‘Okay. I’m going to leave this door open. If you want to save yourself, get to the hangar quickly. Everyone else has abandoned ship, so you’ll have to make an escape on your own. There’s one serviceable Frigate left – get out and away from the ship as fast as you can and make for the
Wright
. You only have minutes before we enter the storm. Don’t waste time on the deck elevator; there’s not enough power to move it. Use the emergency drop ramp.’
‘What about you?’ It was the first words she had said to him.
‘I’m staying on board. I’ll hold the ship as steady as I can to make sure you get away.’ He looked carefully at her, and smiled thinly. ‘I’m taking a risk on you, Foster. If you’re the officer I think you are, you’ll know what to say.’
He walked to the open doorway, and paused, framed by the light from the corridor behind him. ‘You never met Lieutenant Keller. She was like you in so many ways – young, committed –’ he stopped, looking down at the floor, and seemed to be fighting back tears. ‘I loved her, you know, Foster. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself.’ He glanced at her briefly, saw her uncomprehending gaze, and realised that there wasn’t anything more he could say.
The deck tilted underneath them, and a long, drawn-out groan of overstressed metal echoed through the structure of the ship.
‘You’d better hurry,’ he said, and was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Clare limped along the corridor towards the nearest stairs. Her ankles still hurt and she couldn’t walk properly, let alone run. The ship was rolling slowly from side to side now, like a boat in rough seas, and she clutched at handrails and fire extinguishers as she was thrown from one wall to the other.
She wasn’t familiar with this part of the ship; it was evidently some services deck below the main ones. Various doors and access hatches led off to either side. A stale, dank smell permeated the area, and the various doors and hatchways were stained and battered from long use. A shallow puddle of water sloshed from side to side in front of the stairs, and she splashed clumsily through it and started to climb upwards, her ankles protesting at each step.
She emerged at one end of a long, empty corridor, and for a moment, she couldn’t figure out where she was. Then she realised from the wall markings that she was in the lower port side corridor, alongside the hangar, but the familiar noise from inside the hangars was absent; it was eerily silent.
The
Langley
lurched, and she was almost flung back down the stairs by the sudden motion. From somewhere distant in the ship, a deep, infra-bass groan came through the floor.
‘Caution, structural failure in Section Twenty-five.’
The synthesized voice of the ship’s computer came over the PA system. Clare struggled to her feet and hurried along the corridor to the hangar airlock. The
Langley
was starting to break up under the stresses of the storm; she only had minutes to escape.
Colonel Donaldson picked up the glass of whisky from the desk in his stateroom, and walked slowly back to the control room, steadying himself against the corridor wall. He made it to the helm console, and managed to strap himself in before the
Langley
slammed into another pressure ridge. He heard the structure groan under the strain, and the emotionless voice of the ship warning him of the damage, and he took control, one hand on the sidestick, and his feet on the rudder pedals. As the ship’s rolling gradually subsided, he raised the glass to his lips with his free hand and took a long, slow drink.
He had a magnificent view; facing forward, looking through the sweep of the windows into the oncoming storm. It filled the sky ahead of the ship now, and its menacing arms of black cloud seemed to surround the
Langley
, pulling it in. They flashed with brilliant blue-white lighting discharges as the enormous charges within the clouds dissipated their pent-up energies.
He didn’t know if Foster would make it out, but she was young and resourceful, and he had given her a good chance. He was taking a risk, he knew, but the way he figured it, if she managed to escape, then he had done something good, and sometimes you were rewarded for doing good things. Sometimes. He took another sip of the whisky, and his thoughts wandered back to when he had been Foster’s age, and the thrill and the pride of being in the Corps.
He touched the silver colonel’s eagle on his uniform and thought of the many years since then: the work, the disappointments, the triumphs and the promotions. Marion, and the family they had raised together. And then—
And then there was Elizabeth Keller. He lowered his head and rolled the cool glass across his forehead, and he felt the hot tears burning between his closed eyelids.
