A few quakeproof towers, like the Terran Worlds Council building, poked above the bluish miasma covering the megalopolis, but most of the ground structures were cloaked in a smoky veil. Brenna was glad the flier had its own filtering system, could go on total life-support if necessary. She had been on foot in that stuff down there, once or twice in her life, and didn't care to repeat the experience. The big toxic-waste scandal of 2015 had supposedly been the first million-people killer to poison the valley's air, and there had been frequent similar incidents since then, unfortunately, including one this year. Thanks to her reading in the history tapes and Derek's studies for his Hiber-Ship assignment, Brenna knew that this area had always been hazy, even when its population density was near zero, centuries earlier. Use of fossil fuels had compounded the natural problems, of course. But fossil fuels weren't used anymore; the precious resources were needed for other things, and fusion and solar energy had taken up most of the slack. Yet the haze remained. There was always some combustion going on when you collected this many people in one place. Their life processes alone generated a thick atmosphere...
Derek. The simplest things brought him to mind, even aimless thoughts about geography and history. He had called the SE shuttle while Brenna was en route to Earth. Their parting quarrel hadn't been forgotten, nor had what they'd shared for years. He had called nearly every day since then, not letting her put him out of her mind. As if she could! Brenna smiled and set the flier for cruise speed, relishing the leisure. She wasn't due at Mojave Spaceport for another hour, and it was only 150 kilometers away.
She climbed up into the sunlight, peering down through the haze. So. Cal.-L.A. was a better place to live than most on Earth. If you had to live on Earth, you could do much worse than this. At least they had water; on the flier's rear scan screens, Brenna saw a tabular iceberg delivery coming into the harbor, and melt-crew workers swarming all over the floating mountain. Enough fresh water, brought from Antarctica, to quench the thirst of millions and irrigate their crops. Hydro farming was essential. This fertile region had to raise surpluses for those in the glacier-racked climates. The entire scene below fascinated Brenna as a visit to any exotic locale would. A trip to Earth was food for the mind and stimulated the imagination. It tended to make "space brats" more appreciative of what they had, out in the colonies, too. Luna's buried city, Copernicus. Goddard Colony and other space stations. The Martian frontier, carved into the red rocks. Challenges to mankind's ability to adapt. When humanity finally traveled out to really alien worlds, that experience in adapting would be vital. She was glad she didn't have to live on Earth, though. A nice place to visit. No, an interesting place to visit, but... That was elitist, true. But at least the colonists were offering Earth an alternative. Her people could leave, if they wanted to—if they had the courage.
The flier was crossing hectares of suburbs now, cross patches of row upon row of buildings and skimmer transports. She peered down, watching a skimmer train scooting along its rail, heading for the coast. SE Trans Co, hauling passengers. Every time one of those passengers boarded and touched the ident plate and put a fare in the accounts, a percentage of that went to Brenna.
But she had put her share of those riders' fares in pawn, at least for the next year ... as long as the franchise held.
Could they do it? One year. Only one year. They had worked three years after the last, fatal accident before they dared risk it again. By August 2076, Breakthrough Unlimited would have to prove out, or—
The ground and sky exploded.
Brenna was flung violently against her safety harness, horizon lines tumbling. Her ears were ringing from an overwhelming blast of noise.
Reflexes took over.
Rolling. Counter! Go to manual! Move!
Screens began sputtering, tendrils of smoke curling around the edges of the console. The automatic systems weren't putting the internal fire out. Brenna hit another manual circuit, overriding, her hands everywhere on the board at once.
The flier, over on its side, starting to complete another full revolution and another...
Brenna stood on the emergency stabilizer controls and found a bit of power left at her command. Gingerly, telling her stomach to shut up and settle down, she trimmed.
Carefully! Or the tortured ship could go to another mode, a worse one!
Steadying ... steadying ... the roll slowing...
Atmosphere shrieked past the canopy as Brenna held the flier, refusing to let it start another sickening spin. She had it now! Brain in top gear and working frantically.
