Earthblood

“This is it, guys. Once I commit, there won’t be any second guessing. We’re going to be beyond broke on it.”

Then there it was. The expanse of sunbaked concrete, smeared with the black rubber trails of thousands of landings, stretched ahead of the Aquila, perspective diminishing it to a shrinking ribbon vanishing into the desert beyond.

“Ace on the line,” said Marcey. “Everything’s looking good.”

Altitude was seven hundred and fifty feet, the shuttle rock steady.

A light flashed on the control board. “Landing abort point in ten seconds.”

“Still looking perfect, Jim.”

The flashing light stopped, and a loud buzzer began to sound. Then Mom’s voice made a final appearance, businesslike, brisk and insistent. “Must land. Repeat, must land. Past abort point. Vessel must now land.”

THE VIBRATION WAS so bad as they came in on their final approach that Jim Hilton was finding it incredibly difficult to see anything. His whole skull was shaking, making him feel as if his brain was swilling around inside.

The instrumentation was unreadable, and he was forced into making a judgment landing, watching the strip of runway as it came swooping in below the nose of the Aquila.

“Can’t see any sign of life, Captain.” Steve Romero’s voice was distorted by the juddering of the ship.

Jim couldn’t have cared less at that moment. His sole intent was to hold the stubby wings level and stop the bow from digging a fiery furrow along the yellow centerline of the runway.

“Undercarriage down and locked,” shouted Marcey.

Out of the corner of his eye Jim caught a flash of charred and twisted metal. A wing-tip and a silver, folded tail plane. It was on the edge of the runway, half on the scorched and blackened grass.

It was unthinkable that a wrecked fighter would have been just left there, partly obstructing the main operating runway of one of the bigger air bases in the country.

Unthinkable.

Most of the captain’s mind was focused on the immediate flying problem of getting down, but a small section of Jim’s mind was chilled and horrified at what was happening.

His guess put them about fifty feet up, traveling around one hundred and seventy miles per hour. Still too fast, but if he tried to drop the speed the Aquila could come down stern first.

He saw the pile of tangled wires and hawsers in the centre of the runway. Saw the rusting, jagged cables, clear across his landing path.

Saw them way, way too late for there to be any hope of avoidance.

Marcey spotted them at the same moment, hands starting to lift toward her face. She remembered in that fraction of a frozen second that most people’s last words were believed to be expletives.

“Oh, fuck,” she said.

“Hang on!”

The nose was coming down.

Ten feet up.

Five.

The speedometer was still trembling over the hundred-mile-per-hour mark.

There was a surging moment when Jim Hilton thought that the nosewheel of the Aquila might just clear the lethal obstruction.

But it didn’t.

Chapter Eight

A light wind was blowing across the torn wreckage of the ship.

Arma-glass cracking and falling in tinkling shards under the pressure of the crash. Liquid dripping from a dozen places. A ruptured oil line that was oozing, thick and brown, into the scraped earth. High-octane fuel, colorless, the air shimmering around it, trickled into the gray-brown dust.

Metal groaned and settled, parts torn off and scattered back along the huge gouge in the runway, the pieces of debris trailing off into the surrounding grass and dirt. When the leading wheel had caught in the pile of discarded cables, it had tipped the shuttle over onto its blunt, heat-seared nose.

There was an eerie moaning, tiny bursts of sound, almost like someone panting with excitement during the beginnings of sexual arousal. But the cause wasn’t lust. It was pain.

“My leg, my leg. Oh, sweet Jesus, help me, help… My leg.”

The voice so thin and strained that it wasn’t even possible to work out whether it came from a man or a woman.

Jim Hilton lay still and took long, slow breaths, fighting for self-control, knowing that they’d crashed. Lost it in the biggest way. He remembered the control panel rising toward him, and the bow window starring into a million diamonds before the dust had flooded into his mouth and nose and eyes.

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