Rogue Powers (43 page)

"Obviously, if we use our own radar, the Guards will spot us immediately, so that's out. But that means we're relying on inertial tracking and on visual. Those aren't really good enough for precise navigation in this situation. We don't have this system very well charted yet, we don't have maps of Outpost's surface, and we don't really know enough about the performance of this ship. There s some degree of uncertainty about where and when we'll hit air.

We've exhausted our fuel already, as you know. That was planned. In theory there's nothing to worry about. Once we do hit air, this thing is a glider, and it should be a good enough one to get us where we're going.

"The main point is that we're literally going in on a wing and a prayer. But while this will be a somewhat hairier landing than most, all of this was taken into account when we planned this flight. We
should
be all right. Mostly I want to tell this last to Pete and Mr. Sisulu, but it can't hurt for us rough-and-ready pilot types to be reminded too—when we go in, things might look worse than they really are. Relax and hang on, and the hottest pilot I know will pull this one off. Right, Joz?"

"Oh, sure. Mac's just trying to make it sound hard so when we come in you won t think it was too easy." Joslyn tried to sound chipper, and even brought it off, but she knew Mac had told it straight. Sometimes, though, the truth wasn't the best thing for a pilot to hear when she needed her confidence up.

Mac played it very conservatively. He had them all in pressure suits, strapped into crash couches and secured half an hour before they expected to hit air. He felt justified when the first feint quivering and thrumming sounded against the hull, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Now they were in Joslyn's hands. Mac had already watched Madeline enough to wish he were in the backup pilot's station. Maddy was good, but she wasn't seasoned, she didn't have that air of being calmly ready for disaster that combat pilots gained if they lived long enough. But it was too late for second guessing, and Mac couldn't think of anything that could take Joslyn out without killing the rest of them anyway.

Joslyn was trying to get the feel of the
Moose.
She seemed to be a pretty clumsy thing so for, and Joslyn was already worried about cross-ranges. Every second in atmosphere slowed them down, stole kilometers from the distance they could travel. There was enough fat in the landing program to cover the current situation, but just barely. She fought an impulse to tighten her grasp on the stick. This was her show, she had to keep calm and loose, ready for whatever the gods threw at her. She threw switches and let the computer handle the initial entry while she got a look around and tried to track that beacon. The planet's rotation had swung it out of their line-of-sight, but—hah! There she was, happily blinking away, and still within range of what the on-board computers were figuring was their likely glide-radius.

Then the
Moose
hit thicker air, and re-entry, and rode long minutes cut off from the outside world by a sheath of ionized air molecules and heat-shield ablation. This was the dangerous moment, when the
Moose
could not see, but was most easily seen. If there were any ships orbiting above them, and anyone aboard happened to look planet-ward, the
Moose
would be a blazing fire streaking across the dawn sky. No one aboard the
Moose
spoke as the computer dully went through its paces, maintaining ship's attitude at the right heading, keeping the shielding between the hull and disaster.

They went in, surrounded by a ball of flame that thundered through the skies of sunrise. The
Moose
shuddered and groaned, and the hull pinged and clicked as it absorbed the heat.

Slowly, the ball of fire guttered down, and the
Moose,
her hull still faintly glowing, coursed through the skies of Outpost. Joslyn pulled control back from the computer and took a look around. They were still nearly a hundred thousand meters up, still had line of sight on the beacon, though they might lose it as they glided lower. But they were in, and safe—

"Joslyn," Mac called. "I'm not up on reading Outpost weather, but it looks to me as if that beacon is right in the middle of one hell of a storm."

Joslyn's eye jumped from the beacon display to the pilot's window and back, mentally combining the two into one. "Damn! Mac, you're right. I wish to hell there had been time to put some decent viewing gear on this bird. I

0can't really get a good fix on where the beacon is, compared to the cloud cover."

"We've got the gear," Mac said, "it's just that we can't use it without giving our position away."

"Then I wish they had yanked it out so this thing'd be light enough to glide. We've got to go straight through that muck to get where we're going."

In the rear seats, Pete and Charlie Sisulu exchanged nervous glances. This might get to be too exciting a trip.

The
Moose
glided onward and down, Joslyn stretching every horizontal meter she could out of the clumsy craft. The storm clouds came up around them, engulfed them, the dark cobalt blue of the upper atmosphere vanishing into a witch's caldron of angry, writhing gray clouds that grabbed at the
Moose
and flung her to and fro. Lightning flashed about them, thunder exploded at deafeningly short range, and Joslyn wrapped both hands around the stick, braced her arms as best she could to retain control of the bucking, rearing ship. The interior lights flickered once, twice, and then came back on, and the hull rattled and clattered as hailstones and wind-driven rain slammed into it.

Joslyn knew the hull simply wasn't built to take this kind of abuse. Her every pilot's instinct was to get them down test, now, anywhere, to wait out the storm. But the crew of the
Moose
was going to be stranded on Outpost, and their chances for survival rested with the Refiners. They had to hang on, travel as far as they could in the
Moose.
Joslyn held onto the stick and swore through clenched teeth as a hailstone smashed into the pilot's window, starring the viewpoint, making it that much harder to see.

"Maddy! Kick in the look-down radar and get me some hard numbers! If the Guards can spot our radar emissions through this bloody great storm, they
deserve
to win."

"Yes, ma'am." Maddy started flicking switches. "Give it a second to get some returns back—nowl Airspeed, altitude, range and bearing to beacon and descent rate on your panel."

