Chapter
3
The rainbow blur of stars and black space peeled back, and they shot into a vast stretch of absolutely nothing the way a toboggan hurtles into a long, dark tunnel. There was a pause, a sensation of jumping from one place to another. And then, faster than thought, the Missouri rocketed through, and then there was space and there were stars. The turbulence was gone, and things should have been better.
But they weren’t. They were speeding up, not slowing down; she could tell by the heavy drag of gravity’s fingers pulling at her skin. Then she looked forward and saw why: a murky, soot-stained ball of a planet, dead ahead, filling the viewing port and looming closer by the second.
“Bashir! Bashir, we’re in a gravity well; you’ve got to pull up, pull up!”
“I can’t!” Bashir armed blood from his eyes. “The plasma injectors shut down. All I’ve got are maneuvering thrusters, and our shields…”
“I see them,” she said, her voice grim. Shields were at thirty percent, plus the runabout had taken major structural damage along the starboard hull. If Bashir couldn’t correct their approach angle or get into a stable orbit somehow, the runabout would simply split open and spit them out in a rush of sudden depressurization. Or they might just burn up. Or, more likely, both. “Can you ditch us?”
“I can try. What about the planet?”
She brought up sensors, thanking whatever deity was watching over them that they still worked. “M-class, high levels of atmospheric contaminants, pollution, silicates and copper arsenicals, lots of radioactive decay. Partial pressure of carbon dioxide’s higher than Earth.”
“Can we breathe it?”
“Not very well, but we don’t have a lot of alternatives. Sensors reading three continents: two north, and an island continent, about the size of Australia, to the south with a big inland sea or lake. Low salinity, no aquatic life there; mountains north, stretches of desert, and some kind of big industrial complex south.”
“All right, I’ll try for the water. Jettison a distress buoy. Then break out the suits just in case, a medical kit, whatever supplies you can.”
“I’m on it.” She was already moving but with aching slowness, the gravity sucking at her legs like thick mud. A wash of harsh yellow light fanned in, bright enough to throw shadows. Startled, she glanced over her shoulder and saw fire sheeting over the front viewing port, the friction of their passage through the atmosphere igniting a ball of flame like a meteor. The Missouri was burning up.
No time! We’ll never make it down in the ship! Got to evacuate now, now! The runabout was jittering again, and there was a guttural roar so loud that she gritted her teeth as the sound pummeled her brain. Just focus, get the suits; get Bashir into his suit; then we blow the hatch, use the suits’ thrusters to get us down and pray like hell our force fields don’t cut out before we hit or…
The equipment locker was aft of the force field she had thrown up against the smoke, but the transporter fire was out. She stabbed the controls, bleeding in air to equalize pressure before bringing the field down. Then she dragged two suits and helmets from the equipment locker. Even as she tugged one on, her mind was already skipping ahead.
Job one’s to get him into his suit. She jammed her right leg into her own, and then her left before cinching it up around her waist. She shrugged into the arms, toggled the clasps. Need to slap on a fast-clot pressure bandage then bring up his suit’s force field, program his thrusters to correct for speed and distance, tether us together so I can control his descent if he passes out; he’ll pass out; he’s got to, he’s losing way too much blood; patch him up as soon as we get down. Got to hope to hell the impact doesn’t kill us.
“Bashir, come on!” She fumbled out a medical kit, clicked it open, pawed through for a pressure bandage. Got to be quick, quick…“Come on, it’s no use! Leave it! Let’s go!”
“Just a few more seconds!” The runabout was thrashing like a roped steer, and he was straight-arming his console, working fast while his blood puddled on the deck. “We’re still too high! If I blow the hatch now, the depressurization will suck us out; we won’t have any control!”
He was right. She knew he was right. But what made her furious was that she was getting suited up, and he wasn’t.
This is nuts; he has to get back here now! Jamming her helmet down over her ears, she thumbed the catch, heard the click and hiss as the helmet sealed and the suit pressurized. She banged open her external mike. “Bashir, now!”
“Almost there!” His voice was a little tinny and sounded small and very far away through her internal speakers. But he did turn, and she tossed his suit forward, then his helmet. He fumbled for the suit, nearly lost it because his hands were slick. But then he had it, shook it open, shoved in one foot, then the other. Tugging the suit past his waist, he wriggled in one arm, then the other. But then, to her dismay, he turned back to his controls.
“I’ll try to level us!” he shouted over the staccato sputter of maneuvering thrusters. “That way when I blow the hatch—!”
“Forget that! We can blow it from here! Now you’ve got exactly three seconds to get your ass back here, or I’m going to drag you out by your thumbs!”
“No, Elizabeth, stay where you are!” And then Bashir stiffened and he turned. Their eyes met and for one brief instant, it was as if time stopped. Everything fell away, and she would remember the look on Bashir’s face for the rest of her life: his horror and his regret, and all that blood.
Then time began again. The runabout streaked toward its death; the alarm shrilled its ululating cry; then there was a weird, wrenching metallic scream and Bashir was shouting, wildly, “Elizabeth, she’s breaking up, she’s breaking up, she’s breaking—!”
“Julian!” she shrieked. She lunged for him, one gloved hand hooked to a bulkhead, the other outstretched and they were so close she could nearly touch him, she was almost there, she could save him, she had to! “Julian, for God’s sake, give me your hand, give me your hand!”
Maybe he started for her. Maybe not. But she’d never know because the next thing she heard was an enormous ka-bang. Flames sheeted through the runabout, and the air roared. Her right hand closed reflexively but her fingers clutched air, and then she was screaming because suddenly there was no deck, no bulkhead. No Julian.
The entire starboard hull erupted like someone had touched off a bomb.
Lense was swept away in a hail of debris. She smashed through murky clouds, tumbling head over heels so she saw dun-colored land and then an orange sun and then a vast gray-green smudge that undulated like oil. And then she was on her back, looking straight up, and she saw a bright fiery ball: the runabout, or rather what was left of it, arcing south and away from the water, shedding bits and pieces in its passage, streaming a jet of superheated plasma behind and breaking apart like some sort of angel fallen from grace.
Then clouds swallowed her up and she couldn’t see the runabout anymore. There was only the sound of her guttural sobs, the wet of tears upon her skin, a swirl of vertigo. Her vision dimmed as she accelerated, and she went by feel, the g force hammering her body, squeezing her until she could barely take a breath. Her fingers crawled over her suit’s controls as she activated a force field to cushion her impact and programmed reverse thrusters.
Her last coherent thought was that she would never survive. The impact would kill her. She was going to die, and only a fool would think otherwise.
The very last thing she heard was the full-throated bellow of the wind.
Then there was silence, and her mind slid into darkness. But that was a mercy.