Moonfall (62 page)

Carpenter read his mind and glanced at the fuel displays. He shook his head. “It’s not going to be enough,” he said. “Does it matter whether we burn the fuel now or later?”

“
Now
,” said Feinberg. “Keep it simple.” The Plain was sliding down toward the blue seas and distant shimmering clouds. But it continued to turn.

“We have to slow it down,” Carpenter said.

Feinberg scanned the numbers and images on the screens, saw nothing, looked out the window, saw the lights of the
Talley
, saw Solitary Ridge just coming into view. “There
might
be something we can do.”

The
Mabry
, the
Kordeshev
, and the
Talley
were designed to operate exclusively between L1 and Skyport. They never landed on a planetary surface, and they never had to climb from the bottom of a gravity well. Consequently, they produced nothing like the thrust of an SSTO, or of the
Lowell
. But they did generate a reasonable amount of power.

“Enough to slow the rotation down?” asked Carpenter, who grasped the idea immediately.

“We only need to buy a couple of minutes,” said Feinberg. “Let’s find out.”

He opened channels to the pilots of the three ferries. He explained what they hoped to achieve. “The ferries will take up station along Solitary Ridge,
Korckshev
on the left,
Talley
to the right: Find a good spot, but spread out, try to keep a half-k distance between ships. Set up posthaste. Nose in. Go to full thrust on my signal.”

Jay Bannister, pilot of the
Kordeshev
, acknowledged, and then told him the idea was crazy. “We’ll use up too much fuel,”
he said. “None of us’ll get home. I’ve got four passengers on board.”

“They’ll have to take their chances along with the rest of us, Jay,” said Carpenter. “Unless we turn this thing aside, there won’t be any home to go back to.”

And they heard from Rita, in their own ship: “I’m not sure the hull will stand up to this.”

The big drawback was that the ferries, like the buses, had no throttle. Thrust was either on or off. So it now fell on the pilots to ease the vessels in against the ridge using their thrusters. “Snuggle in as best you can,” Carpenter advised them. “Look for as flat a piece of wall as you can find.”

The Possum was picking up speed.

A light winked on and the radioman pointed at it. “The president, sir,” he said to Carpenter.

Feinberg sighed.

Carpenter listened to his earphones and nodded. “So far, okay, sir,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

They were looking out the window at the Back Country now, dropping to ground level. Rocks, mounds, and gulleys drifted past. Ahead, Feinberg could see Solitary Ridge, stretching away to the horizon on both sides. Off to port, the Sun was setting. It had become their job to hold it in the sky, to see that it didn’t rise again. Like Joshua.

A radio voice crackled over static: “
Kordeshev
is in position.”

“Stand by,” said Carpenter.

Feinberg watched the clock.

Rita scanned the cliff wall for the flattest section she could find and glided toward it. If they were to have a reasonable chance to survive, the line of thrust had to be perpendicular to the face of the ridge. An imbalance, even a very slight one, could be fatal. She moved in carefully, cut all forward motion, and allowed the ridge to come to her.

In Mission Control, they felt the slight jar.

“Ready to go,” she said. “But God help us.”

“Are we ready to fire yet?” demanded
Kardeshev
. “Not yet,” said Feinberg. “We’ll do this together.”

Seconds later,
Talley
called in. They were having trouble finding a site. “The cliff face is rough over here,” the pilot said.
Talley
was to their starboard side.

“We don’t have time for a hunt,” said Carpenter.

7.

Talley
Flight Deck. 4:41
A.M.
Fifteen minutes to import.

“There,” said Ahmad.

“You call that
flat
?” Pilot Oscar “Hawk” Adams was a part-owner of Mo’s Restaurant on Skyport. He was the only millionaire among the flight crews.

“I don’t think there’s anything else here,” said Skip Wilkowski, the flight engineer. They needed a relatively smooth piece of rock face, something against which to place the prow. But this part of Solitary Ridge was severely gouged. “We’re going to have to make do.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Adams. He steered toward it.

