Showdown at Centerpoint by Roger MacBride Allen Read Free Book Online Page A

movement came straight from the energy of their fall.
    The ship began to bang and shudder violently, but every crash and rattle was that much more excess energy expended.
    “Honored Solo!” Dracmus protested above theracket, “You have put us in lateral flight! Where are you taking us?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Han said. “But we have to go lateral to shed some speed.”
    “But suppose we land outside the zone controlled by my Den?!”
    “Then we have a problem,” Han shouted back.
    Dracmus did not reply to that, but she had a point. Landing completely at random on a planet in the midst of civil war was not exactly prudent.
    Han pushed it from his mind. The job of the moment was getting this thing down in one piece. Down
where,
they could sort out later.
    He checked his gauges. They were still falling like a rock—but like a slower rock, a gliding rock. And hull temperatures were actually falling, just a trifle. Maybe, maybe, they were going to make it.
    Of course, landing on the sublight engines, rather than on the now-dead repulsors, and landing blind would be challenges in their own right. It would be at least another ninety seconds before he had to worry about such things.
    He checked the gauges and shook his head. The lateral flight trick was slowing them down, but nowhere near enough. At this rate, they’d be lucky to drop below the speed of sound before they hit.
    There was no way around it. He was going to have to get something more out of the engines. What about that fourth engine, the one that had refused to light? Maybe it was just its initiator link that had been blown off. Maybe the engine itself was still there, if he could just get it to come on. Maybe if he tried a parallel backfeed start. With the other engines up and running, he could borrow part of their energy output and back-flush it through the unlit engine. It
might
work. Han reset the power flow from the number two engine, routing five percent of it through the initiator lines to engine three. He stabbed down the button marked PRESSING HERE WILL CAUSE ENGINE NUMBER FOUR TO START .
    A weird high-pitched squeal cut through the clamoring roar that filled the command deck, and the coneship began to oscillate wildly as the engine lit and died and lit and died. A display indicator came on, announcing ENGINE FOUR NOW OPERATING NICELY , but it went out again, then popped on and faded one more time before coming back on and staying that way.
    Four engines. He had four good engines. He might come out of this alive after all. But then he checked his altitude, and found good reason to doubt it. They were only three kilometers up. Han realized that he would have to shed all of his lateral speed immediately if he was going to set this thing down. He pitched the ship around until it was flying flat on its side, the thrust axis parallel to the ground. The planetary horizon swooped into view and kept going right past, until Han was flying exactly upside down, his feet pointed at the sky and his head pointed at the ground.
    He throttled all the engines up to maximum, and just a bit beyond, and held it there, until the ground stopped rushing past from side to side and was simply coming straight at him. Zero forward velocity, or close enough.
    But plenty of velocity in the direction of down. Han pitched the coneship over again, until he was flat on his back, looking at the sky, and made sure the engines were cranked up to maximum power. There was nothing else he could do. “Hanging on!” he shouted in Selonian. “Be strapped in and braced. We are going to be hitting hard!”
    Green lights started to flash all over the propulsion status display. In most ships that would have been a good thing, but not on this crate. To a Selonian, green was the color of danger, disaster. The engines were running full out, at or beyond the point of catastrophe. Han wanted desperately to see if he could bully or tempt just a little bit more out of them, but did