Great.
That was brilliant, Joe, I told myself. I sealed myself into a falling tomb. Closing the cockpit door had been desperate instinct; I thought of taking refuge there until the Dragon came to rest on the bottom of the lake. At the time, I had not remembered how deep the lake was. Now I remembered. It was deep, like really deep for a lake. My last glimpse of the outside world before the Dragon hit the water had shown we came down near the west shore. How far from the shore? The lake was more shallow right around the shore, then the bottom fell like a cliff for hundreds of meters.
How deep was the water where we had come down? It had no way of knowing, but the Dragon’s continuing tail-first downward plunge was not encouraging. The fall seemed to be steady, not accelerating.
But the Dragon was going to hit bottom, soon. When that happened, it was unlikely to be gentle. Quickly, I pulled myself up by one arm into the seat just abandoned by Reed and strapped myself in. I almost laughed as my discarded helmet bobbed to the surface like a loyal puppy. I picked it up with a right arm that was shooting hot flashes of pain, poured out water and jammed it back on my head, pulling the chin strap tight. The seats had a feature that could engage a safety strap with the back of the helmet; I prayed as I rubbed the helmet against the back of the seat, hoping it would engage by itself. It did. My feet slid into loops under the seat and I placed my hands on my lap in the proper procedure for a crash or ejection. In this case, I anticipated hitting the lake bottom, and I wasn’t bothering to hope it would be gentle.
It wasn’t.
With the displays and instruments out, I could only judge motion by my inner ears. And by my teeth, because they rattled in my mouth when the tail crunched on whatever it hit. However fast the Dragon had been falling, it had enough energy to bounce off the bottom and hit again. The whole ship shuddered and for a split second it hung balanced on the flattened tail structure. Then it spun to the right and came down on its belly. Water sloshed around the cockpit, slamming me against the seat. I thought that was the end of it, but the Dragon must have impacted on an underwater slope, because it rolled again and kept rolling, tumbling side to side many times and nose over tail at least twice. The final impact was jarring enough that a needle-thin jet of water shot into the cockpit from a pinhole crack in the starboard hull. After rocking side to side for a moment, partly due to water sloshing around inside, the Dragon came to rest mostly on its belly, with the nose up at a forty five degree angle, judging by the water collected in the cockpit.
Where was I? With no immediate incentive to move, I stayed securely in the seat, waiting to make sure the Dragon wasn’t going to slip on some rocks and fall again. That’s what I told myself. The truth was, I was so stunned and scared, I couldn’t move.
What got me moving was the high-pitched hissing of that jet of water coming in. It was annoying and it hurt my ears listening to it. It was also an immediate threat, a threat I knew how to deal with. The dropship had kits under the seatbacks to seal hull breaches. The patches in these kits were designed for use in vacuum, we had never tested them in water, especially not in deep, cold water. I was shivering from being in that icy lake water, would the cold prevent the patch material from solidifying? There was only one way to tell.
But, crap. As I pulled out a patch I realized they were designed to be used in a vacuum, where the force of air getting sucked out of the cabin would guide the patch material to find the leak. In the lake, the leak caused water to pour in at high pressure. No way would the patch work. I was totally screwed.
Until I remembered Skippy’s Flying Circus. Desai had flown a big Thuranin ‘Condor’ dropship deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant to extract fuel for the Dutchman’s reactors. Part of the training for that mission had been sealing the cabin against leaks of high-pressure toxic gasses from the gas giant. While I had not trained for that flight, I had watched the training so I could understand what was involved and get an understanding of the dangers.
