They stowed their gear and samples back aboard the electroplane, EP02, and pushed it to the downwind edge of the clearing. Tyrell was about to climb into the right side of the plane when Sawyer said “Hold up, Fred. Are you up for playing taxi driver?”
“What do you mean?”
“After we get back to the Chandra, someone needs to take the plane down to the Krechet to bring Doctor Klaar back here. George wants to get all the biologists together for some kind of confab.”
“Okay, sure. But EP01 is already at the Krechet, she could just fly up in that.”
“They’re going to be attaching pontoons to it to make it amphibious, so it may be unavailable for a while. And Ulrika doesn’t have as many flight hours as you or some of the others, I’m not sure I’d want her doing a solo cross-country with newly attached floats. If you take EP02 here after dropping me off, floats won’t be an issue. Are you okay with soloing from the Chandra back to the Krechet?”
“Sure, no problem.” There was genuine enthusiasm in his voice. Sawyer wondered how much of that was the chance to do more flying versus who his passenger would be.
“Great. In that case why don’t you take left seat back to Chandra. You can do the takeoff and landing, but I’m happy to do some of the flying once we’re in the air.” The plane could of course be flown from either seat, but traditionally the pilot in command sat on the left in a fixed wing, a fact reflected in the layout of the instruments and controls.
Chapter 17: Murder of Crows
Somewhere between Krechet and Chandrasekhar
The flight down had been uneventful, and now the Fred Tyrell and Ulrika Klaar were headed back to the Chandrasekhar. The EP02 was cruising two hundred meters above the ground when they encountered the birds.
“Look at the size of that flock!” Klaar nudged Tyrell and pointed off a few degrees to the right. A dark cloud, so dense it was almost solid, a black mass of protoplasm, swept up from the wooded area on the hills to the north, . “There must be thousands.”
The cloud kept rising. “Tens of thousands,” said Tyrell.
“Can we go closer?”
“Sure, but let’s get a little higher and give them some room.” He increased the throttle and put the plane in a gentle climb.
“This reminds me of something I read,” said Klaar.
“Oh?”
“History of American settlement, the early days. Passenger pigeons. There used to be huge numbers of them, billions. They’d form massive flocks that could block out the sun, over a kilometer wide and hundreds of kilometers long.”
“Go on, pull the other one.”
“No, I am serious. At least, that is what the sources said.”
“Doesn’t make any sense,” Tyrell said. “A flock that large? What would they eat? They would be worse than locusts.”
“There was food in the forests. But that was part of their downfall.”
“Oh? How so?”
“As the forests were cleared for agriculture there were fewer nesting areas, and when the birds began feeding on crops they were hunted. Finally their flocking behavior made them a tempting target. Against animal predators the huge flocks were an advantage, but that made them easy to harvest by humans with nets. They were eventually harvested to near extinction, and by the time the population collapsed to the point hunting was no longer profitable, there were too few left to form a breeding population, at least with what they knew about animals in those days.”
“Sounds like what happened to a lot of fish species—large schools makes taking by net easy, which depletes the breeding population drastically.”
“Yes, the same idea. The ocean used to be full of fish.”
They were over the trees now. Below them the birds were clearly agitated, flying back and forth in all directions with no clear purpose. Tyrell wondered if the plane was disturbing them. “What’s all that about, do you suppose?” he asked.
“This is probably a nesting area, we may be making them nervous.”
“Nesting area?”
“Perhaps. Can we go in a little lower?”
“Okay, I’ll take it back down to two hundred meters.” Tyrell backed off the throttle and began a slow descent. The forested area seemed abuzz with the birds for kilometers in all directions. He hadn’t gotten a good enough look to determine what kind of birds they were, or even if it was a species he’d seen before, but there were a lot of them.
All of a sudden the whole flock, which had been flitting around within twenty or so meters of the treetops, suddenly surged higher into the air. Tyrell looked around but couldn’t tell what might have set them off. Did the plane spook them, or some larger bird? Below them more birds were leaving the trees.
