Dusk (59 page)

Jang had patched the earwig network into the
hailing system of the bridge. “Sensors say we’re starting to heat
up, what do I do about that?” Jang yelled at the holomonitor, no
longer bothering to subvocalize.

“When you hit the atmospheric threshold, the
HUD pipe should pop up on the windshield,” Uzziah’s voice came back
filtered, but quick enough to sound preoccupied.

The ship began to vibrate around them, but
the compensators did their job to keep the floor and consoles
steady. The vibrations became more and more apparent, and the
temperature gauge on the holomonitor was rising at a rate that made
it unreadable. Jang was sure something was wrong. If this wasn’t
the atmospheric barrier, what was?

And then, the dark rings of the re-entry pipe
appeared on the screen, and a warning about reentry calmly filled
the comm system. And then a jolt too violent for the compensators
to adjust sent a ripple throughout the ship. Jang felt his seat
leave his body and then rise suddenly back into his tailbone. The
surface of Asha in the windshield began to spin with an obvious
wobble. The rings of the pipe began to rotate on the windshield in
sync with the rotation of the planet’s surface. Jang grabbed the
controls and tried to manually adjust to the pipe. The ship began
to slow its spin, but in correcting the spin, Jang overcompensated,
and the ship veered too much to the right.

“Whatever you do, make sure you don’t go out
of the pipe or lose your x-axis,” Uzziah’s words were more like a
condemnation than a warning. Just as the words entered Jang’s ears,
the pipe moved to the edge of the windshield, and the side of the
Paracelsus collided with the inside of the imaginary pipe with
enough force to send another unmitigated shockwave through the
ship.

And then the ship began to spin again, and
this time, the x-axis lost stability, and the entire visible
surface of Asha smeared in the windshield. Then they saw space, and
then the fierce orange Set, and then Asha again mixed in a blur.
The gravity drive kept Jang in his seat, but the image through the
windshield made him dizzy.

“What in Miasmic death are you doing?” Six
yelled as Jang closed his eyes to keep his head from reeling.

“Stop whining and hit the thruster kill!”
Jang could have reduced thrust himself, but in his daze, his feet
could not find the proper pedal.

“Which one is that?” Six yelled back.

“The bright red one flashing beneath the
warning light on the holomonitor!” Jang’s ankles were numb and his
feet were unsure. The whirr from the thrusters died down, and the
litany of warning beacons dropped two alarms from their chorus.
Jang threw his body over the controller and wrenched at it. The
spinning slowed steadily, and the view from the windshield settled
with half a starscape on the left and the Ashan plain on the right.
Dark bands on the HUD display sped from right to left across the
Ashan backdrop and registered fluorescent yellow and green against
the desolate black of space.

The vibration became too much for the
balancing systems to adjust to, and the metal rims around the
windshield began to glow until they spawned wispy flames.

“Our situation is not improving!” Six belted
at Jang.

“You’re coming in sideways!” Uzziah’s voice
spread over the intercom.

Jang sat up firmly in his chair, threw his
hair from his face, and gripped the control wheel again, “Will
everyone shut the hell up and let me fly!”

The nose was pitched more toward space than
Asha, and as Jang tried to correct right, he feared another bout of
overcorrection. He whipped the stick to the left, the direction the
ship wanted to spin in, and as it spun back around, he corrected
back to the right. The ship spun 270 degrees and settled back into
the pipe, spinning at a slight, manageable rate.

Uzziah’s voice came back over the
loudspeakers, “Good, you’re back straight. As long as the ship is
still in good shape, the three of you should be able to guide the
ship back to the original LZ.” His filtered voice was calm, but it
still had the hurried sound of preoccupation.

Jang looked over his shoulder. Six was there,
but Cyrus was gone. “You think
two
of us can do it with a
ship that’s on fire?” Jang asked, not bothering to subvoc.

“The fire will go away as soon as you get out
of the buffer zone,” Uzziah reported.

Jang was so calm in his delivery, for a
moment it sounded like he was still subvocalizing, “Will the fire
inside
the ship go away too?”