The Thuranin kit to seal a leak coming into the cabin used a sort of tube with a trigger. Did the kit in the Kristang Dragon have something like that? It did! I found two of them. Being short of time, and being a guy, I of course did not bother to attempt reading the instructions. In my defense, the instructions were printed in Kristang script and my ability to read Kristang was limited to things like ‘Danger’ and ‘Bathroom’. Also, the patch kits were intended to be used in emergency situations; they had to operate intuitively as panicked people could not be expected to handle anything complex. I got the sharp nose of the tube jammed as well as I could into the pinhole, to the point I had to close my eyes as water now sprayed in all directions. The water tried to knock the tube from my hands as I pulled the trigger. There was a muffled bang, the tube jerked in my hands and a harsh chemical stink filled the cabin.
And the leak stopped. Some sort of orange foam hardened quickly, becoming rigid. The hissing sound of incoming water stopped.
I was safe.
No, that was bullshit. I was still screwed.
And alone.
At the bottom of a lake.
Chapter Fifteen
It was getting damned chilly in the cockpit. That was a problem I could do something about. The helmet engaged with the collar of my flightsuit; I had only to make a couple adjustments to get it fully sealed. The booties were already sealed to the pants, and after I pulled gloves out of a pocket, put them on and sealed them at the wrists, I pulled a red cord at the waistband to inflate the flightsuit. There was a hissing, and a thin gap of air filled the space between inner and outer layers of the suit. That made me feel warmer almost immediately. The flightsuit had a heater powered by a battery in the waistband, but I didn’t want to drain power yet. Flightsuits were intended to be used only as short-term emergency protection against loss of cabin pressure in the vacuum of space. Heat would leak away from my suit much faster in cold water than in the vacuum of space.
I was still shivering and my fingers and toes were numb; it was a good sign they were tingling as warm blood seeped back in. Now that I wasn’t feeling like I would freeze to death quickly, I turned my attention to other matters. What worried me more than my own fate was what the hell had happened. Who had fired a missile at us, on a planet that was supposedly uninhabited? Could there still be Elders hanging around Gingerbread? Had they or their ancestors overslept and missed transcending their physical form? I found that difficult to believe. If there were Elders still on Gingerbread, surely they had weapons better than an antiaircraft missile?
That was another puzzle. Only one missile had been fired at us, and even though we had been flying slowly without stealth, the missile had failed to score a direct impact. Its warhead had set off a proximity detonation, perhaps when it realized it was going to fly too low and miss us. When Reed called out the missile warning, I had accelerated and pulled the nose up. That simple maneuver should not have caused any advanced-technology missile to miss its target. Yet the missile fired at us had failed to hit a big, fat target. None of it made sense.
Beyond what had happened, I worried about the three crewmembers who had made it out the door. Where were they? Had they been able to swim to shore? They might be injured, certainly they were in shock although we all trained to act in high stress situations.
What worried me most was if the beings who fired a missile at our Dragon were a danger to crash survivors.
Sami popped to the surface, gasping in air and choking out ice-cold lake water at the same time. That didn’t work too well, so she held her breath despite a desperate need for oxygen, and concentrated on coughing up the last of the water she had swallowed during her desperate struggle to get out of the sinking Dragon’s cabin. After three coughs so violent they hurt, she puked up part of her breakfast and took that as a sign that her lungs were now ready to take in air, so she sucked in a giant lungful. It felt like water still was sloshing around the bottom of her lungs; she would deal with that later. “Colonel Bishop?” She gasped the question to Captain
Zhau, who was treading water and supporting her.
Zhau shook his head and, when Sami waved a hand, released her to swim on her own. “He didn’t get out.”
“He was right behind me!” Sami felt a chill of shock from more than the chilly water. “I shouldn’t have left him!”
“Lieutenant! Reed!” Zhau grasped her right shoulder and put his face close to hers. “You did everything you could. Colonel Bishop is capable of taking care of himself. Once we started sinking, your first responsibility was to get yourself out of there. You won’t do anyone any good if you’re dead, understood?”
“He could have drowned in there. This is my fault,” Sami said, her voice trailing off in pure misery. “I lost the Colonel.”
“Reed, listen to me. Are you listening to me?” Zhau waited until she looked him in the eyes and nodded. “This is not your fault. Someone just shot us down with a missile. It is their fault. And I’d like a word with our super-smart AI, who assured us this planet was uninhabited!”
