“Copy, Beanpod. We confirm your burn. Good luck!”
I glanced at a time read-out. Just six minutes until impact…3600 kilometers left to go. Over the past half hour, the globe of the Earth had been growing more and more rapidly, until now it filled almost half the sky. Quickly, I reconfigured the now-blank display to give me a schematic showing our falling pod and Earth’s curving surface below. Alphanumerics gave me a constant check on our speed, G-force, remaining fuel in both kilograms and available delta-V, and the time to impact, all of the figures updating from second to second.
Gently, I throttled up, and the sensation of weight increased. One gravity.
Still okay…
And it increased some more. One point five gravities.
There was no sound—just the vibration transmitted through the hull from the tug beneath us.
And our speed decreased, slowing now by fifteen meters per second per second.
I throttled up yet again. Two gravities, twenty meters per second squared.
I glanced across the compartment at the other passengers. I was worried especially about the two older women. They’d been living on the Moon for some time, and their bones would be brittle. How much deceleration could they stand, and for how long?
And how did I balance their safety with the lives of everyone on-board the falling beanpod?
Both of the women were sagged back in the embrace of their seats. One of them, though, caught me looking at her. Somehow—I will never know how—she lifted her right arm, grimacing with the effort, and managed to shape her hand into a clawed but recognizable thumbs-up.
I flashed the same gesture back, then returned my full attention to my screen.
At two gravities, I’d reached the limit of the Ranger tug’s available thrust. There was a distinct, ongoing shudder now being transmitted through the deck.
Balanced atop a plume of hot helium-nitrogen plasma, we continued our descent.
Five minutes fifty seconds to impact.
Our fuel load was fast dwindling. That actually was helping us. Less fuel meant less mass which meant better thrust efficiency. The question was whether it would help enough. I’d used up a lot of time fumbling with the rendezvous, and then, later, with the flubbed rocket test.
Eight kilometers per second.
Seven point five…
Seven…
Six…
I could feel the shudder through my seat increasing. That was probably the thrust of the rocket acting against our dwindling mass, and the subsequent increase in G-force. We were pushing 2.2Gs, now. I glanced again at the older women, then at the kids. No movement, no way to tell if they were okay…and nothing much I could do about it in any case. I throttled back slightly, dropping back to two gravities, juggling way too many factors in my head as I nudged the virtual controls this way and that.
Past the one thousand kilometer line, still falling at five kps. The revised time-to-impact was now three and a half minutes.
Five hundred kilometers and four kps. Two minutes.
Three hundred kilometers and three kps. One minute thirty.
Two hundred kilometers and two kps. Still one minute thirty…
One hundred twenty kilometers…and suddenly the shudder was much worse. We were beginning to plow through substantially thicker atmosphere now, thick enough that an ionization trail was forming above us.
Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t simply stop at some arbitrary point above the surface. It grows thinner and thinner with increasing altitude, but even 10,000 kilometers up there are still traces of gas present—a few handfuls of molecules per cubic centimeter, say.
Now we were punching straight down through the thermosphere, the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. This was the realm of LEO—Low Earth Orbit. For all intents and purposes it was still vacuum—satellites and space stations could orbit here for years before friction brought them down.
We would be through it and into the mesosphere in seconds.
We were approaching the Kármán line—the most official, if somewhat arbitrary, line marking the beginning of space—one hundred kilometers up.
The shuddering increased with the G-force. The atmosphere was thick enough now to add to our deceleration.
And that meant increasing heat.
This was where things got really dicey. We were down to dregs of fuel remaining in the tug—about five hundred kilos, half a ton. The tank insulation would keep the remaining meta inert for a while, but at some point very soon the insulation would fail, the insides of the tank would start to heat up, and then all of the remaining meta would blow. I had to juggle the numbers now to find the best balance: how much more thrust could I get from the engines, with what safety factor, before I had to jettison the remaining fuel?
One hundred kilometers. Point nine kps…and one minute forty-eight to impact.
