World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (35 page)

He woke to the shrieking of tortured metal.

Warning messages blaring.

Wing Commander Beauregard alternately cursing and imploring as he fought with the arcjet’s controls.

The mounting whine of an aircraft in a terminal dive.

Then came the pounding, juddering, bone-jarring impact of a barely mitigated crash landing.

36

I
N THE AFTERMATH,
there was silence, punctuated by groans. From
Milady Frog
’s occupants, and from the arcjet herself as her damaged airframe settled, bulwarks and skin grinding against one another, ribs and spars adjusting to their new badly bent shape, rivets torquing out of true.

Emergency lighting filled cabin and cockpit with a ruddy glow. There was a haze in the air and a faint whiff of burning.

Beauregard was the first to speak. “Everyone okay? Sound off.”

“Here,” said Dev.

“Here,” said Stegman.

“Trundle?”

At Dev’s query, the dazed xeno-entomologist gabbled out an incoherent word or two.

“Anyone hurt?” was Beauregard’s next question.

Answers came back in the negative. Dev reckoned he had gained several extra bruises to add to the countless others he already had, but nothing worse than that. He tested his limbs, and nothing felt strained, sprained or broken.

Unbuckling his seatbelt, he went forward to the cockpit.
Milady Frog
was perched at a slight angle along both her longitudinal axis and her lateral axis. He was walking uphill on a starboard incline.

“What is this, Beauregard?” he demanded. “We’ve ditched. How the fuck did that happen?”

“Beats me,” Beauregard replied. “One moment she’s sailing merrily along; next, loss of power to the engines, console goes blank, avionics shot, complete shutdown, and she’s plummeting like a stone. I was able to institute pilot override and fly manually. That’s why we’re not dead. I turned a stall dive into a glide and brought her pancaking in. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job. We still have hull integrity and no pressure leaks. Electrics still working. As they say, any landing you can walk away from...”

“How can there be a failure like that? Don’t you have backup systems?”

“Of course. Stop badgering me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“
This
is wrong.” Dev swept a hand across the console, knocking aside the few items of religious tat that hadn’t been dislodged already in the crash. “And
this
.” He snatched the hip flask out of Beauregard’s hand and hurled it away; the pilot had just been about to take a sip. “You not concentrating on flying us properly is wrong.”

“I swear, it was an across-the-board collapse. Bolt out of the blue, no warning. Nothing I could have done to prevent it. The fact is,” Beauregard added defiantly, “if I were any less of a pilot, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d be smeared in little pieces across the planet.”

Dev could hardly argue with that. He looked out through the windscreen. The arcjet’s interior lighting wouldn’t allow his Alighierian eyesight to utilise its night vision. All he could see was blackness, interspersed with distant pinpricks of orange light. An unreadable emptiness. Faint stars above.

His anger abated.

“Right,” he said. “All right. Let’s think about this calmly and logically. A shutdown. Could it have come from an outside agency? Some kind of blunt-force cyber attack piggybacking in via your comms?”

“I guess it could. I have shielding programs, all the right software, all up to date...”

“But the flight computer’s not impregnable.”

“What computer is?”

“Especially not to intrusion by Polis Plus malware.”

“There’s not much you can do to defend yourself against that. I saw battle craft go down from it during the Fomalhaut campaign. Whole squadrons of fighters and heli-wings and para-gunships dropping out of the sky like dead birds, without a tracer round or a flak burst in sight. It was as though invisible angels were touching them in mid-flight and killing them.”

“Yes, well,” said Dev. “I don’t know about angels, but I have a strong suspicion that the person who just nailed us from a distance is Ted Jones, or more likely his accomplice in Calder’s Edge. Zapped us with some piece of Plusser toxic nastiness. Okay, then. Priorities. Where are we?”

“As far as I can ascertain, about a hundred klicks from Calder’s. I was just preparing for final approach when everything went on the fritz. That’s another reason we’re alive. We were going lower and slower than during main flight.”

“And is this crate totally wrecked? Not a chance of liftoff?”

Beauregard smiled thinly and bleakly. “Short of a miracle,
Milady Frog
is grounded for good.”

“Who knows we’ve been downed?”

“No one yet.”

“Then let’s send out a mayday.”

Beauregard frowned in concentration, then said, “Done. Location, situation, time. All points alert.”

“What sort of rescue services do they have on Alighieri?”

“For aboveground travel? Not much. Down below the surface, you’re fine. Up here, life’s a bit trickier. You’re pretty much reliant on other arcjets and limited-range VTOL hoppers when you get into difficulties. Pilots helping fellow pilots – and there aren’t that many of us. Barely even a handful. That’s not the real problem, though.”

“What is the real problem?”

“Heat,” said Beauregard. “It’s already stiflingly hot in here, isn’t it? We’re sitting right slap bang on the surface. The
Frog
’s hull is conducting heat from the rocks under her and absorbing it from the atmosphere around her. Within half-an-hour at most, if not sooner, it’ll be like sitting in an oven. We’ll be, in the purest sense of the word, baking.”

