by Dean M. Cole
Angela laughed and looked up. "What? You mean we can't just dive in behind your tin roof?"
Vaughn shook his head. "I think I liked it better when you were coughing more and talking less."
Over the next three and a half hours, the pilot gradually changed the angle of the thruster. Initially, the western horizon had been in line with the center of Vaughn's makeshift nose cone. However, as they slowed, the nose gradually pitched higher. Vaughn had to direct an ever-increasing portion of the vehicle's thrust downward to counteract the planet's relentless efforts to draw them into its gravity well. They were high above the atmosphere, so the man didn't try to maintain the original altitude. The decelerating and descending burn soon had them less than a hundred miles above the planet.
"What's our ground speed now?" Angela said.
Vaughn pointed to the GPS strapped to the instrument panel. "We're still going four thousand miles an hour."
Angela held up a thumb. "That's great! You've already bled off thirteen thousand."
Vaughn shook his head. "We were slowing pretty quickly at first, but now I'm having to use more thrust to keep us out of the atmosphere. Our rate of deceleration is falling off."
Angela's eyes widened. "But we've already used half your air." She paused and checked her gauges. "And half mine as well."
"Yeah, this is taking longer than I expected."
"Okay. Let's increase power."
Vaughn nodded hesitantly. "It's already running at ninety percent. I'm not sure what that'll do to the RTG."
Angela pointed to their current ground speed. "If we enter the atmosphere at Mach 6, we'll burn up."
"I know that, Angela!" Vaughn stopped, then shook his head. "Sorry."
Before she could respond, the man raised the stick in his left hand. The vehicle's vibrations increased as did the G-force.
Between the ship's thrust and Earth's gravity, they'd been at slightly more than one G for the last few hours. Initially, Angela had almost blacked out. However, after an hour, her circulatory system had finally remembered how to deal with gravity and had redistributed her blood appropriately. Now she could feel her face sagging under the increased Gs, and as it had earlier, her peripheral vision began to gray out.
Afraid that turning her head might cause it to topple from her body, Angela spoke without looking at Vaughn. "What power setting is that?"
"One hundred percent, but that's the module's limit. I have no idea what the RTG's limit is." Vaughn said all of this while moving his hands about, pointing at knobs and twisting dials, as if they were under normal gravity.
Angela supposed that, to him, the current G-load wasn't a big deal.
He looked at her, and his eyes widened. "Oh shit! I didn't think your face could get any whiter. Are you okay?"
"You really know how to charm a girl, Captain Singleton." Angela started to shake her head, but the threat of toppling became very real. With a mighty effort, she pinned it to the back of her helmet. "I'll be fine," she whispered, feeling anything but.
Over the next few hours, Angela fell in and out of sleep. Vaughn kept waking her, afraid she'd passed out. Each time, she assured him that she was fine, just exhausted.
Then a much younger version of the woman woke in the passenger seat of her daddy's car. It was old and smelled of mildew, but she'd loved riding in it. Later, when it took him from her, the little girl had grown to hate that vehicle. Presently, they were racing down an old country road.
"Go faster, Daddy," the younger version of her urged.
The washboard road made the car vibrate as if it had broken an axle.
Suddenly her daddy grabbed her shoulder. "Wake up, pumpkin!"
"No," Angela whispered as the road worsened. "I'm tired."
The hand became more insistent. "Wake up, Commander!"
Angela's eyes blinked and fluttered and finally opened on a slowly spinning horizon.
The seat beneath her still vibrated viciously.
"We have to jump!"
Angela blinked her confusion.
Vaughn pointed to something. "It's running away!"
The disoriented woman followed the gesture. An object on the floor glowed red-hot. Her eyes widened.
"The RTG?!"
Vaughn nodded. "Yes! We have to jump!"
Angela felt buffeting. Then she saw the surface of her suit ripple.
They had entered the atmosphere!
The captain disconnected his oxygen bottle from the rack and then clipped it to his parachute harness.
