Hex (16 page)

T
HE FORCE THAT ATTACKED THE
REESE
WAS INVISIBLE, UNDETECTABLE, and without apparent source. Nevertheless, it seized the lander like a ghostly hand, pulling the small craft away from its intended course with an intransigent power that defied resistance.

Cayce wasn't about to surrender without a fight. “Full thrust!” he yelled at Mark. “Give it all you've got!” Then he stabbed at the com panel again. “Mayday, mayday!
Reese
to
Montero
, do you copy? Please respond, over!”

From his seat behind Cayce, Sean watched as Mark pushed the throttle bar forward. Despite Cayce's insistence, the pilot wasn't pushing the main engine to its limits . . . or at least not yet. Perhaps he was deliberately holding back to keep something in reserve. Yet the lander trembled, creaking and shaking as if it were caught in an unseen windstorm.

“Mayday, mayday . . . !”

“Forget it, sir. You're not getting through.” Unlike Cayce, Mark remained calm. Panic wouldn't get them anywhere, and shouting only made things worse. “If you want to help, then keep an eye on the engine temperature. I don't want it to start overheating . . .”

A sudden lurch, and Kyra yelped as her datapad was suddenly wrenched from her hands. Sandy cursed as it sailed past her head, and Sean heard the pad smack against the aft bulkhead. His camera began to slide from his grip, and as he clutched it tight to keep from losing it, he felt his helmet tug at his skinsuit collar.

“What the hell?” He held the sides of his helmet with both hands. “What's . . .”

“Must be some sort of magnetic beam.” Kyra glanced back to where her pad had crashed into the bulkhead. “Sorry about that, Sandy. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” Sandy's face was ashen. “Can we go home now?”

“Working on it.” Left hand gripping the yoke, Mark gently inched the throttle forward a notch. Another lurch, then the lander suddenly rolled over. “Damn. It's dragging us.”

Dragging?
Hugging the camera against his chest, Sean looked out the porthole beside him. The lander was no longer above the biopod's sunward side; instead, he saw that they were being pulled toward the spherical node at its end. A cable was only a hundred or so yards away, so close that he could see
Reese
's exhaust plume reflected in the glossy black panel of its solar wing . . . and the luminescent white smear was not going forward but backward.

Mark was right. The beam was hauling them away from the biopod. “I think they want to bring us into that node,” he said. “That might be where . . .”

“I don't care what you think!” Cayce couldn't turn his head around enough for Sean to see his face, but he could hear impatience in the lieutenant's voice . . . and panic. “I just want to get the hell out of here!” He looked at Mark again. “Did you hear what I said?
Full power!”

And then, before the pilot could react, the team leader reached forward, grabbed the throttle bar with his left hand, and shoved it all the way forward.

An abrupt surge threw Sean against his seat. The back of his skull connected with the inside of his helmet; despite the padding, he felt a jolt of pain, and fireflies swarmed before his eyes. The blow must have stunned him for a moment, because when the tiny sparks of light finally vanished, he became aware that Kyra was grasping his hand and asking if he was okay. Somehow, he'd lost his camera; it was no longer in his hands.

“You
idiot
!” From a distance, he heard Mark's voice; it sounded as if he'd finally lost his cool. “Do you know what you're . . . Oh,
shit
, hang on!”

Sean barely had a second to brace his hands against the back of Cayce's seat before something slammed against the lander's starboard side. Another painful jolt told him that he'd sprained his left wrist, but at least he'd prevented a second blow to the head. But when he felt a rush of air against his face, and the decompression alarm began to shriek, he knew that minor injuries were the least of his worries.

“Blow-out!”
Mark yelled. “Everyone, close your helmets! Now!”

Sean reached for his helmet faceplate. The moment that it snapped shut, the suit automatically activated its internal air system. Cayce might have been a fool, but at least he'd done one smart thing by ordering his team to wear skinsuits during this sortie.

