The Cause of Death Read online

  But did they still want to reach the ground? She could try for an abort-to-orbit, boosting the poor old Lotus into some sort of minimal orbit to take stock there. They'd have the luxury of time to make decisions, and perhaps repairs.

  But that could leave them marooned in orbit. Besides, they would still have to maneuver to try entry again, sooner or later, or else either try to reach the Hastings or have the Hastings reach them--thus bringing the main ship within easy range of their groundside attackers. "Jamie. How's it going back there?"

  "Fine. The hardest part so far has been reading the instructions on the patch. Just about to slap it down--now."

  She heard a grunt and a muffled thud relayed by his suit radio. The smoke and murk in the cabin began to thin out almost instantaneously. That had been quick work. But not quick enough. There was still another patch to go--the harder one, too. And they were short on time.

  "Okay, that's it for the first one," Jamie said. "Once the last of that gas vents, you should probably close the purge vents again before we hit air."

  Hannah had almost forgotten that. She most definitely did not went air vents open while they were slamming into superheated air at umpteen thousand kilometers an hour. "Ah, right," she said. "Get started on the second hole. But I don't think you can use a regular flat patch on the entry hole. There should be a can of expanding foam sealant in that kit," she said.

  "Yeah, I see it."

  "Okay, get started with that," she said. "But meantime--I'm thinking about abort-to-orbit. And we have to decide fast."

  "No," he said. "Anyway, I vote no. That'll just give our friends groundside more chances to shoot at us, once per orbit for each of them--and we'd still either have to boost out, or try to land again anyway. Besides, there might be damage to the Lotus that we don't even know about. What if our power systems got hit? I think that smoky gas stuff was power coolant. We might not even have enough thruster power left to reach orbit."

  "Well, I'm voting against it too," said Hannah, "so I guess it's unanimous." But if they were going to try for a landing, she was going to have to clean up their trajectory. They were going to hit the top of the sensible atmosphere very soon, but the nav displays made it clear they were going in too fast. She was going to have to put the brakes on and correct their entry angle at the same time. And she was going to have to do it more or less by feel. No time for anything fancy. "Jamie," she said. "I've got to do another retro burn. I'm going to do it low-power to keep the stresses down, so it's going to be a long burn."

  "Ah, okay," Jamie said. "Starting when?"

  "In about thirty seconds," she said. "Brace yourself. We'll be braking at about a quarter gee."

  "Good," said Jamie. "Doing this job with gravity has to be easier than floating around squirting sealant everywhere but the right place."

  "Hang on," she said. "I'll give you a countdown from five." She checked her plots once again, tweaked her attitude, and prayed she had gotten things more or less right. "Braking burn in five, four, three, two, one, zero!" She throttled up the engine and felt weight return.

  "Okay," Jamie said. "Try to hold that steady. That makes this a lot easier." She heard a series of grunts and what might have been muttered curses, then silence for a moment.

  Jamie spoke again after one last series of muffled grunts. "All right," he said. "That's the foam sprayed in and around deep enough and thick enough to cover the entry hole. The patch kit came in a metal can. I squirted some expanding foam into that and shoved it down over the whole patch to reinforce things a bit. Best I can do," he said.

  "Good," Hannah said. She immediately closed the purge valves. "Get yourself back over here and strapped in before anything else can happen."

  "Right," said Jamie. He scrambled back into his seat, snapped all his restraints back into place, and started studying the tactical displays again.

  "One thing," he said. "This cabin is now in vacuum. Just bear in mind those patches were designed to keep pressure in. Once we hit the atmosphere, the patches will be keeping pressure out. Any idea what will happen if they fail? Will it matter?"

  "I don't know," said Hannah. "I haven't had a chance to think too far ahead." She checked her displays. "Coming up on three minutes into the burn. Shutdown in mark, thirty seconds."

  And if she had it figured right, that ought to bring them right down to something like a safe entry heading and velocity just a few seconds above the sensible atmosphere.

