The Rescue Read online

  When David realized they were going over, he reached out and slapped the engine control, shoving the thrust all the way to full. For a moment the sudden acceleration matched the backward force from air friction, but the effect was only momentary. The ship pitched on around, roaring and shaking like a wounded dragon as it did.

  Fortunately, it went over backward instead of forward; at least that way the shifting gee forces shoved them down into their seats instead of yanking them up against their harnesses. If that had happened, they would have broken their collarbones and shoulder blades and probably snapped their necks as well. As it was they only felt as if they were being crushed to death. Boris and Harxae weren’t quite so lucky in back, having no acceleration chairs, but at least they were wedged deeper into their corner rather than thrown across the cargo hold.

  The shuttle wound up upside down. That hardly mattered; heavy gees shoved them back in their chairs. David couldn’t read the gee gauge to know for sure how much it was. His eyes were deformed from the thrust, blurring everything as if he were extremely farsighted. Neither he nor Raedawn could reach the controls to steer. All they could do was sit there, straining merely to breathe, while the ship plunged deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. They were totally at the mercy of gravity and aerodynamics now.

  Boris was still wearing his spacesuit. His voice came over the intercom, laced with pain. “Are we dead yet?”

  “Not . . . quite,” David replied. “How’s Harxae?”

  “Holding on to me. If he hadn’t, I would be up front with you. I lost grip on cargo strap when we first hit atmosphere.”

  David wondered what the Kalira was made of. Harxae looked too spindly to hold up his own weight, but if he was strong enough to hold the mass of a man against seven or eight gees after taking a flak wound in his leg, he was definitely made of sterner stuff than he appeared to be.

  “What’s your plan for landing?” Raedawn asked.

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead,” he admitted.

  Flames roared past the windows, but they were bright red barbecue flames, not the intense white-hot plasma they had been plowing through before. David tried to imagine what it must look like from the ground: a bright fireball streaking across the sky from horizon to horizon, like the Tunguska meteor, or the—

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “What if they think we’re an asteroid?”

  She didn’t need to reply. They both knew what would happen. The orbital battle platforms had been built mainly to defend against missile attacks, but they could fire upon meteors just as easily, vaporizing them before they hit the ground and causing just as much damage as a bomb.

  “Tell them who we are!” Boris yelled.

  Raedawn said, “Radio waves can’t punch through all this ionized gas. We’ll be blacked out for a couple more minutes.”

  “But they knew we were coming, right?” asked Boris.

  “Sure they did, but they’re expecting a ship, not a fireball.”

  Then David realized his mistake and started to laugh. It was more of a wheeze because of the elephant on his chest, but Boris and Raedawn understood it for what it was.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “We’re shooting flame out half a kilometer in front of us,” he said. “They’ll know we’re a ship.”

  “Oh.” She turned her head to the side and grinned weakly. “Duh.”

  “Of course if we’re headed for inhabited land, they may blast us apart anyway. Nobody would believe we can set down gently coming in like this.”

  “We’re over North Dakota headed for Montana,” she said. “We’re not endangering anybody but some cows.”

  “Oh. Good. So have you got any bright ideas on how to land this thing?”

  The thrust gently eased while she thought it over. The more they decelerated, the less resistance the air provided. “We can’t flip back around until we’re moving a lot slower,” she said, “but eventually we should drop to normal flight speed and then we should be able to do it. Hell, we could probably leave the engines running a few more seconds and already be in flight mode back the way we came without even having to turn around.”

  “Provided we don’t hit ground first,” Boris said. “What is altitude?”

  David could see a little better now. He squinted at the gauge. “Sixteen kilometers. Forward velocity twenty-five hundred meters per second, dropping at three hundred meters per second.” He tried to do the math in his head. “We’ve got . . . uh . . . fifty-three seconds until impact. Shit, that’s not good. At—what are we doing, six gees? But that’s dropping. At say five gees average, that’ll take us . . . fifty seconds to come to rest. Jesus, that’s going to be tight. Raedawn, can we curve our flight path any?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How ’bout—”

  “Once we get down below a hundred kicks per second or so. Not before.”

  “But that’s only . . . four or five seconds from impact!”

  “Do you want to try flying this thing backward at high velocity?”

  “No.” She was a much better pilot than he. If she couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done.

  Fortunately, they weren’t picking up any more downward velocity. That seemed to be nearly constant, though if they hit at that speed they’d still leave nothing but a crater. They would have to thrust straight down at full power for at least six seconds to cancel that motion, which left them no time at all to turn around and land like they were supposed to. The agravs could absorb a little velocity, but the effect would be minuscule until the very last moment.

  “Brace yourselves for impact,” he said. “We’re going to have to land backward.”

  “Could we at least not do it upside down?” said Boris.

  “Picky, picky, picky,” Raedawn said. She reached out through the decreasing gee force and used the rotational thrusters to bring them around, then with a what-the-hell shrug she fired the bottom-side jets on both sides. They were only good for a few meters per second of thrust, but at this point every spare meter counted.

  “Impact in twenty,” she said.