Antonia Mabry
, Mission Control 4:43
A.M.
Thirteen minutes to impact.

The ferries fired in unison.
Mabry
groaned and popped, but did not break open as Rita had feared. Carpenter and Feinberg hadn’t taken time to get into p-suits, not that it would have mattered had things gone amiss. After a few uneasy moments, Carpenter returned his attention to the data coming in from the other vehicles. “All three running hot,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought these units would stand up under this.”

Feinberg watched the screens and thought how good it was to be alive. He’d always feared death, feared the final annihilation of light and the long plunge into oblivion. He saw his own mortality as a kind of personal black hole, dragging him inexorably through his days to suck him down at last. And he wondered now, with the ferry’s rocket engine hurling itself against the vehicle’s frail frame, using that frame to hold back the enormous mass of the Possum, whether he hadn’t already slipped inside a Schwarzschild radius.

He had neither a religious faith to console him nor a functional philosophy to fight off the demons. For the first time in his life, he was behaving in a manner that could suitably be defined as heroic. And he suspected that eventually he’d be recognized for this day’s deeds. If they succeeded. But if he was dead, if he wasn’t on the platform to accept whatever medal might be offered, then of what use was any of it?

In the darkness stirred up by his fears, he searched for a presence, for a God who might intervene.
If you’re there
, he murmured,
please get me through this
. He didn’t try to close a deal, didn’t promise to amend his life. He asked only for help. It was as close as Feinberg had come to a prayer in more than twenty-five years.

Percival Lowell
Utility Deck. 4:46
A.M.
Ten minutes to impact.

The most frustrating aspect of the entire problem for Charlie was his sense that he could not actively participate in the effort, other than to sit helplessly in
Lowell
, as he had earlier sat helplessly in the Micro, and watch events unfold. He remained on a direct link with Mission Control, but he wished now that he’d been able to take Feinberg’s suggestion—or had it been Carpenter’s?—to monitor events from the
Mabry
.

He had retired from the flight deck, relinquishing his seat
to Saber. It was almost as if, knowing he could not help, he did not wish to watch.

The only other person with him was Keith Morley. Motley was talking into his mike, and looked up when Charlie came in. He signaled, silently requesting permission to ask the president a few questions on camera. But Charlie shook his head no and collapsed into a seat.

Up front, calls kept coming in for him. Rachel had a waiting list a couple of hundred deep. He’d accepted a few. Twenty minutes ago, when things had begun to go wrong, Charlie had taken a call from, the pope. Were they going to be successful? the pontiff asked. And Charlie responded, not entirely diplomatically, that it was anybody’s guess, and that if the pope had any influence this was a good time to use it.

His cell phone chimed. The
Mabry
tone. “Haskell,” he said. His heart pounded.

Carpenter s voice: “We got two planes with dry tanks. But we’ve got a chance. We’ve slowed it down a little. Feinberg’s a genius.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “He’s pretty good.” But thank God for the woman at the Orbital Lab. And Evelyn. (And, though he did not know it, Chaplain Pinnacle.)

Talley
Flight Deck. 4:50
A.M.
Six minutes to impact.

Hawk Adams had maintained the delicate balance between the ferry’s prow and the rugged cliff wall. It was essential to keep the plane of the cliff precisely at a ninety-degree angle to the central axis of the ship. Should that angle go even slightly out of balance,
Talley
’s engine would demolish the ferry, break her spine, in effect drive the rear of the ship through the forward compartments and crush the flight deck and the people in it. That scenario never left Hawk’s mind.

In fact, he held the ferry steady longer than he would have
thought possible. But something—a hiccup in the fuel lines, a computer blip, a distraction, something—momentarily tipped the flow of power. The end came so quickly that Hawk never knew there was a problem.

Antonia Mabry
, Mission Control 4:51
A.M.
Five minutes to import.

“We’ve lost
Talley
.”

Feinberg nodded.

Carpenter looked at the displays. “What do you think?”

“Not yet.”

Percival Lowell
Flight Deck. 4:52
A.M.
Four minutes to impact.