  The engines died, and they dropped, however briefly, back into zero gee. Moments later, they began to feel weight returning as the Lotus entered the upper reaches of Reqwar's atmosphere one last time and started to decelerate. Almost immediately, the ride started to get rough. A low, thrumming vibration seemed to take hold of the entire ship, rattling Hannah back and forth in her seat. No sound could move through the vacuum in the control cabin, but that only made the shaking and shuddering seem more intense and somehow magnified the creaking and rustling and rattling that came from inside her suit.

  There was a loud and intense bang that came from somewhere belowdecks, hard and sharp enough to get transmitted right through the padding of her seat. Hannah didn't even want to know what that might have been.

  The gee forces were starting to build up as they piled into heavy air and started decelerating more rapidly. A red glow of superheated air began to surround the ship, cutting off their view of the outside world and painting the interior of the cabin a dark and lurid ocher. Hannah could not help but imagine what was going on outside their ship, just out of view. The Lotus was cone-shaped, flying blunt-end first for entry. Nearly all of the energy of entry would be absorbed or reflected by the heat shield in the base of the ship, but the upper hull would come in for its share of heat and stress.

  The heat shield seemed to be working, protecting them from the terrifying frictional heating of their atmospheric entry--but what if it had been hit? What if it had been cracked, or a hole smashed part of the way through it? And the main heat shield wasn't the only danger point. If the upper hull was damaged much, that would do the job. The entry hole Jamie had just patched from the inside could burn through from the outside with no trouble at all.

  All it would take would be a thin finger of superheated air streaming up from the blunt forward end of the Lotus, catching on the lip of the entry hole, heating the exposed edge, worming its way into the interior spaces between the inner and outer hull, heating the outer hull from the inside, weakening it, stressing it as more and hotter supercompressed superheated air pounded its way in, like a blowtorch slicing through paper, like a steel wedge splitting open a seasoned log, peeling back the outer hull, the inner hull, a hot spot forming under the patched hull, the patch itself melting, disintegrating, a tongue of fire stabbing through, slicing the Lotus open, tearing it to shreds, casting them out into the hellish fires of atmospheric entry incinerating the ship and its passengers so fast they would scarcely have time to know that it was--

  BANG! CRASH!

  For a split second Hannah thought it was all about to come true--but then she realized she wouldn't have had time to wonder if it had. She spotted a new flashing red indicator over her displays. CARGO NET 4 UNSECURED, it warned.

  Hannah managed a laugh. A cargo net had come loose, and dumped a stack of supplies to the deck. Wouldn't it be nice if all our problems were that minor?

  The shaking and shuddering began to fade away, and the gee forces were letting up. The red glow was fading away from the window. Hannah realized they had made it through the most violent part of atmospheric entry. They were merely in a gliding high-speed fall, still supersonic, still flying a good seventy kilometers above the ground, well below orbital speed and inside the atmosphere.

  She allowed herself the indulgence of a sigh of relief. They were well away from Site Two, and not yet anywhere near Sites Three or Four. Besides, an orbital attack was one thing, and an airborne intercept or shoot-down something else--but an attack on a vehicle flying at their speed and altitude w
as a third and extremely difficult thing entirely. "Well, we made it this far," she said. "Now we just have to land this thing."

  "Without being shot down," Jamie said. "But if I'm reading the tactical plots right, I might have some good news on that score."

  "I could use good news," Hannah said, studying the ground track and glide path in her flight displays. "Tell me more." There was something there under Jamie's unnerving calm. An intensity, an enthusiasm for it all. He reminded her of a kid playing a game so intently he lost track of time, skipped dinner, stayed up late, and didn't notice he was getting hungry.

  "Well, if I have this figured right, at the time we dropped below the horizon for Site Two, the Lotus was tumbling badly and venting gas. From Site Two's perspective, I think it would look like the Lotus was deep inside the debris field, not at the upper edge. With any luck at all, Site Two will score us as a kill, or at least a probable. Maybe Sites Three and Four will hear that and stand down."

