Second Platoon strikers close enough to hear her laughed. C41 was loose for this landing. Nobody was careless. The strikers were poised with their weapons aimed, reloads and backups ready . . . but nobody really believed the wildlife was a danger on the same scale as Kalendru troops.
It wasn’t, of course. Art Farrell’s real concern was what came next, guarding a thousand civilians from that wildlife.
“Thirty seconds to landing,” Kuznetsov said.
The trouble with the transport’s automatic operation wasn’t the voyage, which had gone as smoothly as any similar period Farrell had spent on a starship, but right now: the landing. 10-1442 was a can of meat until the four bottom-deck hatches opened—which they would do whether or not anybody aboard wanted them to, and before the human cargo had the slightest view of what was waiting for them outside.
A Population Authority advance team had fabricated a landing grid from the system’s asteroid belt, then used a robot lander to drop the mass to the colony site. The actual location might be miles away from the one planners on Earth had penciled in. That could be a problem anywhere; on Bezant, 10-1442 might land right in front of a swarm of murderous herbivores. Deck 1 was for C41 alone until Farrell was very damned sure the site was as safe as his strikers could make it.
“Five seconds to landing,” Kuznetsov said.
The vibration rose to a roar so loud that Farrell’s helmet had to filter it. The transport generated identical magnetic polarities in its own lower hull and the upper surface of the grid. The charges repelled one another. The transport settled to the grid, slowing progressively because magnetic effect increased as the cubed reciprocal of the distance.
The transport touched down, its seams wheezing and groaning. Huge bolts withdrew, unlocking the upper edge of the hatches. Farrell winced at themechanism’s bangbang/bangbang/bangbang/bangbang. The only thing he’d heard that sounded quite like that was the hull of an assault boat taking fire, and he’d heard that often enough.
“Careful, people,” Farrell ordered as the hydraulic rams whined in the relative silence. “Nobody gets more than twenty feet from the ship until I—”
The transport slid with a grinding of metal, then began slowly to topple.
“Watch out for the cargo!” Farrell shouted. “If those bulldozers shift—”
The hatches, three-quarters of the way down, continued to open outward. A green wall of vegetation towered in the middle distance.
Farrell let the sling snatch his weapon and gripped the hatch coaming with both hands. His boots slipped on the deck; the ship tilted farther.
The ship was falling more or less away from Farrell at Hatch A. Metal screamed; the hull was taking stresses at angles where it wasn’t braced. He heard the seam between the transoms of Holds C and D fold inward and tear.
When the deck was at a 30-degree angle, Farrell waited for the accelerating rush whose momentum would flatten the fat cylinder against the ground. The starship halted. The reason it stopped didn’t matter any more than the reason it had tilted in the first place.
“Out of here, strikers!” Farrell cried as he got a boot onto the coaming and launched himself from the vessel. He pulled his stinger into firing position before he hit the ground twenty feet below, tucked into a roll, and came to his feet ready for whatever Bezant wanted to throw at him.
They’d landed in the middle of deep forest, but the vegetation within forty feet of the hold was yellowing. The flux which braked thousands of tons of starship generated enormous waste heat in the magnetic mass. That soaked into the soil and killed the roots of the surrounding plants.
Farrell was familiar with the process: he’d seen the same thing when he boarded at Emigration Port 10. But to have yellowed and dried to their present condition these trees had to have been cooked weeks ago, not in the past few minutes as the transport landed.
Until he got clear, Farrell had guessed the ship slid because the grid was misaligned. In fact there wasn’t a landing grid at all. They’d braked against a nickel-iron asteroid which had been dropped to the planet unformed.