“What do you mean
inside
the
ship?”

“Well, I looked to see if I could find Cyrus
by his locator, and I noticed one of the zones in the holomonitor
is on fire alert. I cancelled the halon system because Cyrus’s blip
is in that section.”

“There’s no way the fire should have breached
the hull. That hull could take a meteor hit, or two, before it lost
its integrity.”

“I’m just giving the news, not the
editorial,” Jang said, again matter-of-factly as he struggled to
keep the ship inside the pipe. The Paracelsus had electromagnetic
and gravity compensators that made adjustments smooth, but this
flying hotel was still too large for his tastes. As smooth as the
corrections were, the overall process was like trying to guide a
levitating brick through an elephant’s bowel tract.

Six threw off his own harness and grabbed a
fire extinguisher. “I am going to see what’s keeping old boy.”

“Great,” Jang mumbled to himself, unaware he
was subvocalizing, “I get to crash-land a burning, three-man brick
all by myself.”

Septangle Mueller Kanto sat monitoring the
lev traffic control gram, but was baffled. One of their ships had
disappeared from the imager. It could have been destroyed, but by
what? There had not been anything else on the radar since the ship
had radioed it was being attacked by another ship that had actually
never appeared on the gram. The stellar flares had bungholed the
communications on the J.L., and it was possible the flares could
have been interfering with the systems on their base, but it seemed
unlikely because the comm-sat they were receiving their signal from
was geosynchronized over the dark side of the planet.

But nonetheless, the ship had disappeared, and
Septangle Kanto was barking orders at the Hexads beneath him to get
his system back up and running again. They had scrambled two other
light attack fighters to assist the distress call, but suddenly,
the ship was back on the gram, and was sending in the coded entry
signal. The command to open the bay doors was issued, but before
the doors even opened all the way there was a hail of missile fire.
And then the controls went dead. He himself could feel the familiar
tingle of electromagnetic pulse that raised the hair on his neck.
He had instinctively dived away from the window, but as he stood,
he saw the entrance to the hangar bay consumed in flames. It was
hard to keep breath inside his body as he felt for the communicator
controls on his badge. “Plan Theta! Plan Theta!” he yelled, not
bothering to subvocalize as he issued the command to evacuate the
most coveted secret of the Shadow Prolocutor.

Cyrus stumbled from Tanner’s room holding his
side. The ship shook periodically as he walked, rattling his wounds
painfully against his clothes and bandages. He had gotten up
because the holomonitor had reported that the living quarters were
on fire. And he, Jang, and Six had been through too much nonsense
to leave to burn the item that had stalled his egress in the first
place. He had known the living area was on fire, but standing
there, watching it spreading through the hallway around him, he was
perplexed at how the fire had started
inside
the Paracelsus.
It was all very strange. The ship was designed to handle the
stresses that atmospheric reentry exerted, and someone would have
to screw up much worse than they had to have generated this much
internal damage.

Cyrus tucked Tanner’s Bible under his left
arm, away from the cut in his side. It sent a burning sensation
through the wound in his back, but it was much better than the pain
he expected to come from pressing the hard-bound volume against his
ribs. Each step sent ripples of pain through his side, and his
body’s involuntary reactions stiffened his walk. He steadied
himself against the wall, staying away from the opposite wall that
was being slowly consumed by the fire. It was amazing how hot it
was even at this distance. How the fire could have started here
continued to perplex him until he rounded the corner and the answer
became abundantly clear.

Before him stood Six with a gun to his head,
held hostage by one of the Eurydice regulars with a face Cyrus
vaguely recognized. Whoever this monkey wrench was, he was not
nearly as bright as he was ballsy—setting the fire had lured Cyrus
back here, but the only reason the halon system had not engaged
automatically was because either Jang had deactivated it, or the
Shipmate had not been rebooted. If that system had engaged, this
man would have found himself locked between bulkheads and gasping
for oxygen-deprived air. But sometimes balls were enough.

“You’re going to set the locator beacon on
this refuse heap to all frequencies, or we’re all going to die
right here,” the soldier demanded.

