Galaxy Blues by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page B

fast…but then there was another jolt as the drogues were released, and one more as the three main chutes were deployed. I sucked in a lungful of air. All right, so I wasn’t going to become toast. Thank you, St. Buzz, and all other patron saints of dumb-luck spacers.
    But that didn’t mean that I was out of danger yet. Although the fuel gauge told me that I still had .03 percent in reserves, that was practically worthless so far as controlling my angle of descent. Firing thrusters now might cause the parachute lines to tangle, and then I’d be dead meat. So my fate was cast to the wind. Although I’d done my best to pick my landing site, so far as I knew I might splash down in a channel. Or descend into the caldera of an active volcano. Or land on top of the Wicked Witch of the East and be greeted by the Lollipop Guild.
    In any event, I had no vote in the outcome. So I simply hung on tight and clenched my teeth as I watched the altimeter roll back. At one thousand feet, there was the thump of the heat shield being jettisoned, followed by the loud whoosh of the landing bags inflating.
    By then my rate of descent was thirty-two feet per second, according to the altimeter. I began a mental countdown from the half minute mark. Thirty…twenty-nine…twenty-eight…twenty-seven …At the count of twenty, I decided that this was pointless, and simply waited.
    Touchdown was hard, but not so violent that I did anything foolish like bite my tongue. To my relief, I didn’t come down in water; there was no rocking back and forth that would have indicated that I’d landed in a channel or a river, just the tooth-rattling whomp of hitting solid ground. A few seconds later, there was the prolonged hiss of the airbags deflating; when I felt the bottom of the lifeboat settle beneath me, I knew that I was safe.
    Welcome to Coyote. Now where the hell was I?
    XIII
    I waited until the bags collapsed, then unbuckled the harness and rose from my couch. After eighteen hours of zero g, my legs felt like warm rubber, but otherwise I had no trouble getting on my feet. The deck seemed stable enough; nonetheless, the first thing I did was look out the window to make sure that the lifeboat hadn’t come down in a treetop. Nothing but what appeared to be a vast savannah of tall grass.
    I already knew the air was breathable, so I went to the side hatch, removed the panel covering the lock-lever, and twisted it clockwise. The hatch opened with a faint gasp of overpressurized air. A moment later my ears popped. Coyote’s atmosphere was thinner than Earth’s, so I swallowed a couple of times to equalize the pressure in my inner ear, then I climbed through the hatch and dropped to the ground, landing on top of one of the deflated bags.
    It was early afternoon, wherever it was that I’d landed, the alien sun just past zenith in a pale blue sky streaked here and there with thin clouds. Although the air was a little cooler than I had expected, nonetheless the day was warm; it was midsummer on Coyote, if I correctly recalled recent reports of this world, which meant that it wouldn’t get cold until after Uma went down. About two or three miles away, beyond the edge of the field, was a line of trees; when I stepped away from the lifeboat and turned to look the other way, I saw more forest, with low mountains rising in the far distance.
    The lifeboat had a survival kit; I’d already found it during my long trip here. Yet although it included a map of Coyote and a magnetic compass, a fat lot of good they’d do me now. The mountains represented no landmark that I recognized from ground level, and although the compass would help me tell north from south and east from west, a sense of direction was all but useless when I was ignorant of exactly where I had landed. So far as I knew, I was on the outskirts of Munchkinland, about a hundred miles from the Emerald City.
    But the kit also included food sticks,