Acid Sky (28 page)

Clare stared at the vortex of dark cloud for several long seconds, hoping to catch another glimpse of the carrier, but there was nothing but swirling, churning cloud. The
Langley
had gone.

She dragged her eyes away from the scene, and finally consulted the navigation display to try to locate the
Wright
. There it was on the edge of the display, circling round the perimeter of the storm. They must be able to see her on radar at this range. She pressed the transmit.

‘Wright Approach, this is Houseboat Zero Six, I am low on fuel and request radar vector for straight in approach and immediate landing.’

They must have been expecting her, because they answered immediately:

‘Houseboat Zero Six, Wright Approach. We have you on radar. Turn right onto heading one four zero. Climb and maintain six one five. What is your fuel state?’

‘Two decimal eight tonnes. I should be able to make it.’

‘Zero Six, concur. We have two more to recover then you will be number one for landing. How many aboard?’

‘One aboard.’ Clare suddenly felt incredibly tired. She was forgetting her radio drill, but she had to keep flying; that was the most important thing. She realised that she was having trouble breathing; and she had a splitting headache. Where had that come from?

She grabbed suddenly at the air gauge on her facemask, and saw that it was empty – she was breathing on nothing. She checked the cabin O
2
level, and ripped the mask off. It wasn’t quite up to normal in the cabin, but it would have to do. At least there was oxygen. She sat back and took several lungfuls, as her head cleared slowly.

She became aware of a bad smell in the cabin, and realised with distaste that it was coming from herself; her flight overalls stank from being in the garbage container for so long. She shuddered as she remembered the experience. She checked the heading and engaged the autopilot; she had just enough time to go back and see if she could find anything else to wear in the passenger cabin.

She pushed her seat back and made her way out of the cockpit and into the cabin. As she suspected, there were several zipped bags left lying around from the preparations for the evacuation. She found a pack of sandwiches in one, and realised how hungry she was – how long had she been in the container? She ripped open the packet and ate the sandwiches ravenously as she looked further.

As she worked her way past the second row of seats, she noticed the blood on the doorframe again. It wasn’t just a small smear as she had thought. There was quite a lot of it, all over both sides of the frame. A horrible, crawling feeling started inside her, and her eyes dropped down, to the trail of blood that led from the door towards the rear of the cabin. Clare walked forward cautiously, and looked round into the last row of seats. The trail of blood stopped there, but there were several bloody shapes imprinted on the seat cushions. She leaned closer to inspect one of them. It was a
handprint
. There was an unpleasant smell of burnt meat, and an icy fear trickled down her spine.

She stood up suddenly and backed away, and that was when Shaffer grabbed her from behind.

His bloody hands closed round her neck and one arm, but she managed to half-turn towards him, flailing at him with her fists. His face was a ruin of burned flesh and blood. One eye was closed completely, possibly gone altogether, and his uniform was burned and torn open in several places. She punched him twice, hard, on his wounded face, and he made a croaking sound and released her, holding his head, then he came at her again, pulling a wrench from his pocket. He raised it above his head, as she was forced back into the corner, on the last row of seats, unable to escape.

She put her hands up to protect herself, and the wrench cracked into her right forearm. She cried out, and clutched her arm to her chest. The wrench whooshed down again, and a hot flower of pain exploded in her left cheek, knocking her down onto the seat. Through the pain, her instincts were screaming at her – if she didn’t fight back, he was going to beat her to a bloody pulp on the seat. She got her knees up and kicked out viciously with one foot, then the other, and she got him in one knee. His hand with the wrench was right in front of her, and she grabbed it with her good hand and tore it out of his bloody fingers. She couldn’t get a good swing, and she hit him clumsily on the head with a left-handed blow. He staggered back, and she swung the wrench back and hit him again, a much harder blow, a red mist of rage filling her vision. The wrench was slippery with blood, and something that wasn’t blood, but she didn’t notice; she hit him again, and again, on his head, as he reeled away from her, towards the front of the cabin.