The flocks rose fast, and even as he added power to climb out himself, they overtook the small plane and kept climbing. Their flight was chaotic, birds flying in all directions, unlike the ordered motion he was used to seeing in flocks of birds in flight. They mostly stayed clear of the plane, but a few stragglers or renegades were coming closer. Tyrell eased the power back and trimmed out to lower their airspeed. It was bad enough that the cloud made it hard to see landmarks on the ground, with birds flitting back and forth across his view. “All we need now is a bird strike,” he started to say, and then it happened.
The plane kicked violently to starboard when the first bird hit it, or it hit the first bird. Klaar yelled the obvious. “A bird hit the wing!”
Tyrell focused on trying to counter the loss of lift in the now-dented wing, tilting the stick and pushing the power lever forward. Klaar shouted something at him again, and he looked up to see another cluster of birds in front of the plane. He banked hard, trying to avoid them, but the panicked birds flew in all directions. The rest was inevitable.
Propeller and bird met with a loud WHAP! and an explosion of blood and feathers. The low windshield turned red and Tyrell felt something splash over him. He tensed, wondering if the propeller was all right, and climbed for altitude. The air was still filled with those damn birds. The prop should be okay, but—
There came another burst of feathers and blood as they hit a third bird. Tyrell reached to pull the power back but it was too late. With a loud CRACK the damaged prop blade flew off and the plane shuddered, the now-unbalanced motor vibrating like a love-crazed washing machine. Tyrell gripped the controls tightly and quickly slapped the switch to OFF before the vibration could rip the motor out of its mounts. If that had happened, the shift in balance as the motor ripped free would make the plane unflyable. The sudden silence was disturbing.
He had to find a place to set down right now. Even with the small plane’s phenomenal glide ratio, it couldn’t stay airborne for long without power. He set the trim for their best glide speed and looked for somewhere to set down, all the while also seeking to take advantage of any thermals or ridge lift that he could find. He wouldn’t have long at this altitude.
Klaar, beside him, also moved quickly. She let Tyrell fly the plane but grabbed the radio. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Echo Papa Zero Two calling mayday. We have a bird strike and have lost power.” She looked over at Tyrell. He gave her a quick glance and nodded. “We are attempting an emergency landing. Over.”
“Zero two this is Chandrasekhar, say again?”
“Chandra, we’re calling a mayday. We hit birds and lost the prop. We’re going down. We’re a hundred fifty kilometers north of Krechet, on a bearing of three-five-zero.”
The trees were getting closer.
“Roger Klaar, a hundred fifty klicks from Krechet on three five zero. We’ll get someone to you as soon as we—”
“What was that, Chandra?” The transmission had cut off. They were below the level of the surrounding hills.
Tyrell searched for a spot clear of trees. If he went down in those the plane would certainly be destroyed, possibly taking him and Klaar with it. Then she elbowed him and pointed.
“There’s a field!” She had spotted a clearing partway down the slope.
“Got it,” said Tyrell. “That’s what I’m aiming for.” He nudged the stick to bank the plane around, lining up with the long axis of the field. There were no good indicators of which way the wind was blowing—and the flock of birds was still going crazy, but he was below most of them now. “Brace yourself!”
Tyrell brought the wounded aircraft in over the scattered trees at the base of the field. As they dropped below the treeline the plane dipped and wobbled in the turbulence. He wrestled it back to straight and level, feet dancing on the rudder pedals to keep the plane lined up in the slight crosswind. Damn, they were landing on the side of a hill.
Okay, focus on the horizon, not the slope in front, he told himself. Keep the wings level until the wheels are on the ground. As the airspeed dropped off, he raised the nose slightly to prolong the glide, bleeding off as much speed in the air as he could before the inevitable.
The trees at the far end of the clearing were too close, and getting closer. The plane wouldn’t stop before reaching them.
Tyrell picked a pair tree trunks, a bit over two meters apart, and lined up on the gap between them. If he couldn’t stop before that it was better to take the impact on the wings.
They were just a couple of meters above the ground now, and the stall horn started honking. Just a little further. He briefly wondered how Klaar was doing but couldn’t spare a glance. “Hang on!”
