by Allen Steele
I spent the rest of the morning in my cabin, lying on my bunk and staring at the walls, determined not to pack up my stuff until someone came by to give me the news. True to her word, Lynn brought me a muffin and some dried fruit; she seemed to see that I was nursing a rage, because she left again without saying much else. Not a long time after that, Jorge dropped by. Apparently he hadn’t expected to find me there, because he hesitated just outside the door, uncertain whether to enter. I told him that it was okay, I wasn’t mad at him, and the kid shuffled into the room, still unable to look at me. The fact that he stayed just long enough to retrieve his toothbrush, and not the rest of his belongings, confirmed my suspicions: one of us would soon get the cabin all to himself, and it wouldn’t be me.
Before he left, though, Jorge stopped at the edge of my bunk. “I’m…I’m sorry ’bout what I did last night,” he murmured. “That was bad of me.”
“Yes, it was. You should have listened to me. I…” Then I saw the tears welling in the corners of his eyes, and realized that the boy was carrying a man-sized burden of guilt. No point in loading on him even more. “But I forgive you,” I finished. “I’m in trouble, not you.”
Jorge nodded. He was probably aware of something he believed I didn’t know, but had been forbidden to tell me. For a second it seemed as if he wanted to say something else, then Susan called for him from the other end of the passageway. She obviously didn’t want him to spend time with that bad ol’ Mr. Lee.
“G’bye,” he said, then he hurried from the room, not bothering to close the door behind him.
Cherokee had just appeared off the starboard bow when a sailor came below to tell me that I was wanted on the bridge. When I got there, I found everyone who mattered waiting for me: Jon, Carlos, Barry…even Susan, who stood off to the side, arms folded across her chest.
As captain, it fell to Jon to break the news. I didn’t bother pretending to be surprised, but neither did I let my temper get the best of me. No sense in letting Susan have the satisfaction of seeing me make accusations I couldn’t defend. Besides, I didn’t want to say anything that might come back to haunt me in a courtroom. But the hypocrisy of the situation still irked me. No one made mention of the fact that Carlos had carried a rifle aboard as well…but then, Carlos was Susan’s father, wasn’t he?
So I took the news as best I could, and went below to pack up my stuff. And that was it. I was no longer a member of the Exploratory Expedition.
Cherokee’s northern coastline was a long expanse of white-sand beach littered with driftwood and the decaying remains of dead fish. Just beyond the beach lay tidal marshes leading to equatorial savanna; it could well have been New Florida, were it not for the low mountains farther inland. Here and there, we made out groves of tall, broad-branched trees that appeared to be second cousins to blackwoods. Sea-swoops circled overhead, protesting our intrusion upon land that they’d become used to calling their own.
The LeMare dropped anchor at the southernmost extent of the bay, about five hundred yards offshore, where Barry and Jon were fairly confident the ship would be able to ride out the storm. It appeared that we hadn’t arrived too soon. To the west, the sky above the Great Equatorial River was already darkened by an ominous wall of cumulus clouds, their purple masses tinted yellowish orange by the midday sun. The hurricane had entered the Meridian Sea and was lashing the archipelago; it wouldn’t be long before its leading edge touched the southern coast of Vulcan.
Once the sails were furled, Jon ordered one of the tenders to be lowered over the side to take Carlos, Lynn, and me ashore. A couple of naturalists wanted to come along, saying that their best chance to study the coastal wildlife would be before the storm hit, but the captain refused; he didn’t want anyone on the beach when the hurricane arrived. On the starboard poop deck, Susan and Jorge said good-bye to Carlos while Lynn and I stood quietly nearby, then Jon climbed down the accommodation ladder to the tender and helped his father-in-law disembark. The crew waved farewell as we headed for the beach, but I knew that it wasn’t me they were going to miss.
