Lois Bujold - Falling Free

Leo was silent for a moment, then leaned forward. “Dr. Yei, I’m forty-five thousand kilometers up. You’re there in the same room… you stop him.” He flicked the holovid off, and floated in numb silence.

“Is that wise?” choked Ti uncertainly.

Leo shook his head. “Don’t know. But without an audience, there’s no reason to carry on a show, surely.”

“Was that acting? How far will that guy really go?”

“In the past I’ve known him to have a pretty uncontrolled temper, when he got wound up. An appeal to his self-interest usually unwound him. But as you’ve realized yourself, the, um career rewards in this mess are minimal. I don’t know how far he’ll go. I don’t think even he knows.”

After a long pause Ti said, “Do you, ah—still need a shuttle pilot, Leo?”

Silver clutched the arms of the shuttle co-pilot’s seat tightly in mixed exhilaration and fear. Her lower hands curled over the seat’s front edge, seeking purchase. Deceleration and gravity yanked at her. She spared a hand to double-check the latch of the shoulder-harness snugging her in as the shuttle altered its attitude to nose-down and the ground heaved into view. Red desert mountains, rocky and forbidding, wrinkled and buckled below them, passing faster and faster as they dropped closer.

Ti sat beside her in the commander’s chair, his hands and feet barely moving the controls in tiny, constant corrections, eyes flicking from readout to readout and then to the real horizon, totally absorbed. The atmosphere roared over the shuttle’s skin and the craft rocked violently in some passing wind shear. Silver began to see why Leo, despite his expressed anguish at the risk to them all of losing Ti downside, had not substituted Zara or one of the other pusher pilots in Ti’s stead. Even barring the foot pedals, landing on a planet was definitely a discipline apart from jetting about in free fall, especially in a vehicle nearly the size of a Habitat module.

“There’s the dry lake bed,” Ti nodded forward, addressing her without taking his eyes from his work. “Right on the horizon.”

“Will it be—very much harder than landing on a shuttleport runway?” Silver asked in worry.

“No problem,” Ti smiled. “If anything, it’s easier. It’s a big puddle—it’s one of our emergency alternate landing sites anyway. Just avoid the gullies at the north end, and we’re home free.”

“Oh,” said Silver, reassured. “I hadn’t realized you’d landed out here before.”

“Well, I haven’t, actually,” Ti murmured, “not having had an emergency yet.…” He sat up more intently, taking a tighter grip on the controls, and Silver decided perhaps she would not distract him with further conversation just now.

She peeked around the edge of her seat at Dr. Minchenko, holding down the engineer’s station behind them, to see how he was taking all this. His return smile was sardonic, as if to tease her for her anxiety, but she noticed his hand checking his seat straps, too.

The ground rushed up from below. Silver was almost sorry they had not, after all, waited for the cover of night to make this landing. At least she wouldn’t have been able to see her death coming. She could, of course, close her eyes. She closed her eyes, but opened them again almost immediately. Why miss the last experience of one’s life? She was sorry Leo had never made a pass at her. He must suffer from stress accumulation too, surely. Faster and faster…

The shuttle bumped, bounced, banged, rocked, and roared out over the flat cracked surface. She was sorry she had never made a pass at Leo. Clearly, you could die while waiting for other people to start your life for you. Her seat harness cut across her breasts as deceleration sucked her forward and the rumbling vibration rattled her teeth.

“Not quite as smooth as a runway,” Ti shouted, grinning and sparing her a bright glance at last. “But good enough for company work…”

All right, so nobody else was gibbering in terror, maybe this was the way a landing was supposed to be. They rolled to a quite demure stop in the middle of nowhere. Toothed carmine mountains ringed an empty horizon. Silence fell.

“Well,” said Ti, “here we are.…” He released his harness with a snap and turned to Dr. Minchenko, struggling up out of the engineer’s seat. “Now what? Where is she?”

“If you would be good enough,” said Dr. Minchenko, “to provide us with an exterior scan…”

A view of the horizon scrolled slowly several times through a monitor, as the minutes ticked by in Silver’s brain. The gravity, Silver discovered, was not nearly so awful as Claire had described it. It was much like the time spent under acceleration on the way to the wormhole, only very still and without vibration, or like at the Transfer Station only stronger. It would have helped if the design of the seat had matched the design of her body.

“What if Rodeo Traffic Control saw us land?” she said. “What if GalacTech gets here first?”

“It’s more frightening to think Traffic Control might have missed us,” said Ti. “As for who gets here first—well, Dr. Minchenko?”

“Mm,” he said glumly. Then he brightened, leaned forward and froze the scan, and put his finger on a small smudge in the screen, perhaps 15 kilometers distant.

“Dust devil?” said Ti, plainly trying to control his hopes.

The smudge focused. “Land rover,” said Dr. Minchenko, smiling in satisfaction. “Oh, good girl.” The smudge grew into a boiling vortex of orange dust spun up behind a speeding land rover. Five minutes later the vehicle braked to a halt beside the shuttle’s forward hatchway. The figure under the dusty bubble canopy paused to adjust a breath mask, then the bubble swung up and the side ramp swung down.

Dr. Minchenko adjusted his own breath mask firmly over his nose and, followed by Ti, rushed down the shuttle stairs to assist the frail, silver-haired woman who was struggling with an assortment of odd-shaped packages. She gave them all up to the men with evident gladness but for a thick black case shaped rather like a spoon which she clutched to her bosom in much the same way, Silver thought, as Claire clutched Andy. Dr. Minchenko shepherded his lady anxiously upward toward the airlock—her knees moved stiffly, on the stairs—and through, where they could at last pull down their masks and speak clearly.

“Are you all right, Warren?” Madame Minchenko asked.

“Perfectly,” he assured her. “I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose.”

“Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then.”

Silver was fascinated by the way gravity gave form to Madame Minchenko’s dress. It was a warm, dark fabric with a silver belt at the waist, and hung in soft folds about her booted ankles. The skirt swirled as Madame Minchenko stepped, echoing her agitation. “It’s utter madness. We’re too old to become refugees. I had to leave my harpsichord!”

Dr. Minchenko patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. “It wouldn’t work in free fall anyway. The little pluckers fall back into place by gravity.” His voice cracked with urgency, “But they’re trying to kill my quaddies, Ivy!”

“Yes, yes, I understand…” Madame Minchenko twitched a somewhat strained and absent smile at Silver, who hung one-handed from a strap listening. “You must be Silver?”

“Yes, Madame Minchenko,” said Silver breathlessly in her most-politest voice. This woman was quite the most aged downsider Silver had ever seen, bar Dr. Minchenko and Dr. Cay himself.

“We must go now, to get Tony,” Dr. Minchenko said. “We’ll be back as quick as we can drive. Silver will help you, she’s very good. Hold the ship!”