The Cause of Death

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "So what happens if we don't fly that entry path?" Hannah asked. "If we just flew the sort of short ballistic-entry approach our lander is designed to make?"

  "Best guess? We'd get called an imminent threat and get shot down on final approach. At last report, the main spaceport was under Thelm's Law--but it's in sort of a salient, a thumb-shaped piece of land that's surrounded on three sides by the High Thelek's land--and the Thelm is Dynamist, but High Thelek Saffeer is a heavy-duty Staticist."

  "Wait a second," Hannah said. "There was something else that didn't quite make sense until now." She brought up a close-in detail map of the spaceport, showing their final approach and assigned landing area. "Would you bet your life that there's still Thelm's Law at the spaceport?" she asked grimly. "My guess is that there's been a change in management. Why else tell us to land where there won't be witnesses?"

  Jamie could see it as plainly as she could. Their assigned landing point was ten kilometers away from the normal set-down zone, and even farther off from the terminal itself. "That's about as isolated as you can get on the spaceport," he said. "Far enough off that you wouldn't have to worry much about blast debris in populated areas. Or chance witnesses."

  "Right. My bet would be that your High Thelek friend is in control of the spaceport these days. He's painted a target on the ground and told us to land on the bull's-eye. So, if we fly the assigned approach, we'll beat the hell out of our lander and probably get shot down before we ever get to final approach," said Hannah, staring at the screen. "If we don't fly it, we'll probably get shot down. And if we do manage to land, we'll be sitting ducks. Got any suggestions?"

  "Well," Jamie said in an apologetic tone, "I do have one. But you might not like it."

  That we quit and go home right now? Do what Bindulan suggested and REFUSE THE ASSIGNMENT? She couldn't blame him if he did suggest such a thing. It would be impossible to do their work without at least a minimal level of cooperation from the locals. If instead the locals were looking to kill them at once--and they weren't even exactly clear what they were supposed to be doing on arrival--there would come a point when there would be no point in persevering. "Go on," she said cautiously. If he did suggest bailing out, she had no idea how she would reply. After all, she had pretty specific orders to come home alive, or at least bring Jamie home alive. She liked to think it came to the same thing.

  "Well, if they have any sort of file on the BSI--and they ought to--they'll know we have a reputation for being lousy pilots. And I'm no pilot at all."

  "No, you haven't had the training yet. What's your point?"

  "Well, no offense, but maybe we should play up to that reputation."

  "What do you mean?" Hannah asked.

  "Maybe you should fly the assigned approach route," Jamie said, "but just not very well."

  ELEVENENTRY

  The Lotus lifted off from her docking stand on the upper deck of the Hastings and came about to the proper attitude for her deorbit burn. Hannah moved the Lotus about two hundred meters away from the Hastings and then took her hands off the controls. The Hastings came about to a new attitude and fired her main engines.

  Hannah watched the Hastings--and their ride home--boost out of view toward a more distant and safer orbit, then turned toward the controls of her own little ship with something less than complete confidence. The Lotus was a far more cramped and spartan craft than the Hastings. The pilot and copilot chairs would have been a tight fit even without pressure suits. In the suits, they barely fit at all.

  Hannah was, in theory, qualified to fly such landers, but she had flown only one actual landing in one--and that under far less challenging conditions than they now faced. But there was no sense spending too long with her doubts. This would have to be a largely manual entry. It was all on her.

  "All right," she announced as the countdown clock moved toward zero, "here we go."

  The Lotus's autosequencer fired the main engine, right on spec for attitude, thrust, and duration, leaving them exactly in the groove for entry. That was all well and good--but the rest of the flight was up to Hannah.

  "Okay," Jamie said, watching the tactical plot, his voice coming to Hannah through her suit radio. "Site One coming over the horizon now."

  There was silence in the ship for a minute or two, but then an alert tone went off.

  "We're getting painted by triphase radar," Jamie announced as he silenced the beeper. "That sure ain't traffic control. Definite hostile intent."

