by Allen Steele
( THREE )
Aboard the good ship Lou Brock…
no coffee for the wicked…
coming in on a heat shield and a prayer…
wherever it is you think you are, you’re not there.
XI
Forget everything you think you know about lifeboats; whatever it is, it’s probably wrong. The one I stole from the Lee didn’t have wings or landing gear, nor did it have particle-beam lasers for fending off space pirates; the first kind is rare, and the latter exists only in fantasy fics. Mine was a gumdrop-shaped capsule, about twenty feet in diameter at its heat shield, that bore a faint resemblance to the moonships of historic times. All it was meant to do was carry six passengers to a more or less safe touchdown on a planetary surface, preferably one that had an atmosphere. Other than that, it was useless.
But it was a spacecraft, with a liquid-fuel engine and four sets of maneuvering thrusters, which meant I had nominal control over its guidance and trajectory. And although the Lee was still eighty thousand miles from Coyote when I took my unauthorized departure, the boat also had a life-support system sufficient to sustain a half dozen people for up to twelve hours. Therefore, I had enough air, water, heat, and food to keep me alive for three or four days.
So as soon as I was sure that I’d made my getaway, I grabbed hold of the hand rungs upon the ceiling and pulled myself across the cabin. The lifeboat was tumbling end over end by then, but so long as I was careful not to look through the portholes, there was no real sense of vertigo. I reached the pilot’s seat and pulled it down from the bulkhead. It was little more than a well-padded hammock suspended within a titanium-alloy frame, but it had a harness and a headrest, and once I strapped myself in, it was much as if I were in a simulator back at the Academy.
The next step was to gain control of my craft. I unfolded the flat-panel console and activated it. The board lit up just as it was supposed to, and I spent the next couple of minutes assessing the status of my vehicle. Once I was sure it was fit to fly, I pulled down the yoke and went about firing reaction-control thrusters, manually adjusting the pitch, roll, and yaw until the lifeboat was no longer in a tumble. The lidar array helped me get a firm fix on Coyote, and the navigation subsystem gave me a precise estimate of where it would be x-times-y-times-z divided by t minus so many hours later. Once I had all that lined up, I entered the data into the autopilot, then pushed a little green button marked EXECUTE.
A hard thump against my back as the main engine ignited. Gazing at the porthole above my head, I watched the starscape swerve to the left. Coyote, still little more than a green orb capped with white blotches at either end, drifted past my range of vision until it finally disappeared altogether. I wasn’t heading toward where it was at the time, though, but where it would be. That is, if I hadn’t screwed up in programming the comp. And if the comp was in error, then I would be taking a tour of the 47 Ursae Majoris system that would last until the air ran out.
The engine fired for four and a half minutes, giving me a brief taste of gravity, then shut down, causing my body to rise within my harness. I checked the fuel reserves, and muttered a curse under my breath. That maneuver had cost me 42 percent of what was in the tanks; I’d have enough for braking, final course corrections, and atmospheric entry, but practically zero for fudge factor. Like I said, the lifeboat was little more than an uprated version of the cargo pod I’d flown on Highgate. Even the training craft I had piloted at the Academia del Espacio was more sophisticated.
In the bottom of the ninth, I’d earned myself another chance at bat. Yet there was no room for strikeouts, and my next foul ball would be my last.
I let out my breath, closed my eyes for a second. Eighteen hours until I reached Coyote. Might as well offer my apologies to the home team. Groping beneath the couch, I found a small packet. I ripped it open and pulled out a cheap headset. Slipping it on, I inserted the prong into the left side of the console, then activated the com system.
“Hello?” I said, tapping the mike wand with my thumb. “Anyone there? Yoo-hoo, do you read?”
Several long moments passed in which I heard nothing, then a male voice came over: “CFSS Robert E. Lee to CFL-101, we acknowledge. Do you copy?”
“Loud and clear, Lee. This is”—I thought about it for a moment—“the Lou Brock. We copy.”
A few seconds went by. I imagined bridge officers glancing at each other in bewilderment. Then a more familiar voice came online. “CFL-101, this is Commodore Tereshkova. Please use the appropriate call sign.”