As flames spread from the floor up to the
ceiling, Cyrus wondered why the designers of the ship had not used
more flame resistant materials. Then a wisp of smoke arrested his
lungs. It was not a toxic smoke, but it was enough to tweak his
lungs into a spasm. A cough escaped his throat, and the band of the
subvocalizing unit constricted painfully against his Adam’s apple,
conveniently reminding him of its existence.

He was careful not to mouth the words as he
subvocalized, “I need you to kill the internal grav-drive.”

“Under these circumstances?” came over the
earwig. Jang’s reluctance was unnerving, but Cyrus knew he would at
least check his holomonitor.

There was a shimmy in the ship. “Nothing to
say, dexter? Give the order now, or I finish him, complete!” The
soldier’s face contorted as spittle erupted with his threat.

“Do it now,” Cyrus subvocalized, sure his
lips had moved this time. He took a short step forward, but before
he could put his foot down, Six was already in motion.

Six moved his head from the path of the gun and
reached across his own body, twisting the soldier’s wrist along
with the gun, until the barrel pointed at the soldier’s own chest.
Cyrus ignored the pain in his side and lunged forward. Six moved to
adjust his grip, but the soldier moved faster than either of them
had expected, revealing a small hold-out pistol from behind his
back. The ship shimmied again and they were all airborne when the
gun fired.

Uzziah marveled at the scale of the hangar
beneath the pyramid as he saw the lines etched into the wall in
shapes and forms that were hard to discern at this speed. He no
longer needed to watch the smaller square in the holomonitor that
showed the reentry trajectory of the Paracelsus, but he left it on
anyways. He took a moment to press the record button on the
holographic imager as he noticed shimmering lines of light dancing
here and there behind the mysterious lines carved into the rock.
The Echelon was firing small ordinance at them from the ground, but
their fighter was moving too fast, and the shield protected them.
Paeryl quietly manned the weapons systems from the seat next to
Uzziah as the two small Apostate fighters had returned and
synchronized their attacks as they sped ahead the apportioned
Echelon craft. According to Jang’s scans, the pyramid had four bay
doors on each side that led to a large chamber beneath it, which
was flanked on each side by smaller hangars. Even knowing the
layout, it wasn’t until the door leading to the central room opened
that he realized the ominous room they had just sped through was
one of the smaller rooms.

The sheer scale of the central hangar boggled
the mind into vertigo. “What in the Miasma is this?” Uzziah heard
Paeryl murmur as they passed the massive transport-type ships
inside the central hangar that seemed to be in the final stages of
construction. The transports were of relatively contemporary Earth
design, but they were much larger than any Earth endeavor could
have created. The Sagarmatha Mobile Fortress had been halfway
constructed by the Uni before the Uni had reassigned the funds to
this ill-fated mission to Asha. That monstrous ship would have been
at least a quarter smaller than the five titanic constructs before
them. And then, the words Uzziah’s rapidly beating heart had been
waiting for came over the earwig, “Fire on the mountain, run boys,
run.”

Paeryl fired off two more incendiaries and two pulse
missiles as their escort fighters fanned out and then slowed as
Uzziah activated Jang’s overboosters.

Six had heard the command to disengage the
gravity through his earwig, and was surprised that he knew the
Knight of Wands well enough to have expected it. What he had not
anticipated, even as he had brought his right elbow up and back
into the chest of whoever had gorgejacked him, was the
gravitational shift to relieve the leverage he had exerted on his
assailant’s gun hand enough for the assailant to draw a small slug
caster from behind his back.

Cyrus had lunged forward, and the loss of
gravity caused him to twist as he flew across the hallway. Six felt
an emptiness spread across his stomach, and he realized the gravity
dampers had not been inverted, they had been turned off, and Cyrus,
he, and the soldier were all falling. Then the gunshot obscured his
thought. Cyrus’s body snapped backward and his legs flipped upward
at different rates, forming an odd scissor as the shot set him
spiraling backward against the burning wall. The Comptex should
have protected him, but its integrity had been compromised by the
damage he had taken in the jetway.