Sean glanced out the porthole again. It was whiskered by dozens of hairline fractures, but Sean caught a glimpse of the cable that the
Reese
had just hit. Its nearest black panel was ripped lengthwise, and it appeared to be barely hanging on by its rigging. Then the cable disappeared, and the biopod's sunward side came back into view.

“What . . . ? How . . . ?” Cayce stammered. “Did we hit something?” He apparently had little idea what was going on.

“A cable. We sideswiped it.” Mark hauled at the yoke, struggling to regain control of his craft. “We broke out of that beam, but I think . . .” His voice trailed off as he reached up to hastily snap toggles on the overhead console. “Uh-oh . . . I'm getting nothing from the starboard RCRs.” He glanced back at Sean. “Can you look out there, tell me what you see?”

Sean peered out the window again, craning his neck to see the lander's aft starboard side. Remarkably, most of the wing was still intact, but its canard had been sheared away, and the outboard spoiler appeared to be warped. He reported the damage to Mark, and the pilot tested the flaps.

“No good,” he muttered. “I've got no control over that wing. Landing is going to be tricky.”

“Landing?” Cayce stared at him. “We're not landing anywhere. We're returning to the ship. That's an order.”

Sandy brayed laughter.

“With all due respect, sir, I think not.” Mark nodded toward the cockpit windows. He'd managed to stop the lander's spin, and the biopod had reappeared through the forward portholes. Its transparent roof was upside down, but closer than it had been before. Much closer. “That stunt you pulled has yanked us out of the beam, all right . . . but the damage we've sustained gives me only partial control. With the starboard RCRs out of commission, there's no way I can turn us around, let alone maneuver through the cables again. Not safely, at least.”

“Then . . . then we sit tight. Wait for the
Montero
to rescue us.”

“We've lost most of our cabin pressure.” Mark nodded toward the cabin environment readout; Sean couldn't see it clearly, but its top bar was flashing red. “The suits won't keep us alive and breathing longer than six hours. That, and the fact that we've lost contact with the ship, makes rescue unlikely.”

“You don't know that!”

“Listen to me, Lieutenant.” Mark squeezed the left handle of his yoke; the port RCRs silently fired, and the lander slowly rolled over until the biopod was right side up again. “That's about as much lateral control as I still have. If I try to get us back to the
Montero
, we're screwed, and if we try to wait for rescue, we're screwed, too. Like I said, we're out of options. We're going down, whether we like it or not.”

“But . . .” Cayce began, then stopped himself. Sean caught a glimpse of his face, reflected in the glass of the cockpit windows. Although his expression was distorted by his helmet faceplate, the lieutenant was obviously frightened by the prospect of a crash landing. “How do you think you're going to make it through the roof?”

“He's got a point, Mark,” Sean said. “You don't know how thick it is, or even what it's made of. For all we know, it might be some kind of transparent metal.”

“I know that.” Again, Mark let out his breath. “All we can do is hope for the best.”

Sean traded a look with Kyra, then the two of them cinched their seat harnesses as tight as they could. Behind them, Sandy had become uncommonly quiet, but when Sean glanced back at her, he saw her lips silently moving behind her helmet faceplate; she'd wisely muted her comlink before giving voice to the thoughts in her mind, and Sean had little doubt that they included nothing nice about Lt. Amerigo Cayce.

For the next fifteen minutes, the
Reese
descended upon the biopod in a steep, perpendicular dive. As the massive cylinder grew ever larger beyond the cockpit windows, the snow-covered landscape beneath its roof gradually gained detail. Sean began to make out what appeared to be forests surrounding what were either meadows or, more likely, frozen lakes. At least there was plenty of uninhabited area for Mark to land . . . if he could get them through the roof in one piece.

The pilot kept an eye on his instruments all the way down, even as he fought to keep the lander on a smooth and consistent approach pattern. The biopod roof had become a vast, concave expanse only a few miles away when he spoke again. “Good news. According to the lidar, the ceiling is just a few inches thick, and the spectrometer's not showing any metallic traces. Looks like it's some sort of polymer . . . not glass, but not quite plastic either.”