“I am using an appropriate call sign.” I couldn’t help but smile. “Lou Brock. Outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. One of the great base-stealers of all time.”
While she was trying to figure that one out, I checked the radar. The Lee was near the edge of my screen, about eight hundred miles away. So far as I could tell, it was keeping pace with me; I had little doubt that, if Tereshkova ordered her helmsman to do so, the ship could intercept my lifeboat within minutes.
“All right, so you’re a baseball fan.” When Tereshkova’s voice returned, it was a little less formal. “You’re very clever, Mr. Truffaut. I’ll give you that. If you’ll heave to and allow yourself to be boarded, I’ll see what I can do about getting you tickets to a game.”
I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “Thanks for the date, Commodore, but I’m going to have to take a rain check. Maybe next time you’re in town?”
For a moment, I thought I heard laughter in the background. In the meantime, I was sizing up my fuel situation. If the Lee started to close in, I could always fire the main engine again. But I needed to conserve as much fuel as possible for retrofire and atmospheric entry; as things stood, I had barely enough in reserve to do that. The Lou Brock was no shuttle, and my margin for error was thin as a razor.
“Ensign, you know as well as I do that this is pointless.” The commodore no longer sounded quite so affable. “My ship is…”
“Faster, sure. No question about it.” I switched back to manual override, then raised a forefinger and let it hover above the engine ignition switch. “And you know as well as I do that there’s no way in hell you can board me if I don’t want you to do so. Allow me to demonstrate.”
I touched the red button, held it down. A quick surge as the engine fired. I counted to three, barely enough time for the lifeboat’s velocity to rise a quarter g, then I released the button. On the screen, the Lee had drifted a few millimeters farther away. “See what I mean? Get too close, and I’ll do that again.”
No answer. If she had any remaining doubts whether I was an experienced spacer, that little display settled them. The Lee was capable of overtaking my lifeboat, sure, but her ship didn’t have the equipment necessary to latch on to a craft whose pilot was willing to alter delta-V at whim. Not unless she wanted to position her craft directly in front of mine…but even if she was foolish enough to do so, my lifeboat would collide with her vessel like a coupe ramming a maglev train.
I’d never do anything like that. For one thing, it would be suicidal; I would die a quick but horrible death. For another, there were also passengers aboard, and the last thing I wanted to do was put their lives in danger. But Commodore Tereshkova didn’t know I was bluffing; perhaps she’d realized that I’d just trimmed my fuel reserves by three-quarters of a percent, but there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t pull silly crap like that again. And no one but a fool would play chicken with a madman.
The comlink went silent, doubtless while she talked it over with her bridge team and tried to determine if I was the lunatic I seemed to be. While they did that, I took the opportunity to get a new flight profile from the nav subsystem and feed the updated info into autopilot. To my relief, I discovered that all I’d done was shave twenty minutes from my ETA. I’d just let out my breath when Tereshkova’s voice returned.
“All right, ensign. Have it your way, if you must.” There was an undercurrent of resignation in her voice. “You may proceed with
your present course.”
“Thank you, Commodore. Glad you see it my way.” Another thought came to me. “I meant it when I said that all I want is amnesty. You’ll communicate this to your people, won’t you?”
“I’ll…” A brief pause. “I’ll ask them to take this into consideration. Lee over.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Lou Brock, over.” I waited for another moment, but when I heard nothing more, I switched off the comlink.
All right, then. For better or for worse, I was on my own.
XII
The Robert E. Lee remained on my scope for another hour or so, but gradually it veered away, its course taking it farther from my lifeboat. Although I had little doubt that its crew continued to track me, the fact remained that it was a faster ship, and it had its own schedule to keep. Through my porthole, I caught a brief glimpse of its formation lights as it peeled away, its passengers probably enjoying dinner and drinks as they chatted about the minor incident that had occurred shortly after the ship had come out of hyperspace. Sweetheart, did you hear about the man in Cabin 4 who lost his mind? Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s been properly dealt with…oh, steward? Another glass of wine, please?
