Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

Blueshell brushed against her left side, Greenstalk against her right. Ravna twisted, laying some of Pham's weight on the skrode hulls. If all four merged their pressure suits, there would be a few more moments of consciousness. "The OOB: I'm flying it down!" he said.

Something was coming down. A ship's torch lit the ground blue white, with shadows stark and shifting. It's not a healthy thing to be around a rocket drive hovering in a near-one-gee field. An hour earlier the maneuver would have been impossible, or a capital offense if accomplished. Now it didn't matter if the torch punched through the Docks or fried a cargo from halfway across the galaxy.

Still… where could Blueshell land the thing? They were surrounded by sinkholes and moving cliffs. She closed her eyes as the burning light drifted down before them… and then dimmed. Blueshell's shout was thin in their shared atmosphere. "Let's go together!"

She held tight to the Riders, and they crawled/wheeled down from their little hill. The Out of Band II was hovering in the middle of a sinkhole. Its torch was hidden from view, but the glare off the sides of the hole put the ship in sharp silhouette, turned its ultradrive spines into feathery white arcs. A giant moth with glowing wings… and just out of reach.

If their suits held, they could make it to the edge of the hole. Then what? The spines kept the ship from getting closer than a hundred meters. An able-bodied (and crazy) human might try to grab a spine and crawl down it.

But Skroderiders had their own brand of insanity: Just as the light -the reflected light — became too much to bear… the torch winked out. The OOB fell through the hole. This didn't stop the Riders' advance. "Faster!" said Blueshell. And now she guessed what they planned. Quickly for such an awkward jumble of limbs and wheels, they moved up to the edge of the darkened hole. Ravna felt the dirt giving way beneath her feet, and then they were falling.

The Decks were hundreds — in places, thousands — of meters thick. They fell past them now, past dim eerie flickers of internal destruction.

Then they were through, still falling. For a moment the feeling of wild panic was gone. After all this was simply free fall, a commonplace, and a damnsight more peaceful than the disintegrating Docks. Now it was easy to hold onto the Riders and Pham Nuwen, and even their commensal atmosphere seemed a little thicker than before. There was something to be said for hard vacuum and free fall. Except for an occasional rogue agrav, everything was coming down at the same acceleration, ruins peacefully settling. And four or five minutes from now they would hit Groundside's atmosphere, still falling almost straight downwards… Entry velocity only three or four kilometers per second. Would they burn up? Maybe. Flashes pricked bright above the cloud-decks.

The junk around them was mostly dark, just shadows against the sky show above. But the wreckage directly below was large and regular… the OOB, bow on! The ship was falling with them. Every few seconds a trim jet fired, a faint reddish glow. The ship was closing with them. If it had a nose hatch, they would land right on it.

Its docking lights flicked on, bright upon them. Ten meters separation. Five. There was a hatch, and open! She could see a very ordinary airlock within…

Whatever hit them was big. Ravna saw a vague expanse of plastic rising over her shoulder. The rogue was slowly turning, and it scarcely brushed them — but that was enough. Pham Nuwen was jarred from her grasp. His body was lost in shadow, then suddenly bright lit as the ship's spotlight tracked after him. Simultaneously the air gusted out of Ravna's lungs. They were down to three pocket pressure fields now, failing fields; it was not enough. Ravna could feel consciousness slipping away, her vision tunneling. So close.

The Riders unlatched from each other. She grabbed at the skrode hulls and they drifted, strung out, over the ship's lock. Blueshell's skrode jerked against her as the he made fast to the hatch. The jolt twisted her around, whipping Greenstalk upwards. Things were getting dreamy now. Where was panic when you needed it? Hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, sang the little voice, all that was left of consciousness. Bump, jerk. The Riders pushed and pulled at her. Or maybe it was the ship jerking all of them around. They were puppets, dancing off a single string.

… Deep in the tunnel of her vision, a Rider grabbed at the tumbling figure of Pham Nuwen.

Ravna wasn't aware of losing consciousness, but the next she knew she was breathing air and choking on vomit — and was inside the airlock. Solid green walls closed in comfortingly on all sides. Pham Nuwen lay on the far wall, strapped into a first aid canister. His face had a bluish cast.

She pushed awkwardly across the lock toward Pham Nuwen's wall. The place was a confused jumble, unlike the passenger and sporting ships she'd been on before. Besides, this was a Rider design. Stickem patches were scattered around the walls; Greenstalk had mounted her skrode on one cluster.

They were accelerating, maybe a twentieth of a gee. "We're still going down?"

"Yes. If we hover or rise, we'll crash," into all the junk that still rains from above. "Blueshell is trying to fly us out." They were falling with the rest, but trying to drift out from under — before they hit Groundside. There was an occasional rattle/ping against the hull. Sometimes the acceleration ceased, or shifted in a new direction. Blueshell was actively avoiding the big pieces.

… Not with complete success. There was long, rasping sound that ended with a bang, and the room turned slowly around her. "Brrap! Just lost an ultradrive spine," came Blueshell's voice. "Two others already damaged. Please strap down, my lady."

They touched atmosphere a hundred seconds later. The sound was a barely perceptible humming beyond the hull. It was the sound of death for a ship like this. It could no more aerobrake than a dog could jump over the moon. The noise came louder. Blueshell was actually diving, trying to get deep enough to shed the junk that surrounded the ship. Two more spines broke. Then came a long surge of main axis acceleration. Out of Band II arced out of the Docks' death shadow, drove out and out, into inertial orbit.

Ravna looked over Blueshell's fronds at the outside windows. They had just passed Groundside's terminator, and were flying an inertial orbit. They were in free fall again, but this trajectory curved back on itself without whacking into big hard things — like Groundside.

Ravna didn't know much more about space travel than you'd expect of a frequent passenger and an adventure fan. But it was obvious that Blueshell had pulled off a near miracle. When she tried to thank him, the Rider rolled back and forth across the stick-patches, buzzing faintly to himself. Embarrassed? or just Riderly inattentive?

Greenstalk spoke, sounding a little shy, a little proud: "Far trading is our life, you know. If we are cautious, life will be mostly safe and placid, but there will be close passages. Blueshell practices all the time, programming his skrode with every wit he can imagine. He is a master." In everyday life, indecision seemed to dominate the Riders. But in a crunch, they didn't hesitate to bet everything. She wondered how of that was the skrode overriding its rider?

"Grump," said Blueshell. "I have simply postponed the close passage. I broke several of our drive spines. What if they do not self-repair? What do we do then? Everything around Groundside is destroyed. There is junk everywhere out to a hundred radii. Not dense like around the Docks, but of much higher velocity." You can't inject billions of tonnes of wreckage into buckshot orbits and expect safe navigation. "And any second, the Perversion's creatures will be here, eating whoever survives."