"If they come," Alan said. "A skip drone is bound to get back to Phoenix. They'll know that the Rraey know they're coming. If they know that, they might not come at all."
"Oh, they'll come," I said. "They might not come when we want them to, is all. We have to be ready to wait for them. The good news here is Coral is human friendly. We can eat off the land for as long as we need to."
"I'm not in the mood to colonize," Alan said.
"It's not permanent," I said. "And it's better than the alternative."
"Good point," Alan said.
I turned to Fiona. "What do you need to do to get us to where we're going in one piece?"
"A prayer," she said. "We're in good shape now because we look like floating junk, but anything that hits the atmosphere that's larger than a human body is going to be tracked by Rraey forces. As soon as we start maneuvering, they're going to notice us."
"How long can we stay up here?" I asked.
"Not that long," Fiona said. "No food, no water, and even with our new, improved bodies, there's a couple dozen of us in here and we're going to run out of fresh air pretty fast."
"How long after we hit the atmosphere are you going to have to start driving?" I asked.
"Soon," she said. "If we start tumbling, I'll never get control of it again. We'll just fall down until we die."
"Do what you can," I said. She nodded. "All right, Alan," I said. "Time to alert the troops about the change in plan."
"Here we go," Fiona said, and hit the thrusters. The force of the acceleration pinned me back into the copilot's seat. No longer falling to the surface of Coral, we were aiming ourselves directly at it.
"Chop coming," Fiona said as we plunged into the atmosphere. The shuttle rattled like a maraca.
The instrumentation board let out a ping. "Active scanning," I said. "We're being tracked."
"Got it," Fiona said, banking. "We have some high clouds coming up in a few seconds," she said. "They might help to confuse them."
"Do they usually?" I asked.
"No," she said, and flew into them anyway.
We came out several klicks east and were pinged again. "Still tracking," I said. "Aircraft 350 klicks out and closing."
"Going to get as close to the ground as I can before they get on top of us," she said. "We can't outrace them or outshoot them. The best we can hope is to get near the ground and hope some of their missiles hit the treetops and not us."
"That's not very encouraging," I said.
"I'm not in the encouragement business today," Fiona said. "Hold on." We dove sickeningly.
The Rraey aircraft were on us presently. "Missiles," I said. Fiona lurched left and tumbled us toward the ground. One missile overflew and trailed away; the other slammed into a hilltop as we crested.
"Nice," I said, and then nearly bit off my tongue as a third missile detonated directly behind us, knocking the shuttle out of control. A fourth missile concussed and shrapnel tore into the side of the shuttle; in the roaring of the air I could hear some of my men screaming.
"Going down," Fiona said, and struggled to right the shuttle. She was headed toward a small lake at an incredibly high speed. "We're going to hit the water and crash," she said. "Sorry."
"You did good," I said, and then the nose of the shuttle hit the surface of the lake.
Wrenching, tearing sounds as the nose of the shuttle ripped downward, shearing off the pilot's compartment from the rest of the shuttle. A brief register of my squad and Alan's as their compartment flies spinning away—a still shot with mouths open, screams silent in all the other noise, the roar as it flies over the shuttle nose that is already fraying apart as it whirls over the water. The tight, impossible spins as the nose sheds metal and instrumentation. The sharp pain of something striking my jaw and taking it away with it. Gurgling as I try to scream, gray Smart-Blood flung from the wound by centrifugal force. An unintentional glance at Fiona, whose head and right arm are somewhere behind us.
A tang of metal as my seat breaks off from the rest of the pilot's compartment and I am skipping on my back toward an outcropping of rock, my chair lazily spinning me in counterclockwise direction as my chair back bounces, bounces, bounces toward the stone. A quick and dizzying change in momentum as my right leg strikes the outcropping followed by a yellow-white burst of two-hundred-proof pain as the femur snaps like a pretzel stick. My foot swings directly up where my jaw used to be and I become perhaps the first person in the history of man to kick himself in his own uvula. I arc over dry land and come to ground somewhere where branches are still falling because the passenger compartment of the shuttle has just crashed through. One of the branches comes down heavily across my chest and breaks at least three of my ribs. After kicking myself in my own uvula, this is strangely anticlimactic.
I look up (I have no choice) and see Alan above me, hanging upside down, the splintered end of a tree branch supporting his torso by wedging itself into the space where his liver should be. SmartBlood is dripping off his forehead onto my neck. I see his eyes twitch, registering me. Then I get a message on my BrainPal.
You look terrible — he sends.
I can't respond. I can only stare.
I hope I can see the constellations where I'm going — he sends. He sends it again. He sends it again. He doesn't send it after that.
Chittering. Rough pads gripping my arm. Asshole recognizes the chittering and beams me a translation.
— This one yet lives.
—Leave it. It will die soon. And the green ones aren't good eating. They're not ripe yet.
Snorting, which Asshole translates as [laughter].
"Holy fuck, would you look at this," someone says. "This son of a bitch is alive."
Another voice. Familiar. "Let me see."
Silence. The familiar voice again. "Get this log off him. We're taking him back."
"Jesus Christ, boss," the first voice says. "Look at him. You ought to just put a fucking bullet in his brain. It'd be the merciful thing to do."
"We were told to bring back survivors," the familiar voice says. "Guess what, he survived. He's the only one that survived."
"If you think this qualifies as surviving."
"Are you done?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Good. Now move the goddamn branch. The Rraey are going to be on our ass real soon."
Opening my eyes is like trying to lift metal doors. What allows me to do it is the blasting pain I feel as the branch is moved off my torso. My eyes fly open and I aspirate in the jawless equivalent of a scream.
"Christ!" the first voice says, and I see it's a man, blond, flinging away the massive branch. "He's awake!"
A warm hand on the side of what's left of my face. "Hey," the familiar voice says. "Hey. You're all right now. It's okay. You're safe now. We're taking you back. It's okay. You're okay."
Her face comes into view. I know the face. I was married to it.
Kathy has come for me.
I weep. I know I'm dead. I don't mind.
I begin to slide away.
"You ever see this guy before?" I hear the blond guy ask.
"Don't be stupid," I hear Kathy say. "Of course not."
I'm gone.
Into another universe.
PART III
THIRTEEN
"Oh, you're awake," someone said to me as I opened my eyes. "Listen, don't try to speak. You're immersed in solution. You've got a breathing tube in your neck. And you don't have a jaw."