The wheels hit with a bump and the plane lifted on the bounce, coming down again a fraction of a second later. Then the left wheel slammed into something and the plane pivoted wildly around, the wingtip digging into the ground on the uphill side.
Tyrell felt himself pulled violently sideways, and then something hard slammed against his head.
Chapter 18: Mayday Received
Chandrasekhar, Landing Site One
“Echo Papa Zero Two, this is Chandrasekhar, please respond.” Ganesh Patel looked up from the radio to check the time. At his glance, Sawyer did too. It was almost two minutes since they’d received the frantic mayday call. “Klaar or Tyrell, nothing heard. Status report please.”
“Maybe the radio was damaged by the hard landing, or there’s a hill in the way,” said Sawyer. She had been passing the bridge and caught heard the tail end of Klaar’s mayday, and stayed to listen and help if she could.
“Any landing hard enough to damage the radio would have left the crew injured, or worse.” Patel said.
Sawyer cursed under her breath. “Check with the Heinlein,” she said. “Maybe they have something.”
“Centauri Station is below the horizon. We can a signal to them using the relay, but its configuration is not suitable for the aircraft radios.” Patel said. “Anyway, I am raising them now.” He touched a control to change radio channels and hailed them.
“Chandrasekhar, this is Centauri Station. What’s up?”
“The plane with Tyrell and Klaar is down. We got a mayday call about a bird strike and they were attempting an emergency landing.” Patel touched a control to upload the recording to the orbiting station. “That was two minutes ago, we have heard nothing since. They were about a hundred fifty kilometers from Krechet, bearing three five zero.”
“Roger Chandra, Zero Two down one fifty at three five zero from Krechet. We won’t have any contact with them until our orbit brings us around again. We’ll keep you posted. Let us know if you hear anything.”
“The other plane is at the Krechet, any chance they can do a pickup?”
“We’ll talk to them. Last I heard they were making a configuration change, something about putting floats on to make it amphibious. They’d have to reverse that and strip out some other gear to be able to take an extra passenger, or do two trips.”
Sawyer heard a garbled voice in the background, somebody else was talking.
“Ah, wait one, Chandra”
Sawyer’s mind raced. They might be all right, the mayday had faded before impact, so perhaps they were just in a radio shadow. If there was one injury, then the other plane, EP01, could keep the floats and pick up whoever it was, assuming there was somewhere nearby to land. The floats didn’t replace the wheels, so it could still land on dry ground, but the floats meant it would need a longer runway. Were they near the coast? They could run the inflatable parallel to the shoreline, although that would take hours. Damn!
The radio sounded again. “Okay, Chandra, we’re back. Doctor Krysansky raises the point that they might need to rig a litter if there are serious injuries. Any idea?”
“None, Centauri, we lost contact just before they landed. That will have to wait until you can contact them directly, or observe them from orbit.”
“Agreed. All right, let me contact Krechet and have them start prepping the other plane. They’ll have to remove equipment to save weight anyway.”
“Roger that.”
“And don’t worry, I’m sure they’re fine.”
Sawyer rather doubted that, and from Patel’s grim look, he felt the same. They’d have to be incredibly lucky to find a good place to land, although the little electroplanes could set down with very little roll out. If the winds were right and they’d had power.
Chapter 19: No Walk in the Park
EP02 crash site, Kakuloa
Something poked Tyrell’s right side. It wouldn’t let him sleep, and that’s all he wanted to do. He tried to push it away and his hands encountered graphite tubing. The memory started to come back, and with it pain. They had crashed.
He opened his eyes. Or rather, his left eye, the right one was stuck shut. He wiped it with his hand, rubbed it, then blinked it open. Dried blood covered his hand. Ulrika? Where was Klaar? He moved to get up, or tried to. He was still strapped in to the plane’s seat, but the frame was crumpled and the wings had collapsed. It was a piece of the frame that dug into his ribs.
“Ulrika?” His voice came out as more of a croak, and the effort made his head hurt. “Dr. Klaar, you there?” Ow, that was enough. Time to rest again. He closed his eyes.
“Fred, don’t go back to sleep on me.” Klaar’s voice.