All the normal systems were dead, the faithful screens blank. What kind of mechanical failure could blank all of them? Brenna was on eyeball mode alone, flying by the seat of her pants, and with very little to control the crippled ship with. She craned her neck quickly, looking back over her shoulder to port and starboard. A falling cloud of propellant was sifting down onto the outer suburbs behind her. Her fuel. Brenna reached for the emergency switchover to reserve, then hesitated. She couldn't say what instinct made her stop. The way the flier was handling, the main tanks must be nearly empty.
Well, I've handled one of these dead stick before ... wonder where that term originated? "Dead stick." No stick here. Glide signal controls, like every modern surface craft...
Her mind raced through manuals she hadn't studied on a vid in years. She needed altitude. She wasn't going to get it, unless she picked up a thermal off the desert ahead. How far? Before all hell had broken loose, the ETA had read ten minutes. That could be a long way, in a ship flying this low and practically starving.
"Mojave Spaceport Traffic Control, this is SE Flier Three-One. Do you copy? I have an emergency..."
The audio circuits were supposed to hold no matter what happened on board the flier. Apparently they hadn't. There was no response. No sign that the little ship was sending anything to the landing area ahead.
Brenna felt keyed taut, exhilarated. Hands very steady, she balanced the controls, stretching the flight, taking in the landscape on either side and down her glide path. The end of the suburbs, coming up. Scrubby open ground not yet invaded by housing or the hortieulturalists. Salt pan. Heat waves rising in distorting curtains.
Beautiful little flier! Steady! Taking the abuse and hanging on!
What had happened? Brenna had no time to speculate. An on-board explosion of some sort—knocking out the systems, almost crippling the flier.
Almost, but not quite.
The ground was getting uncomfortably close. Brenna forgot all the regs and training. Estimates would have to do. Approximate airspeed—200 kph and dropping. Deadly dangerous, landing this craft with full controls at anything higher than 150 kph.
She wasn't ready to bring the nose up yet, though. Brenna had to get more distance out of the flier. She darted a glance sideways and down from the cockpit. Maybe a hundred meters to the baked surface. Not enough altitude, but the best she was likely to do.
Nurse it. Keep it aloft. If there had been a way to put an arm out the side and "swim" it through the air, Brenna would have done that to help the flier stay airborne.
Eight minutes. Still stretching. Each minute cutting that hundred meters down by ten or so.
Somewhere, deep in the more primitive parts of her brain, Brenna knew she should be gibbering with terror. She was fractions of seconds from sudden death. One slip, one errant wind gust catching the flier, and it would be all over.
It wasn't going to happen. She had control. Ride her on out. Steady. Steady ...
Other ships were closing in around Brenna, bracketing her. Breaking the regs, flying as low as she was. Escort? Another hasty side glance to check idents—Space Fleet! This wasn't their territory. They had ships posted on Earth, but only for the Council's convenience. Now, however, they were running rescue, helping a disabled ship into port. But this wasn't an asteroid base or Goddard Colony or a Kirkwood Gap satellite! There would be more room to maneuver, out in space, than there was here, coming in too fast towar
d an ancient lake bed!
The com was useless. Brenna used hand signals to tell the accompanying Space Fleet pilots that she had nil automated control. They answered the same way. "We will nursemaid you in, SE Flier."
"Just stay out of my way when I touch down," Brenna muttered, worried about distractions or hitting a wing tip and cartwheeling and one of the would-be rescuers making it a grand smashup nobody could walk away from.
The landing strip, ahead. She wasn't on the glide path. It didn't matter. She hadn't a prayer of sideslipping the half-kilometer to get to the glide path. Brenna hoped the escort had radioed ahead and warned Traffic to clear the approach. There was certainly nothing she could do to avoid other craft!
Thirty meters off the hard desert surface now. Kilometers of open space ahead of her. She didn't let herself breathe easy yet. Brenna brought the flier's nose up by hairbreadth intervals, easing the airspeed down, feeling the drag when the sturdy craft began to lose her airworthiness.
Twenty meters...
Ten...
Five...
No skids were down. Those controls had been blasted, too, in whatever unknown disaster had crippled the ship. She would have to go in on her belly, dead straight and as smooth as possible, to make it.
