Part 6 (2/2)

Kalenda laid in her course and powered up that one remaining main engine as slowly and gently as she could, taking a good ten minutes to bring it up to one-quarter power, to the accompaniment of a number of disturbing b.u.mps and thuds and bangs as the s.h.i.+p's structural members strained against the unbalanced thrust and bits of debris knocked themselves loose and clattered around in the compartments behind the c.o.c.kpit door.

Kalenda watched her displays carefully, and it did not take long for her to be inspired to curse a blue streak. Even at one-quarter power, she was getting a whole series of rather alarming readouts. The engine seemed to want to overheat. Its cooling system must have been damaged. She backed off to one-eighth power and tried to divert cooling power from the dead engines, to little or no effect. More than likely she was sending commands to sstems that weren't even there anymore.

Lowered thrust required a longer engine burn, of course, but that beat having her last engine melt down. She adjusted her course to compensate and watched Corellia grow bigger in the viewport.

Now she did have the leisure to worry over how they had known to jump her, and over what the devil was going on down there on the planet.

The Corellians seemed to be zeroing right in on NRi's objectives, such as herself, without any need to bother searching through civilians to find them.

There had to be some sort of leak back at HQ.

Kalenda had a hunch that the higher-ups in NRI were starting to figure that out for themselves. That meant they were working on some more carefully compartmentalized operations against Corellia, wherein the left hand would not have the least idea what the right was doing. She had suspicions that there were a few NRI agents placed among the trade delegations.

For all she knew, the attempt to insert her was at least in part meant as a diversion, to get the opposition looking the other way from someone else's arrival. It occurred to her that she should have been bothered at the thought of being someone else's diversion, but that was the way of the world-at least the espionage world. If you did not wish to risk the chance of being a piece on someone else's game board, it was best not to volunteer for the service.

But there was at least the hope that, even if she did not get through, did not find out what was going on in this madhouse of a system, someone would. Maybe that was why the thought of being a diversion did not upset her. If she was a diversion, and she did die, and manage to get the Corellians looking in the wrong direction at the proper moment, then at least her death would not be in vain.

Not much of a comfort, but with the Corellians gunning for her, and her life staked on an engine that wanted to give up and a night water landing, Lieutenant Kalenda needed all the comforts she could imagine.

Kalenda woke with a start as the alert buzzer blatted in her ear.

She blinked, looked around, remembered where she was, and wished she hadn't. But what had set off the alert? Had something else given out on this old tub? She checked her boards, and her eyes lit on the chronometer.

Good. No malfunction. The alert was from the plain old alarm-clock function. Time to wake up and get ready for reentry. She pushed a b.u.t.ton and s.h.i.+fted in the pilot's seat and stretched as best she could in a vain attempt to work the kinks out.

Now would come the time for some real piloting. Flying a freighter in on manual, unpowered reentry was no easy job in the best of times.

Coming in at night, over hostile territory, with no guidance, in a badly damaged s.h.i.+p was going to take everything she had-and maybe more.

Hold on. No sense going into this thing with such a negative att.i.tude. Think good thoughts, about how the freighter was a solid old s.h.i.+p to hold together as long as it already had. About all her training, and her painstaking memorization of every map of Corellia. About how it was very unlikely that anyone was looking for her, and how she would be d.a.m.ned hard to find even so.

Yes, that was the tone to take. Good thoughts. Good thoughts. She checked over all her systems one last time, and wished that they were looking better, even as she gave thanks that they were not looking worse.

She looked out the port to the huge bulk of Corellia, looming lovely and dark, so close she thought she could reach out and touch it.

She was square over the night side of the planet, but by no means was Corellia in absolute blackness. The lights of cities shone here and there, and starlight gleamed off gray cloud tops and blue sky and black land, making it all seem to glow as if from within, knots and whorls and points of light s.h.i.+ning out from the sleeping world below.

A lovely world, and one full of danger. She would have to be careful down there. If she lived. She checked her countdown clock. It was almost time to cut the engines.

The normal procedure, of course, was for a powered descent, going in with the engines throttled up, decelerating from orbital speed to flying speed with the brute force of the s.h.i.+p's engines. But her freighter's sole remaining engine did not have anything like the power to manage that. She would have to do it the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, bas.h.i.+ng her way through the atmosphere, using air friction instead of engine power to slow her craft. In theory, her freight was built to survive just that sort of emergency entry, but she would have been just as happy not to test the theory. Not that she had any choice in the matter. The countdown clock clicked off the seconds to engine stop, arriving at zero far too quickly. Her one surviving main engine cut off, and Kalenda reoriented the s.h.i.+p, pointing it in the right direction for an aero-braking reentry.

Any moment now she would start to feel the first slight stirrings of atmosphere on the freighter's hullAlmost before she had finished the thought, the freighter bucked and quivered, and the controls tried to leap out of her hand. Kalenda grabbed the flight stick in a death grip and forced the s.h.i.+p back to an even keel. She had flown plenty of reentries, and on nearly all of them initial contact with the atmosphere had been smooth and subtle. This was more like hitting a brick wall. The exterior of the freighter must have goflen more torn up than she thought.

This was going to be interesting.

There was another series of shudders and thuds, and then, with a long-drawn-out shrieking noise, something tore off the aft end of the s.h.i.+p and broke clear. The freighter tried to flip itself over, and it was all Kalenda could do to force it back to a level flight path. On the bright side, it seemed as if the s.h.i.+p were flying a bit more steadily with the whatever-it-was gone.

She checked her actual flight path against her planned course. She found she was running a bit fast, and a bit high.

She made what adjustments she could, and started watching her hull temperatures climb steadily upward. The freighter began to shudder again, with a new, deeper, noise, a sort of rhythmic banging, thrown into the mix as well. Something else back there wanted to tear itself off, and no mistake.

