"The Trofts claimed that wouldn't happen," LuCass reminded him.
"Yeah. Right." Koja took a deep breath, fought the rage back down to a cold anger. If only the Southern Cross had been overhead when the shuttle went down, instead of in their own orbit half a world away. If only they'd been there; had seen the crash as it happened, instead of finding out about it an hour afterward...
And if they had, it wouldn't have made any difference. None at all. Even if the
Southern Cross had the capability of landing down there-which it didn't-they would still have been too late to save anyone. A crash like that would have killed everyone on board on impact. Koja closed his eyes briefly. At least, he thought, it would have been quick. It wasn't much consolation.
"I'll be damned," the scanner chief muttered abruptly into his thoughts.
"Captain, you'd better take a look at this."
Koja turned back to his display. A closer view of the crash site had replaced the first photo on his display. "Lovely," he growled.
"Maybe it is," the chief said, picking up his lightpen. A circle appeared briefly in the photo's lower right-hand corner. "Take a look and tell me if I'm seeing what I think I am."
It was an animal-that much was obvious even to Koja's relatively untrained eye.
A quadruped, with the build of a hunting feline, lying prone on the leafy ground cover in the clearing the shuttle's passage had torn through the tree canopy. "A spine leopard?" he hazarded.
"That's what I thought, too," the other nodded. "Notice anything unusual about its head?"
Frowning, Koja leaned closer. The head...
Was gone. "Must have gotten caught in the crash," he said, feeling suddenly queasy. If something outside the shuttle had been torn up that badly...
"Maybe, maybe not," the chief muttered, an odd note in his voice. "Let me see if
I can get us in a little closer-"
A new, tighter photo replaced the one on the display, the normal atmospheric blurring fading away as the computer worked to clean up the image. The spine leopard's head...
"Oh, my God," LuCass whispered from his side. "Captain-that's not crash damage."
Koja nodded, the cold hand on his heart tightening its grip. Not crash damage; laser damage. Cobra laser damage.
Someone had survived the crash.
"Complete scan," Koja ordered the scanner chief through dry lips. "We've got to find him."
"I've already done a check of the area we can penetrate-"
"Then do it again," Koja snapped.
"Yes, sir." The chief got busy.
LuCass took a step closer to Koja's chair. "What are we going to do if we do locate him?" he asked softly. "There isn't any place down there we could possibly set this monster down."
"Even if there was, I doubt the Qasamans would sit back and let us do it." Koja clenched his teeth until they ached. He'd asked the Directorate-begged the
Directorate-to rent a second shuttle from the Trofts as an emergency backup. But no; the damned governor-general had deemed it an expensive and unnecessary luxury and vetoed the request. "Any chance we could get some food and medical supplies down to him? It would at least give him a fighting chance."
LuCass was already typing on Koja's computer keyboard. "Let's see what we've got on board... well, we could foam some ablator onto a mini cargo pod. A parachute... yes, we could rig a chute. Pressure sensor to tell it when to pop...? Hmm. Nothing... wait a second, we could put it on a simple timer and have it pop at a prefigured time. Looks feasible, Captain."
"At which point the question arises of where to send it so that he can actually find it." Koja looked over at the scanner chief. "Anything?"
The other shook his head. "No, sir. The canopy's just too thick for short-wave or infrared penetration. His only shot at civilization is to the east, though-we could try dropping the supplies where the road ahead of him intersects an eastward path." He hesitated. "Of course, there's no guarantee he's lucid," he added. "He could be going in any direction, in that case, or even walking around in circles. Or his brain could be functioning fine but his body too badly injured to get all the way to the road."
"In either case he's dead," Koja said tightly. "He may be dead even if he does get to a village-the Qasaman leaders are hardly going to keep the shuttle crash an official secret." He looked at LuCass. "Get a crew busy on that pod," he ordered. "Include a tight-beam split-freq radio with the other supplies. We'll have a spot picked out to aim for by the time you're ready."
"Yes, sir." LuCass turned back to his own board, keyed the intercom, and began issuing orders.
Exhaling in a silent sigh, Koja looked back at the dead spine leopard still on his display. And it's all just so much wasted effort, he thought blackly.
Because as long as the Cobra was alone in enemy territory the time clock would be ticking down toward zero. Eventually, the Qasamans would identify him; or else a wandering krisjaw or spine leopard would find him; or else something completely unknown would get him.
Qasama was a deathtrap... and the only people who had any chance at all of pulling him out of it were back on Aventine. Eight days and forty-five light-years away.
Eight days. Koja cringed, trying desperately to find a closer alternative. The
New Worlds, perhaps-Esquiline and the other fledgling colonies-or even the nearby Troft demesne of Baliu'ckha'spmi. But Esquiline would have no spacecraft capable of making groundfall, either; and with neither an official credit authorization nor a supply of trade goods on board, trying to deal through an unfamiliar Troft bureaucracy for the rent of another shuttle could take literally months.
Eight days, A minimum of fourteen days for the round trip, even if the faster
Dewdrop was available. Add the time needed to choose and equip a search and rescue team, and it could easily be twenty days before they could even begin to look for him.
And with or without a supply pod, twenty days alone on Qasama was a death sentence. Pure and simple.
But that didn't mean they had to give up without a fight... and if the fight in this case consisted of hoping for a miracle, then so be it. The fact that one of the Cobras had survived the crash was a miracle in and of itself; perhaps the angel in charge of this area would be feeling generous.
Eventually, they would find out. In the meantime...
Reaching to his keyboard, Koja began plotting out the route and fueling stops for a least-time course back to Aventine. It had been his experience that miracles, when they happened, tended to favor those who had laid the proper groundwork for them.
Chapter 13
Jin stood at the road for a long time, trying to figure out what to do next.
It was, at any rate, confirmation that the shuttle had indeed crashed to the west of the Fertile Crescent. Roads always led to civilization; all she had to do was follow it.
The question was, which way?
For a moment the landscape seemed to swim before her eyes, and the red warning border appeared superimposed on the scenery. She twisted her head, sending a jolt of pain through the stiffness in her neck. There had been no fewer than five such warnings in the past half hour, a sure sign that she was losing it.
Combat fatigue, shock from her injuries, some slow poison in the animal bites and scratches she'd suffered-it didn't much matter the cause. What mattered now was finding somewhere safe to collapse before she did so on her feet.
So... which way?
Blinking hard against a sudden moisture in her eyes, she studied the road. Two lanes wide, probably, paved with some kind of black rocktop-hardly a major thoroughfare. Running almost due north-south, at least at this point, it was probably one of the connecting roads between the small forest villages west and northwest of the major Fertile Crescent city of Azras. The maps in her pack showed those villages to be anywhere from ten to fifteen kilometers apart. A trivial distance for a Cobra in good condition, but her present condition was anything but good.