Part 7 (1/2)
One last card to play. She brought the nose of the s.h.i.+p up just a bit, in hopes of tempting just a bit more lift out of the wings. For a wonder, it seemed to work. Her rate of loss of alt.i.tude faded away, and she actually achieved level flight.
But Kalenda knew better than to relax her guard. Something else was bound to go wrong.
It started as a low hum, almost below the range of hearing, but it did not stay hard to hear for long. Bi-bi-bi-be-heebee-bee-bang-bang-hang.Bang-Bang-BANG BANG BANG BANG! BANG! BANG! It grew louder and louder, and shook the s.h.i.+p harder and harder. Some bit of the stabilizer, or a torn-up piece of rudder, was slamming itself against the hull with incredible violence. Kalenda set her teeth and hung on. As best she could see with the s.h.i.+p bucking and bouncing like a mad thing, she was still flying level, and every second she did that was another few hundred meters toward sh.o.r.e. So long as it got her in toward sh.o.r.e, the freighter could tear itself to pieces as much as it liked.
Getting closer now. Kalenda scanned the horizon, watching for land. There! A strip of motionless, darker darkness off in the distance.
Stars and sky, she was going to make it.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! Long past the time when it seemed impossible, the banging was getting worse. What in the name of s.p.a.ce was trying to tear itself loose back there? BANG! BANG! BANG! BANThere was a sudden silence, and then, a heartbeat later, the gut-wrenching shriek of metal on metal and a final shudder that spasmed through the whole s.h.i.+p. Kalenda felt the freighter's tail pull up and heel over to starboard. Well, whatever it was that had just pulled itself loose must have been part of the horizontal stabilizers. She corrected back toward port, but not too far. Let the s.h.i.+p hang at an odd angle of attack, as long as it was flying straight, more or less.
How far to sh.o.r.e now? She checked her navigation displays. Not more than twenty kilometers to go. If she could just hold this thing together that much longerPing -PING! Ping-PING! Ping-PiNG! Kalenda hit the alarm reset and checked her displays. d.a.m.n! The engine overheat alarm. The thing was going to hit meltdown if she kept pus.h.i.+ng it, and no mistake. She knew what she had to do, but she didn't like it. What good in getting this far if the engine blew up and she crashed into the sea here and now? With infinite reluctance, she throttled the engine back down to one-sixteenth power, and grimaced as the freighter promptly set back to work losing speed and alt.i.tude.
Ping-PiNG! Ping-PiNG! Ping-PiNG! She hit the alarm reset and swore under her breath with a fair amount of creanvity. The engine was still overheating. Some last cooling connection must have failed altogether. With all cooling systems out completely, the engine would explode in short order, no matter how little power she ran through it.
For one mad moment she toyed with the idea of letting it blow, taking the explosion in trade for whatever last driblets of thrust she could get from the engine. But if there was one thing this s.h.i.+p was not going to take, it was yet another explosion.
She braced herself, and then cut all power to the engine.
The freighter lurched violently, and tried to pull its nose up into a stall, but she forced it back into something like a level glide.
And that was that. No power left, no tricks left to try, all options explored. She was left with a deadstick glide into a nighttime open-ocean ditch. It didn't get much worse than that. Kalenda tried not to tell herself that at least she had the blessing of fair weather, for fear of the universe conjuring up a storm for her out of sheer perversity.
Flying is divided into two sorts of time-the steady, careful stretches where the idea is to keep things more or less as they are, and the sudden, rus.h.i.+ng, fast-moving moments where the idea is to get from one state to another as quickly as possible while not getting killed.
Pilots should not be rushed or hurried during cruise operations, but they must move fast for the takeoffs and landings.
As Kalenda was in the process of learning, all that was true in spades for a deadstick water landing. That water down below was coming up on her awfully fast. Best to get ready. She was going to have to get out of here in a hurry, once she put down. Keeping one hand on the flying stick, she reached up with the other and pulled down on the safety cover for the overhead escape hatch. She risked a glance up to spot the safety releases, then got eyes forward again. Getting closer.
Much closer. She reached up without looking and flipped the releases, then yanked down hard on the hatch eject lever.
Blam! The bolts blew and the hatch flew clear. Suddenly the wind was roaring past, and the stale, burned-insulationflavored atmosphere of the c.o.c.kpit was swept away by the cool, tangy salt air of the Corellian ocean by night.
Much, much closer. Kalenda struggled to flatten out her glide angle and braced herself for impact. Water might seem softer than land, but it still packed a h.e.l.l of a wallop if you hit it at speed.
And here it came. Kalenda resisted the temptation to shut her eyes, and got both hands back on the flight stick, hanging on for dear life.
Coming in closer, lower, faster-faster-faster! The water so close now it was a blur, all the nice neat waves she could see so clearly from higher up nothing more than a smear of blue gray she could not focus on.
The wind roared through the hatchway, and her hair got loose and blew wildly into her face. She ignored it. Better to go in halfblind than to take her hands off the stick. Closer faster can't get closer must be there but we're not closer faster fasterWith a shuddering, roaring crash the ruined freighter slammed into the waves, bounced clear, and slammed down again with renewed vigor. Kalenda held on for dear life as the s.h.i.+p slammed head-on into wave after wave after wave, the water slas.h.i.+ng up over the viewports, then clearing away before the next wave blinded her again. The shuddering, terrifying ride seemed to go on forever, with always the next wave lunging into view just as the last one washed away.
But at last the freighter slowed, rode lower in the water, eased itself to a halt, and the stupefying, cras.h.i.+ng roar of the landing was quite suddenly replaced by the absurdly prosaic, hollow, echoing sounds of water slos.h.i.+ng about under a hull, of waves cras.h.i.+ng on a nearby sh.o.r.e. She had made it. At least, made it this far.