The gyro arrived less than a half hour after we made landfall; leave it to the Colonial Militia to have such good timing. The aircraft came in low over the bay, its twin rotors causing small curlicues of spindrift to rise from the water, and we shielded our eyes against windblown sand as it touched down a few dozen yards from where we’d beached the tender. The pilot was obviously in a hurry, because he kept the engines going while he opened the side passenger hatch. There was no time for long speeches, but I couldn’t help but notice the apologetic look in Jon’s eyes when he shook my hand. If he’d wanted to say anything to me, though, he’d already had his chance, so I gave him a polite smile before I shouldered my knapsack and rifle and followed the others to the waiting gyro.
Until then, I’d been tough about the whole situation, telling myself that it was probably just as well; I was no longer welcome on the ExEx and probably never had been. But when the gyro lifted off from the beach, and I gazed down from the portside passenger window to see the LeMare floating in the bay, I couldn’t help but feel something catch in my throat. Until only a day ago, I’d thought I’d be aboard her all the way around the world, helping to make history. Instead, I was destined to become little more than a footnote.
The gyro was a small, five-seat version meant for long-range sorties. The pilot was a young guy by the name of Charlie Banks; he assured us that his craft had more than enough hydrogen in its cells to get back to Hammerhead. Almost as soon as we left the bay and turned northeast to cross the river, though, he received a text message from Ft. Lopez over the wireless. The hurricane had just sideswiped the outpost, causing significant damage, and the commandant had grounded all air traffic in and out of Hammerhead for the next few hours. To make matters worse, the eye of the storm was presently above the Meridian Archipelago; if we attempted to fly straight to Ft. Lopez, there was no question that we’d run smack into the hurricane.
The gyro was already being buffeted by headwinds, its stubby wing-lets rocking back and forth as the engines at their ends growled menacingly. The aircraft hit an air pocket and dropped a dozen feet or so; Lynn grabbed my hand so hard that I nearly yelped, and when I looked at her, I saw that her jaw was clenched. Praying that she wasn’t about to become airsick, I put my arm around her and hoped our pilot wasn’t prone to displays of machismo.
Fortunately, he was smarter than that. A quick look at his nav screen, then he glanced over his shoulder at us. “Gonna take a little detour, folks,” Charlie said, raising his voice above the engines. “I’m going to fly north to Vulcan and fly around Mt. Pesek. If I’m right, that’ll get us around the bad weather, and the volcano should shield us from the worst of the wind.”
I nodded, but Carlos seemed skeptical. “That’s a pretty long distance, especially if you aim to go around the mountain,” he said, leaning forward to peer at the screen. “Isn’t that going to drain your fuel reserves?”
“Yes, sir, it’ll be a stretch…but it’s either this or try to fly through that thing.” Charlie gave Carlos a sidelong stare. “Of course, if you’re in a hurry, Mr. President…”
“No, no. You’re the driver. You know what you’re doing.” Carlos settled back in his seat, then looked at me. He didn’t say it aloud, but I knew what he was thinking: Better hope he knows what he’s doing.
That pretty much settled the issue. The pilot turned the yoke, and the gyro peeled off to the right, putting us on a new course that would take us almost due north, straight across the river toward Vulcan. Now that the aircraft was broadside to the wind, the turbulence became more violent. The gyro bucked like a young shag that had been saddled for the first time, and I pulled Lynn closer to me, putting her head against my chest as I clutched an armrest with my free hand.
The gyro made it across the river in a fraction of the time it had taken the LeMare to make the same trip. A little more than an hour after we left Cherokee, we were past the equator and approaching land
again. Charlie shed altitude as we came upon Squanto; through my porthole, I caught a glimpse of its dense rain forest, and briefly wondered if the island’s birds and animals were aware that a hurricane was bearing down on them. The sun had disappeared behind swollen clouds, and rain-drops were already beginning to spatter the cockpit windows and drool across the portholes.
We passed over the Vulcan Channel, and suddenly Mt. Pesek loomed directly before us, its broad flanks completely filling the windshield. There was no way the gyro could fly over the summit—it was too high for unpressurized aircraft—so Charlie decreased altitude again until we were flying parallel to its lower slopes, then made the northwest turn that would begin our orbit of the volcano. Once we had the mountain between us and the hurricane, the ride became less choppy; the gyro settled down, and gradually Lynn raised her head from my chest to peer cautiously through the porthole.