Yes! I’d read that right! As we continued to slow, the time-to-impact readout was going up.
But were we slowing enough?
And how much longer could I keep the rocket engines going, because once I jettisoned the tanks, we would be in free fall once more, with the ground still a long way down.
Over the past several seconds, the sky visible through the pod’s wall and deck displays had begun growing pink and hazy. When I glanced up now, they showed a solid wall of pink and orange light rapidly growing brighter as we reentered the atmosphere.
Someone yelled, shrill above the thundering roar of atmosphere across the hull. It was getting hotter…hotter…hotter, until I was convinced the outer hull was beginning to boil away. One panel of the internal display flickered, then went blank…followed by another. The external cameras that had been feeding us our panoramic view were beginning to fail.
External meta tank temperatures were reading nine hundred degrees or a bit higher. Internal tank temperature…frag! Almost eight degrees Kelvin.
Time to get ride of those ticking bombs.
I killed the thrust, and the crushing sensation of weight died away…though not entirely because the atmosphere was clawing at us, still slowing us, as well.
The meta tanks started to separate from the tug’s framework, then were snatched away by the fiery rush of atmosphere, flashing to the side and up…and then we all felt the heavy thud as one of the tanks blew, knocking us to one side.
Another thud was transmitted through the shock wave, but more distant, muffled. Then we felt a savage, wrenching jolt and one of the businessmen screamed, clawing at his seat belt.
“You stay put, fella!” Big Mike yelled.
I didn’t pay them any attention, though, because now I was trying to use the tug’s remaining reserves of hydrazine to add just a bit more deceleration. With a final, shrieking, shuddering, banging crash, the remnants of the Ranger tug tore free in a blazing rush of fragments and debris, and we saw huge, half-molten chunks flashing up past the remaining displays on the bulkheads.
We were in free-fall now. My telemetry was gone. No more tug meant no more sensors giving me vector data, and the ionization outside was interfering with my radio link up to Midway. I no longer had any idea how fast we were falling…or how much time remained until impact.
Only two wall panels remained alive…and, miraculously, the view appeared to be clearing. The sky outside was a deep, intense and utterly brilliant and beautiful deep blue, and I could see clouds against the curve of Earth’s horizon.
We began to tumble.
The rotation was slow and stately, but the Earth’s horizon was swinging up and around with disconcerting finality.
Someone was praying out loud.
It was Jones.
The parachute should deploy automatically, if the panel was, indeed, functioning again. It was designed to fire at a programmed altitude in case a malfunction resulted in the beanpod falling off the elevator.
But the mechanism depended on a radar altimeter mounted somewhere inside the lower end of the beanpod, and the pod itself wasn’t designed for high-velo
city reentry. Its designers had intended the parachute as a safety mechanism to be deployed if the pod was knocked off the Beanstalk within the first couple of hundred kilometers up, before it had acquired much velocity.
Everything now depended on the emergency chute, and at this point my experience counted for nothing. I had no controls, no telemetry with Midway, no readouts, and no thrusters.
I looked at Lily. She had her monocam focused on me, and was continuing to mumble a low-voiced monologue. Carefully, I switched off the holographics and handed her back her PAD. “Thanks,” I said.
My voice cracked. The inside of the beanpod was still stiflingly hot.
“Did we make it?” she asked.
“We’ll know in a—”
The chute compartment opened with a sharp bang, and the drogue parachute deployed, streaming out behind the falling pod and bringing our tumble to a halt. A moment later, the main chute emerged, unfolding into an enormous, two-layered triangular ram-airfoil, bright orange in color and just visible on one of the wall displays, the one overhead, right beside the restroom.
The interior swung dizzily back and forth for a moment, then steadied, as the passengers erupted into a cacophony of cheers and shouts and laughter. The kids and the business people were unbuckled and dancing up and down on the sloping deck and there was nothing Big Mike or his friend could do about it.
A moment later, we punched through a cloud deck, and I could see land and water below—land parceled out in the neat and ordered geometries of the agroplexes, water gleaming in sunlight in some places, shadowed by cloud in others.
