She spoke. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“That remains to be seen.” Aaron glanced out at the water below. He saw his ’Mech’s shadow now, well separated from that of the DropShip.
Wind whistled past the cockpit. This would have to be far enough. If he waited any longer, they’d never survive the landing.
The Black Hawk rolled back again as he pushed the jump jets into overload. Red lights began to flash on his panel. Burning insulation stung his nose and eyes. The cockpit started to feel like a furnace, but that would be the least of their problems when they were in the water.
“Hold on,” he heard himself say.
Aaron had gone skydiving in his younger days, and his instructor had warned him not to trust his eyes when it came to opening his chute. “Your eyes will fool you until it’s much too late, and then I’ll have to pour your high-blood out of your boots.” He knew that things would look fine, and suddenly he’d realize how close the ground was, and it would come up to smack him.
That’s exactly what happened, except it was shallow water coming up far too fast. He moved the stick just a little, aiming for the deep water just past the reef. “Ulysses!” he yelled into the mike. “Hold your breath!”
Then they hit.
Deena yelped with pain as she was slammed down in her narrow refuge, metal digging into her body in a dozen places. There was a roar, like a waterfall turned inside out and backward. For a moment they were actually looking up at the sky from a hole they’d made in the water.
The gulf slammed in around them, and there was a grinding crunch as they slammed into the coral-covered bottom. The legs howled in protest, folding until every joint slammed against its stops.
Then they were stilclass="underline" green water surrounding the canopy, metal moaning and shrieking from the pressure and sudden cooling, bubbles from the heat sinks and red-hot jump jets making it impossible to see anything—even which way was up.
He didn’t need to see.
MechWarriors called it situational awareness. He’d oriented himself coming in. He knew where the reef was. He knew how far it was. He knew that Ulysses might have only seconds to live if he didn’t get up there.
He pushed the throttles and pulled the stick over hard. The legs moaned and hesitated. Then they were standing, moving, running across the bottom, up an underwater slope.
It grew brighter above his head, changing from green to wavering blue. His cockpit breached the surface, water streaming down the armorglass.
He raised the arm to where Paxton was hidden and opened the missile exhaust chutes loading hatch, hoping that any water that had gotten inside would quickly flow out. So much water was running off the ’Mech, it was impossible to tell how successful this was.
“Ulysses, are you with us?”
Nothing.
“Ulysses!”
There was a choking cough in his headset. “Still here, Lord Governor.”
The Black Hawk continued up the bank until they were on top of the reef. The water there was no more than a meter deep—barely enough to cover the ’Mech’s feet.
Aaron set the throttle at one quarter and started a slow trot toward the island, watching for dark water ahead that might require him to leap from one colony of coral to another. There was no telling what sort of environmental damage he was doing, but it couldn’t be helped.
Deena pushed her face close to the canopy.
“My Lord!”
He wasn’t sure if she was calling for his attention, or for her savior. He followed her gaze, just in time to see the crippled DropShip plunge into the gulf. White-hot metal met warm tropical water with explosive results. Fusion reactors detonated, spewing plasma, causing a rapid cascade of secondary explosions as the magazines went off.
The hull of the ship, what part they could still see of it, shattered like a dropped Christmas ball, and a ghostly hemisphere of shock wave moved out from the crash. It washed over them, shuddering the ’Mech with its force.
But that was only the beginning. Even as the broken bulk of the DropShip vanished into the gulf, a huge, white wall of water rose up, towering higher than the ’Mech’s cockpit. Aaron bit his lip. The jump jets were fried. The wave roared toward them, and there was no avoiding it.
And as it swallowed them, ripping the ’Mech off its feet like a toy, he remembered Deena’s question, and his answer:
That remains to be seen.
The entry bell on Erik’s cabin door rang, followed by an urgent pounding. He groaned, threw back the covers, and squinted at the holoclock display hovering over his bed. The floating green numbers told him he’d been asleep for two hours.
More pounding, followed by a woman’s muffled voice. “Commander! There’s been a flash-news report from New Canton, regarding the Duke!”
He considered ignoring the voice, but realized he was already awake. He reached over, clicked on the reading light, and pushed the hidden button that released the door’s security lock. “Come.”
The door slid open, and he recognized the uniformed woman standing there as Captain Malvern, the watch intelligence officer. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Commander, but we’ve just received a report that I knew you’d want to hear immediately.”
He asked skeptically, “A flash-news report? Do you people actually read that stuff?” Since the breakdown of the HPG, reliable news of distant events usually traveled no faster than a JumpShip could traverse the same distance, taking weeks or months to cross any substantial part of The Republic.
Even though jump travel was in itself instantaneous, logistics limited the speed of any physical object traveling between star systems. JumpShips had to recharge, people and cargo had to load and unload, DropShips had to undock from one JumpShip and transfer to another, or fly between jump points and the planets themselves.
In theory, information suffered no such limitations. The limiting factors for information travel were the speed of sound or data, in-system light-speed delays as the information was passed along from ship to ship, and the availability of the next charged ship which would leave the system to pass the information on to the next.
Occasionally, by random chance, a long chain of such rapid transfers would take place, information traveling rapidly from one arriving JumpShip to a departing one, and so on, system by system. By this method, news could travel across a Prefecture in days or hours instead of weeks, flashing over like an electric arc crossing a gap.
The problem was that information travel was completely unpredictable and notoriously unreliable. Information was almost certain to travel via an indirect and circuitous route, through an unknown number of relay stations of unknown reliability. Even in the best of times, the information tended to “drift” and change as it was passed along, and the potential for malicious manipulation was unlimited. Some in the communications and intelligence community had started calling the phenomenon of rapid information transfer “flash-news,” but still others called it the “new HPG,” which in this case stood for “Hyper-Pap Generator.”
Even if the random tidbit was of potential interest, Erik didn’t see how it could be trustworthy. Yet Captain Malvern seemed sincerely to believe that this flash-news was important. He couldn’t see her face clearly while she was back-lit from the hallway, but she looked grave.
He sat up in bed, suddenly feeling wide awake. “Out with it.”
“The report said that Duke Aaron Sandoval’s DropShip had an accidental thruster explosion and crashed into the Gulf of Emeralds shortly after takeoff from the Capital Spaceport.”
“Survivors?”
She lowered her head. “All hands were said to be lost.”
“It could just be a rumor,” he said, “even misinformation planted by the Cappies.” But even as he said it, he sensed there was at least some truth to the report.