Seen from above, Mt. Pesek was astonishing. Although only its steppes were visible, what lay below us was a vast forest, with trees clinging precariously to granite bluffs hundreds of feet tall. As the gyro circled the northwest side, we caught sight of an enormous waterfall, higher than even Johnson Falls on Midland, spilling water from a glacial plateau into a deep gorge. Here and there were clearings where wildfires, spawned by lightning storms, had burned away woodlands to expose the rocky ground beneath, yet even these bare places showed evidence of regrowth; the volcanic topsoil, rich in nutrients, was responsible for the lushness of the forest.
“This is amazing.” From his seat on the other side of the gyro, Carlos stared down at the volcano’s northern slopes. “We have got to come back here again. There’s a whole world down there we haven’t seen before.”
“Maybe…but not by boat.” It had been a while since I’d lost sight of water; the Vulcan Channel lay many miles behind us. “And I sure wouldn’t want to bushwhack my way through all that.”
“Why not? Where’s your sense of…?”
“Holy crap!” Charlie yelled. “What the hell is…?”
I looked up just in time to see a mammoth winged shape directly before us. I barely had time to realize that it was a thunderbird before the creature slammed straight into the gyro, colliding with the cockpit so hard that it was as if the windshield had been hit by a giant hammer. Lynn yelped as both Carlos and I instinctively threw up our arms to cover our faces; the windshield remained intact, but as the thunderbird tumbled away, it left behind a spiderweb of shattered glass.
A half second later, there was a sudden jolt from the left side of the aircraft. For a moment, I thought another thunderbird had hit us. Then the master alarm began to shriek and the gyro pitched to the left.
“Dammit to hell!” Charlie shouted. “That goddamn thing just took out the port engine!”
My porthole was streaked with gore, but nonetheless I could see smoke billowing from the nacelle. In an instant, I knew what had happened. The thunderbird had been chopped to pieces by the rotors, but nonetheless it was large enough that most of its carcass had entered the air intake and jammed the turbine.
“We’re gonna crash!” Lynn screamed.
“Shut up!” Charlie clenched the yoke with both hands, fighting for control of his craft. “We’re not going to crash!” He reached forward to flip a switch on his dashboard, and the grinding clatter of the stricken engine abruptly died. “We’re not going to crash,” he repeated, a little more calmly now. “So long as we’ve still got one engine, we can make it to the ground.”
Over his shoulder, I could see the altimeter. Its needle was rapidly moving from the right side to the left. “But we’re not going to make it to Hammerhead either, are we?”
“Nope.” He stole a hand away from the yoke to reach for the wireless. “Mayday, mayday. All stations, this is Mary Zulu Foxtrot five-two, reporting a flight emergency. Midair collision with unknown object, going down on Vulcan. Please respond. Mayday, mayday, calling all stations, this is Mary Zulu Foxtrot five-two…”
As he spoke, Charlie pulled back the lever that rotated the nacelles to vertical landing position. The gyro shuddered, its fuselage creaking against the strain, and I looked out my porthole again. The port rotors had gone still, but oily black smoke continued to pour from beneath the cowling, with the nacelle itself still frozen in horizontal cruise mode. Absurdly, part of one of the thunderbird’s wings remained stuck to the air intake, its dark brown feathers fluttering in the slipstream, almost if the creature was trying to help keep the gyro aloft.
Lynn was almost hysterical. She was certain that it was the last minute of her life. I kept an arm around her, telling her again and again that everything was going to be all right, even as the gyro spiraled toward the ground, the pilot continuing to radio for help even as he struggled with the yoke. Through the shattered windshield, I could see treetops racing toward us. If we went down in all that…
“You know,” Carlos said all of a sudden, his voice weirdly calm, “perhaps we should reconsider how we explore this planet.”
I stared at him, my jaw sagging open in amazement…and then I broke out laughing. He gazed back at me, a wry grin on his face. “You might have something there,” I managed to say. “Maybe next time…”
“Get your heads down!” Charlie yelled. “We’re going in!”