“Great. No way of keeping cool?”

“The backup batteries don’t have power for anything more than basic life support. I can try to reboot the system, but I don’t hold out much hope.” He slapped the console. “Blood from a stone. And that’s not all, I’m afraid.”

Dev heaved a heartfelt sigh. “Lay it on me.”

Beauregard jerked a thumb rearward. “Somewhere behind us, day is coming. We were outpacing it, but now that we’ve halted it’ll be catching up. Fast. Iota Draconis will be broaching the horizon, and when dawn arrives, we won’t have to worry about baking. Then, my friend, we are going to
fry
.”

37

“T
HERE IS SOMETHING
we can do,” Beauregard went on. “It’s a gamble, but it beats sitting on our derrieres hoping help’ll come in time.”

“I’m listening,” said Dev.

“I have shieldsuits on board. The kind used by workers running the helium-three converter units. I bought them in case of this very eventuality.”

“So we put them on and we won’t cook as quickly.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m suggesting we put them on and start walking.”

“Out there?”

“Out there. We don’t want to be inside the
Frog
when the sun reaches her. We’ll be trapped when she starts to burn, like rats in a bonfire.”

“How far are we likely to get before the sun catches up with us too?”

“I’m not pretending it’s the ideal solution,” said Beauregard. “But an extra couple of hours out of the sun, even just an hour, might make all the difference. We keep beaming out maydays from our commplants, like distress beacons, and rescuers will still be able to home in on us even on the move.”

“I thought a basic rule of survival was stay put. An arcjet is easier to locate in the wilderness than four men on foot.”

“Basic rules of survival don’t apply on the surface of a thermoplanet. Here, your chances are better the less you stand still. Think of the shieldsuits as individual, self-contained lifeboats.”

“Okay.” Dev could see the sense in what Beauregard was proposing. He didn’t like it, but it was the lesser of two evils. “Then I suppose time is of the essence. Where are these shieldsuits?”

They were hanging in lockers in the hold. They were scuffed and battered, their faceplates scratched, their shells covered in tatty old decals identifying the mining conglomerate they had belonged to –
France-registered Dumoulin Et Fils Exploitation Minière d’Espace Cie.
– and stencilled with the surnames of their previous occupants.

“Wow,” said Dev. “These look... pre-loved. I hope you got them cheap.”

“Reasonably,” said Beauregard. “To be honest, they were past the end of their useful lives. They were going to be decommissioned and broken down for scrap. Rest assured, I’ve overhauled them and I keep them well maintained. The cryo-coolant systems are in working order, and the waste-water filtration and recirculation units are fully operational.”

Trundell and Stegman were present, and the former voiced an observation that Dev himself had made, but hadn’t wanted to mention yet.

“There are only three of them,” he said.

“I could only afford three,” said Beauregard. “Mostly I’m alone on flights. Sometimes I’ll have one passenger, never more than two. Three shieldsuits would under normal circumstances be fine.”

“But not now,” said Stegman. “We’re one short.”

“You haven’t got another spare stashed somewhere?” Dev asked, more in hope than expectation.

The pilot shook his head. “We all realise what this means. One of us is staying behind with
Milady Frog
. But that’s okay. We won’t have to draw lots or anything, because I know who it is.”

“Yes,” said Stegman. “Me. I’m the one with the messed-up leg. It feels fine right now, but the analgesics won’t last forever. I’ll start dragging it, and I’ll slow the rest of you down. I’ll stay.”

“Noble, but no,” said Beauregard. “It’s me. This is my plane. The captain always goes down with his ship, right?”

“Bullshit,” said Stegman. “I’ve stated my case. No arguments. Get those suits on, the rest of you.”

“
I
could stay,” Trundell offered. “I’m not that physically fit. I’ll tire before the rest of you. I’d end up holding you all back.”

“This is stupid,” said Dev. “Each of us can give a good reason for being the one who doesn’t go. Look at me. This isn’t even my body. Why should I give a damn if it gets burnt to cinders?”

“Nice try,” said Trundell, “but we all know you’ll die if it does. You of all people have to get back to Calder’s Edge. More so than me or Stegman or Beauregard. You’re the one who’s got the expertise when it comes to Plussers. The city needs you.”

“Your faith in me is touching.”

“It isn’t faith. It’s common sense.”

“This isn’t even open to debate,” said Beauregard. “I’ve made the decision. Now hurry up and get into those things. Day’s on its way.”

“Actually, the wingco’s got a point,” said Dev. “We could go round in circles about this for hours. He is the sensible choice.”

“Harmer...” said Stegman.

“Hear me out. I don’t like it. Really I don’t. But we’re in an impossible situation, and it has to be settled quick-smart. So I’m backing Beauregard. We leave him, and he can get busy trying to get
Milady Frog
off the ground. None of us three can fly this thing. Beauregard knows her inside out. Maybe, just maybe, he can restart her and then pick us up en route to Calder’s. If he stays, the odds of us
all
getting out of this alive actually improve.”