Deucalion by Brian Caswell Read Free Book Online Page A

above the wall of rock.
    Saebi turned to run inside the cave, but Cael was already emerging. In his hand he held the painting stick, still wet with colour, but his eyes were fixed on the swirling column of black that rose perhaps a hundred metres into the sky, before the desert wind caught it and drove it eastwards towards the deep-water.
    Another explosion shook the ancient riverbed, and Saebi looked at her mate, reading on his face the decision she had already reached.
    â€˜Come.’ She spoke the word aloud, and he responded.
    DARYL
    Poor Jacklin. Johannsen never gave him anything but the power put-down. Sometimes I wondered why Jacklin stood for it. I guess he figured that the old guard could only last a few more years before they were put out to pasture, then those who had stuck it out, put up with all the crap, would still be around to take over the reins.
    I actually think Jacklin would have made an acceptable politician – if there is such an animal. He was pretty honest, even if he was just about running the J-man’s election campaign. And he got on with nearly everyone. He spoke to you as if you were just as important as Johannsen or anyone on the Ruling Council, yet he still got you to do more – and willingly – than all the J-man’s posing and demanding could ever do. But in one moment, it was all over. And who he was, what he might have become . . . suddenly, it all meant nothing.
    When the flyer started to lose power, no one really worried all that much. Even the cheapest personal models have back-up field-generators, and all the guidance and navigation circuits were duplicated in a stand-by computer with its own power source. The chances of every system failing at the same time were too minuscule to even consider.
    So, of course, that was exactly what happened.
    Jacklin was a grade one pilot. It was one of the original reasons he was on Johannsen’s staff. He could fly anything, from a two-passenger cub to a full-size flyer like the one we were on. It gave the J-man flexibility in his movements, and that was important. Sometimes he had to fly to secret meetings with people who wanted them to remain secret. A pilot who could take part in discussions and be trusted to keep his mouth shut was a valuable asset.
    But it wouldn’t have mattered who was piloting the thing, it was never going to make it to Edison.
    It’s amazing that he got it as far as he did. Once the secondary field-generator began to fritz out, I knew he was looking for a nice soft place to put down. But ‘soft’ and ‘Deucalion’ are two words you don’t often use in the same sentence.
    We had already reached the foothills, and the terrain there is about the worst you’ll find anywhere. Jacklin scouted a couple of dry river valleys, without any luck, and all the time we were losing power and altitude. Then, just as we climbed out of one of the valleys, the generator coil collapsed completely, the repulsion-field died and we were on our way down.
    I was sitting a few seats back from Jacklin. I watched him as he fought to control the flyer’s trajectory. He looked amazingly calm. ‘Hang on,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘We’re going in.’ Then he turned for just a moment and caught my eye, with a sort of half-smiled encouragement.
    Actually, I think I would have liked him, if he had survived.
    But he didn’t. And neither did most of the thirty-odd people on board.
    At first I thought he’d managed to pull it off. He angled the crippled flyer for a space between two huge boulders and hit reverse on the thrusters. It killed a lot of the forward momentum, but the thing was falling too fast. At the last moment, the nose dipped, and the whole flyer slewed over onto its side as the right-hand wing glanced off the face of one of the rocks.
    I know it’s all supposed to happen in slow-mo like a videodisk replay; things spinning around, your life flashing before