Swaying, bouncing, shuddering, they sat in suffering, frightened silence for an eternity of about five minutes.
“There’s the airfield! Touchdown in two-three more minutes. Might be rough.”
With a terrifying roar the landing wheel hatches opened beneath them. Despite their training, most of the men were clearly startled.
“Get ready for the landing,” Alec shouted over the din of the rushing wind. “As soon as the pilot gives the word we pop the hatch and start moving.”
The impact of hitting the ground was unmistakable.
The shuttle bounced once, hit again, then rolled onward with a wild screeching of brakes and roar of retrorockets. Alec leaned against his shoulder straps, felt his head pushing forward.
Then abruptly the noise and motion ceased.
“Okay. We’re down,” the pilot reported tersely.
Behind him, Alec heard the main hatch crack open. He took one fast breath, then grabbed at his harness buckle. Standing up and reaching for his helmet, pack, and machine pistol, he commanded the others, “All right—let’s move.” The man from the other side of the aisle swung the hatch open. Alec gestured him back as he hefted his light gun over his shoulder.
“The steps are jammed,” the man grumbled.
Alec nodded once, then without even thinking about it he jumped from the lip of the hatch. He barely had time to realize how fast he was falling when he hit the ground with a solid thump that buckled his knees. He put his hands out to brace himself and managed to keep from toppling over.
Unslinging his gun, he stepped away from the shuttle quickly. The other men were jumping behind him with a steady succession of thumps and oofs.
“All right, you know your positions,” he waved his free arm at them. “Spread out and form a perimeter.”
They hustled outward, a few limping noticeably.
The steps finally creaked out of their slot below the hatch and dropped into place. The final ten men scrambled down them and got to work on the equipment bay hatches. Jameson was the last man out, looking as unruffled as if he were coming out of chapel after attending a friend’s wedding. Except that his heavy automatic rifle was resting on his right hip, muzzle pointed outward, ready to fire.
Alec strode to the nose of the shuttle to watch the other men swing open the cargo hatches. Abstractedly, he noticed that the ship’s nose and underside were charred slightly and streaked from its burning journey through the atmosphere.
And then it hit him. I’m on Earth! I’m standing, moving, breathing on Earth!
He spun around. The sky was gray, not blue, and the Sun was hidden behind the clouds. It was nowhere as bright as Alec had expected, so he kept his glare visor up inside his helmet. It wasn’t even particularly hot, about the same temperature as the living quarters at the settlement. But there was something else, something strange: air moving across his body, like standing in front of one of the circulation fans. Except that this was gentler, softer, and nowhere near as steady. It stopped and started again, playfully.
The shuttle had landed not on the cracked concrete runway, Alec saw, but on the green grass alongside the runway. The concrete was broken and pocked with holes while the grass was reasonably flat, though bumpy. The shuttle’s many-wheeled bogeys looked undamaged; they could get out again.
The whole area around the airport was open and unobstructed. The land seemed to go on forever; the horizon was much further away than it should be. Off in the distance were dark undulating hills, farther away than Alec had ever seen any landscape features before.
“Alec.”
It was Jameson, who had come up beside him.
“Perimeter’s established, and the heavy stuff’s been rolled out of the cargo bay.”
“Good.” Alec glanced at his wristwatch; five minutes since touchdown. “Very good. Get the laser trucks up along the perimeter. A couple dozen men can’t keep this field secure with nothing but hand weapons.”
Jameson grinned tightly. “Sound observation.”
He turned and started shouting orders.
A shriek split the sky and Alec looked up to see the second shuttle coming in, trailing a plume of vapor behind it. It circled the field once, then came down on the opposite side of the broken runway, screeching and roaring, blowing out tongues of bluish gas from its retrorockets, tossing clumps of sod and chunks of rock and concrete before it.
Alec hurried to the shuttle as soon as it ground to a halt. Before he could reach it, the ladder came down and men were pouring out to take their assigned positions. Last to emerge was the lanky figure of Martin Kobol, his limp much worse in Earth’s heavy gravity.
“Welcome to Earth,” Alec called to him.
A burst of machine gun fire punctuated his greeting.
Chapter 13
Ferret was checking his traps when the sky seemed to crack open with a terrifying screaming sound. He dropped the dead rabbit he had been holding and instinctively dived into the bushes.
Too frightened even to open his eyes, he clawed as deeply as he could into the brush and then froze.
He held his breath and tried to stop trembling.
Minutes later, the same roaring, screaming sky shook the world. Birds went silent. The whole forest froze with fright. Ferret pushed his face deeper into the damp earth and tried to become totally blank, nonexistent, so that whatever monster was shaking the woods would not find him.
He stayed there for a long, long time. Or so it seemed to him. Gradually the woods returned to normal. Birds took up their songs again. The breeze made the leafy trees sigh. Something slithered past his bare leg. Slowly, very cautiously, Ferret looked up. He saw nothing unusual, nothing to be afraid of. The monster had apparently gone away.
Still, it might not be far off. On his belly, Ferret slithered through the brush toward the edge of the woods, where the old cement buildings and long empty cement paths lay. If a giant monster was thrashing around through the woods, maybe he could spot the thing from there.
He risked getting up on all fours and scampering the few yards from where he was safely hidden by the brush to the bole of a large tree at the edge of the clearing. When he finally worked up the courage to peer out from behind the tree, he was startled by what he saw. Two weird silvery things, huge, shaped something like bullets, were sitting out on the cement runways that had been empty earlier that morning. They didn’t look like monsters.
Then his eyes went even wider. There were men standing around the silver things! Men just like himself. They were dressed better and they had strange metal pots on their heads, but they were men, sure enough. And they carried guns. And there were wagons, too, that the men climbed onto and drove around on fat, soft-looking wheels.
An invading band of raiders here in our territory, Ferret thought. Billy-Joe’s got to be told about this. But he’ll want to know how many men, and what kind of weapons they have.
Every fiber of Ferret’s wiry little body wanted to get up and run deep into the woods, away from these fearsome strangers. But he could see the expression on Billy-Joe’s face when he reported incompletely.
And when Billy-Joe started heating his knife over the camp fire, all other fears fled from Ferret’s mind, even though he had never felt that punishment himself.
Swallowing so hard he nearly choked, Ferret sneaked out from behind the protective tree, crawling slowly, ever so carefully, toward the shelter of one of the big cement buildings, closer to the invaders. It seemed like hours, but the shadows thrown by the Sun had hardly moved at all by the time he reached the corner of the nearest building.