He grabbed one of the zip bags from a nearby seat, and, holding it in front of him, charged her, knocking her to the floor of the cabin. He gripped her left wrist and banged it hard against one of the seat struts. He did it again, and she let go of the wrench with a cry of pain, and then he was backing away from her, wrench in hand.

Blood ran down from his head into his eyes, and he stood there, swaying, teeth bared, and she knew he was coming back for the kill. What evil force still animated him, she had no idea. She had hit him several times in the head, but he was still up and fighting, and her own strength was failing. She could feel her cheek throbbing, and her right forearm was numb; her fingers wouldn’t work. She tried to get up, and he came at her again. She kicked out again wildly, and got him in the shins, making him back away with a grunt of pain. She scrambled to her feet with the last of her strength.

They faced each other down the tiny aisle. Shaffer stood by the door to the cockpit and Clare two rows back, just behind the hatch.

‘You miserable, fucking bitch!’ he said thickly, through his mangled lips, ‘I should have killed you on the spot. When I’ve finished with you you’re going to wish you’d gone out with the garbage.’

Clare said nothing. Her mind was working furiously, watching where he was standing, assessing, calculating.

‘I bet you thought I’d been killed in the crash!’ he shouted, ‘Well I
wasn’t!
Three of us made it down the stairs before the spaceplane hit, and I was the only one to get past the pressure doors before they closed!’

‘Did you push them out of the way to get out?’ she said, goading him. She needed him to come just a little closer.

‘I was first! They were too slow – that’s how it works!’ He brandished the wrench and took a step closer to her.

‘I’ll show you how it works, you bastard,’ Clare said. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs, and then she grabbed the emergency hatch release handle next to her.

Shaffer’s eye flew open; he turned in horror to see that he was standing directly in front of the hatch, just as Clare lifted the handle upwards in one swift movement. She hooked her left arm round it and closed her eyes. The hatch released, and the pressurised cabin blew it out into the slipstream with explosive force, hitting the left engine cowling. The air in the cabin vented out of the open doorway in a split second, and Shaffer, unable to stop himself, was swept out with it.

Clare clung on to the release handle with all her strength as she was almost lifted off her feet by the sudden tornado of air. It felt like her arm was being torn from its socket, but it only lasted a few moments, and was replaced with a deafening roar of air from the open doorway. Still holding her breath, Clare released the handle and made her way as fast as she could towards the safety of the cockpit – she
had
to get air.

As she passed the open hatch, Shaffer’s bloody mask of a face looked up at her, his one eye staring madly. He was hanging by one hand to the doorframe, and his legs trailed out in the slipstream, just in front of the left engine intake, where the powerful fan was trying to suck him in. Shaffer’s blood-covered fingers started to slide – the engine was winning the struggle, and his mouth opened to scream a final curse at her, the words just audible in the gale of the slipstream:

‘Someone will kill you one day, Foster! Someone – will find you – they will come –
and kill you!
’

He clung on to the doorframe by his fingertips for one more hate-filled second, and then with a terrible scream he was torn from the aircraft and sucked feet-first into the murderous blur of the fan.

The engine shook on its pylon as the whirling fan blades scythed his body into bloody pieces. The fan gyrated wildly with the uneven load, then some large piece of him went into the compressor, and the engine disintegrated in a cough of dirty orange flame and a shower of blade fragments that buzzed through the metal skin of the cabin. Black smoke belched from the exhaust, and the Frigate’s nose pitched suddenly downwards.

The autopilot had disconnected! The explosion must have cut something. Clare’s vision was going black from lack of oxygen and her lungs screamed in protest as she crawled towards the cockpit.