Damn! Those numbers weren't good. They were going to land a good fifty kilometers short of the beacon. Joslyn dragged back desperately on the stick, pulling the wallowing
Moose's
nose up as far as she could, risking a stall to try and drag some more range out of her. With no consciousness of what she was doing, Joslyn felt an updraft in the thrumming of the wings and the tricks of the wind. She grabbed at it, rode it as far as she could, felt the ship wallow back down into still air. The updraft might have bought them a kilometer, maybe two. Joslyn prayed for a tailwind, and got it, and then wished she didn't have it, a roaring, wailing banshee of a gust that almost knocked the
Moose
off her tail and into a fatal spin.

In the crash and the roar of the storm, Joslyn wrestled with the elements of air and wind and water, battling to keep her craft on course and in one piece.

They were getting lower now. They broke through the base of the cloud deck and looked upon the rain-soaked, wind-torn face of Outpost.

They were very low and too damn slow now—almost out of airspeed, headed for a stall. Joslyn swore and pushed the
Moose's
nose down, trading altitude she could ill afford for the airspeed she needed to keep her bird in the air. The ship seemed to wallow in the air, felt clumsier than ever, if that was possible. The damn porous ceramic hull must have soaked up the rainwater. And water was heavy. The added weight was dragging them down.

At least here, below the cloud deck, the winds had steadied down. No gusts or air pockets, just a hard, steady cross wind that did her no good, but no great harm, either. Joslyn turned into the wind and held her nose as close as she could to where it should be.

Now they were really coming down. Nothing fancy, just keep this thing in the air as long as it would stay there. Nothing but unbroken forest land below, no cozy meadow to set down in, just hope the local equivalent of trees had soft branches. How far from the beacon? Seventy kilometers. Sixty-five. Sixty. Still slowing. Come on! Fifty-five.

0
Fifty! And they were still a few klicks up in the air. Forty-five. Every klick was a gift from the gods of the air, now. Forty. There came the ground straight up for them. Thirty-five. What was that in miles? Never mind, figure it on the ground. They were only a thousand meters up now.

The wind came about to their nose, blowing them back against their course. Joslyn pulled the
Moose's
nose down and to port, trying to avoid a stall and maybe still make some headway. She kept it level, trying to pancake it down, spread the shock evenly—

—and the
Moose
ran out of sky.

She plowed into the treetops with terrible force, a roaring, screaming, keening crash of branches breaking and wings snapping off and shouts of frightened people and the horrible whistle of air screaming out of a broken hull. The
Moose
slammed on and on through the trees, far longer than seemed possible, tree limbs whipping past the cockpit windows, until finally a tree trunk stood its ground and the
Moose
shattered her nose square against it. The ruined ship tilted over to port and fell the last ten meters to the ground on its side.

Suddenly, the world, which had been so full of noise, was silent, or nearly so, with nothing but the creak of tree limbs, the patter of the rain, and the moans of people to be heard.

"Everyone still with us?" Mac called out, and got a ragged chorus of
yes's.
"Good. That was some kind of flying, Joz."

Joslyn shook herself and forced her hands to peel themselves away from the stick. "Thanks, Mac. Though that has to be the least covert landing I've ever made." She felt herself trembling. Perhaps no one else would ever realize it, but
she
would always know just how close it had been.

Mac took a few minutes to check again that everyone was all right. They had all taken some bumps and bruises, but no one seemed much the worse for wear. All the pressure suits were behaving themselves, and that was a blessing. There was one spare aboard, but getting anyone into it with the Moose's hull cracked and breached would have been a challenge, to say the least.

It was tempting to sit tight and wait for the rain to end, but Lucy warned them just how long the rains could last—there was nothing for it but to get moving. Within a half hour of landing, they had their carrypacks strapped on, rifles and other weapons at the ready, and the direction finder pointing twenty-nine kilometers
that
way to the beacon.

The six of them stepped from the wreckage of the
Sick Moose,
their hearts and spirits as gloomy as the dismal, rainswept forest that surrounded them. Lucy's helmet started to blur over with rain, and she switched on the wiper arm. The others followed her lead, turned to her. She was the only one who could guide them on this trek. She looked to Mac, and he nodded.

"You're our native guide, Lucy. We follow your commands on this leg."

"Right, then. Everyone make sure your external mikes are up, so you can hear them coming. You've seen what a Z'ensam—an Outposter looks like. If you see
anything
else move, kill it. I don't care if it looks like a sweet little baby fawn that only wants to nibble the grass. Kill
it! There
are
no harmless wild animals on this planet. Any creature that spots us will try to eat us. So kill them, without hesitation. And make sure it stays dead. Don't worry about offending the locals either—it's the same way they deal with the wildlife. Is all that grimly clear?"

No one said anything.

"Mac, you take the rear. I’ll lead. Lieutenant Madsen, you're behind me with the direction finder. Joslyn, you watch her back while she's watching our route. Mr. Sisulu, Mr. Gesseti, if you would follow Joslyn. Let's go."

Charlie Sisulu didn't like the odds. He was sweating, not from exertion, but from fear. The forest was a grim, gloomy, wet and dismal place, claustrophobic—the vegetation shaded in livid greens that seemed horrid parodies of Earth's lovely plant life. His suit's external mikes picked up no birdsong, no musical calls of one beast to another, but instead an endless screaming, roaring challenge of defiance and death, set to the refrain of staccato, bone-rattling bursts of thunder. The rain came on and on, pouring down off his pressure suit, the wiper blade on his helmet barely able to keep his helmet halfway clear. And Charlie Sisulu had never been in a pressure suit before in his life. He felt trapped, sealed up, entombed in the clumsy suit.