Redliners(36)

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.

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.