The Frigate started to roll to the left. She
had
to get it back under control! She pulled herself upright against one of the seats and almost fell into the cockpit through the open door. She grabbed a facemask from the emergency rack and held it over her face, gasping for breath, and scrambled into the left-hand seat. She dropped the facemask and pulled back on the sidestick with her free hand. The Frigate responded, and she levelled out and corrected for the loss of thrust, and took another two quick breaths from the facemask, before re-engaging the autopilot. Mercifully, it responded, and she cast an anxious eye over the red warnings on the EICAS display to see what damage had been caused when the engine blew. One of the hydraulic systems was reading zero pressure, but the others were working, and there was no fuel leak – the other warnings could wait.

She managed to get the facemask straps over her head and fasten it on properly, and she adjusted the heading to take her back towards the
Wright
. Her breathing steadied as she sat back, exhausted from the terror of Shaffer’s attack. The injuries he had inflicted on her were really hurting now; she was sure her arm was broken, and her cheek throbbed with pain. She would have to breathe from the facemask’s air supply all the way back to the
Wright
, and then make a landing with only one engine, but she knew she could do it.

She had done it before.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Three days later, Clare sat on a chair in the corridor outside the captain’s staterooms on the
Wright
. She was in a borrowed dress uniform again; this was the start of the Astronautics Corps’ official investigation into the loss of the
Langley
, and the conduct of its officers and crew. She had already given her version of events in the debriefings immediately afterwards, but the formal investigation was where her story would be scrutinised and challenged. The investigation process was likely to take at least a year, and she had already been told that she would be required to give evidence to further teams once she got back to Earth.

Conway, as the most senior officer to survive the accident, had given his testimony this morning, and Neale had been in there now since lunchtime, behind closed doors. She had been sat there nearly an hour already, waiting to be called, but she didn’t mind; in fact, she welcomed the time to sit quietly and think. This area here by the control room was the only part of the ship where there weren’t people constantly in the corridors, trying to work round each other.

Her face and ribs still hurt from the fight with Shaffer, and her right arm was in a cast, in a sling under her uniform jacket. She still didn’t know how she’d managed the landing on the
Wright
, but she’d done it somehow, even managed to catch a two-wire. She smiled, but even that was painful, pulling at the dressings on her broken cheekbone.

The survivors from the
Langley
had been found space on board somehow; most of them were sharing two or even three to a cabin, with temporary bunks set up in the gym and the engineering deck, but nobody minded. Another group had been ferried over to the
Curtiss
yesterday to make some much-needed room, and the first survivors would start being lifted up to orbit as soon as the tug schedules could be rearranged. The
Curtiss
herself had been badly damaged in the storm, and would need a good deal of repair work to restore her operational capability. There was no question of putting into a port, of course; all the repairs had to be carried out while she was flying.

She wondered if the
Langley
would be replaced. Much of that would depend on the outcome of the investigation, she supposed, but from an operational point of view, three carriers were the minimum for safe operations, as the accident had shown all too clearly. Maybe the two remaining carriers would operate with a reduced crew for the time it would take to build a replacement. Who knows, she thought.

And who knows what she was going to tell the inquiry about Colonel Donaldson. She stared at a stain on the deck near the polished toe of her boot. Hartigan would have known what to do; she could have talked to him. But Hartigan was gone, and she had to figure this one out on her own.

The door to the stateroom opened, and Neale came out. She stood up and opened her mouth to ask him how it had been, but he gave a slight warning shake of his head and walked off down the corridor, leaving her alone.

One of the
Wright’s
junior officers stepped out of the room. For a second, she regretted that she looked such a mess, then she decided that it didn’t matter; they would have to take her as she was.

‘Lieutenant Foster?’ He consulted his clipboard. ‘Come in please.’ He lowered his voice, and added: ‘Centre of the room,’ so that she would know where to stand.

She clumped across the carpet to where a single chair stood in front of a long table, stood to attention, and saluted with her left hand. Facing her at the table were seven officers, only a few of whom she recognised. A court recorder sat at a small table alongside.