Brenna blessed the cooperative air currents, bracing herself, the nose of the flier at optimum angle. Without vid screens, she could only tell by intuition when touchdown would come.
She did. Exactly. A kiss. A hard one. But smack on target where she wanted it, on the strongest part of the underframe. The flier settled and continued to slide, hideous scraping noises shaking the entire one-seater.
Skidding forever, it seemed. Brenna had made longer powerless touchdowns in a simulator, though. She didn't anticipate, balancing her weight to help the flier finish the descent in style.
When the craft stopped and sagged over onto her left wing, it felt like an anticlimax.
Brenna took a deep breath, then unsnapped the safety harness. She cracked the canopy. Desert heat poured into the cockpit. She had thought it was melting hot within, during that hair-raising dead-stick landing. But it was much hotter outside, on the landing strip.
The escort was landing, now that she was safely down. One of them had followed Brenna in, at a safe distance. The pilot was taxiing up, cutting power ten meters aft. By the time the pilot got out and ran toward Brenna's flier, Brenna was doing her walkaround, looking over the disabled aircraft. She felt like kissing the one-seater. Sirens were wailing. Emergency vehicles thundered toward the cripple and the landed escort at flank speed, stirring up enormous clouds of dust. The Space Fleet escort pilot trotted up to Brenna as she completed her circuit of the ship. "Miss Saunder? Traffic lost your signal on their screens. They notified us immediately. You okay?"
Brenna nodded absently. She turned and stared at the emergency vehicle screeching to a stop a short distance away. Firemen and medics piled out at a gallop. Yuri Nicholaiev was in the lead. Brenna waved a cheery greeting to him.
"Brenna! Are you all right?"
His frantic concern and the Space Fleet pilot's amused her. "I'm fine." Brenna patted the flier's cowling. "Afraid she isn't, though. Look at that." Brenna pointed to a gaping hole in the craft's skin. A knife might have ripped through the metal, severing key control linkages and propulsion feed lines all in one deadly slash. "Wonder what happened? I never saw in-flight mechanical failure that looked like that." Yuri bent over, peering up at the damage, fingering some of the dangling metalline connectors. Firemen were spreading out around the flier, using their gauges, testing for radiation and explosion potentials. "She's clean," Brenna said. "Lost most of the propellant back there. Didn't matter, though. She's a forgiving little ship, fortunately."
Yuri's expression was changing from puzzlement to hard anger. He crawled out from beneath the flier, standing up and dusting his hands. The Russian looked intently at the Space Fleet pilot, who had walked a few paces away. The rest of the escort was landed now, and his fellow pilots had hurried to the scene of potential disaster. The military pilots had their heads together and were talking softly. Brenna frowned, questions beginning, amid the triphammer rhythm of her heart and the cold sweat of relief drenching her. What was Space Fleet doing here? She might have expected a Saunder Enterprises Security Flight Force team to rush out to help her, if they had known she was in danger. She might even have expected Protectors of Earth's Civil Enforcement Flight Division to send some of their expert emergency backup pilots. Space Fleet? That didn't make sense. The chief pilot had said Traffic knew she was in trouble the moment her screens went out, when the explosion happened. That was damned fast detective work for Mojave Traffic Control. Or ... someone had tipped them off and put Space Fleet on the alert. That meant someone knew what was happening.
"Yuri?" Chills mixed with the exhilaration chasing through Brenna's veins. The Russian was still staring at the Space Fleet pilots. If there was a silent language former servicemen could use to communicate with those in the Fleet now, Yuri was reading their minds. He didn't like what he was seeing. When he finally turned to her, Brenna asked lamely, "Joe and Adele and Shoje?"
"They're waiting in the V.I.P. lounge or maybe the tower, by now. When we got the news, I was closest to the door. And we couldn't all ride the crash wagon. The firemen will radio them that you're okay."
"Yes, I am. But the flier isn't. She was sabotaged, wasn't she?" There. She had said it. The unthinkable, impossible thing. Brenna saw her own shock and outrage mirrored in Yuri's green eyes.