“Yes, Sir,” Sami’s eyes narrowed in recognition that Skippy the Unreliable had indeed informed the Merry Band of Pirates that Gingerbread was totally uninhabited. For a moment, that took her mind away from the horrifying thought of the colonel being trapped and drowning in the sinking dropship. “He did tell us that.” She felt for her zPhone, and for a panicked moment could not find it in the right thigh pocket of her flightsuit. Then she remembered tucking the zPhone into her left breast pocket and sealing it there just after the Dragon stopped skidding across the water. “We should call- What was that?” Zhau was interrupted by a splash in the water twenty meters away, toward the western shore.
“Air bubble from the ship?” Singh speculated.
Zhau feared the splash might have been caused by a predator under the water. They knew almost nothing about the native life of Gingerbread, and what little they knew came from Skippy. That alien AI had proven to be less than accurate on too many occasions, especially recently. “We should head for shore,” Zhau ordered. “There’s nothing we can do for Colonel Bishop out here, the water is too deep. We barely made it to the surface from where we were, and the Dragon must have gone deeper by now. This water is too cold for us to survive long out here. Swim toward-” He jerked and spun around as another splash appeared, just to the west of him. “Ah!” He exclaimed and clutched his right shoulder.
Sami had been looking at the west shore of the lake, seeking the best spot to swim toward, to get out of the water as quickly as possible. The current in the lake was flowing south, that would drag the three humans along so they needed to plan for drift rather than blinding swimming due west. When she came to the surface, she had been pleasantly surprised to see the lake shore was only a bit more than a hundred meters away; the crashing Dragon at least had skidded across the water in a helpful direction. Captain Zhau had been right; there was nothing the three of them could do for Bishop, and she was already shivering uncontrollably from being in the frigid water. Because she had been looking away from Zhau, she didn’t see him get hit. When she turned, she did see speckles of blood splattered on the right side of his face, and a tear in his flightsuit between his neck and right shoulder. “Sir! You’re hit!”
Zhau felt the wound with his left hand, as his right arm was stiff and hurt to move. From what his fingers could tell, the bullet or whatever it was had only grazed him; the wound was not deep but it was bleeding freely into the water. “It’s just a scratch! They’re shooting at us from the eastern shore!” He shouted the obvious and as he spoke, there was another splash just three meters to his right. This splash was bigger, throwing up a fountain of water and pounding his underwater limbs and torso with a hard shock. “Explosive rounds! Dive!”
Sami would never forget that terrifying swim. She wanted nothing more than to float atop the water, exposing as little as possible of her body to the icy water, but to do that meant death. The sniper shot every time a human was on the surface more than a few strokes, so the three popped up only to gulp in air, exhaling while submerged. They couldn’t swim in a straight line because that would give the sniper an easy target, so the swim of only a hundred meters took more than fifteen minutes. After three minutes, chilled to the bone and shivering so her arms were clumsy, she remembered the flightsuit had internal heaters, and she activated that system. Running only on the battery pack built into the front torso of the suit, the heaters would not last long; Sami only needed to get ashore where the air temperature was like a warm Spring day, so she cranked up the heat and soon felt her arms and legs loosening as they warmed.
Underwater navigation was not her best skill, she realized after the fifth time she popped up for air and saw the lake shore had annoyingly shifted position again. She kept drifting to the left as she swam underwater, made more difficult because she could not risk swimming in a straight line. The water was clear enough to see twenty or more meters, but the lake was deep and there were no underwater markers until she was close enough to shore not to need them.
The three humans touched bottom at roughly the same time, and without needing to communicate with each other, they all knew what to do. Remain under the water until they were as close to the lake edge as possible, then get to their feet and dash up the bank quickly to get behind a tree. Getting behind a rock or the cover of a streambed would be preferable, but the glimpses Sami had seen told her the western shore near her was a steady slope upward without any cover other than sparse trees dotted here and there.
