The asteroid made a perfectly satisfactory magnetic mass, but its domed, pitted upper surface wasn’t even notionally flat. 10-1442 had lowered itself into contact, then slipped sideways until it overbalanced. The only reason they hadn’t gone completely over was that the open hatches braced them.
Temporarily. The starship creaked as it wobbled. A gust of wind, subsoil cracking under the strain, or the collapse of Hatch D’s hydraulic rams could finish the job at any moment.
C41 was out of the vessel, even the two strikers per hatch wearing full hard suits because Farrell hadn’t known what to expect. “C41, perimeter a hundred feet out!” he ordered. “Nobody in the footprint where the ship’s going to fall. Out.”
He stayed where he was while his strikers, laden with weapons and equipment, lumbered away from the ship. Farrell needed to be central because he didn’t know where the threat would be coming from.
He knew for certain that there was a threat, though.
He manually keyed the liaison channel. “Farrell to Ibrahimi,” he said. “Get your civilians out immediately, but for God’s sake keep them close to the ship. Farrell out!”
If the chunk of nickel-iron had been a natural meteor moving at orbital velocity, it would have blasted a crater the size of Emigration Port 10. Only droplets would remain on the site. The bulk of the projectile would have splashed through the stratosphere and rained down in a circle thousands of miles across.
This mass had been dropped at deliberate speed with braking rockets like those which slowed the grid where the transport had been intended to land. A raw asteroid wasn’t suitable to land a human transport, but Kalendru military vessels used outriggers of variable length to permit them to come down safely on crude surfaces.
“C41, watch out for company,” Farrell said. He tried to watch both his strikers and the masked schematic of their deployment on his visor. “This is a Spook site, and they’re going to be coming for us. Six out.”
When 10-1442 started to slide, Esther Meyer’s first flashing thought was that the planet had opened its green maw and was swallowing them. She hadn’t seen much of Bezant yet, but she’d seen enough to dislike it.
Meyer was in her hard suit, ready to push her dolly of cannon shells down the ramp to wherever Top or the major decided they wanted the weapon emplaced. Now she jerked the two heavy cannisters out of their clamp restraints and let the little support device bound off one side of the lowering ramp.
The gun was dollied-up also. Nessman switched his lift fan off, collapsing the air cushion. The dolly continued to slide down the increasing slope. Nessman jammed a boot in the crack between the hull proper and the lowering hatch. With that purchase he was able to keep the heavy gun from spilling wildly out of the ship.
Meyer tried to drag her cannisters up the deck to where she could hook an arm through a cargo strap. When that didn’t work she sat down. Her boots had non-slip soles, but the seat of Meyer’s ceramic armor was close to being a frictionless surface. It still seemed like the natural thing to do when she was trying to keep from falling out of a starship that was about to topple on whatever was below it.
“C41, watch for cargo shifting,” the major’s voice warned. This boarding deck had no partitions, just stanchions and the lift shafts which acted as structural columns. The circumference of the deck was open. Items too large for the lifts to carry to higher levels were secured in the remaining volume.
It was possible that one of the vehicles was going to break loose, but that wasn’t Meyer’s first concern. She’d chance having a bulldozer land on her and hope it wouldn’t crush the hard suit. The entire mass of 10-1442 was something else. She’d never be found.
The ship stopped tilting. “Everybody out!” Sergeant Daye ordered, pausing at the edge of the hatch to make sure his people were clear before he jumped. Daye gripped the jamb with one hand and bent to help Nessman with the cannon’s weight.