  "Maybe," Hannah said doubtfully. "I wouldn't bet my life on it."

  "Me either," Jamie said. "But at least it's something. The other bit of left-handed good news is that the debris field attack makes it pretty clear they're trying for a deniable attack: one they can make without leaving evidence."

  "What's so great about that?"

  "It limits the ways they can attack. I don't think we'd be flying along right now talking things over if the people at Site Two didn't care about getting caught."

  "That's all good news--sort of," she said. "But we'd be upping our odds if we could dodge Sites Three and Four, keep them from getting line of sight on us. Can we dodge them from where we are now, at our current speed and altitude?" Hannah asked.

  "Site Three shouldn't be a problem. It's to the north, and we're already way off course to the south. Site Four, though. It's just fifty kilometers from Thelmhome Spaceport. We're going to have to get near it if we're going to put down there."

  "At the spaceport?" Hannah had assumed that all their wild maneuvering had thrown them completely off course. She brought up her terminal maneuver displays and saw a map of a big slice of Reqwar, with an elongated oval "footprint" overlaid on its center. The Lotus was designed to function as a lifting body, and could maneuver aerodynamically, within limits. The oval represented the range of locations it would be possible for them to reach under glide, assuming that they did not relight their engines before the final landing maneuvers--and Hannah wanted to use the engines as little as possible.

  Until she studied that footprint, she had assumed they were going to have to put down in whatever clearing they could find. But, somehow, all their maneuvers seemed to have canceled out, and put the spaceport fairly near the middle of their footprint, about a hundred kilometers east of their uncorrected landing point projection. Beyond that, it was pretty clear that the spaceport itself was the only reasonably flat and unforested piece of land they had any chance of reaching. Hannah didn't much like the idea of dropping the Lotus into a stand of trees or setting down on a hillside or in the water, which seemed to be the only other choices they had. Hannah shook her head ruefully. "Okay, Jamie," she said, "you got it right. We don't have much choice in the matter. We're going to have to put the Lotus down at the spaceport."

  She was just starting to figure out how to do that when an explosion belowdecks shook the lander from stem to stern.

  TWELVEHAND

  Zahida gunned her open-top self-drive transporter down the highway toward the spaceport, dodging and weaving among the robotically controlled traffic, breaking every law in the book. She nearly missed the turnoff and swerved violently at the last moment, wheels squealing.

  It was coming on toward evening, Reqwar's sun just touching the western horizon. A high wall of cloud shielded the sky. She glanced at the dashboard timepiece and swore. The humans had arrived in-system and started their descent days before they were expected. The Thelm's guard of defense was nowhere near organized or ready to deploy. Even the tracking center hadn't managed to function properly. They had promised to give her at least an hour's notice of the human ship's arrival, and they had barely managed fifteen minutes.

  And without the guard of defense, Zahida and the pendant charm hanging around her neck were all the humans had left for protection. If she didn't get there in time, the humans likely wouldn't have more than fifteen minutes left to live.

  She gunned the engine harder.

  * * *

  Hannah held on to the control stick as if--and because--her life depended on it. The Lotus was still in the air, still flying under control--but just barely. It had taken all of her piloting skills to keep them from being knocked out of the sky.

  Something in the lower decks had exploded with almost enough power to throw the Lotus on her side. Unless one of them went down to check, they weren't ever likely to learn more about whatever it had been--and neither of them even considered taking such a pointless risk.

  At least Site Four hadn't fired on them. Maybe the Lotus had never gotten into range for them. Or maybe no one thought that a shoot-down from Site Four, so close to the capital and a city full of witnesses, would be "deniable."

  "How close now?" Hannah called to Jamie, still hunched over his tactical display.

  "We're still fifty kilometers east-southeast of our assigned touchdown point," Jamie said. "We have to keep backtracking."

  "I don't know if I can hold this thing together long enough."

  "Hang in there, Hannah. You've gotten us this far."