Zhau and Singh touched bottom in an area where the underwater ground was smooth stones that provided good footing, until they reached the line right near shore where wave action kept the exposed rocks wet and therefore covered with slippery algae. Both Zhau and Singh skidded and fell on the algae, before choosing survival over dignity and crawling on hands and knees to gain the shore. Singh’s life was saved by one fall when she slipped and bashed a knee on a stone; just after she fell an incoming round buried itself in the undercut bank at the water’s edge, and the explosive tip blew dirt and mud back at her, knocking her to fall on her ass in knee-deep water. She wasted no time in rolling to one side, ignoring the pain signals from her injured knee and scrambling up the muddy lake bank on her belly. By the time she stood to sprint for the cover a tree, she saw Captain Zhau also stumbling vigorously out of the water just to her north, weaving side to side to throw off the sniper’s aim.
Sami was not so comparatively lucky. When she felt her outstretched hands touch bottom in murky water, she touched not stones but mud and silt. The lake bottom in front of her was a sticky mass that sucked at her boots when she tried to walk in it, and attempting to stand caused her to sink in the muck up to her knees. No way was she going to be able to run quickly enough to avoid providing an easy target for the sniper, she saw instantly. Rather than trying to wade through the stubborn mud, she pulled herself backwards into deeper water and ducked down as a round hit the water where she had been struggling only a moment before. What saved her life was the sniper being distracted by the two humans who had already gained the shore and were temporarily exposed; the enemy’s attention was drawn to Sami only after Zhau and Singh ducked behind the western side of trees and were lost to view.
During the brief moment she had her head above water while trying to walk through the muck, Sami had seen her companions wobbling on the slippery stones along the shore. That, she decided, was not what she was going to do. She could not afford to pick her way carefully over the submerged stones, particularly not as the sniper would now only have her as a target. With the suit heaters fading but her exertions keeping her warm enough, she swam along the shore until she saw what she wanted. A thin stream, really a creek, flowing down into the lake. Barely any water trickled out of the creek now, and the watercourse cut so shallowly into the land that it was useless as cover. But in the time the creek had been flowing, it had flushed small rocks and grains of sand down into the lake. In the lake below the creek, the bottom was sandy and, Sami hoped, firm footing for
a quick dash to a tree she was already focused on.
If the sniper anticipated her plans, her efforts would be for nothing. So she swam north past the creek and popped up for a deep breath, determined to swim all the way in toward the creek until she could leap to her feet and run. Fortunately, the lake bottom was indeed sandy where the creek cut in, and that sand extended out into the water, so she was able to follow the underwater marker until her hands were clutching sand. Sweet, relatively hard-packed sand.
She swam inward, lungs burning until the water was less than waist deep and she feared the sniper could see her body’s heat signature in the shallow water. Gathering herself, she exploded out of the water, rising to her feet and already running, weaving side to side intentionally. In five long strides a foot touched the shore and she made a beeline for a tree, then dodged to her right at the last second to duck behind a different tree that had been her intention all along. Good idea, she thought as she flung herself flat on her belly, because the first tree had a chunk knocked out of it by the impact of an explosive round. Bark, splinters and sawdust were flung in all directions, with the sawdust drifting down to coat her hair.
“Are you all right, Reed?” Zhau called from her left.
“Yes, Sir!” She replied, not daring to move.
“That was good thinking, coming up where the bottom is sand.”
“I saw you slipping on those stones, Sir, figured I couldn’t take time to do that. Do we stay here?”
“The trees up away from the lake are larger, give us more cover. I’m afraid the sniper can knock down one of these trees,” he gestured to the tree he was huddled behind, “with a couple rounds.”
Sami raised her head. “We won’t make it up to the forest, Sir.” The trees grew thickly farther away from the lake, but the slope of the land was steep in that direction, and the denser tree cover had to be half a kilometer away.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 28