We descended…
Chapter Twenty-One
Day 9
I wasn’t sure where we were coming down, but I knew it was well to the east of Cayambe and the Root, and it was going to take time to get a rescue craft to our location, get us pried out of the beanpod, and get us back to New Angeles. I was worried we would miss the press conference, the one Vaughn had called for 1600 this afternoon and which I’d been wanting to attend.
As it happened, though, we didn’t miss a thing. The press conference never happened.
At 1315 we came down in Lago de Secumbíos.
Once, the entire stretch of low, rolling land east of the Andes across northeastern Ecuador, southern Colombia, northern Peru, and western Brazil had been rain forest—the vast and once-verdant Amazonia. Most of the forest is long gone now, save for a few struggling and pathetic reserves in Brazil. For the better part of a century, the agroplexes have been here, attempting to refertilize the poor soil and force-grow crops and gene-tailored animals to feed New Angeles. With the trees gone, erosion became a serious matter, especially along the banks of the larger tributaries of the Amazon—the Napo, the Caquetá, the Pastaza, and others. Eventually, the tributaries had been dammed to keep them from carrying away all of what was left of the topsoil, and the result was a series of large freshwater lakes and, in Brazil, the small, inland Amazon Sea.
Lago de Secumbíos is a fair-sized lake—twice the size of Lake Erie—now occupying eastern Ecuador and northern Peru, extending along the old valley of the Napo as far as the port of Iquitos. Dangling almost upright beneath its bright orange parasail, our beanpod sailed out of a mostly sunny sky and in for a perfect splashdown in the northwestern corner of the lake. The Ecuadorian lake patrol hoverfoil Calicuchima reached us first, but a big tilt-jet hover-lifter out of New Angeles and an escort of fliers arrived moments later. By the time they cut us out—the heat of reentry had warped and partially melted the doors to all three decks—it was past 1600 and all of us were seasick.
But we were alive.
A winch had hauled the entire pod out of the water and set it on the forward deck. With the side cut open, I stepped out, blinking in the sunlight with the others. Lily was right behind me, capturing everything on camera and giving a steady, running commentary as she did so.
She truly seemed to be in her element.
I moved through the crowd on the forward deck of the Calicuchima—the beanpod passengers exhausted but celebrating, the medics attending to injuries, the Ecuadorian sailors passing out blankets and water. All of us were soaking with sweat after the descent, and as our clothing dried we were all feeling chilly. The blankets helped.
There’d been thirty-two people on-board the beanpod, and ten had been hurt. Ms. Quintana, one of the women on my deck, had suffered a fractured femur during the high-G part of the ride down, and a teenager on Deck One had suffered a mild concussion when he chose a bad time to leave his seat. Those were the worst; the rest were bruises, contusions, and heat exhaustion.
All things considered, it could have been a lot worse.
I checked in on Ms. Quintana, and got another solid thumbs-up from her. “A nice landing, Captain,” she told me. “I didn’t know the NAPD flew spaceships, too.”
“Not all of us do,” I admitted. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really expecting to have to use that skill again.”
It had been thirteen years ago and 160 million kilometers away when I’d last piloted a Striker.
I remembered the thud as the fuel tanks had detonated, and realized now just how very close we’d come to dying up there.
Wolf-boy hugged me. So did snake-girl. Others hugged me, or shook my hand, or just congratulated me on getting them all down in one piece. I smiled and accepted the good wishes, but kept pushing through the crowd, searching.
I spotted Big Mike and his friend, blankets over their shoulders, water bottles in their hands.
“Hey, the hero of the hour!” Mike Morales called.
“We’re not quite done yet,” I told him. I looked at his friend. “What’s your name?”
“Steve Matloff.”
“Okay, Steve. You and Big Mike here are now officially duly deputized officers of the law. Raise your hands and say ‘I do.’”
“I do,” they both said in unison, looking confused but playing along.
“Good. Come with me.”