I barely had time to catch a glimpse of the small clearing that had miraculously appeared below us. Then I bent double in my seat, pulling Lynn down with me. My head was between my knees when the gyro hit the ground. The windshield broke apart, spraying glass across my back and neck. Charlie cried out in pain, and Lynn screamed, and then it was all over.
It was a good landing. We walked away from it.
Charlie Banks got the worst of it. His forehead was lacerated by flying glass, and his neck was badly sprained from being whiplashed against the back of his seat, but otherwise he was okay. When Lynn raised her head, I saw blood on her lips, and thought for a moment she’d suffered internal injuries, but all she’d done was bite her tongue. Both Carlos and I were unhurt, although my hands trembled for a long time.
The gyro was totaled. Carlos managed to pry open the side hatch, and we climbed out, with Charlie using our point of exit since his own hatch was staved in. We saw then that, although the landing gear had buckled, at least it had absorbed most of the impact. We hastened to get away from the aircraft, but there was no danger of explosion; Charlie later told us that he’d voided the hydrogen cells in the last few seconds we were still airborne, a precaution that probably prevented the aircraft from blowing up when we crashed. But one look at the ruined nacelle, with its twisted rotors and burned-out engine, and I knew that the gyro had just become a permanent human landmark on this little part of Coyote.
I had to hand it to Charlie. In the couple of minutes between the thunderbird colliding with us and the gyro hitting the ground, he’d located what was probably the only clear and relatively level place within a couple of square miles. The clearing was about a third of the way up the mountain, a few thousand vertical feet below the tree line, one of those places we’d noticed earlier where the vegetation had been burned away by a wildfire and hadn’t yet regrown, leaving a bare, rock-strewn patch just large enough for a gyro to make an emergency landing.
A hard rain was coming down on us; the hurricane may have missed Vulcan, but nonetheless Mt. Pesek was receiving squalls from its blowoff. We still had seven hours of daylight left, but there was no telling how long it would be before we were rescued. Charlie had radioed our position on the way down, yet no one had responded before we crashed; with the wireless out of commission, we didn’t have any way of getting in touch with Fort Lopez. However, once Carlos found a survival pack beneath one of the passenger seats, we discovered that it contained a satellite transponder. Although we couldn’t use it to send or receive verbal messages, the instrument was able to transmit a repeating signal, including our coordinates. I carried it to the center of the clearing and unfolded its dish, using my watch’s electronic compass to align the dish
along the proper azimuth for its signal to be received by one of Coyote’s geostationary comsats. I held my breath when I turned it on, but a red diode on its panel showed me that the instrument was still in good working order.
That done, we went about setting up camp. While Carlos used the first-aid kit to tend to Charlie, Lynn and I unfolded a tarp from the survival pack and lashed it between some trees on the uphill side of the clearing. Once we had shelter from the rain, she and I gathered fallen branches and twigs, digging beneath leaves to locate ones that hadn’t been soaked. A few feet from the shelter, I carefully arranged the wood as a small teepee and surrounded it with loose stones, then used a fire-starter from the pack; a few minutes later, we had a campfire. The pack also contained a small supply of ration bars, but I hoped that we wouldn’t be there long enough to have to rely on them.
Carlos cut up a seat cushion to fashion a neck brace for Charlie; as soon as Lynn and I set up the tarp, he moved the pilot beneath it and made him lie down, propping his head up on the empty pack. Charlie soon went to sleep, and although Lynn volunteered to watch over him, it wasn’t long before she’d dozed off herself, her head cradled between her knees. I was content to let her; the crash had scared her out of her wits, and she needed rest just as much as Charlie did.
That left Carlos and me to stand watch. The rain had let up by then, so we sat on the ground next to the fire, where we could keep an eye out for a rescue gyro. Although we hadn’t spotted any animals other than the occasional glidemunk, just to be on the safe side I reloaded my rifle and kept it by my side. After that, there wasn’t much left for us to do but hope that we wouldn’t have to spend the night on Mt. Pesek.