The freighter plunged deeper and deeper into Corellia's atmosphere, bucking and swaying and banging and shrieking its way down.

The nose of the s.h.i.+p started to glow a cherry red, something Kalenda had never seen before. She was used to gentle, fully powered descents, not this sort of primitive aercbraking approach.

The g forces were starting to build up, and Kalenda felt as if she were being shaken to death and crushed to death at the same time. A new alarm went off, barely audible in the cacophony that filled the s.h.i.+p's c.o.c.kpit. Kalenda was being shaken anound so badly that she could focus her eyes only clearly enough to see what the visual displays were telling her. A temperature alarm. It had to be a temp alarm.

Well, that was just too bad. She didn't dare take either hand off the flight stick long enough to make any adjustments, and besides, there was precious little she could do to cool things off. She couldn't even abort the landing attempt anymore. At one-eighth power, her one remaining engine didn't have anything like enough thrust to push her back into orbit.

Not that orbit was a good place to be on a s.h.i.+p that was probably losing air, on a s.h.i.+p with no accessible food or water.

Wham! The noise was loud and sudden enough to make Kalenda jump clear out of her seat if she hadn't been belted in. Something had just broken loose back in the s.h.i.+p's interior. A second, smaller crash announced that whateverit-was had just slammed into the opposite bulkhead.

The vibration reached a crescendo, and just when it seemed that it would tear the freighter apart, it began to taper off, fading away more quickly than it had come on.

Now Kalenda had some faint hope that she was through the worst of it. The freighter was still jouncing around quite impressively, but it had at least survived the reentry phase proper. It had become a badly damaged aircraft, not a halfwrecked s.p.a.cecraft. Not that it was handling any better, or that she would be any less dead if she lost control of it and the freighter succ.u.mbed to its obvious desire to crash.

Kalenda heard a loud whistling from behind the c.o.c.kpit door. It began at a high pitch and gradually worked its way down through the scale to a low rumble. It was the sound of air leaking back into the aft compartments of the s.h.i.+p.

Kalenda did not dare take her eyes off the viewport and the main displays for even a moment to check the environment display, but air in the aft compartment had to be good news.

She would be able to get back there and grab the survival gear.

She checked her rates, forward and down. Still a bit fast and high, but now it was a question of energy management, of controlling her descent, trading alt.i.tude and speed for distance, rather than any question of burning up in the atmosphere. She set the freighter into a series of wide, gentle S-turns to shed a bit more speed.

Well, at least they were meant to be wide and gentle. If the freighter had handled like a live bantha in convulsion during reentry, in normal aerodynamic flight it handled like a dead one. The s.h.i.+p barely responded to the controls at all, and she had to fight it through every moment of every turn. Something in the control system started hammering and banging, o-testing the strain. She gave it up and got back on her ground-track course, and never mind if she were a bit fast and high.

The s.h.i.+p glided downward into the velvet darkness of Corellia's night sky, biting into thicker air now-and suddenly all of Kalenda's concerns about being fast and high vanished. The s.h.i.+p's performance in the lower atmosphere was atrocious. She should have expected that, with half the aerodynamic surfaces shot to glory, but she had been concentrating so hard on staying alive long enough to get into deep air that she had never thought of how the s.h.i.+p would fly once she got there.

Suddenly it was not a question of overshooting her target point by a few kilometers, but a question of not undershooting by several hundred kilometers. She had planned to put down just offsh.o.r.e, not in the middle of deep ocean. She had no choice but to relight her main engine and try to stretch out her glide as much as she could. She had hoped to avoid doing so. She didn't trust that engine, and she wasn't sure about the s.h.i.+p holding together while it was taking stress from both the aerodynamic surfaces and the engines. With the stress on the stabilizers and the off-center thrust of one engine, things could go very wrong very fast.

However, it was not as if she had a choice at this point. It was relight the engine or drown.

Kalenda looked out the port. It was a lovely view, and even in the midst of her struggle for survival, she felt privileged to see it. She granted herself a second, two seconds, to drink it all in, so that she might die with some recent memory of beauty, if die she must. The clear and cloudless sky was blue black, pocked with jewel-bright stars, white, red, blue; diamonds and rubies and sapphires s.h.i.+ning down on the blue-black sea and its gray whitecaps far below.

Lovely. Lovely. But if she was going to live to deserve further such privileges, she was going to have to tear her eyes away and get back to the job at hand. As gently, as delicately as possible, she powered up her single engine and brought it up to one-sixteenth power. The freighter slewed over a bit to port, but she managed to compensate without too much trouble. There was a low groan from the hull as the stresses on the s.h.i.+p rearranged themselves, but that was to be expected.

She checked her displays again, and saw that she was still losing more speed and alt.i.tude than she could afford, even if the loss rate had decreased. She was still going to fall short of her intended landing zone, and that was not good. If need be, she could swim three kilometers to reach the sh.o.r.e-but she could not swim fifty.

She bit her lower lip and throttled up toward one-eighth power, as slowly as she could. The hull began to groan again, but this time the sound did not fade out, but grew louder. The damaged s.h.i.+p was not likely to take much more strain. The freighter's nose started to drift to port, and she pulled it back to starboard-and then had to heel back over to port as it started to heel over to starboard. Almost before she knew it, the s.h.i.+p was in a dangerous oscillation, its nose wobbling back and forth, unable to hold a stable att.i.tude. If that oscillation got much worse at all, the freighter would heel over all the way and go spiraling into the drink.

Kalenda throttled down until the oscillation faded out again, and the groaning of the hull members receded. She checked her displays and swore. Not enough. Not enough.

She was still going to land short of her intended ditch point.

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