  “Landing,” David said. “Think of it as ‘landing.’ ”

  “I’d think of it as a snowflake falling on a cotton ball if I thought it would make any difference,” she said. “Fifteen.”

  “Please, no countdown,” said Boris. “I would rather be surprised.”

  “Chicken.”

  Raedawn reached forward again, straining to keep her hands in place over the controls.

  David looked out the windows. It was hard to see clearly through the melted glass near the top, but the section closest to the bottom was still optically flat. The horizon was visible through the flames rushing around from behind the ship: jagged mountains to one side and green fields out the other. A double line of highway snaked through the fields. That would be I-90. He had driven that road once on the way from Seattle to Yellowstone Park, in an old hovercraft that needed to follow its gentle inclines through the mountains.

  “Call ’em out,” Raedawn said.

  He looked back at the controls. Right. The pilot should look outside; the navigator should read the indicators. “Forward velocity four-sixty,” he said. “Down two-eighty.” The forward velocity was steadily dropping at five gees, fifty meters per second per second, but the vertical was only dropping in the single digits. “Forward three-seventy. Three-twenty. Two-eighty. Down two-seventy.”

  He kept calling out the figures, and as he did, he saw Raedawn tweak the attitude jets ever so slightly. The direction of down changed subtly, and now the vertical rate was changing almost as fast as the horizontal. The shuttle wobbled once and she cursed, but she got it under control again a second later.

  “Forward one hundred!” he yelled when the magic number clicked past. “Down one-twenty.” Now they were dropping faster than they were moving sideways.

  He risked a glance out the window, but wished he hadn’t. The mountains were way
above them now, and it looked like the ship was about to smack into the ground at any moment.

  Raedawn switched on the agravs. That shot her control all to hell again, but it didn’t matter anymore. The ship shed the last of its horizontal velocity, and the mass-repelling effect shoved upward harder and harder the closer they came to the ground, building up to a spine-numbing ten gees before they ran out of room.

  The rear landing legs hit first, then the front, slamming hard into the dirt. Raedawn killed the engines and the agravs just as the ship began to pitch over. It teetered on the front legs for a second, almost going over onto its top, but it finally settled back down on its legs.

  In the sudden silence, David said, “Nice landing.”

  She snorted. “Thanks for calling out those crucial last few meters.”

  “Anytime,” he said before he realized she was being sarcastic.

  She ignored him. “Look,” she said, pointing. “Here comes the welcoming committee.”

  He followed her outstretched finger. Sure enough, off in the distance, roaring straight toward them through what looked like a million hectares of wheat, was a single vehicle no doubt bearing a very irate farmer.

  14

  It took all David’s courage to open both airlock doors and step outside without a spacesuit on. He knew he was on Earth, but he’d been conditioned by years of living in space stations and on Mars. There, death waited beyond the airlock unless you protected yourself against vacuum and cold, and he had to consciously remind himself that here there was air and that the temperature was shirtsleeve comfortable.

  The sky held puffy white clouds suspended in a vast expanse of blue, but the sun was not the same as he remembered it. Instead of a small disk too bright to look at, the swirling nebula that Harxae called the “Tkona” filled a couple hands’ width of sky. It shone less intensely, and there were half a dozen black specks from other planets between it and Earth, but it made up for that in size. He wondered if it provided the right wavelengths for plants, and if the total incoming radiation would keep the atmosphere warm enough through the winter.

  If there was a winter. Earth’s axis could tilt in an entirely new direction here. And if that was the case, then the planet’s normal convection patterns could break down, isolating air masses into bands like on Jupiter, or engulfing the entire globe in storms like the ones that periodically swept around Mars. He knelt down to look at the wheat stalks. They were charred black right near the ship, but they were green just a few meters away. They looked a bit withered on top even farther out, but it was hard to tell if that was from drought or from the shuttle’s fiery landing. Either way, it was a good thing they hadn’t come down a month later. If the grain had been ready to harvest, they could have set half the state on fire.

  It was harder than he thought to stand up again. He was going to have to be careful until he adjusted to Earth’s gravity. Fortunately Raedawn had come out just behind him, and she reached out to steady him when he wavered.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She nodded back inside. “Harxae’s in pretty bad shape. Boris doesn’t look too good, either. I radioed for help, but it’ll be a while. We’re a long ways from where we were supposed to set down.”

  “There must be a hospital somewhere around here.”

  “Sure doesn’t look like it.”

  “We’ll find out in a minute,” he said. The pickup bounced over an irrigation ditch and roared the final few hundred meters toward them, its oversized rubber tires leaving wide tracks in the wheat.

  “You’d think he’d use agrav in a wheat field,” David observed, but then he realized the truck didn’t have agrav. It looked like it had been built in the previous century, and when it drew close enough to see the rusted body panels he realized that it had probably been built near the beginning of that century. He half expected it to have an internal combustion engine, but it did at least have an electric motor.

  The driver brought it to a skidding stop just a few steps away from the airlock. The door screeched with a metal-on-metal grate that set David’s teeth on edge, but he held his smile for the farmer, who was scowling as he looked over the scorched shuttle and the two passengers standing before him. He wore a green and brown cap with “Bob’s Steak Out” stitched above the bill. The cap shaded a fiftyish face that had seen a lot of sun in its life but no razor in the last week or so. David had expected a flannel shirt and bib overalls to go with the truck, but this guy wore a green-and-gray-striped T-shirt and blue jeans instead.

