Engineman - Eric Brown [91]
"It's coming apart at the seams!" someone cried. "We don't stand a chance!"
"Be quiet, Elliott," Fekete commanded with impeccable calm. "I actually think the pilot's doing an amazing job. Does anyone know his name?"
"Kaminski," Olafson said through gritted teeth.
"Then Kaminski should be awarded a medal for holding on so long - posthumous, of course."
"Fekete," Mirren yelled. "Just shut it!"
The chaos was accentuated by an electrical fault. The lights dimmed and flickered in synchronicity with a series of explosions which bucked the 'ship throughout its length.
Mirren thought that Leferve, laid out beside him, was humming; no - the continuous, low note was a religious chant. Elliott began gibbering again. Mirren warned her to shut it, or face the consequence of physical violence; which prompted the wry observation from Fekete that he hoped he would be around to watch the fight.
It came to Mirren in an inspired moment of calm reflection that, after all, this was not so bad a way to die: there was a certain irony in the fact that this would have been his and his teams' last flight anyway. He'd often dreaded, since learning that the Canterbury Line was closing down, the prospect of life without the flux. Now his fear was academic.
The Perseus Bound hit something - it could only be the ground - and broke up in a series of impacts. He heard multiple explosions, and flaring, actinic bursts of fire seared his exposed flesh. Before he could conceive of being incinerated he was knocked out by a shock wave.
When he came to his senses he was amazed to find himself still in one piece and strapped into his pod.
More amazing still was the absolute calm.
The other pods, arranged around the systems-column like petals, seemed to be intact too. The engine-room had been sheered clean in half, affording a view of the jungle and the main body of the 'ship some distance away. The Perseus lay broken-backed in the pit of its own ploughing, ablaze and further torn apart by secondary explosions. The vegetation on either side not destroyed by the crashlanding was alight and burning like an avenue of torches.
Mirren experienced ten seconds of inertia, during which he could do nothing other than marvel that he was still alive. Then he rapidly unfastened himself from the harness. "Dan? Caspar?"
"Well, I must admit this is a surprise," Fekete commented.
Dan was still chanting his mantra.
Elliott and Olafson replied that they were okay.
Mirren pushed himself from the pod and staggered to the jagged edge of what once had been the deck. The engine-room was lodged on a jackstraw arrangement of fallen tree trunks. The heat from the burning wreckage swept over him in a wave. Overhead, unfamiliar constellations burned in an indigo sky.
He returned to the systems-column. From a storage unit he retrieved the distress beacon and emergency supplies and crouched beside the opening. Using the tree trunks as an impromptu stairway, he made his way down to the jungle floor, stood and surveyed the remains of the bigship. At intervals between the larger chunks of wreckage, small parcels of blackened carcasses, some with their extremities still glowing, smoked in the humid night air. The clearing was filled with the stink of cooking flesh. Mirren made a cursory tour of inspection through the red hot wreckage, looking for survivors but knowing that the chances of finding any were remote. He recalled the sight of the hundreds of civilian passengers boarding the 'ship from the terminal on Xyré, and the faces of the dead returned to him.
He entered the details of the crashlanding and the