“So what?” Cayce's voice was hollow. He hadn't said anything since losing his argument with the pilot but had only stared straight ahead with blank, hopeless eyes.

“It means I might be able to punch through that thing if I give it enough juice.” Mark hesitated, then he glanced back at Sean. “What do you say? Roll the dice?”

“Roll 'em.” Sean shrugged. What else did they have to lose?

“All right, then.” The pilot nodded, then he reached for the thrust bar. “Hold on tight. We're going in.”

He pushed the bar all the way forward, and the lander trembled as they were all pushed back in their seats again. As Sean gripped his armrests, he was startled to find Kyra's hand upon his own. One look at her expression through her helmet faceplate, and he knew that she was scared out of her wits. Wishing he could do more for her, he took her hand within his and prayed that it wouldn't be the last human contact he ever made.

He wasn't alone. As the lander hurtled toward the biopod, he heard Mark murmuring something just under his breath. Sean couldn't hear what he was saying, but nonetheless he knew what it was: a prayer-poem from the
Sa'Tong-tas
. Sean had never thought very much of
Sa'Tong
, but for the first time he found himself envying his friend for his beliefs, if only because they seemed to help keep him calm.

If we get out of this alive,
Sean thought,
I'm going to ask him to lend me his copy. It can't be that—

And then the
Reese
hit the biopod roof.

The impact wasn't what he'd expected. Not a crash, but instead a loud and violent
riiiiiip
, as if the lander was tearing through some fibrous membrane. A moment of resistance, then the small craft went through . . . only to have some giant foot kick the lander in the side.

“Hang on!”
Mark yelled. “We're . . . !”

Another sudden jolt, then the lander went into a flat spin. Screaming, Kyra clutched Sean's hand so hard that his knuckles hurt. Through the cockpit windows, he could see the ground spiraling toward them as if the lander were caught in a kaleidoscope. Fighting an urge to vomit, he clenched his teeth as he shut his eyes. That only made the vertigo worse; he opened them again, to see Mark fighting the controls.

“C'mon, you bitch!” he snarled. “Straighten out . . . straighten out . . .”

A muffled shriek of wind on the other side of the fuselage, then it slowly diminished as the lander's wings grabbed at the atmosphere. Another abrupt slam, a little less violent that time, then the spinning ceased.

“We're out of it!” Cayce shouted.

“Not yet.” Mark didn't relax. As if to confirm what he'd said, the lander quivered as it encountered more turbulence. “I can try to glide in, but with the starboard flaps out of commission, I'm not going to have much say over where we're going to land. Or how fast.”

Sean glanced through his porthole. The ruined glass made it difficult for him to see the ground clearly, but the white landscape was closer than he liked. “How far up are we . . . ?”

“Can't tell you. Forward array got knocked out when we went through.” Mark reached for the middle console and snapped a row of toggles. Below their feet, there was the thud of the landing gear coming down. “That'll slow us down a little,” the pilot added. “As soon as we're close enough, I'll kick in the . . . Ah, damn.”

“What's going on?” Cayce demanded.

“I was afraid of this. The starboard VTOL is shot, too.” Another shudder, and Mark returned both hands to the yoke. “Sorry, folks, but we're in for a rough landing.”

“Just keeps getting worse and worse.” Sandy sighed. “Man, I knew I shoulda gone to med school.”

Kyra laughed out loud, but there were tears spotting the inside of her faceplate, and Sean heard an edge of hysteria in her voice. The lander was through the clouds, and the ground was getting closer by the second. Their descent had become more horizontal than vertical, but there was no comfort in the sight of snow-covered terrain rushing toward them. Forests, hills, frozen ponds, the central river . . .

“There. That open area straight ahead.” Cayce pointed to the left through the middle cockpit window. “Think you can make it?”

Mark didn't reply, but instead twisted the yoke to port. The lander veered slightly to the left. “I might,” he said at last, “but we're still going to come down hard.” He raised his voice to be heard over the roar of the wind. “Sean, Kyra, Sandy . . . bend over, put your heads between your knees and hands over your heads.”