  “Well, what’s your story?” the man finally asked.

  “I’m Captain David Hutchins, Union Space Command. This is Raedawn Corona, of the same. We’re here from Mars to see what we can do to put Earth back where it belongs.”

  The farmer slowly nodded. “Howard Robertson, and that’d be fine with me. Doesn’t look like you’re in much shape to be moving planets around anytime soon, though. What happened? Get a bee in your shirt on final approach?”

  Raedawn, caught unaware by the image, burst out laughing. “Ha! No, but we sure as hell got stung. We had to take out a few ships and dodge what’s left of a battle station on our way in.”

  “That’d be Liberty Station.” Howard scratched the back of his head with a dirty finger. “One o’ the Miller boys helped build that. He wasn’t happy to hear it’d got hit.”

  He ought to be happy he wasn’t on it at the time, David thought, but he prudently kept his mouth shut.

  Raedawn wasn’t so courteous. “About five hundred laser jocks aren’t happy, either,” she said. “I just hope they fried some Soviet bacon before they got hit.”

  “Yeah,” said Howard dubiously. He either didn’t know or wasn’t saying.

  David wondered if he and Raedawn knew more about the situation on Earth than the locals did. “What all’s happened here since you went through the spatial anomaly?”

  The farmer squinted at him for a moment. Then he angled his head toward the mountains that rose like jagged teeth only a few kilometers away. “I’m not sure about all that, but we got plenty goin’ on around here. We got us a new mountain range, for one thing.”

  “What?” David looked up at the majestic peaks. Had the transition been violent enough to raise an entire new range? The earthquakes must have been incredible. But the smooth wheat field didn’t look like it had felt a tremor. Just to be sure he’d heard the farmer right, he asked, “Those mountains weren’t here before?”

  “Do they look like the Bitterroots?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, I would, and they don’t. They’re somethin’ else entirely; grew up out o’ the ground like a ring o’ mushrooms. Dammed up the Clark’s Fork tighter’n a bung in a barrel. Gonna play hell with irrigation.” He sighed and looked back at his wheat field. “Not like it’s gonna matter much. Damn weird weather’s already messed up the crops, and now you come in here and burn half an acre on top of it. I tell you, it just ain’t been my week.”

  “Week?” asked David. “Earth’s only been gone a day.”

  The farmer looked at him askance. “Maybe a Martian day, but it’s been seven here.”

  David groaned. “Shit. Temporal effects, too. That’s going to complicate things even more.”

  Raedawn said, “You don’t really think you’re going to be able to send Earth back through the rabbit hole, do you? After seeing all these other planets stuck here, and after what Harxae told us?”

  David felt a tightness in his chest at the thought of how far they were from home. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m not going to give up without even trying.”

  A voice from inside the shuttle said, “Stop chitchat and get help!”

  There was no disguising that accent. Howard squinted to see through the airlock into the dark interior and said, “You got a prisoner in there?”

  David hesitated. What was Boris’s status, anyway? Technically he was a political refugee, but that probably wouldn’t make any points with the farmer. Nor
would it impress the Union military. But David wouldn’t let him be treated like a prisoner, either, not after all he’d done.

  He took a deep breath and said, “He’s part of the crew. We’re all members of the New Mars Alliance. The Union and the Neo-Soviet forces on Mars patched up our differences in order to mount a rescue mission.” He locked eyes with Raedawn, defying her to say otherwise.

  Howard was skeptical enough without her help. “The Russkies made peace? On Mars? Next you’ll be sayin’ you’ve got Martians to help you out, too.”

  David grinned. “Well, as a matter of fact . . .” He held out his hand, inviting Howard to have a better look inside.

  The farmer stepped into the airlock, then did a wonderfully theatrical double-take when his eyes adjusted enough to see who waited in the cargo hold. “Jesus Mary,” he said. “You weren’t shittin’, were you? What happened to its leg?”

  “He got hit by some space debris.”

  Howard backed away and continued to gape at Harxae with his mouth hanging open. Then his mouth snapped shut as a thought occurred to him. He took a step closer. “You been releasin’ that tourniquet every once in a while?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t just tie off a leg and ’spect it to live,”

  Howard said. “You gotta let some blood into it from time to time or you might as well just chop it off.”

  “Oh. Excuse me.” David squeezed past him and bent down next to Harxae’s leg. It was pasty gray, rather than the greenish color it had been. “This is probably going to hurt,” David said as he took the tourniquet in his hands.

  Harxae said, “Fanorxa,” and squeezed his eyes shut. Apparently he was still in too much pain for telepathy.

  David loosened the knot. Harxae winced, but didn’t cry out, even when blood started squirting into the leg of his clear spacesuit again.

  “Blue, eh?” Howard said with more bravado than the shaky tone of his voice would suggest. “Guess that makes sense. We live on a blue planet and have red blood, so it stands to reason Martians would—”