The airlock door to the main hangar slid aside, and Clare stepped in, and stopped in astonishment. Behind the clear plastic of the facemask, her eyes were wide as she looked about her. The hangar was full of swirling snow; it blew around her like a blizzard. The deck elevator had come to a halt, stuck part-way between the flight deck and the hangar floor, and the snow was blowing in through the gap. The sharp edges of the hangar and the shapes of the two remaining Frigates were softened by growing drifts, making it look like some scene from an Arctic base on Earth.
One of the Frigates in the hangar was badly damaged; one wing was bent upwards at an extreme angle, and it had been pushed aside against the far wall. So it was the Frigate in front, the one with its hatch standing open. She prayed that it had been fuelled.
Use the emergency drop ramp
, Donaldson had said. Where the hell was it? The hangar deck was covered in snow. Somewhere in the centre of the deck was an aircraft-sized hatch, which could be opened into the slipstream to create a launch ramp. It was a last-ditch emergency exit route from the carrier, for situations when the deck elevator could not be used.
The controls of operating the drop ramp must be somewhere in the hangar. They wouldn’t be in the centre, where the ramp was; they had to be somewhere round the edge, and clearly marked. She set off round the hangar, looking at every control box that she found. The walls were covered with them, and she wasted precious time going past and checking them all. Finally, when she was beginning to wonder if she had been wrong and the controls were located somewhere in the floor, she found the controls, in a large white box with red warnings on it.
She ignored the warnings and ripped it open. The emergency instructions were printed on the inside of the door, and she read them quickly, her eyes darting over the red lettering. All she had to do was fire the explosive bolts holding the ramp in place, then release the drop mechanism and the ramp would fall open. She turned the interlock handles to arm the firing circuits, and as she did so, the hangar came alive with the sound of alarms, and rotating red warning lights. The ship’s computer voice added its own strident warning:
‘Danger, drop ramp release, clear the area, repeat clear the area.’
She gripped one of the handrails tightly, closed her eyes, and pressed the
FIRE
button.
The warning alarm changed to a continuous note, and three seconds later the bolts fired. In the empty hangar, it sounded like cannons going off, and eight columns of snow leaped into the air, making an angular U-shape in the deck. Clare reached down, gripped the manual release, and pulled. It was hard to move, and she had to use both hands and all her strength to pull it upwards, then suddenly the resistance was gone, and the handle flipped up. She turned round to see an amazing sight.
Where a few moments ago a solid floor had lain, the outlines of a huge panel, hinged along one side, had opened. Snow poured into the widening aperture as the panel opened, turning into a ramp, leading down and backwards into the air. As the gap widened, a howling gale roared across the opening, filling the hangar with snow. Deflector plates dropped to smooth out the airflow, but the noise was deafening; its infra-bass note reverberated inside the confines of the hangar, shaking Clare’s ribcage.
She set off at a run across the hangar, keeping well away from the lowering ramp. As she passed in front of it, she could see out and back, below the carrier, into a sea of dark, swirling clouds. Lightning flickered below her, illuminating the scene with its eerie light.
She had precious little time left. The carrier heaved and groaned now as the stresses of the storm flexed its wings and structure. She could actually see the hangar flexing, the deck moving under the shifting loads.
She made it to the Frigate, and clambered aboard. Someone must have been injured close by; her hand came away from the doorframe covered in blood. She didn’t have time to think about it, and pulled the hatch closed and made for the cockpit.
To hell with procedures. She had to get the engines started and get out immediately. She pulled the engine start switches on the overhead panel and opened the fuel valves on both engines, and let the engines whine through their start sequence while she did a rapid scan of the controls.
‘Come on,
come on,
’ she muttered; the engines seemed to be taking forever to spool up and ignite. She couldn’t spread the wings until she had turned round and was lined up on the ramp. Would the engines ever get going?