  "Might be time to make my first mistake," Hannah said. She brought the Lotus about to a new pitchdown heading and fired the translation thrusters, introducing a navigation error into their previously correct heading. "Oh, dear." She smiled. "I've corrected for an error that wasn't there in the first place. Now I'll have to correct in the opposite direction."

  "They've locked on," Jamie announced.

  The Lotus jerked hard sideways and shuddered violently as Hannah deliberately overcompensated for her phony error. Two warning lights came on, and three distinct audio alerts started beeping.

  "Lock lost," Jamie reported. "I think we have them confused."

  "Wonderful," Hannah replied, fighting the controls. Confusing the opposition wouldn't be all that much help if she managed to get them killed while doing it.

  With a bang and a rattle, the Lotus let it be known that she had hit the top of Reqwar's atmosphere. Almost immediately, two more audio alarms popped on, warning of too-rapid temp increases. The Lotus was a tough little ship, but she couldn't hold up to all that much overheating. Even the flight path they had been instructed to take would have been rough on the lander--and the flight path they were currently on would be harder still on the hardware.

  "Time to do a skip-out," Hannah called out. "Hang on a little bit harder."

  "They have lock again," Jamie called back. "Do it before they get a weapon on us!"

  Hannah gritted her teeth and pulled back on the joystick, shifting their angle of attack. Suddenly the Lotus was pulling twice as many gees, eyeballs down, pressing them hard into their seats with crushing force. More alarms instantly began hooting--then cut out, as the overloads went away, at least for the moment, and the gee forces slacked off. The Lotus had literally bounced off the top of Reqwar's atmosphere, and was heading back out into space. The temperature alerts shut down and the strain gauges slid back into the normal range.

  Suddenly the cabin of the lander was strangely quiet. But it was nothing but a lull before the storm. Things were going to get a lot worse before they got better--if they ever got better.

  "Tell me we're out of range of Site One," Hannah said. She brought the Lotus about to a normal entry heading again. They were near the top of their atmospheric skip, and just about to head back down again.

  "Lock lost," Jamie said. "Site One still has us above their horizon, but not by much. The real question is how closely they're working with Site Two."

  "We'll find out," Hannah said. Site Two was the one that had worried Jamie the most. The Lotus had to do an almost direct overflight of the site, and it was one of the pair of known military installations specifically designed for shooting down hostile spacecraft, with defense responsibility for a whole continent. If Site One passed on all its data to Two, and did it fast enough, then Two would have ample time to reaim their weapons--whatever those weapons might be. The out-of-date fourth-hand intell that was the ultimate source for their planning data hadn't gone into too many details on that point.

  Hannah checked attitude one more time and shifted in her flight chair. This second entry was going to be the trickiest part of the whole operation. As expected, the skip-out entry had thrown off their whole preprogrammed flight plan, and tossed a heap of complications into the mix.

  In order to make it to an on-target touchdown, they were going to have to stretch their high-altitude flight path as far as possible. That meant no fun and games with maneuvers in the next phase. Later, if they got that far, Hannah could throw in some evasive action. For the
moment they would have to fly arrow-straight, right on down the line, just begging the bad guys to get in some target practice. So maybe it was time to stop worrying about an on-target touchdown.

  "We've lost line of sight on Site One," Jamie announced. "We should be over the horizon for Site Two in thirty seconds."

  Unless they weren't. Suppose they got there a little bit sooner? The whole idea of their entry plan was to be unpredictable, to do things that a race of careful and conservative beings would not expect. All right. They were supposed to be slowing down and descending in order to make their entry, and the techs watching their screens at Site Two knew that as well as Hannah did. So why not speed up and go higher?

  Hannah grabbed at the controls, swung the ship around through ninety degrees, and gave the main engines a good swift kick of thrust directly toward the zenith, then another ninety-degree pitch-over to point their nose straight toward the horizon, and pulsed the engines again for another short sharp jolt of power. Then she swung the ship about one more time, putting the Lotus back into her proper stern-first attitude for atmospheric entry. Anyone using the last tracking data to take a potshot at them was going to be aiming in what had just become the wrong place. Maybe she had just saved them--or she had just doomed them by setting up a entry profile the ship couldn't survive.