The vehicle's slow rotation was speeding up. If they didn't jump soon, Angela would lose consciousness.
He pointed to the GPS. "Still above a hundred thousand feet, but I think we're safe to jump."
Vaughn placed his left hand on his seat belt disconnect. "Are you ready?"
She swallowed and then nodded.
"We have to release at the same time." He pointed toward a tan-colored land mass. "Any difference up here will just get worse down there."
The astronaut nodded again. "Same time. Got it."
"Alright. Release your harness on one."
Vaughn counted down.
"Three, two, one!"
Angela released her belt and immediately flew out of the spinning module. Her mind cleared, as her body welcomed the sudden weightlessness like an old friend. She fell backward initially, but a slow tumble turned her earthward.
The woman looked around but couldn't see the captain.
"Vaughn! Where are you?"
"Shit! I got hung up for a second. I'm over here."
"Where? I don't see you."
"Look toward the water."
Expansive oceans of sand and water met beneath the astronaut, desert on her right, ocean to the left. After months in space, Angela instantly recognized it as North Africa. She looked left, toward the Mediterranean.
"I see you!"
Vaughn waved. "I'm drifting away … you. … Bluetooth range …" Then his voice cut out completely.
The rotating module had tossed them in opposite directions. Now they were outside of the range of their Bluetooth headsets.
"Vaughn!"
No reply.
His retreating white spacesuit shrank out of sight.
"Damn it!"
Angela felt gravity reasserting itself. Atmospheric drag ramped up. That same resistance also arrested her sideward drift, causing the astronaut to fall straight down. However, the heavier module continued to bore through the atmosphere on its angular dissent. Its apparent size quickly shrank as it raced toward the eastern horizon. Then it disappeared in a brilliant flash.
The thruster had exploded!
Captain Singleton got them out just in time. Any later, and they would've still been too close.
"Thank you, Vaughn."
Over the next several minutes, the initially tranquil atmospheric buffeting increased. Its barely audible whisper soon roared in her ears.
Angela's slow tumble morphed into a flat spin that quickly accelerated. It felt as if the building blood pressure would soon crack open her head.
The woman's arms flailed wildly as she tried to arrest the spin. She held them at various angles. The first attempts only exacerbated the situation, accelerating the spin. Finally, Angela tilted her hands the other way, and the rotation slowed and then stopped.
Now at terminal velocity, the spacesuited woman fell through the atmosphere like a novice skydiver, wobbling through the air with arms splayed and knees bent.
Angela searched the sky for Vaughn, but still couldn't see him.
She peered down. The world looked as it would from a cruising jetliner. On her left, glistening blue sea stretched to the horizon. The dunes of the Sahara desert filled the other half of the world visible through the visor. Beneath the woman, a city that she recognized as Tripoli cut a silver and gray pit into the sandy shoreline. Arterial black highways flowed from the mass and disappeared into the surrounding desert. In the months since Day Zero, the wasteland had reclaime
d many of those roads. Ever-advancing dunes now covered vast sections of the highways.
Tripoli looked like an island in a bifurcated sea of sand and water. Angela spotted its airport. As much as she could in a spacesuit, she tried to guide her free fall toward it.
A minute later, the astronaut yanked the ripcord. The drogue flew out in front of her face and then disappeared above her as it pulled the parachute from the pouch mounted on her chest. Then her feet snapped earthward, and the beautiful vision of a fully inflated canopy blossomed overhead.
"Oh, thank God," Angela whispered.
She scanned the skies, searching for Vaughn. The desert was still on her right, ocean to her left. She did a double take in that direction.
A small white dome hung in the air, just visible against the deep blue horizon.
The captain's parachute!
It looked like he might come down in the ocean.
"Oh, no!"
Angela opened her visor.
"Vaughn!"
If he replied, she couldn't hear him above the hot, dry air blowing through her helmet.
The man was a tiny white dot beneath the parachute. From this distance, she couldn't even tell if he was moving. Vaughn was definitely lower than her. He'd opened his parachute later than her.
