by Mark Anson
‘Caution, structural failure in Section Twenty-five.’ The synthesized voice of the ship’s computer came over the PA system. Clare struggled to her feet and hurried along the corridor to the hangar airlock. The Langley was starting to break up under the stresses of the storm; she only had minutes to escape.
Colonel Donaldson picked up the glass of whisky from the desk in his stateroom, and walked slowly back to the control room, steadying himself against the corridor wall. He made it to the helm console, and managed to strap himself in before the Langley slammed into another pressure ridge. He heard the structure groan under the strain, and the emotionless voice of the ship warning him of the damage, and he took control, one hand on the sidestick, and his feet on the rudder pedals. As the ship’s rolling gradually subsided, he raised the glass to his lips with his free hand and took a long, slow drink.
He had a magnificent view; facing forward, looking through the sweep of the windows into the oncoming storm. It filled the sky ahead of the ship now, and its menacing arms of black cloud seemed to surround the Langley, pulling it in. They flashed with brilliant blue-white lighting discharges as the enormous charges within the clouds dissipated their pent-up energies.
He didn’t know if Foster would make it out, but she was young and resourceful, and he had given her a good chance. He was taking a risk, he knew, but the way he figured it, if she managed to escape, then he had done something good, and sometimes you were rewarded for doing good things. Sometimes. He took another sip of the whisky, and his thoughts wandered back to when he had been Foster’s age, and the thrill and the pride of being in the Corps.
He touched the silver colonel’s eagle on his uniform and thought of the many years since then: the work, the disappointments, the triumphs and the promotions. Marion, and the family they had raised together. And then—
And then there was Elizabeth Keller. He lowered his head and rolled the cool glass across his forehead, and he felt the hot tears burning between his closed eyelids.
The airlock door to the main hangar slid aside, and Clare stepped in, and stopped in astonishment. Behind the clear plastic of the facemask, her eyes were wide as she looked about her. The hangar was full of swirling snow; it blew around her like a blizzard. The deck elevator had come to a halt, stuck part-way between the flight deck and the hangar floor, and the snow was blowing in through the gap. The sharp edges of the hangar and the shapes of the two remaining Frigates were softened by growing drifts, making it look like some scene from an Arctic base on Earth.
One of the Frigates in the hangar was badly damaged; one wing was bent upwards at an extreme angle, and it had been pushed aside against the far wall. So it was the Frigate in front, the one with its hatch standing open. She prayed that it had been fuelled.
Use the emergency drop ramp, Donaldson had said. Where the hell was it? The hangar deck was covered in snow. Somewhere in the centre of the deck was an aircraft-sized hatch, which could be opened into the slipstream to create a launch ramp. It was a last-ditch emergency exit route from the carrier, for situations when the deck elevator could not be used.
The controls of operating the drop ramp must be somewhere in the hangar. They wouldn’t be in the centre, where the ramp was; they had to be somewhere round the edge, and clearly marked. She set off round the hangar, looking at every control box that she found. The walls were covered with them, and she wasted precious time going past and checking them all. Finally, when she was beginning to wonder if she had been wrong and the controls were located somewhere in the floor, she found the controls, in a large white box with red warnings on it.
She ignored the warnings and ripped it open. The emergency instructions were printed on the inside of the door, and she read them quickly, her eyes darting over the red lettering. All she had to do was fire the explosive bolts holding the ramp in place, then release the drop mechanism and the ramp would fall open. She turned the interlock handles to arm the firing circuits, and as she did so, the hangar came alive with the sound of alarms, and rotating red warning lights. The ship’s computer voice added its own strident warning:
‘Danger, drop ramp release, clear the area, repeat clear the area.’
She gripped one of the handrails tightly, closed her eyes, and pressed the FIRE button.
The warning alarm changed to a continuous note, and three seconds later the bolts fired. In the empty hangar, it sounded like cannons going off, and eight columns of snow leaped into the air, making an angular U-shape in the deck. Clare reached down, gripped the manual release, and pulled. It was hard to move, and she had to use both hands and all her strength to pull it upwards, then suddenly the resistance was gone, and the handle flipped up. She turned round to see an amazing sight.
Where a few moments ago a solid floor had lain, the outlines of a huge panel, hinged along one side, had opened. Snow poured into the widening aperture as the panel opened, turning into a ramp, leading down and backwards into the air. As the gap widened, a howling gale roared across the opening, filling the hangar with snow. Deflector plates dropped to smooth out the airflow, but the noise was deafening; its infra-bass note reverberated inside the confines of the hangar, shaking Clare’s ribcage.
She set off at a run across the hangar, keeping well away from the lowering ramp. As she passed in front of it, she could see out and back, below the carrier, into a sea of dark, swirling clouds. Lightning flickered below her, illuminating the scene with its eerie light.