I found Federico Cavallo a few meters away. He saw me bearing down on him and just nodded. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Steve? You stay with this guy. Don’t let him out of your sight. Mike? You’re with me.”
I kept searching, Big Mike following behind. They were here. I knew they were here, somewhere.
And I found them at last, at the edge of the crowd—two soggy, sweat-drowned rats: Coleman and Hodgkins. Hodgkins had a bloody swath of bandaging around his upper left arm and shoulder, where I’d shot him that morning. His face was white and drawn. They’d discarded their disguises as Wiggins and Callahan somewhere along the line, probably back at Midway.
“Ms. Coleman, Mr. Hodgkins,” I said, “you are both under arrest, for murder, for attempted murder, and for conspiracy to commit murder.”
I’d first suspected that they just might be on-board this beanpod when I realized they’d gone down-Stalk from Challenger to Midway ahead of me. I’d not been certain, though, until the bomb had gone off.
Oh, sure, I could flatter myself that the higher-ups in the conspiracy had been trying to kill me with that bomb but until I’d actually arrived at Midway that morning, they couldn’t have been certain as to which beanpod I was going to take. They might have assumed I was going to try to make it to Vaughn’s press conference, but the hour or so that Lily and I were in the Freefall restaurant really wasn’t enough time to get hold of a suitable quantity of high explosives, assemble a bomb, hack into SEA Control to hijack a work pod, and attach the explosives to the beanpod.
No, that bomb hadn’t been meant for yours truly, much as that idea might tickle my ego. It had been intended to kill Coleman and Hodgkins, to make sure we didn’t take them into custody and learn who was heading up this little conspiracy. They’d already been on-board by the time Lily and I got there; Cavallo had been watching for them, not me—watching to make sure they didn’t get off the pod again, to be certain they were there—because chances were good that the
re wouldn’t have been enough genetic material left at the end of the descent for a positive identification.
Hodgkins put a glower on his face and started to rise, but I pulled my pistol from inside my jacket and let him see it. I knew he wasn’t armed—he’d gotten through the backscatter scan at Midway, after all—and he knew that I knew.
He hesitated, then sagged back, looking broken.
But Coleman laughed. “You’re overlooking something, gilún,” she said. “You’re out of your jurisdiction.”
“You think?”
“I know. You’re a New Angeles cop. But right now we’re in Ecuador. I checked with one of the sailors.”
She had a point, actually. The city limits embraced the mountain of Cayambe, the eastern-most bit of New Angeles, but we’d come down at least a hundred kilometers east of there.
We weren’t in the United States now. We were in the sovereign country of Ecuador.
I glanced around. The Calicuchima’s skipper—one Miguel Alvarado—was standing with a group of rescued survivors nearby. “Capitán Alvarado!” I called. “Un momento de su tiempo, por favor.”
“You’re Captain Harrison,” he said, beaming and coming to my side. His English was excellent. “The hero of the hour—”
“Thank you. I need your help.”
“Anything.”
I gestured with my pistol. “These two,” I said, indicating Coleman and Hodgkins, “are wanted in New Angeles for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, and probably quite a few other crimes once we get this sorted out. I intend to arrest them both and take them back with me.”
Alvarado’s smile vanished. “That could pose…problems, señor. This is Ecuador, not Angeles Nuevo…”
“Ah. So we would need to call in diplomats, contact the American Embassy in Quito, that sort of thing.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“There is a principle in law enforcement, Captain, called hot pursuit. I was in pursuit of these two coming down the Beanstalk.”
He looked uncertain. In fact, there are provisions for hot pursuit enshrined both in international law and, specifically, in the Quito Accord. The Ecuadorian capital of Quito, for example, is in effect a suburb of New Angeles, with the international boarder running along the Dr. Manuel Cordova Galarza Highway for many kilometers—and in places zig-zagging through the barrios and even cutting through individual houses. There’ve been plenty of times when a New Angeles cop chased a perp into Quito without bothering to check in at the nearest border crossing. It happens.
Android: Free Fall Page 29