Blighted Star by Tom Parkinson Read Free Book Online Page A

them was any more important to him than he
was to them. It would be good to see them humbled just a little, to see them
huddled in blankets while he and his troops delivered them from danger…
    The
shuttle was another matter. The shuttle was an invaluable piece of equipment.
Without it everything on the planet would have to be lifted and carried and he
could guess who that task would fall to. The colonial marines always got stuck
with the shitty end of the stick. Outside in the corridor that damned woman was
still pacing up and down. Every time she went passed the doorway he felt she
was staring right at his back. And that was getting really unnerving. He
wondered if he was missing under similar circumstances what Christel would be
doing. Probably getting a good night’s sleep, he thought bitterly. He tapped
out a few instructions on the keyboard and the drones began set off from the
quarry site on another quadrant.
     
    <><><> 
     
    When
the plasma sphere had burst, the shuttle had been right on the periphery of the
resulting explosion. The rear of the craft had been instantly vaporised leaving
the exposed ends of the bulkheads, walls and floor glowing with heat fading
from white hot down through orange. The cabin filled for a moment with the
smoke from the burned metal, then the smoke had been whisked away by the
screaming gale from the gaping hole where the back had been bitten off.
    Grad’s
head had been smacked into the back of the seat by the jolt, and it took him a
moment or two for his blurred vision to clear. When he did so, the console
before him was utterly dead. He realised the pulse of electricity and magnetism
must have tripped all the safeguards. Looking out of his cracked side window he
could see that they were still going upwards, carried by their own momentum and
by the push from the blast, but they would soon be arcing down again. He had to
get the controls on line.  His hands danced across the control pad,
tapping in instructions urgently. Nothing responded. The shuttle, guided and
powered entirely by electronic systems, was now nothing more than a three tonne
alloy building a mile above the planet, with nothing to hold it in the sky.
    Their
momentum was slowing and as it did so the aerodynamic forces on the hull
shifted, pushing the nose down and initiating a sickening tumbling motion. In
the passenger side footwell Jim’s unconscious form flopped from side to side.
They began to fall, tumbling erratically. Grad continued to run through all the
sequences of his training, struggling to regain control. They dropped through a
layer of wispy cloud. He felt like punching the console with his fist but
forced himself to caress the keys normally, even as the cracked screen before
him showed him the ground, then the sky, then the ground again. It was hard to
get a good estimate of the rate of descent but he knew it must be great because
each time the ground was in front of him it was closer. A lot closer. Now he
could make out details quite clearly; an outcrop of rock, a series of small
ponds and a larger body of water. It looked as if they might be going to crash
into the lake rather than smash into the ground. At this speed it would make no
difference…
    It
was an effort to concentrate now; all he wanted to do was to spend his last few
moments thinking about Lana. He dragged his mind back to the task in hand,
feeling strangely detached. Not long now. The lake filled the entire windscreen
then slipped from view as the craft flipped into another rotation.
    Suddenly,
with a panicky sounding series of bleeps, the entire control panel blinked back
to life. Grad took a fraction of a second to register this and a fraction
longer to realise that it was too late, they were going to impact anyway. But perhaps
he could lessen the angle of that impact and turn their steep dive into a
shallow one. If he could make it shallow enough then they might just skip like
a stone off the surface of the lake…
    Cursing,
he