  * * *

  Zahida peered through the darkness. The spaceport was dead ahead. She was driving flat out--but then she saw something that made her slam on the brakes and come to a violent halt.

  She stared up into the sky. There it was, just breaking through the high cloud deck, and difficult to see in the failing light. The little ship was coming in from the east, not the west. Plainly they had overshot. The Hard Spikes, a tall and cruel range of mountains, were not far off in that direction. It would have been near-on suicide to try to set down a lander there--but scarcely safer to do a full stop in midair, reverse course, and head back to Thelmhome Spaceport.

  The little ship was getting closer. It was canted over hard in the direction of travel, losing altitude as it came in, hard and fast. Smoke was pouring out of at least two hull breaches, and tendrils of vapor were oozing out of three or four places in the aft section.

  Every rescue and alert vehicle at the spaceport should have been out and rolling toward the BSI lander's projected set-down point--but none were in sight. No alarms sounded. That told her a lot. Zahida started up her vehicle again and drove as hard as she could toward the nearest field access gate.

  The guards at the spaceport gate were gawping at the injured ship coming in, and paid the least attention to the vehicle blasting through the entrance at top speed.

  It didn't occur to Zahida until she was through the gate that she could have stopped, shown the Thelm's Hand, and been waved through amid a flurry of respectful salutes--but that would have slowed her up, and she had no desire to risk running into some guard who wasn't particularly impressed by the mere sight of the Thelm's Hand.

  No, you'd rather run the risk of a bullet through your back. She instantly felt a terrible itching sensation along her spine-shields, and hunched her head forward to reduce the target area--but no shots came whistling past her. Maybe the guards were too stunned to respond. Maybe they had received orders not to interfere with whatever happened and were taking that a bit too literally.

  She drove as fast as she could toward the point where the foundering craft looked likely to put down if it didn't crash first.

  Then the weapons fire began--but it was not aimed at her. The low pat-pat-pat of a medium-caliber electromagnetic slug thrower was coming from off to her left. She turned her head to look and saw streaks of fire in the sky. It was unguided tracer fire, one slug in ten treated with a special coating that flared on contact with air. Fortunately, the gunner hadn't come close to hitting the
lander so far.

  No doubt the High Thelek had ordered some underling to "welcome" the humans, with a wink and a flap of the ears to convey what sort of welcome he wished. That subordinate would have ordered his subordinate to give the humans "the proper sort of welcome," and his subordinate might order his people to "keep the humans out of trouble," and his subordinate might instruct his underlings to "see to it the humans were kept from ever causing trouble," until at last some security force squad leader came right out and ordered his gunner to shoot down the human ship with a gun meant for some other job. The investigators, if any, would trace the sequence of orders and discover it was all a most unfortunate mix-up, with each underling misinterpreting his orders and taking more drastic action than was intended.

  And, of course, the electromag guns in the spaceport would all vanish almost before the human vehicle had finished crashing--and if anyone checked, it would turn out to be a long-scheduled plan to decommission surplus hardware, and merely a coincidence that they were removed at about the same time as the unfortunate accident. And, yes, they had been test-fired that day as part of the decommissioning process, and if a few stray rounds had somehow gotten mixed up in the wreckage, that meant nothing at all. Besides, it was a wholly unsuitable weapon for bringing down a spacecraft; therefore, it must have been an accident.

  It took Zahida no longer than the time required for the first burst of tracer fire to streak across the sky to get that far in her thinking. It was all business as usual, the way the game was played.

  Everyone would know that the High Thelek had ordered that the human ship be shot down. But that did not matter, so long as it was nearly impossible to prove that he had done so, and so long as he made it possible for everyone to pretend that he hadn't done so. As long as there was some chain of logic, some line of reasoning, however flimsy or improbable, that made it remotely conceivably that he had nothing to do with the crash, that would be enough. What was it Great-uncle Bindulan had written to her? We have lost our every shred of honor by striving to preserve all appearance of honor.