to explode," Hannah said in a whisper. "It looks like all the volatiles are cooking off and burning instead, with maybe a few more storage tanks popping off from the heat."

"Good, I guess," Jamie whispered back. "Though I wouldn't want to be any closer when the next tank blows."

"Oh, I'm right with you," Hannah said. "I'm not going back toward it. But I think we're pretty much safe where we are."

Jamie pulled his head back down and rolled over onto his back, signaling for Hannah to follow. Hannah moved back down into the ditch and turned on her side to face him. "We won't get killed if the ship blows up," he said, "but we're not safe from whoever was shooting at us. We need to get out of here before someone comes poking around. Got any ideas?"