The hangar deck quivered under her, and the
Langley
shuddered. This was it. If she didn’t get out now, nothing else would matter. She released the brakes and pushed the thrust levers forwards, even though the engines were only just starting to turn. There was just enough thrust to get the Frigate moving forward, and she turned the nose sharp left in a tight U-turn, to line up at the top of the ramp, and held it there on the brakes while she glanced over the controls.
The engines were barely at idle thrust. She flicked the switch to spread the wings, and they lowered reluctantly into position; the engines generators weren’t yet providing full power, and everything was slow. She glanced at the fuel gauges – she had enough for half an hour’s flight and a landing, and that was going to have to be enough.
She could hear the carrier’s automated voice through the cockpit windows, reverberating through the hangar:
‘Emergency. Imminent structural failure. Abandon ship, repeat, abandon ship.’
That was enough for her. She let go of the brakes, and the aircraft rolled down the ramp. For an instant, she had a view of the underside of the
Langley
– it was streaked with old fluid leaks, and a trail of escaping vapour came from some ruptured fuel tank – then the Frigate fell off the end of the ramp and into the roar of air.
There was no sensation of flying at all; the aircraft dropped like a stone, and Clare gasped in fear. The engines shuddered in protest in the turbulent, snow-filled air. She hauled on the sidestick, but the controls were sluggish, and the cloud deck started to spin round in front of her. She had stalled out – she was going down!
‘Recover now,’
the flight computer warned.
‘I’m trying to recover, you stupid bitch,’ she hissed between her teeth, as the altimeter unrolled before her eyes.
‘Too deep, too deep.’
The engines were developing thrust again. Clare put the rudder over, and the spin was slowing, but she was still hurtling down, down towards certain death.
‘Caution, crush depth approaching.’
‘Come on – come on,’ she coaxed, as the nose slowly started to come up. Now she was flying level, and the engines’ thrust was rising. She let them come up to full power, and then pointed the nose up and let the Frigate climb. The aircraft was being tossed about in the storm force winds, but she had to climb higher, out of the crushing pressure of the deep atmosphere. She was burning precious fuel, but she desperately needed more height, and the safety of thinner air.
‘Safe altitude.’
Clare reduced thrust and lowered the nose slightly, and rolled onto a new heading, climbing away from the storm. She would worry about finding the
Wright
shortly. Right now, she had to get out and away from the storm before it tore her small aircraft to pieces.
Another gust shook the Frigate, and it pitched about violently, before breaking through into a patch of relatively clear sky. As it settled out, Clare glanced to her left, and found herself looking down into the very heart of the storm. She hadn’t realised how close she had come. She had a good view of the scene below her for maybe ten seconds, and that brief sight stayed with her for the rest of her life.
She looked down on the edge of a slowly turning whirlpool of black and grey cloud, laced with vivid tendrils of lightning. On the edge of the whirlpool, far, far below her, she could see the small shape of the
Langley
against the cloud bank, its nose desperately seeking altitude. A thin line of black smoke still trailed from its shattered engines.
The vortex of storm clouds turned slowly around a central funnel of clear air, leading down into the depths of the atmosphere. By some freak of the atmosphere, she could see all the way, kilometres – no,
tens
of kilometres down, into the darkness below the cloud layers. And right down at the bottom, at the very limits of her vision, was a tiny dot, a dimly-guessed glow that she knew must be the planet’s surface, far below her.
More lightning played round the edges of the funnel, brilliant forked lines in the darkness, and in the turbulent air, the
Langley’s
right wing stalled, and it heeled over, slowly, its nose dropping, until it was falling into the black funnel of the storm, going straight down.
If it broke apart on the way down, Clare never saw it. There was a sudden, blinding burst of lightning; perhaps the falling carrier had short-circuited the enormous charges in the storm. The Frigate shook under another hammer blow of turbulent air, and a bank of cloud turned on the edge of the funnel, sliding like a curtain over the view of the
Langley
as it shrank from sight, turning over and over as it fell. The brief view down through the funnel of clear air contracted, broke up, and vanished forever.