I was about to point out that he didn’t know they were smugglers, though I couldn’t think of anything else they’d be doing that would require that kind of secrecy and isolation, but I was interrupted. By an explosion.
“What the fuck!”
I don’t know who said it first, since all three of us were combat veterans and while profanity may be a crutch for inarticulate motherfuckers, it was also a mainstay of the Marine vocabulary. But we were all three of us on our feet, scanning the sky, trying to find the shuttle.
We found the smoke first, a black line of it staining the sky, streaming out of the starboard jet engine of the shuttle. The lines of the aerospacecraft were plain in the red glow of sunset, bulbous and ungainly, a fat lifting body shape built for utility rather than looks. The silver gleam of its hull was broken by dull squares here and there where the fuselage had been repaired with patches.
Gonna need a couple more, I judged.
“It’s going down,” Vicky noted. “And it’s not going to make Hellnick’s place.”
She was right about that. The thing was already tottering in mid-air, the remaining jet not enough to keep its bulk in the air, and they weren’t using their belly jets, which perhaps meant those thrusters weren’t working or perhaps meant they didn’t know if they were damaged and didn’t want to find out until they were somewhere they could set down. And they were losing altitude fast, coming down not over Hellnick’s land, but over Clines’ farm.
It hit. We were kilometers away, but the whump of the impact rolled across the fields, filtered through the groves of trees separating one property from the other before reaching us distorted and broken. A cloud of dust and smoke rose above the crash site and we all looked at each other.
“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing my jacket off the back of my rocking chair. “We’ll take our rover.”
Vicky and Clines followed. Whether these guys were smugglers or just independent spacers, one thing was for certain, they needed help.
4
The rutted dirt road battered the rover’s suspension and us along with it, the shadows falling deeper with the dusk, hiding chuck-holes and rocks until we hit them. It wasn’t hard to plot a course—I just followed the smudge of black smoke still billowing into the night sky. Flames were licking above the tree line by the time we reached it, and I hit the brakes when I felt the heat, not daring to park the vehicle any closer.
The aerospacecraft itself wasn’t on fire, though the whole starboard side was charred, smoking, and partially melted. The reactor must have scrammed, venting plasma during its emergency shutdown, and although there was nothing on the shuttle that could burn, the same couldn’t be said for the tall grass surrounding it. The flames had spread to the nearby trees, but I wasn’t worried about the fire surrounding us, since there was a swathe of cleared land between us and the crash, but even from a hundred meters away from the shuttle wreck, the heat was already almost unbearable.
“Well,” Clines said, slipping out the rear passenger’s side door, hand resting on the frame of the vehicle as if the solidity of it comforted him, “I don’t think we’re gonna be pulling anybody out of that thing.”
I nodded, slowly opening my own door, not in nearly as much of a hurry now. The cargo bird had shattered on impact, the fuselage split from belly to spine at the cockpit and the end of the cargo hold, and as bad as the damage to the aerospacecraft seemed, the damage to the people who’d been flying it would be even worse.
Images superimposed themselves over the crashed ship, memories swimming across my vision unbidden of drop ships falling out of the sky, trailing fire, Marines in battlesuits leaping from the burning craft in desperation. Too high, much too high to survive the fall, but jumping anyway because you didn’t just give up and ride the bird down, you kept fighting until the very last second.
I snapped back to the moment, shaking away the flashback and forcing the present to cohere back to clarity.
“We should check for survivors anyway,” I said, though the words sounded as if they were coming from someone else, from somewhere over my head. “Just in case.”
I reached back into the cab and grabbed a pair of work gloves, thick enough to protect my hands from the heat. The jacket was heavy, insulated. I needed something to cover my face and I went to the back, ignoring Clines’ disbelieving glare as I fished in our emergency survival kit for a spare T-shirt. I wrapped it around my face experimentally and decided it would have to do, then added goggles to the mix.
Vicky was next to me, equipping herself with similar gear without saying a word. She didn’t try to argue me out of doing it, so I returned the favor, just nodding to her.
“You guys are nuts,” Clines insisted, gaping at us. “Ain’t nobody lived through that!”
“Then don’t come,” I told him.
He sighed and started digging through our equipment, cursing under his breath.
“Goddamn officers,” he murmured. “Always dragging my ass into the fire.”
I didn’t recall dragging his ass anywhere, but he came along for all the grumbling. Even though the ship hadn’t caught fire, it was still insanely hot. The plasma vent had been enough to melt the starboard jet engine to slag and the heat radiated off it in waves, bad enough that the few centimeters of exposed skin I’d left stung as if I’d stuck my flesh over a campfire. I paused and adjusted my clothes, covering up what hurt and hoping it wouldn’t blister, particularly the small section at the bridge of my nose.
It was amazing just how huge the cargo bird was this close up to it. I’d been on dozens of drop ships during the war, but I’d been in my suit, and the bulk and mass of the Vigilante had given me a distorted perspective of the size of the boats. This one was a good two hundred meters long from stem to stern and a bit less than that half that distance at the widest point of its wingspan. Walking beside it was like being an ant wandering around the corpse of an elephant.
They hadn’t even tried to lower the landing gear, which I suppose was smart. They’d been hoping, no doubt, that they could slide across the grass to bleed off some momentum, but their angle had been too steep. The nose had been crushed by the impact, obliterating the cockpit, and looking very much like Clines had been right and we were wasting our time. But the gap in the hull just behind the command section offered access to the cargo hold, and it was possible there had been a loading crew strapped in back there.
I approached the rent in the hull cautiously, one hand extended in front of me in case the heat became bad enough to ignite my fire-retardant clothing, but it actually seemed to be cooler the closer I got to the front of the ship, and I thought maybe the shielding between the cargo hold and the reactor had actually done its job, even if nothing else on the ship had. I touched the jagged metal at the edge of the gap with a tentative, outstretched finger and found it not too far above ambient temperature, cool enough to use as a handhold and pull myself up into the shuttle.
Not so much as a chemical strip light illuminated the interior of the cargo hold, shutting out even the red glow of twilight and plunging the whole compartment into darkness. I’d brought a small flashlight along from the rover and I scanned its beam back and forth from the cockpit back to the cargo, searching for survivors. I’d been worried that the interior would be filled with smoke, making both breathing and vision difficult, but it wasn’t. The smoke was outside and the crash had dug its own firebreak between the ship and the tall grass.