Kalenda allowed herself a moment to resume breathing.
She peeled her hands off the flight stick, released her crash belts, and stood up, more than a little weak in the knees.
She wanted to give herself time to recover, but there was no time.
The nose was already creeping up into the sky as the freighter's aft end took on water.
She went to the c.o.c.kpit hatch and pulled open the manual release panel. She pulled down the lever and felt the latch disengage. She leaned into the hatch and shoved it open.
There. The pressure suit she'd never had the chance to get to-and the standard-issue survival packs. She grabbed both ration packs and the gear case, and noticed her feet were wet. Water. Water already coming in. Hurry. Move. The ration packs had carry straps, and she threw one over each shoulder while carrying the gear case by its handle. She heaved the case out the overhead escape hatch and then scrambled through it herself as fast as she could, for fear of the case sliding off the hull without her. She managed to s.n.a.t.c.h at it just as it was threatening to slip off into the water.
In theory, there was a life raft in the case, along with all the other hardware. Kalenda had planned to open the case, get the raft and its paddles, close the case, inflate the raft, load it up with the gear case and the ration packs, climb in herself, and then paddle sedately away. She might as well have planned to compose a few Selonian sonnets as well, for all the good it would do her. The freighter was sinking beneath her feet, and it was, after all, the dead of night, and far too dark for rurrunaging around in a gear case looking for a life raft.
Well, if the survival gear designers had had any senseshe heaved the gear case into the water. Sure enough, praise be, it floated, and fairly high in the water at that. She readjusted the straps on the ration packs-which seemed likely to act in the stead of flotation devices in their own right-and stepped slos.h.i.+ngly off into the cool salt water.
After an anxious moment or two when it seemed the gear case wanted to escape from her altogether, she managed to grab it by the handle, and sort of pull herself on top it, so that she was lying on her stomach on the case, her feet dangling off the end. She discovered the case had a handle on either side, and took one in each hand. She started paddle-kicking vigorously without worrying too much about which direction she was going. She was eager to get some distance between herself and the sinking s.h.i.+p.
A s.h.i.+p, even a small one, produces quite a bit of suction as it goes down, and she had no desire to be pulled under as the freighter went to the bottom.
Judging that she was far enough away, she turned herself around with a kick or two of her feet and watched as her poor old freighter commenced its final voyage, toward its last resting place, on the bottom of the Corellian sea.
The nose of the s.h.i.+p continued to angle up out of the water. There was a flash, and a shower of sparks illuminated the c.o.c.kpit from the inside as some power system or other shorted out. The s.h.i.+p's interior lights flared, guttered down, flared again, and then died altogether.
There was a dull thud and a ma.s.s of dirty bubbles belched out of the water from the aft end of the s.h.i.+p. The nose of the s.h.i.+p swung clear over to the vertical. There were a few creaking sounds, and the sound of water rus.h.i.+ng in, and the nose of the s.h.i.+p sank straight down, moving with an odd sort of dignity. A final slosh, a gurgle, and the nose of her ill-starred freighter vanished beneath the waves.
Kalenda stared at the spot where it had been, more emotions than she could rightly name running through her as she watched what might well have been her own watery grave close over itself, as if there had never been any such thing as a freighter that ditched in the sea. It had vanished altogether.
She looked up at the gleaming stars overhead. Possibly someone had seen the glowing trail of her reentry across the sky, but Corellia's skies were just as full of junk as most places these days. That was one grim legacy of the Republic-Imperial War: Most star systems were cluttered up with shot-up s.p.a.cecraft of one sort or another. No one even bothered to report the most spectacular of fireb.a.l.l.s anymore. She had come in at night over water precisely to avoid being seen, but if there were any witnesses on the planet, her arrival would have looked just like the entry of dozens of derelict fighters and tenders and s.p.a.ce-probe s.p.a.cecraft that had crashed into the planet these last few years.
The odds were very good that she had made it, and that the Corellians didn't know she was here, and would have no way of finding her if they did.
The question became-what good was that going to do?
A wave lifted her up a bit, and she levered herself up a bit over the gear case to try and get her bearings. Good.
Good. She was already pointed toward land, which looked to be only a few kilometers away.
She started kicking her feet, propelling herself toward the sh.o.r.e.
CHAPTER SIX.
Farewelland Hall Luke threw his black cloak back over one shoulder and stepped out of the shadows, toward where the Millennium Falcon was sitting on her hard stand, ready for liftoff. It was a scene of organized chaos-or more accurately, two such scenes mixed up with each other.
On the starboard side of the s.h.i.+p, Han was arguing with one of the s.p.a.ceport safety inspection service, apparently about some sort of clearance regulation, while at the same time shouting at Chewbacca, who was crouched down over an access panel on the starboard wing of the hull.
Well, Han and Chewie had been arguing over how to keep the Falcon patched up ever since Luke had known them. No reason to expect they'd stop now.
On the port side of the s.h.i.+p, Leia was surrounded by a little knot of governmental types of all sorts and descriptions. Luke looked over the crowd. Clerks, civil-service droids, cabinet officials, senators, and a sprinkling of military officers. No surprises there, either. Even in as democratic and informal a government as Leia was trying to build, it wasn't possible to let the chief of state escape for her vacation without at least a few stray details-and egosto sort out at the last minute.
A line of household service droids were rolling through, straight between the two groups and up the s.h.i.+p's ramp, delivering the last of the luggage aboard the Falcon.
Han and Leia's three kids were racing around like wild things, beside themselves with excitement at the start of the big adventure-and, no doubt, well aware of the fact that they were about to get out from under Threepio's nagging and fussing. Luke smiled at that thought. No wonder they had wanted to make their own droid, the way that old bucket of bolts worried and niggled over everything.