Deucalion by Brian Caswell Read Free Book Online Page B

your eyes, the whole bit, but let me tell you, it doesn’t. Everything happened in an instant.
    Even so, every detail is clear. The flyer crashed on its side, and suddenly it was like a giant hand had ripped it in half. We were tumbling, cartwheeling out of control. I could see sky and rocks and the ground flashing past my eyes. The seat’s automatic crash-bars had locked into place, and I was completely immobilised and helpless, but I knew, at that moment, that I was going to survive. Don’t ask me how. It was like . . . a flash. The whole front of the flyer had been torn off – the cockpit and all the seats in front of mine. I knew that Jacklin and the others were dead. There was no hope for them. They’d taken the full force of the impact that had ripped the flyer in half. But I was still there.
    Then I felt the explosion. That close to the centre, it isn’t a noise, it’s a wall of energy, thumping into the back of your seat, tearing it from its mountings and hurling you out, clear of the flyer, with the rock face hurtling towards you.
    I closed my eyes and waited for the impact, but the seat was spinning, and instead of smashing me face-on into the rock, the momentum carried me around, so that the reinforced seat-back took the force of the collision. I felt it crack, and the breath was driven from my lungs, but nothing snapped. I felt none of the searing pain I was expecting. The seat bounced away from the huge boulder, and I tumbled with it. The crash-bars had held, and with my head secured, and the microlite cage between the ground and me, when I finally came spinning to a halt, the only injury I could sense was the bruising where the crash-bars had pressed into me.
    I was lying face down, with my eyes about ten centimetres off the dirt. And that was where I was going to stay. My right hand was caught between the bars of the crash-cage and I couldn’t reach the release button. I was straining and cursing when I heard the second explosion. The ground shook, and a shower of rocks and debris rained down around me, rebounding off the broken back of the seat, so that it saved me again. Two explosions .A strange suspicion began to grow somewhere in the back of my mind, but at that moment I was far more concerned with how I was going to get out of my new predicament. How many others had survived? I knew how lucky I was to be still breathing. The crash-cage was never designed to protect you outside the flyer. If I’d struck that boulder face on, instead of turning . . .
    But I was alive . . .
    I remembered the explosions. How many had survived the impact, only to be blown apart in their seats, just as they were congratulating themselves on their good fortune?
    I struggled again to free my hand, but it was no use. Unless someone was still alive, I was there until the rescue flyers arrived. I could survive that long. Jacklin would have punched the automatic distress signal, and Edison was only a hundred or so clicks to the east. All they had to do was home in on the coordinates relayed with the distress call and they’d be here in maybe fifteen minutes Standard.
    That’s if Jacklin had sent the signal. I remembered him battling to keep the flyer in the air. He was a professional, but what if he’d forgotten to send the signal?
    One of the last things I’d done before we hit was to look at my chrono. Why, I don’t know. I guess some habits are hard to break, even when you’re about to die. But lying there face down, not knowing how long I’d have to stay like that, I began to do some calculations. It was just on four when we came down. An hour from midday, and already the heat was oppressive. But the vagaries of the climate in the Central Desert meant that in the next seventy or eighty minutes, it could rise by another 20 degrees, and by five, midday, if no one arrived to get me out, I might be wishing I’d bought it in the crash with everyone else. Boiling to