As Angela descended below skyscraper height, she saw the man splash down. His canopy went slack, but the point of impact disappeared behind the cityscape before she could judge Vaughn's distance from shore.
The woman looked down to see that she was descending toward a parking lot full of vehicles. She tugged on the right riser, desperately trying to steer toward a clear patch of pavement, but the unwieldy, round parachute responded slowly. The odd collection of cars rushed up toward her ill-prepared feet.
"Not good!"
The astronaut was going to come down hard on weak legs and crash into a bunch of strange-looking vehicles.
"No, no, no!" Angela shouted as the mass of metal and concrete rushed toward her.
Chapter 32
Angela cringed in anticipation of the coming agony.
"Shit!"
Suddenly, just as she was about to slam into a dusty car, her feet yanked up and shot skyward. Then the woman started swinging like a pendulum. The canopy had snagged on one of the parking lot's light towers.
"Oh, thank you."
A moment later, Angela convinced the parachute harness to release. It dropped her unceremoniously onto the ground. She collapsed into a pile and then lay there, struggling to catch her breath.
After climbing to a seated position, Angela removed her helmet and gloves. Breathless, she leaned against a hot car. Then she removed the lid from the makeshift mice habitat and fished out her little stowaways. She gently placed the lethargic, gravity newbies inside the rocking helmet. Then she unlocked the top half of her spacesuit.
Dizzying minutes of struggle later, Angela freed herself from the suit's plastic and metal confines and stripped down to a t-shirt and a pair of shorts.
Sitting in the shade of the car, the astronaut pulled the water bladder from the discarded suit and drained it in long, slurping draws.
Angela tried the car's door. Mercifully, it opened. Oven-like heat poured from its interior. From the dusty ground, the driver's seat looked impossibly high. She craned her neck around to check the ignition.
Empty.
The woman reached through the open door and raised the near corner of the mat.
"Thank you!"
Angela grabbed the hidden key and wormed her way onto the hot driver's seat. It felt as if the back of her thighs would melt into its vinyl surface. She set the helmet on the passenger side and belted it into place.
A wave of nausea washed over Angela. Each step exhausted her, every exertion threatening to rob her of consciousness. She could feel her eyes trying to roll back.
The woman leaned into the headrest, breathing heavily. Finally, color returned to her grayed-out world.
"Move it, Commander Brown!" she said, with a growl that launched a fresh spasm of coughs.
It took both of her hands to raise a key that felt as if it weighed twenty pounds. Once she had it in the ignition, it also took both of them to twist it to the start position. The engine lugged, turning over slowly. On the third try, it fired to life.
"Woo … hoo!" she said through a cough.
Angela leaned back and stared at the dusty headliner. She looked over to the passenger seat.
One of the mice had wakened. Nate Junior's pink nose and white whiskers were twitching above the rim of the upturned helmet. He regarded her with his little eyes.
Angela nodded and sighed. "Yeah, yeah, we're going."
By the time she maneuvered the car out of the parking lot, she was out of breath and soaked with sweat. Angela grabbed the crank. After a brief struggle, she managed to crack open her window. Relatively cool air flowed through the gap.
As she guided the car out of the parking lot and turned toward the ocean, Angela looked at Nate and tilted her head toward the opposite window. "Sorry, buddy. You're on your own with that one."
The road's northerly path took her through a burned-out section of the city. Melted asphalt and shattered glass crunched beneath the car's tires. Mid-rises had lined both sides of the two-lane road. Now only their heat-distorted metal frames stood.
A block later, Angela came upon an intersection choked with burned-out husks of vehicles. She turned down a side street. As the car rounded a bend in the road, she glimpsed sparkling blue water through a gap in the carnage. The woman resisted the urge to speed up. She'd be no good to Vaughn if the car plowed into some unseen obstacle or careened off a washed-out road.
