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

notdare. No point in coming this far just to have the ship detonate a half kilometer off the ground.
    Maybe, maybe, they had slowed down enough to make this a survivable crash. Han cut power to all systems and diverted it all into the inertial dampers. There was no way the dampers could absorb all the energy of impact, but they would soak up some of it. Maybe if they were running at max power, it would be just enough.
    And that was it. That was all. There were no tricks left. Nothing left to do but hold on and watch the numbers in the altimeter evaporate. Han had not the faintest idea where they were about to land. There had not been time, in his one quick glance at the ground, to do anything more than see that it was there. He had seen water, flat land, and some good-sized hills, but which of them he was about to hit, he had no idea.
    One kilometer up. Eight hundred meters. Seven hundred. Five hundred. Four hundred. Three fifty. If only the repulsors were still working. Too bad he had been forced to fry them to a crisp starting the engines. Three hundred. How accurate was that altimeter, anyway? Two hundred. One fifty. One hundred meters up. Seventy-five. Fifty. Han braced for the impact and resisted the impulse to shut his eyes. Zero.
    Negative ten meters. Not all that accurate. But every extra meter was another fraction of a second for the coneship’s engines to slow them down. Neg twenty. Neg fifty—
    SLAM!! A hundred crazed banthas jumped onto Han’s chest all at once, driving him down into the padding of the pilot’s flight station. Dracmus screamed, a startling, high-pitched ululation. A metal bulkhead tore itself apart somewhere in the ship with a terrible metallic shriek, and a dozen alarms started hooting at once. The overhead viewport held together, somehow, and Han could see the sky was filled with smoke and steam—and mud.
    Huge gobs of sodden earth splattered down on the viewport, covering it all but completely.
    Han hit the alarm cutoff, and was astonished by the sudden near-silence. But for Dracmus moaning in fright, and the plopping sounds of the last of the mud raining down on the ship’s hull, all was quiet. They were down, and alive. A sudden flurry of water, falling in a single thin sheet of droplets, fell on the ship, washing some—but far from all—of the mud off the viewport.
    Han got to his feet, feeling more than a little wobbly. “That one was close,” he said in Basic, to himself as much as anything. “Come,” he said in Selonian. “We must leave ship. Might be—” He stopped dead. Half his Selonian seemed to have faded away, at least for the moment. After that close a call, it was a wonder he was calm enough to remember his own name. But he couldn’t think of the words for “chemical leak,” or “fire,” or “short circuits.” “Bad things,” he said at last. “Might be bad things on ship. Must leave
now.
”
    The two Selonians, both of them clearly shaken up, got to their feet and followed Han down the ladder to the lower deck and over to the main hatch. Han punched at the open button, and was not the least bit surprised when nothing at all happened. The ship they had risked their lives to land, the ship that the Hunchuzuc needed so badly, was a write-off. A complete loss. Han knelt down, fumbled with the access panel for the manual controls, got the cover off, and turned the hand crank. The hatch swung reluctantly open, and jammed up twice before it swung wide enough for them to get out. Han stuck his head out first and looked around.
    It looked like they had landed square in the middle of a shallow pond—and splashed it dry on impact. The bottom of the pond was completely exposed, but for one or two puddles here and there. The mud was steaming here and there, letting off the heat producedby the ship’s impact. It was a beautiful, perfect spring day. Somehow, the picturesque meadows and woodlands that surrounded the splashed-out pond made the mud and the mire and the