The fans had come on in her suit and cool air bathed her face. “Getting warm,” said Saber.

Rachel nodded. “Going to get warmer.” They were into the ionosphere now. The ship wasn’t designed for atmospheric travel. It was going to heat up very quickly.

Streaks of light, charged solar particles, were raining down on the surrounding rockscape. The sky was turning pink and the stars had winked out.

Among the SSTOs, only
Arlington
was still firing. And, of course, so was the
Lowell
.

“Hang on,” said Rachel, and she switched to the PA. “Brace yourselves, gentlemen. It’s about to get rough.”

SSTO
Arlington
Flight Deck. 4:53
A.M.
Three minutes to impact.

The last of the fuel ran out and the engines shut down.

“That’s it,” said George. There was something terribly final about the silence that now engulfed them. They were indeed bound to the rock, headed presumably for Florida.

A low ridge to starboard exploded, and the pieces flew backward, whipped from sight.

“Atmosphere,” said George. Crunch time.

Antonia Mabry
, Mission Control. 4:54
A.M.

Feinberg watched the numbers spin across his display. His mind had gone numb and he could do nothing now but wait. Not that it mattered: Events were moving far too fast for analysis, blurring, flowing into a jumbled stream of scattered images and physical forces and sheer terror. Everything depended on whether they’d got enough of the angle and whether the Possum’s underbelly was sufficiently flat.

Carpenter sat strapped in his seat. Now that there was no more to be done, he’d withdrawn into some interior space to await the outcome.

Questions, demands for information, crackled over the intercom. The Brits, the Russians, the Japanese, even that impossible woman, what’s her name, Tory Clark, sitting safe and secure at Skyport: “Did we do it?” “What’s our status?”

“Rainbow, are you still there?”

What’s our status?

“A low murmur began. Gusts of wind blew up out of nowhere and rocked the
Mabry
. The bulkheads creaked and the storm exploded into a hurricane. Feinberg was thrown violently against his restraints. The cabin tumbled and rolled. Already he could feel the temperature rising.

It went on for almost a full minute before their pilot got the ship under a condition that might pass for control. “We’ve been blown clear of the rock,” she announced over the P.A. As if it weren’t obvious.

He waited for his stomach to settle and opened the general channel. “This is Rainbow,” he said. “We are evaluating the situation.” And he laughed. Roared at his own joke.
Yes, give me two minutes and I will tell you precisely how we are doing
.

The storm continued to hammer at them. Something, a piece of rock, maybe a piece of the ship, rang against the hull.

Skyport, Orbital Lab. 4:55
A.M.

No one dared speak. But Tory watched the Possum descend through sunlight, sinking toward the Atlantic. The ocean was dark and eternal beyond the pools of light that marked the southeastern coast of the U.S.

The rock passed gradually into the night.

She saw one of the ferries, both of the remaining ferries, tumble clear. The rock was still turning on its axis, enveloped in flames. A plume tracked behind it.

The plume glittered in the red light. But its downward curve was leveling off!

An ocean of air had gathered beneath the Possum. Forming a barrier.

The rock was beginning to skid.

Like a pebble skipping across the surface of a pond
.

Fiery particles blew away. Some fell down the sky; others soared back into sunlight.

Like the
Ranger.

Percival Lowell
Utility Deck. 4:56
A.M.

Charlie Haskell couldn’t bring himself to watch the images any longer. The
Lowell
was trying to shake itself to pieces and the roar of the engines seemed to have become louder. Rachel was still trying, he thought, still pitting the nuclear fire against the vast dead weight of the Possum, trying to lift it out of the atmosphere, to haul it away from the fragile terrestrial surface.

The glut of voices asking mission control for a status report had faded into background noise. If Feinberg didn’t respond in any meaningful way, it could only be because he had no news to give. They had done everything they could,
thrown the full weight of the world’s fleet into the effort. And it hadn’t been enough.

POSIM—38 rumbled across the sky, and Charlie rode with it, he and thirty-odd others, like Slim Pickens in the old movie riding the H-bomb to its target.