A few minutes later, driving as quickly as she dared, Angela rounded the last corner. A broad swath of the Port of Tripoli scrolled into view, revealing an apocalyptic panorama.
The same thing that had happened to the road vehicles had also afflicted the shipping industry. Having followed their autopilots to this location, several unmanned supertankers had run aground. The tremendous inertia of the massive ships had wrought incredible damage. Four of their towering command decks protruded from the mangled wreckage at varying angles. Beneath their crumpled bows, broken concrete slabs pointed skyward like questing skeletal fingers.
A burned-out oil refinery sat to the car's front left, framing that side of the hellish milieu. Beyond the facility, an expansive tank farm covered a finger of land that extended into the bay. The burned and distorted walls of the massive storage vessels leaned inward like collapsed soufflés.
Angela scanned the water. Small, multicolored bits of debris littered its glinting, choppy surface. However, she soon spotted a white patch that she thought must be Vaughn's parachute, but it was too far away to make out any other details.
To the right, beyond the grounded tankers, a long, floating dock extended perpendicularly from the waterfront. Fishing boats of varying sizes lined its gently undulating length.
Angela struggled with the wheel, trying to guide the car toward the pier and its water access. It felt like the power steering had failed. After a moment of breathless struggle, she managed to point the vehicle toward her destination. Breathing heavily, she relaxed her grip. Color flooded back into her grayed-out vision.
The car quickly closed on the pier.
The water's edge rushed toward her.
Angela mashed the brake, but the pedal barely budged.
"Damn it!"
She threw her other foot into the effort, now stomping the pedal with both feet. For good measure, she yanked up on the handbrake as well.
The brake pedal dropped to the floor.
The car didn't slow!
"Really?!"
The subcompact was about to become a submarine!
Large, metal poles bracketed the imminent point of departure.
Using both hands, Angela pulled down on the left side of the steering wheel, leaning her body into the effort. With all the enthusiasm of the Titanic dodging an
iceberg, the car grudgingly heaved to port.
As if welcoming an end to its pathetic existence, the vehicle finally accepted the new course and tracked unerringly toward its demise. The car struck the foot-thick post dead center. The obstacle proved as formidable as Angela had hoped. Black car met white pole with an explosion of glass, metal, airbags, and mice. The front bumper wrapped around the pipe, welcoming the bollard into its warm embrace like the returning prodigal son.
In Angela's expanded perception of time, the helmet floated up from the seat belt's loose confines. A leisure somersault tossed out its furry occupants, briefly reintroducing them to weightlessness. Their legs splayed wide as did their eyes. The mice appeared to stare at her accusingly until they bounced off the already inflated airbag.
Then the normal flow of time reasserted itself with extreme prejudice. The shoulder harness captured Angela, snapping her head forward. Her eyes began to burn as acrid smoke billowed from the airbags.
The woman released the seat belt and fell out of a door that she couldn't remember opening. She clambered back into the car and found the mice lying on the rear floorboard. They seemed lethargic but otherwise unfazed. She deposited Nate Jr. and his siblings back in the now-abraded helmet.
Finally, Angela backed out of the vehicle. She pushed off of the car and stumbled to the edge of the floating pier. Up close, its undulations looked anything but placid. There was a fair bit of chop churning the nearby waters. Sounds of slapping waves and bouncing hardware filled the air. The dock's heaving deck drew even with the top of the waterfront's concrete bulkhead. Angela's eyes widened as she watched it drop six feet.
Her shoulders slumped.
"Oh, come on! Give me a break!"
The woman scanned the water, but still didn't see any sign of the man. She shook her head and then cupped hands around her mouth.
"Vaughn!" The yell came out as a weak croak, barely audible above the din of the waterfront.
Angela inched up to the edge and set the helmet on a shaded patch of concrete. A twitching pink nose regarded her over its chrome ring. She held up a finger.
"Don't worry, Nate. I'm taking you with me."
The woman turned toward the pier and swung her legs over. The second time it came up and touched the bottom of her feet, Angela pushed herself over the precipice.
