“Then do it. The sooner we get down, the sooner I can get my city back to normal.” Avery favored Derec with a last crusty look, then stalked out of the control room.
Derec grinned at Ariel and shrugged his shoulders. “Oops.”
She giggled. “ ‘Oops,’ “ he says. “You changed the surface of an entire planet with a single order, and that’s all you have to say about it? Oops?”
Coming from Avery, those words would have stung, but Ariel meant no harm and Derec knew it. She thought it was funny, as did he. Robots were always misinterpreting their orders, always doing things you didn’t expect them to do; this was just an extreme case. Even so, it wasn’t anything to get upset over. They would figure out why the city had done what it had, correct the problem, and that would be that.
“Deceleration coming up in seven minutes,” Wolruf warned.
Derec looked out the viewscreen. Wolruf had aligned the ship so they were aimed just above the horizon behind them in orbit. Internal gravity had kept the ship’s occupants from feeling any of her maneuvering, as it would keep them from feeling the braking thrust, but Wolruf’s warning carried with it an implicit suggestion: time to strap in. Cabin gravity compensated for planned motion like rocket thrust, but it was slow to react to unexpected shifts. Air buffeting on reentry would still throw them around, as would any last-minute maneuvering the gravity generator couldn’t anticipate.
The ship understood Wolruf’s meaning as well. A week earlier it wouldn’t have-while attempting to keep the starship from responding to every comment as if it were an order, Derec and Avery had inadvertently made it ignore the alien’s orders as well-but they had since fixed that. The ship had functioned perfectly the entire way home, and it did so now. When Wolruf issued her warning, two bumps rose up in the floor behind and to either side of her control chair, molded themselves into more human-style chairs, and swiveled around to allow Derec and Ariel to seat themselves. When they were comfortable, waist and shoulder restraints extruded themselves from the arm and back rests, crossed over the chairs’ occupants, and joined seamlessly to hold them in.
Mandelbrot remained standing, but the ship grew a holding bar beside him, which he gripped with his left hand. It seemed inadequate, but with the energy of a microfusion powerpack behind that hand, he wasn’t going anywhere either.
No doubt Avery, wherever he happened to have gone, was also being coaxed into a chair, and the three unresponsive robots in the hold were probably being restrained in some way as well.
The observers in the control cabin watched the planet roll by beneath them while the countdown ran out; then the descent engine fired and they watched it roll by a little slower. They could hear the soft roar of the nuclear engines through the not-quite-soundproof hull, but that and the changing perspective as they began to fall toward the planet were the only indications that something was happening,
As they lost orbital velocity and picked up downward velocity, their apparent speed began to increase. The horizon grew flatter, and they seemed to be rushing away from it faster and faster. Wolruf turned the ship around until they were again facing in the direction of motion, and they fell the rest of the way into the atmosphere. The howl of air rushing past replaced the roar of the descent engine.
Wolruf was an excellent pilot. She had to be; if she were anything less, the robotic ship wouldn’t have let her near the controls, for the ship could have landed itself perfectly without her assistance. That it allowed her to do so without its assistance was a supreme compliment, one which Wolruf proved she deserved only seconds from landing.
They had dropped down through a layer of high, thin cloud, and were gliding now on wings the ship had grown once they’d reached air thick enough to use them in. The ship had reconfigured its engine into an atmospheric jet, which Wolruf let idle while they bled off the last of their orbital speed. Through the viewscreen they could see an undulating sea of treetops rushing by beneath them, and off in the distance a glittering flat-topped pyramid that had to be the Compass Tower. Wolruf steered to the right of it, swinging the ship in a wide circle around the tower while she examined the forest for landing sites.
There were none. The canopy of trees was complete. As she completed the circle, Wolruf turned her head toward Mandelbrot and asked, “So where are we supposed to land?”
“On the-” Mandelbrot started to reply, but Derec, who had not looked away from the viewscreen, saw a sudden flash of movement directly ahead and shouted, “Look out!”
There came a loud thump and a lurch not quite compensated for by internal gravity. Wolruf snapped her head back toward the viewscreen just as another fluttering black shape swept toward them and another thump shook the ship.
In the next instant the air seemed filled with frantic, flapping obstacles. They were huge birds of some sort, easily three or four meters across. The ship shuddered under impact after impact, and ragged sections of the viewscreen went dark as the outside sensors were either obliterated or simply covered up by their remains. Wolruf howled what was no doubt a colorful oath in her own tongue, pushed the throttle all the way forward, and pulled back on the flight controls to take the ship above the flock. Three more birds swept toward them. Wolruf ducked, but so did the birds; there came a triple hammer blow to the ship, and suddenly they heeled over and began falling.
“Engine failure,” the autopilot announced.
“Grow another one,” Wolruf commanded it.
“Fabricating. “
Wolruf struggled to right the ship, got it into a glide again, and peered out between the dark patches in the viewscreen. “We’re too low,” she muttered. “ ‘urry up with that engine.”
“I am transmogrifying at top speed. Engine will be operational in four minutes. “
“We don’t ‘ave four minutes!” Wolruf howled, then immediately added, “Give me more wing.”
“Expanding wing surface.”
Derec looked over to Ariel, found her looking back at him with wide eyes. “We’ll make it,” he said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. She nodded, evidently not trusting her own voice, and reached out a hand toward him. He realized that no matter how calm he had sounded, he was gripping his chair hard enough to leave finger depressions in its yielding surface. He unclenched his hand and took hers in it, holding more carefully. Together they looked back to the viewscreen.
The treetops looked as if they were only a few meters below the ship. The view directly ahead was obscured; Wolruf weaved the ship back and forth to see what was in their path. Between one weave and the next an especially tall tree loomed up seemingly from out of nowhere, giving her only time enough to swear and bank sharply to miss it. The ship lurched as the lower wing clipped another treetop, but wing proved stronger than wood, and they flew on. Wolruf leveled them out again and pulled back gently on the flight control to give them more altitude. They were still moving fairly fast, but slowing noticeably now.
“We really need that engine,” Wolruf said.
“Two and a half minutes,” the autopilot responded.
“We’ll be down by then,” she muttered. She looked to her left, out a relatively unobscured section of viewscreen, and came to a decision. With a cry of “ ‘ang on!” she banked the ship to the left, held the bank until they were aimed directly at the Compass Tower, then leveled off again.
“The tower is too narrow,” the computer began. “You have too much airspeed to land on it without reverse thrust-” but it was too late. The Compass Tower came at them, a slanting wall rising well overhead, visible now through the clear spots to either side and above. Wolruf held their angle of approach until it seemed they were about to smash headlong into it, then at the last moment pulled back hard on the control handle and brought them up almost parallel to the slanting wall.