Pathways - Jeri Taylor [2]
The trick now was timing. He had to gauge—through a combination of skill, experience, and luck—just the right time to maneuver the nose of the ship down. Too soon and it would throw him into an end-over-end tumble from which it was almost impossible to escape. Too late and the atmosphere would be dense enough to keep the shuttle nose-up and he would continue to spin out of control, screaming into the atmosphere at a speed that would incinerate him.
His body was being slammed against the seat with increasing pressure, his head filling with blood from the centrifugal force of the spin. He forced his eyes to bore into the control panel, watching as the altitude was displayed. He was falling about fifty meters a second, three thousand meters a minute. He estimated he’d have to engage his emergency drogue field at an altitude of about thirty thousand meters, and that was coming up fast.
At thirty-one thousand meters, he realized he was in trouble. His vision was darkening and his head throbbed as blood sloshed through it. He’d better engage the field now . . . but he knew it was too soon. He’d go tumbling into an endless somersault until he and the craft became a hellish fireball.
He had to wait . . . until it felt right. But how would he know when it felt right? Maybe his judgment was becoming impaired by the unnatural rearrangement of his bodily fluids. Go ahead, something told him, the altitude’s close enough . . . engage the drogue field. His fingers slid with practiced ease to the controls.
But no! screamed through his mind, and his fingers responded, poised over the panel, refusing to enter the command. The ship was now under thirty thousand meters. Was he heading for dangerously turbulent atmospheric levels?
Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . .
Darkness was overtaking him, and the panel was nothing more than a dim arrangement of lights that swam in his field of vision. Much longer and he wouldn’t be conscious to enter the field engagement command. Hang on, Tom . . . hang on . . .
Suddenly, the startling image of the incident from long ago—another time when he had told himself to wait . . . wait . . . wait—ripped through his mind like a phaser, and he cried out involuntarily. He thought he was over that, had long ago purged himself of those awful sights, but there they were in his mind’s eye, brilliant and indelible, shot through with colors . . . colors of fire, colors of death . . .
The shock of the memory cleared his vision briefly and he saw that he was under twenty-nine thousand meters above the surface.
Now.
His fingers danced on the controls and the drogue field engaged . . . within seconds he would feel the tug as the ship nosed down and fell out of its spin. He drew great gasps of air because now he felt light-headed and dizzy—had his eyes flicked for a half second to the window? He was sure they hadn’t, and yet he was unaccountably queasy . . . why wasn’t the nose pitching down? Had he entered the wrong command? The beginnings of panic crackled in his mind like arcing plasma.
That wouldn’t do. Can’t panic. Think. Nose down . . . why not happening . . . think . . .
He had just promised himself that if he got out of this, he’d never flirt with danger again—when the long-awaited tug pulled at him and he felt the shuttle pitch downward. In a flash, he realized that nothing had been wrong, after all, except his perception of time, distorted by his biological responses. Everything was going as it should.
Air flooded the intake ducts and the thrusters began to respond. Tom regained control and drew the shuttle into a vectored descent, then looked out to see the ripe blue sky of the alien planet, familiar and welcoming. Soon he was dropping to the surface, searching for a landing spot, telling himself that his promise not to try things like this anymore should be nullified because nothing had really been wrong, after all.
Beneath him, he saw the figures of the Voyager crew, tiny as dust motes at first, then gradually increasing