“You know we have to go down there. We need to track this to its source.”
“Dammit, I knew you’d say that. Not that we have much choice. We need to get this busted bird planetside on the double.” He sighed, then plotted a heading to the signal’s point of origin. “It’s gonna be a rough landing, honey. You’d better make sure everything’s still tied down and shut tight.”
Bridy got up, took one step aft, then stopped. “I’ve seen you botch normal landings when the ship wasn’tfried. Are you sure you can do this?”
“Positive.”
“Without getting us killed, I mean.”
“Ask me again in thirty minutes.”
Twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds later, Bridy was too busy hyperventilating to ask Quinn much of anything.
Turbulence buffeted the Dulcineaas it arrowed through the upper atmosphere of the white dwarf’s solitary, tiny planet. Critical failures cascaded through the ship’s major systems, leaving only maneuvering thrusters and the primary sensors functioning for what promised to be a brutal planetfall.
Quinn shouted over the roar of wind and engines, “How’s the signal?”
“Five by five.” Bridy checked its origin against the ship’s heading. “Dead ahead, range nine hundred sixty kilometers.”
“Right.” He started flipping toggles on the helm. “Braking thrusters in ten seconds.” The ship pierced a thick layer of cloud cover and then leveled out above a desolate, arctic plain. Massive peaks of jagged black stone made Bridy think of daggers thrust up by a giant’s hand through the planet’s snowy surface. Studying the wild landscape, Quinn frowned. “Not many good places to land.”
“I’ll watch the ground, you watch the instruments.”
“I would if they still worked.” He slammed his palm against the console in front of him, but his attempt at percussive maintenance seemed to have no effect. “How’s the ground looking?”
“A lot closer than it did five seconds ago.”
He primed the braking thrusters. “Hold on to your ass.”
The engines boomed, and the rapid deceleration threw them forward. Bridy winced as her seat’s safety harness straps dug into her chest. Outside the cockpit the landscape spun, black rock and white ice melting into a gray blur.
Bridy pointed at a fleeting image of level ground. “There!”
“Too far!” Quinn fought with the ship’s controls to little apparent effect. “Main thruster’s gone! We got five seconds to set down before we falldown!”
“Starboard! Get the nose up!”
She grabbed the console white-knuckle tight.
Quinn pulled the ship through a hard turn that arrested most of its forward momentum. Dulcinea’s landing thrusters sputtered erratically as Quinn guided it to a mountainside ledge barely as wide as the ship itself. All at once the engines cut off, and the ship dropped the last half meter onto a deep bed of ice-crusted snow. The thud of impact reverberated and then stopped—enabling Bridy to hear a low, dangerous rumbling from high overhead. She and Quinn looked up in unison through the top of the cockpit’s canopy at the snow-capped peak looming over their precarious perch. They waited for several seconds, neither speaking nor breathing, while waiting to see whether the mountain would welcome the Dulcineaby burying it. Then the distant tremor faded, leaving only the faint creaking of the ship’s overtaxed hull as it settled into its new resting place.
Their wide-open eyes remained fixed on the mountaintop.
Bridy’s voice was barely a whisper. “So . . . thathappened.”
Quinn rose from his chair and trod cautiously aft. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a short nervous breakdown.”
15
Bundled in cold-weather clothing and laden with arctic climbing equipment that had been stowed by SI in the Dulcinea’s hold (along with gadgets and gear for just about every other terrain and scenario Quinn could ever imagine), Quinn trudged away from the slope of the mountain in pursuit of Bridy. Screaming wind whipped grains of ice against the few bits of exposed flesh on his face, forcing him to dip his chin and watch his legs chop through knee-deep snow.
He clenched his jaw against the cold. “Are we there yet?”
“If you ask me that one more time, I’ll smash this tricorder over your head.” She led him across a level and nearly circular plain several kilometers in diameter and ringed by steep black peaks like the one they’d descended after leaving the Dulcinea. The mountains hid the sunset, which painted the sky in shades of violet.
Bridy pointed forward. “The signal’s coming from underground, inside some caves beyond the other side of this frozen lake. Another hour’s walk, tops.”
Quinn harrumphed from behind his air-warming face mask. “Remind me not to use you as my tour guide the next time I plan a vacation.”
“Do you ever stop complaining?”
“I was fine till you made me leave the ship.”
“I didn’t makeyou leave the ship. We decided to track the signal.”
“No, youdecided to track the signal. I wanted to fix the impulse coils.”
She sighed. “Get serious, they’re fried. We’ll need a starbase for that.”
“That’s what you said about the thrusters, but I got those working.”
“Yeah, and if you’d used them, you’d have triggered an avalanche and buried us—not to mention the caves where the signal’s coming from.”
“Which is why we’re walking instead of flying. Of course, if we’d fixed the transporter, we could’ve just beamed over there.”
“I don’t know how to fix a transporter, and neither do you.”
“No, but we have a manual. We could figure it out.” He scowled. “Why is it whenever we disagree we always end up doing things your way?”
She glanced back at him. “Because I’m in charge.”
“Then why even ask my opinion?”
“To make you feel better.”
“Well, it ain’t workin’.”
They didn’t speak to each other the rest of the way across the lake. Quinn tried to keep up with Bridy, but she outpaced him enough to open her lead by slow degrees. By the time they reached the far side of the crater-shaped basin, she was twenty meters ahead of him, and she showed no sign of slowing down as she pressed forward into the mouth of a cave. She was limned by the pale glow of her tricorder and partly silhouetted by the beam of her small flashlight as she forged ahead into the dark.
Quinn was about to shout her name when he remembered that a sudden loud noise echoing off the mountains above them might prove disastrous.
Dammit,he cursed her in his imagination, don’t do nothin’ stupid.
He quickened his pace until he reached the cave, and then he stopped to fish his own flashlight from his jacket pocket. His gloved hands fumbled first to find the device and then to activate it. Its narrow beam slashed through the darkness as he pivoted side to side, surveying the path ahead. It was a wide space populated by stalactites, stalagmites, and pillars of dark-blue ice. He glimpsed another, smaller passage on the cavern’s far side, but there was no obvious clear path to it—only routes of greater or lesser resistance.
To his dismay, he saw no sign of Bridy.
Then he heard a weak and distant echo of her voice: “Quinn!”
“Honey? Where are you?” She called his name again, but he wasn’t sure from what direction. “Keep talkin’, darlin’! I’m comin’!” Bridy repeated his name; it sounded as if it had come from beneath him. He prowled about the cavern, searching its floor with his flashlight beam.
He stumbled to a halt half a step shy of a narrow crevasse. Kneeling beside it, he aimed the flashlight into its depths and called, “Bridy?”
“Down here!”
Targeting her voice, he trained the flashlight beam on her. She was a dozen meters below him and wedged between two walls of rough, black ice.
“You okay?”