"The tower said it was a probable malfunction." Memories of Prototypes I and II in that phrase. Yuri lowered his voice to an aching whisper. "It looks like she was cut open with a mini-mine. Those are very precise, not heavy firepower. But nasty."
"Maybe they didn't want to blow me out of the sky, just make it look like an accident," Brenna said, speculating with him. Anger overrode her fear. But she was shivering, cold to the marrow.
Yuri grinned, a bit shakily. "If that is so, it did not work. You are a top pilot."
Brenna looked at the huddle of Space Fleet pilots, thinking. Sabotage! Space Fleet tipped off, right on the spot, seemingly trying to help her. Or maybe to make sure the sabotage attempt worked properly? Why? No, it couldn't have been Space Fleet. They had no motive. But they might be involved in counter-measures against whoever was responsible. The Fleet was a trifle sloppy, if that was the case. They had almost lost Terran Worlds Councilman Ames at the Colony Days gala. If this was related to that conspiracy by the crazies, they had come in too late to do another potential victim—Brenna Saunder—much good. She had saved herself by damned skillful flying and the grace of a lovely little ship. But... why was Brenna Saunder a target in the same category as Councilman Ames? For starters, they were both Spacers. That was good for megatons of fanatics' hate right there! In a cockeyed, mixed-up way, all of this was making a kind of ugly sense.
The chief Space Fleet officer broke away from his huddle and approached Brenna and Yuri. The man's face was a rigid mask. "Miss Saunder? You're not hurt?" She assured him again that she wasn't. "Then, if it's okay with you, we'd like to take over. Permission to contact the general?" He didn't need to explain which general. Ames. Not Ubaldi, the reactionary. "This affair ought to be handled..."
"Discreetly," Brenna finished for him, growing bitter. Politics! Again! "What can I say? You've got the Spaceport Authority in your pocket, too, I'll bet." Brenna shrugged. "Okay. You can bottle it up. I won't tell ComLink. On one condition— you don't tell my father. He's got enough worries. Agreed?"
"Consider it done, Miss Saunder. We don't want this news spread around anymore than you do."
Brenna didn't let him off the hook. "But I want to know what you find out. Tell that to the general, huh?"
The pilot's face was flesh-tone marble. "That'll be up to him, Miss Saunder. Sorry you had a scare." A scare! Space Fleet had a lovely way of understating the case! "We'll check out your shuttle before you leave for the Caribbean, t
o be sure there won't be any repetitions." He saluted her, very crisply, as if she ranked him. Brenna didn't respond, but Yuri returned the salute with an ironic smile. The man met Yuri's gaze, and the thinnest suggestion of an answering smile touched his mouth. Then he wheeled around, barking orders at the emergency team. They confiscated the damaged SE flier, towing her toward the far side of the field, not to the Saunder Enterprises hangars. Brenna and Yuri watched the group until flier and firemen and pilots were hidden by the billowing dust.
Just like this situation! Obscured in dust!
Mojave Spaceport in August was always murderously hot. Brenna was cooking in the mid-morning sunlight. Yet she was freezing. She couldn't stop shivering. The reaction embarrassed her. She worried that Yuri would think the close call aloft had stolen her nerve. It hadn't. But what was happening now was rattling her badly.
Very softly, Yuri asked, "By the way, did we get the franchise?"
His sly tone, sitting on his intense curiosity, made her laugh. "Yes! A one-year deadline."
"That'll be enough," Yuri said confidently. Then his expression darkened once more. "Maybe that is what is behind this.
Earth First fanatics and the Hiber-Ship supporters. We will make Hiber-Ships obsolete..."
Brenna didn't want to talk about that aspect of the race for the stars. Her mind was rushing over the events and what the Space Fleet pilot had said. "Can we trust Ames? Really trust him? He's been our booster, but..."
"You can trust him." No qualifiers, no reservations. Brenna hoped that wasn't Yuri's old Space Fleet loyalty talking, but present-day common sense. He studied her thoughtfully. "Brenna, do ... do you wish to cancel this trip to Saunderhome?"
Outward Bound Page 26
