CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT  Aboard the Sick Moose

The long-range cameras tracked the great shape, brought it more frighteningly close than it truly was. "That's Nike," Lucy whispered. "She's big."

"That much we already knew," Mac replied in a whisper of his own. Logically, they could all be shouting at the top of their lungs and it wouldn't make any difference. But under the very nose of the huge military orbital command station, sneaking in past their radar, the desire to keep quiet went past the logical.

"Maddy, what can you see on passive detection?" Joslyn asked.

"Plenty enough," Madeline said, "and I've got everything cranked down to minimum power. But it looks to me that we should have Nike and Ariadne below our horizon when we hit the atmosphere."

"A bit of luck running our way," Joslyn said. "Even if this flying teapot is supposed to be invisible, I don't see any reason to experiment."

"Well, for what it's worth, we have now sailed through at least six different radars without being spotted."

"Mac, how are we, as far as the beacon signal?"

Mac was riding the comm station, which left him without much to do besides watch the beacon. He had gotten caught up on his reading this trip. "Right on the money. No change in its position since we picked it up. So do your bit and land us right on top of it."

The Sick Moose's one small cabin was crowded with six people forced to sleep and eat in each other's pockets for several rather long and uneventful days, but the two civilians had managed to carve out a small corner for their own. Charles Sisulu had taken advantage of the long trip and methodically skinned Pete Gesseti's hide in four kinds of card games. Now Pete was grimly trying to win it all back in chess, fifty Kennedy dollars a game. Even with chess, his strong suit, Pete was just about holding his own. If he was even managing that, he thought, as he sadly watched his second bishop join its ancestors. "Charlie, isn't there any game you're not good at?"

Charlie grinned as he collected the bishop. He was a short, pudgy young man, perfect white teeth set off against his dark-skinned face. His hair was trimmed very short, and his rounded features and alert eyes suggested a quick and clever mind working behind the laughter and smiles. "If there was, why should I tell you? I figure you've paid for a month's vacation on Bandwidth already."

"And on what a diplomat makes. You should be ashamed of yourself. Seriously, though, how'd you get so good?"

'Easy. It's how I worked my way through college. My part of South Africa used to be one of those phony homelands. Technically not under South African law, which banned gambling among other things. The Afrikaaners'd come in to make a killing at roulette and we'd skin 'em alive. After the Rebellion, a hundred years ago, we got pulled back into the nation, but we had the smarts and the luck to hang onto our special exemption to the gambling laws. The marks might come in a different color but they still come, and we still clean 'em out and send 'em home. During the southern winter, that is the northern summer, I stayed home with the folks and played poker for a living. Or played anything. I'd just learn the odds and bet with them. When September rolled around I'd fly to America and live off my earnings while I studied at the University of California. If I got short of money, I spent a weekend at Las Vegas. Later on, when I started research at Wood's Hole, I'd go to Atlantic City."

"That's the last time I play with anyone before I check their resume," Pete said, pulling his queen back into what looked like a safer position. "So how do you like our odds here?"

Charlie shrugged. "No way to calculate them. But I'm a biologist! The stakes are so high. When they waved the foam worms at me, I signed every security agreement in sight—I had to work on that, top secret or no. And now I'll get to talk to someone who designs living things, from scratch! For a biologist, that's like a chat with God." Charlie moved in his own queen, took Pete's, and grinned. "Check. Mate in two moves. I'll take an IOU."

When they were about two hours from atmosphere, Mac called a meeting of all hands, which simply meant that everyone turned around in their chairs and faced the center of the tiny cabin. "All right," Mac said, "let me go over the situation one more time. So far the Guard radars haven't picked us up, but that could change at any time. This ship might be invisible to radar, but she's slow, she's hard to maneuver, and she's unarmed. And I don't care if she's made out of special-purpose ceramics or prune danish, when she hits the atmosphere, the light and heat of atmospheric entry are going to be detectable. We're going in on the daylight side, at a time when the bigger stations can't see our entry window. But we still might get spotted.

"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.

0Fifty! 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."