  She looked over at Jamie. He was staring at her in wide-eyed, speechless shock. Hannah silently dared him to protest. Instead he nodded, once, very slightly, then turned back to his tactical plots.

  "We've got a debris cloud rising toward us," he announced. "Many targets, all sizes from off-scale low to a meter across, radiating out from one point at about eighty-three kilometers altitude, and almost exactly over Site Two."

  "Great. What's all that mean?"

  "They loaded a pile of junk--bits of metal, chunks of concrete, even just plain old rocks--into some sort of canister. They launched it straight up at suborbital velocity, so it would go up, then drop back down. They blew the can up while it still had lots of upward momentum. The debris cloud will get up high enough to hit us, then all fall back into the water. They're hoping we'll fly into the junk and hit something. They're trying to get us with a covert, deniable weapon. It'll look like we rammed into a piece of orbiting junk instead of being deliberately shot down."

  Hannah's gut went cold. "And will we hit something?"

  Jamie studied their tactical plot. "Thanks to that last stunt of yours, I don't think so. We're going to skirt the upper limit of the cloud, instead of flying right through the center of it."

  What was the greater risk? Boosting again to fly a bit higher, but fouling up their entry path even more--or staying as they were and hoping to dodge between the outer fringes of the debris cloud?

  Higher seemed safer to her--if she could bring the Lotus about to the right attitude fast enough and then get her back to the proper entry angle again in time.

  She pitched the lander's nose back toward the zenith and started the setup for another quick burn to boost them just a trifle higher and dodge the top of the debris cloud. At best, she had only a couple of seconds to do what--

  BLAM-BLAM!

  Cabin lights died and the ship was tumbling, pitching, lurching in all directions. Alarms started hooting. There were crashes from the lower deck. Smoke spewed into the cabin, blinding them. Emergency lights cut in but they were dim and hard to see in the blue-black smoke.

  Hit, Hannah told herself. She felt her suit starting to stiffen around her as the air was sucked out of the cabin, leaving only vacuum behind. We must have taken a hit. Maybe two. She felt foolish that it took her any time at all to reach a conclusion that obvious, but the shock had thrown her off.

  Hannah forced herself to be calm, to think. Never mind about the vacuum. Their suits would protect them, at least for the time being. Another danger came first. If the Lotus were still tumbling at entry, they were going to be burned to a crisp. She needed attitude control, fast.

  She reached up to the upper right side of her control panel and flipped open the safety cover on a switch marked STOP ALL ROTATIONS--EMERG USE ONLY.

  She snapped her finger down hard on the switch under the safety cover. Instantly, the ship's automatics set to work, ignoring all other problems or inputs, and simply used every possible system to stop all movement through roll, pitch, and yaw as quickly as possible. Thrusters fired wildly, slamming Hannah and Jamie around in their seats. The autos worked far faster than a human ever could, and the thruster firing steadied down in surprisingly short order, canceling out roll, pitch, and yaw within a few terrifyingly efficient seconds.

  A light came on under the STOP ALL ROTATIONS light, announcing--a bit smugly, to Hannah's way of thinking--ATTITUDE STABILIZED.

  All well and good--but the autos had left the ship with her nose pointed directly at her direction of travel, precisely and exactly the wrong way around for entry into atmosphere. However, it didn't stay pointed that way for long. The nose started yawing about almost at once, and the ATTITUDE STABILIZED light started to flicker, then went out. Hannah quickly switched off the tumble-stop before it could start correcting things again in the wrong direction.