It took another eighteen hours for me to reach Coyote. I didn’t have table service; my sustenance was the ration bars I found in the emergency locker, which tasted like stale peanut butter, and tepid water that I sipped from a squeezebulb. I caught catnaps now and then, only to wake up an hour or so later to find my hands floating in front of my face.
Little sleep, then, and no coffee. Not much in the way of entertainment, either, save for a brief skim of the emergency tutorials on the comp, which told me little that I hadn’t known before. I sang songs to myself, mentally revisited great ball games and tried to figure out where critical errors had been made—the World Series of ’44 between Havana and Seoul was one that I studied more than once—and reviewed my life history in case I ever wanted to write my memoirs.
The rest of the time, I stared out the window, watching Coyote as it gradually came back into view, growing larger with each passing hour. My flight was long enough that I witnessed most of a complete day as it rotated on its axis; what I saw was a planet-size moon a little larger than Mars, lacking oceans but instead crisscrossed by complex patterns of channels, rivers, estuaries, and streams, with a broad river circumscribing its equator. By the time I was scratching at my face and wishing that the emergency kit contained a shaver, I was able to make out geographic features: mountain ranges, volcanoes, tropical savannahs, and rain forests, scattered across subcontinents and islands of all shapes and sizes.
A beautiful world, as close to Earth as anything yet discovered in our little corner of the galaxy. Worth the effort to get there…provided, of course, that I didn’t end my trip as a trail of vaporized ash following the slipstream of a man-made meteor.
When the lifeboat was about three hundred nautical miles away, the autopilot buzzed, telling me that the time had come for me to take over. By then I was strapped into my couch again. I took a deep breath, murmured the Astronaut’s Prayer—“Lord, please don’t let me screw up”—then I switched off the autopilot, grasped the yoke, and did my best to put my little craft safely on the ground.
While I was earning my wings in the Academia del Espacio, I logged over two hundred hours in simulators and four hundred more in training skiffs. Before I was thrown out of the UA, I’d also flown Athena shuttles, including one landing on Mars. But those were all winged spacecraft, complete with all sorts of stuff like elevators and flaps and vertical stabilizers. As I said, though, the Lou Brock was only a lifeboat, and for this sort of thing I’d completed only as much training as I needed to graduate from cadet to ensign: four hours in a simulator, and my flight instructor had forgiven me for a crash landing that would have killed everyone aboard.
I was getting a second chance to show that I’d learned something from that part of my education that few spacers thought they’d ever use in real life. Watching through the windows, I carefully adjusted the lifeboat’s attitude until it assumed a trajectory that would bring it over Coyote’s northern hemisphere. I’d studied maps of the world, so I had a pretty good idea of what was where. Once I determined that I was somewhere above Great Dakota, I initiated entry sequence.
Keeping an eye on the eight ball, I maneuvered the RCS thrusters until the lifeboat made a 180-degree turn, then I ignited the main engine. My body was pushed against the straps as the engine burned most of what remained of my fuel reserves. This lasted several minutes, and once my instruments told me that I’d shed most of my velocity, I shut down the engine and fired the thrusters again, delicately coaxing the lifeboat until it had assumed the proper attitude for atmospheric entry. Then I revved up the main once more, this time to make sure that I didn’t hit the troposphere too fast. When everything looked copacetic, I goosed the yaw and pitch a bit, fine-tuning my angle of attack.
This went on for about fifteen or twenty minutes, during which I barely had time to look out the porthole, let alone give the lidar more than a passing glance. Since I was coming in backward, I didn’t have the luxury of selecting a precise landing site. At that point, though, all I wanted to do was make it through the upper atmosphere in one piece. So by the time a white-hot corona began to form around the heat shield, I couldn’t tell where the hell I was going. Except down.
Gravity took over like a baby elephant that had decided to sit on my chest. Gasping for air, I struggled to remain conscious…and when my vision began to blur and I thought I was about to lose it, I hit the button that would activate the automatic landing sequence. It was a good thing that I did so, because I wasn’t totally myself when the Lou Brock entered Coyote’s stratosphere.