She had precious little time left. The carrier heaved and groaned now as the stresses of the storm flexed its wings and structure. She could actually see the hangar flexing, the deck moving under the shifting loads.
She made it to the Frigate, and clambered aboard. Someone must have been injured close by; her hand came away from the doorframe covered in blood. She didn’t have time to think about it, and pulled the hatch closed and made for the cockpit.
To hell with procedures. She had to get the engines started and get out immediately. She pulled the engine start switches on the overhead panel and opened the fuel valves on both engines, and let the engines whine through their start sequence while she did a rapid scan of the controls.
‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered; the engines seemed to be taking forever to spool up and ignite. She couldn’t spread the wings until she had turned round and was lined up on the ramp. Would the engines ever get going?
The hangar deck quivered under her, and the Langley shuddered. This was it. If she didn’t get out now, nothing else would matter. She released the brakes and pushed the thrust levers forwards, even though the engines were only just starting to turn. There was just enough thrust to get the Frigate moving forward, and she turned the nose sharp left in a tight U-turn, to line up at the top of the ramp, and held it there on the brakes while she glanced over the controls.
The engines were barely at idle thrust. She flicked the switch to spread the wings, and they lowered reluctantly into position; the engines generators weren’t yet providing full power, and everything was slow. She glanced at the fuel gauges – she had enough for half an hour’s flight and a landing, and that was going to have to be enough.
She could hear the carrier’s automated voice through the cockpit windows, reverberating through the hangar: ‘Emergency. Imminent structural failure. Abandon ship, repeat, abandon ship.’ That was enough for her. She let go of the brakes, and the aircraft rolled down the ramp. For an instant, she had a view of the underside of the Langley – it was streaked with old fluid leaks, and a trail of escaping vapour came from some ruptured fuel tank – then the Frigate fell off the end of the ramp and into the roar of air.
There was no sensation of flying at all; the aircraft dropped like a stone, and Clare gasped in fear. The engines shuddered in protest in the turbulent, snow-filled air. She hauled on the sidestick, but the controls were sluggish, and the cloud deck started to spin round in front of her. She had stalled out – she was going down!
‘Recover now,’ the flight computer w
arned.
‘I’m trying to recover, you stupid bitch,’ she hissed between her teeth, as the altimeter unrolled before her eyes.
‘Too deep, too deep.’
The engines were developing thrust again. Clare put the rudder over, and the spin was slowing, but she was still hurtling down, down towards certain death.
‘Caution, crush depth approaching.’
‘Come on – come on,’ she coaxed, as the nose slowly started to come up. Now she was flying level, and the engines’ thrust was rising. She let them come up to full power, and then pointed the nose up and let the Frigate climb. The aircraft was being tossed about in the storm force winds, but she had to climb higher, out of the crushing pressure of the deep atmosphere. She was burning precious fuel, but she desperately needed more height, and the safety of thinner air.
‘Safe altitude.’
Clare reduced thrust and lowered the nose slightly, and rolled onto a new heading, climbing away from the storm. She would worry about finding the Wright shortly. Right now, she had to get out and away from the storm before it tore her small aircraft to pieces.
Another gust shook the Frigate, and it pitched about violently, before breaking through into a patch of relatively clear sky. As it settled out, Clare glanced to her left, and found herself looking down into the very heart of the storm. She hadn’t realised how close she had come. She had a good view of the scene below her for maybe ten seconds, and that brief sight stayed with her for the rest of her life.
She looked down on the edge of a slowly turning whirlpool of black and grey cloud, laced with vivid tendrils of lightning. On the edge of the whirlpool, far, far below her, she could see the small shape of the Langley against the cloud bank, its nose desperately seeking altitude. A thin line of black smoke still trailed from its shattered engines.
The vortex of storm clouds turned slowly around a central funnel of clear air, leading down into the depths of the atmosphere. By some freak of the atmosphere, she could see all the way, kilometres – no, tens of kilometres down, into the darkness below the cloud layers. And right down at the bottom, at the very limits of her vision, was a tiny dot, a dimly-guessed glow that she knew must be the planet’s surface, far below her.
More lightning played round the edges of the funnel, brilliant forked lines in the darkness, and in the turbulent air, the Langley’s right wing stalled, and it heeled over, slowly, its nose dropping, until it was falling into the black funnel of the storm, going straight down.
If it broke apart on the way down, Clare never saw it. There was a sudden, blinding burst of lightning; perhaps the falling carrier had short-circuited the enormous charges in the storm. The Frigate shook under another hammer blow of turbulent air, and a bank of cloud turned on the edge of the funnel, sliding like a curtain over the view of the Langley as it shrank from sight, turning over and over as it fell. The brief view down through the funnel of clear air contracted, broke up, and vanished forever.
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 O2 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 seve
ral 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.
