Galaxy Blues by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page A

was scratching at my face and wishing that the emergency kit contained a shaver, I was able to make out geographic features: mountain ranges, volcanoes, tropical savannahs, and rain forests, scattered across subcontinents and islands of all shapes and sizes.
    A beautiful world, as close to Earth as anything yet discovered in our little corner of the galaxy. Worth the effort to get there…provided, of course, that I didn’t end my trip as a trail of vaporized ash following the slipstream of a man-made meteor.
    When the lifeboat was about three hundred nautical miles away, the autopilot buzzed, telling me that the time had come for me to take over. By then I was strapped into my couch again. I took a deep breath, murmured the Astronaut’s Prayer—“Lord, please don’t let me screw up”—then I switched off the autopilot, grasped the yoke, and did my best to put my little craft safely on the ground.
    While I was earning my wings in the Academia del Espacio , I logged over two hundred hours in simulators and four hundred more in training skiffs. Before I was thrown out of the UA, I’d also flown Athena shuttles, including one landing on Mars. But those were all winged spacecraft, complete with all sorts of stuff like elevators and flaps and vertical stabilizers. As I said, though, the Lou Brock was only a lifeboat, and for this sort of thing I’d completed only as much training as I needed to graduate from cadet to ensign: four hours in a simulator, and my flight instructor had forgiven me for a crash landing that would have killed everyone aboard.
    I was getting a second chance to show that I’d learned something from that part of my education that few spacers thought they’d ever use in real life. Watching through the windows, I carefully adjusted the lifeboat’s attitude until it assumed a trajectory that would bring it over Coyote’s northern hemisphere. I’d studied maps of the world, so I had a pretty good idea of what was where. Once I determined that I was somewhere above Great Dakota, I initiated entry sequence.
    Keeping an eye on the eight ball, I maneuvered the RCS thrusters until the lifeboat made a 180-degree turn, then I ignited the main engine. My body was pushed against the straps as the engine burned most of what remained of my fuel reserves. This lasted several minutes, and once my instruments told me that I’d shed most of my velocity, I shut down the engine and fired the thrusters again, delicately coaxing the lifeboat until it had assumed the proper attitude for atmospheric entry. Then I revved up the main once more, this time to make sure that I didn’t hit the troposphere too fast. When everything looked copacetic, I goosed the yaw and pitch a bit, fine-tuning my angle of attack.
    This went on for about fifteen or twenty minutes, during which I barely had time to look out the porthole, let alone give the lidar more than a passing glance. Since I was coming in backward, I didn’t have the luxury of selecting a precise landing site. At that point, though, all I wanted to do was make it through the upper atmosphere in one piece. So by the time a white-hot corona began to form around the heat shield, I couldn’t tell where the hell I was going. Except down.
    Gravity took over like a baby elephant that had decided to sit on my chest. Gasping for air, I struggled to remain conscious…and when my vision began to blur and I thought I was about to lose it, I hit the button that would activate the automatic landing sequence. It was a good thing that I did so, because I wasn’t totally myself when the Lou Brock entered Coyote’s stratosphere.
    I was jerked out my daze by the sudden snap of the drogue chutes being released. The altimeter told me that I was twenty-seven thousand feet above the ground. Through the porthole, I could see dark blue sky above a cotton-gauze layer of clouds. So far, so good, but I was still falling