I was jerked out my daze by the sudden snap of the drogue chutes being released. The altimeter told me that I was twenty-seven thousand feet above the ground. Through the porthole, I could see dark blue sky above a cotton-gauze layer of clouds. So far, so good, but I was still falling fast…but then there was another jolt as the drogues were released, and one more as the three main chutes were deployed. I sucked in a lungful of air. All right, so I wasn’t going to become toast. Thank you, St. Buzz, and all other patron saints of dumb-luck spacers.
But that didn’t mean that I was out of danger yet. Although the fuel gauge told me that I still had .03 percent in reserves, that was practically worthless so far as controlling my angle of descent. Firing thrusters now might cause the parachute lines to tangle, and then I’d be dead meat. So my fate was cast to the wind. Although I’d done my best to pick my landing site, so far as I knew I might splash down in a channel. Or descend into the caldera of an active volcano. Or land on top of the Wicked Witch of the East and be greeted by the Lollipop Guild.
In any event, I had no vote in the outcome. So I simply hung on tight and clenched my teeth as I watched the altimeter roll back. At one thousand feet, there was the thump of the heat shield being jettisoned, followed by the loud whoosh of the landing bags inflating.
By then my rate of descent was thirty-two feet per second, according to the altimeter. I began a mental countdown from the half minute mark. Thirty…twenty-nine…twenty-eight…twenty-seven…At the count of twenty, I decided that this was pointless, and simply waited.
Touchdown was hard, but not so violent that I did anything foolish like bite my tongue. To my relief, I didn’t come down in water; there was no rocking back and forth that would have indicated that I’d landed in a channel or a river, just the tooth-rattling whomp of hitting solid ground. A few seconds later, there was the prolonged hiss of the airbags deflating; when I felt the bottom of the lifeboat settle beneath me, I knew that I was safe.
Welcome to Coyote. Now where the hell was I?
XIII
I waited until the bags collapsed, then unbuckled the harness and rose from my couch. After eighteen hours of zero g, my legs felt like warm rubber, but otherwise I had no trouble getting on my feet. The deck seemed stable enough; nonethe
less, the first thing I did was look out the window to make sure that the lifeboat hadn’t come down in a treetop. Nothing but what appeared to be a vast savannah of tall grass.
I already knew the air was breathable, so I went to the side hatch, removed the panel covering the lock-lever, and twisted it clockwise. The hatch opened with a faint gasp of overpressurized air. A moment later my ears popped. Coyote’s atmosphere was thinner than Earth’s, so I swallowed a couple of times to equalize the pressure in my inner ear, then I climbed through the hatch and dropped to the ground, landing on top of one of the deflated bags.
It was early afternoon, wherever it was that I’d landed, the alien sun just past zenith in a pale blue sky streaked here and there with thin clouds. Although the air was a little cooler than I had expected, nonetheless the day was warm; it was midsummer on Coyote, if I correctly recalled recent reports of this world, which meant that it wouldn’t get cold until after Uma went down. About two or three miles away, beyond the edge of the field, was a line of trees; when I stepped away from the lifeboat and turned to look the other way, I saw more forest, with low mountains rising in the far distance.
The lifeboat had a survival kit; I’d already found it during my long trip here. Yet although it included a map of Coyote and a magnetic compass, a fat lot of good they’d do me now. The mountains represented no landmark that I recognized from ground level, and although the compass would help me tell north from south and east from west, a sense of direction was all but useless when I was ignorant of exactly where I had landed. So far as I knew, I was on the outskirts of Munchkinland, about a hundred miles from the Emerald City.
But the kit also included food sticks, six liters of water, a fire-starter, a survival knife, and a satphone. I could always use the satphone to call for help…but only as a last resort. I’d arrived aboard a stolen lifeboat, after having made a somewhat violent escape from a Coyote Federation starship. Therefore, it made little sense to yell for help when it was all but certain that my rescuers would take me to the nearest jail. And although my two feet were safely planted on Coyote soil, these weren’t exactly the right circumstances to beg for political asylum.