“What?” He opened his eyes again. There was Klaar, leaning on the wreckage of the plane right in front of him. He could have sworn she wasn’t there a moment ago.
“Here, can you drink some of this?” She held out a water bottle.
Tyrell sat up a bit further. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. His throat hurt. He grabbed for the water bottle and drank from it greedily, chugging it down.
“Stop,” she said, grabbing back the bottle. “Take it slowly, we don’t have much of that, and you don’t want to make yourself sick. How are you feeling, does anything hurt?”
Tyrell wondered if there was anything that didn’t hurt, but he paused and took stock. Headache, sore throat, the pain in his side from where the fuselage had poked him. His hips hurt, probably bruised from the seat-belt. Aside from that and a general feeling of having been rolled down a flight of stairs in a cardboard box, he didn’t feel too bad.
“No broken bones, if that’s what you mean. How about you?”
“Shaken but not stirred. Just a few bumps and scrapes. What’s my name?”
“What? Ulrika Klaar. You got amnesia?”
“No, just wondering if you do. What’s your name?”
“Fred Tyrell. And my birthday’s June twenty-second. And today is . . . uh, do you want Earth time or Alpha Centauri time? Why do you think I have amnesia?”
“Do you remember waking up before?”
“Uh, no, I just woke up.”
“This is the third time you’ve woken up and we’ve talked. Mind, you’re doing better this time. You took a nasty bump on the head, it knocked you out. You had amnesia for a little while there.”
“What?” The thought of losing his memory was frightening.
“Don’t worry,” Klaar added at the look of alarm on his face, “most likely it was just short term memory. Sometimes that happens, coming around from being unconscious.”
“I was awake
before? Really?”
“Yes you were.” She peered into his eyes and held up a finger. “Now watch my finger.” She moved her arm slowly left and right, up and down. “Good, both eyes are tracking. I don’t think it’s anything serious.”
“How long was I out?”
“Just a few minutes, I think. I don’t know exactly what time we crashed. I was dazed but I don’t think I was knocked out. How is your head? You’re covered in blood but I don’t know how much of that is yours and how much is the bird’s.”
Tyrell gingerly reached a hand up to his throbbing head and patted gently. The matted blood felt sticky in his hair, and—ouch!—there was a cut in his scalp. He felt around that cautiously. He had a nasty lump but it didn’t feel like anything was cracked. He’d probably still be out cold if he’d been hit that hard. “Some of it’s mine, but I’m not bleeding anymore. I hope that bird blood isn’t toxic.”
“It shouldn’t be. We haven’t found anything like that in the birds we’ve examined.”
“Okay,” he said, his self-assessment complete for now. “What now? Where are we and can we get a pick up?”
“Look around. I don’t see anywhere suitable for landing the other plane.”
The ground sloped, and there were small boulders in amongst the low vegetation. Klaar was right. They’d have to hike to somewhere more suitable, wherever that was.
“Have you talked to anyone at either of the ships yet?”
“No, I’m having a trouble getting a signal to either Chandrasekhar or Krechet. It’s probably the terrain.”
“What about Heinlein, Centauri Station?”
“They’re on the other side of the planet at the moment, they should be over the horizon in a half hour or so.”
“I knew they should have stayed synchronous.” Before the landing there had been discussion, some of it heated, as to where Centauri Station would ‘park’. The argument in favor of taking up a synchronous orbit in sight of the landing area was that radio coverage would be continuous, and the lander would be in sight from the Heinlein at all times. The disadvantage was that they’d miss out on a lot of observing time. Without orbiting over different areas of the planet they wouldn’t get the kind of mapping, weather and other data they were here to gather. At the higher altitude of synchronous orbit they’d also be exposed to more radiation, although that should be nothing the antirad drugs couldn’t deal with. They’d elected the lower orbit, inclined to the equator. It was a compromise, of course. Some of the scientists had wanted a polar orbit to get complete coverage of the planet, but Drake overruled that, citing mission safety requirements; a polar orbit would put them out of contact with the landing party for too many hours at a stretch, even with a relay satellite.
Alpha Centauri: First Landing (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 1) Page 12