  They were losing cabin pressure. A hole had been knocked in the ship. It had to be the air jetting out that was causing the yaw. She took a moment to try to find the hole--and it wasn't hard to do. By craning her neck around, she could see not one, but two holes in the inner hull, directly opposite each other. One was big, maybe five centimeters across, framed by jagged daggers of metal that jabbed out into the cabin. That had to be the entry hole. Opposite it was a smaller, neater-looking hole. Some sort of opaque gas or smoke was spewing in from that hole, whirling around inside the cabin, then jetting out the larger hole. The exit hole must have punctured some sort of high-pressure gas or fluid line. Either more of the stuff was gushing out into space through a corresponding puncture in the outer hull, or else whatever had hit them had failed to smash all the way through on the way out, and the outer hull was still intact on that side, leaving that opaque gas with no place to go but into the cabin.

  In a sense, it didn't matter. They were in plenty enough trouble even if there was only one break in the outer hull--and besides, for all she knew, the Lotus had taken half a dozen other hits in the same split second, in all sorts of places they couldn't get at. The lower deck, the propulsion system--anywhere.

  But she could at least do something about their yaw problem--and maybe the smoke, too. She flipped the safety off another switch marked CABIN PRESSURE EMERG to reveal a selector switch that could be pointed to various commands, with a big red button marked ACTION under the knob. She twisted the knob to LIFE SUPPORT SHUTDOWN and stabbed down on the button. A tiny screen came on next to it and started counting down from five seconds. She had to hold the button for that long before the system would accept the command. A sensible safety feature--unless you were getting close to the top of the atmosphere, and five seconds seemed like an awfully long time. The count finally crawled down to zero, and the indicators for the ship's life support all suddenly went red. There, she told herself. Now the ship wouldn't try pumping more air into the system.

  Next she had to get rid of the smoke-filled air they already had. Hannah instantly twisted the selector to PURGE CABIN AIR and punched the ACTION button again. Whatever committee of engineers decided such things had set this one to a three-second countdown. The count went to zero, then an indicator lit up saying PURGE VALVES OPEN--but she knew that already. The sudden roaring noise in the cabin, very loud at first, then fading away, told her as much. She didn't worry about making the yaw motion worse. The purge valves outlets on the outside of the ship were positioned so that the air jetting from each was canceled out by the jets from the others. There was still that opaque gas leaking into the cabin, but it was being drawn off by the air purge system.

  The yawing motion seemed to stop as soon as the air purge was complete, and there wasn't any significant amount of gas or smoke to jet out the hole in the h
ull, but Hannah didn't wait for a precision test. She grabbed the control stick and fired thrusters to bring the Lotus back into a more or less correct attitude for atmospheric entry. The instruments all told her she was on-attitude, but stars alone knew which systems had been damaged and which were still working. What if an attitude sensor had been knocked ten degrees out of true? Never mind. Not much she could do about it. The view out the window showed her lined up with the horizon, and that would have to be enough. She had also added an appreciable amount of altitude with her last burns before the impact. She had not the slightest doubt that the bonus altitude had saved their lives--for the moment. But it also meant they were going to hit the atmosphere coming in high, hot, and long. But by how much?

  Hannah glanced over at Jamie, wondering what sort of shape he was in--and discovered that he was watching her. As best she could see through the visor of his suit helmet, he seemed in control of himself, and he had just shown the common sense to keep still and refrain from shouting unhelpful advice at a pilot during an emergency. If anything, he seemed a bit too calm, considering the amount of trouble they were in.

  She nodded toward the back of the cabin. "Box on the back wall marked EMERGENCY AIDS," she said. "Hull patch kits in there. Patch the holes--and do the one with the smoke dumping in first."

  "Ah, right," Jamie said, his voice oddly matter-of-fact. "Okay." He undid his seat restraints and lifted himself very carefully off the seat, using every handhold he could find to move himself toward the rear of the cabin. He moved out of her field of view, and she turned back toward her piloting problems, which left her with more than enough to worry about.

  As best she could see from the numbers, their attitude and velocity at entry were going to be just barely within the safety specs for the Lotus--and that was assuming the lander was basically undamaged, and she certainly wasn't making that assumption. If they were going to have any hope of reaching the ground in one piece, they were going to have to fly as gentle an entry as she could manage.