But the closer they got to the asteroid, the harder this whole mission looked. The asteroid appeared smooth and quiet from a distance, but close up was a tumbling, shifting mass of spiked ice and rock.
Pieces the size of an aircraft carrier would occasionally break off and collide with a dozen other bits of rock before settling into an uneasy orbit around the planet. Yet the closer they got, the more stable Grayson’s vital signs were. Her heart rate was slow and steady, her blood pressure what he would expect from a person sitting in a rocker with a cat in their lap.
She abruptly cranked the stick up and to the left and simultaneously hit the left thruster. Left on left caused the ship to spiral, and then another deft movement of her wrist caused them to do a neat flip around a frozen rock the size of a house. They landed back at nearly the exact spot they had started. The “Tyler Tip” – the one move that couldn’t be faked. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t just experienced it.
“You really are El Tyler.” There was awe in his voice, and damned if he couldn’t figure out how to keep it out.
“Yep.” It was all the gravelly voice uttered before she went back to twitching the stick in ways that looked effortless, but Rand knew better. He was the one navigating, fingers moving on the antiquated keyboard to enter directions on the fly. Nothing about the Javelin was effortless. It was a heavy, cludgy ship that few pilots would even take on. The gravitational fields were affecting it in weird ways.
He started swearing quietly under his breath as another small stone hit the ship’s hull. “There are just too many of them, El. All I can do is get out of the way of the biggest ones.”
The next words out of her mouth stunned him. “I think we’re going to have to land this beast.”
“Land? Land where?” They were in an asteroid field. There weren’t a lot of stable spots to navigate to.
He turned his head as much as he could and stared at the side of her head.
She raised her hand enough to point out the front port. “Right there. It’s not the biggest one, but it’ll have to do.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Good one. Of course, landing sort of requires that you’ll remain in one place with the power off.”
“Oh, we will. Just steer me to the flat surface on this rock when it comes around again and I’ll do the rest.” She dropped her face shield. Her vital signs might be stable, but he wasn’t so sure about her brain.
Still . . . the one thing that made Tyler a legend was thinking outside the box. He (or she) managed things that normal people wouldn’t even contemplate. And hey, if he had to go out of this life, it might as well be doing something very cool. And riding an asteroid was something nobody had ever done.
He watched the screen in front of him while tapping on the keyboard to line up the ship with the correct pitch of the rock.
Tyler’s gravel bass came over the mic in his helmet. “You don’t make notes, do you? Most navigators I’ve met scribble with one hand and enter the numbers with the other.”
He responded without looking up. “It’s all eyes and fingers for me. I don’t know that it actually goes through my brain. I see and my fingers just start moving. Always been that way, even when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, I get that,” she said. “For me, my eyes sort of convert images into numbers. I was a master at paint-by-numbers. I even used to make them for my friends. I knew a guy in grade school who could sketch outdoor scenes, and I’d add numbers based on what I saw. Got in trouble for it when a girl who couldn’t paint won the talent show with one of our paint-by-numbers. The principal considered it cheating.”
“Why didn’t you become a navigator, then? Or why don’t you do your own navigation?”
She gave a little laugh. “Because I can’t both navigate and fly at the same time. I can do one or the other. Just not both . . . at least not fast enough to handle all the vectors. What about you? Why don’t you fly?”
A snort erupted from him, sounding like a sneeze in his ears. “No dexterity, I’m afraid. I crashed the simulator so often that the techs banned me from the unit. I was actually messing up the software. I don’t have a light enough touch. I go through keyboards pretty fast too. I even—”
“Hold that thought. We’re coming up on our point. Bring me in flat so my nose is pointed toward the sun.”
“You sure the nose is the best thing? Shouldn’t we have the port wing toward the sun?”
Her voice snarled back. “Don’t distract me! Just give me the figures.”
He could see this ending badly, but his fingers flew over the keyboard to create the directions to land the ship. “Okay, start the touchdown in fifteen seconds, and . . . mark.”
Rand’s world narrowed to the sensation of movement from delicate blasts of the thrusters and the image of the rapidly approaching asteroid, lit only by the reflection from the nearest planet. They were about to touch down when something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. A large rock was breaking off from the asteroid. It wasn’t big enough to hurt them by itself, but it could definitely throw their trajectory off enough to crash. “Wait! Veer off. We’ve got a bogie to the left.”
“No. We’re too close. There’s nowhere to go where we won’t hit something. I can do this.”
Crap. She was right. The closer they got, the more small objects were traveling in the wake of the asteroid that they hadn’t noticed further back. His fingers hit the keys so hard as he typed that he could feel the vibration of the panel on his legs. Left, then right, up, over, twist. El moved the ship in ways he didn’t know it would travel – totally dispelling the ‘cludgy’ rap the Javelin had from other pilots.
They hit the flat surface with a bounce and scrape and El scrambled to stop their forward movement before they shot right into an outcropping the size of an apartment block. “This isn’t the way I wanted to do this!” Her voice was about an octave higher than normal. She reached forward in a rush and opened a panel he hadn’t noticed. She slammed her fist down on the blue button underneath and he heard a muffled explosion underfoot. “Hang on!”
He was so tightly packed into the navpit, he couldn’t imagine he could move. And yet he did. The ship made such a sudden stop that his head whiplashed against the inside of his helmet when it hit the neck support, making his teeth slam down on his tongue. “Ow!”
They had stopped, and he wasn’t quite sure how. He watched the view port as their aspect shifted, turning the ship upside down. But they didn’t drift. Then it occurred to him. “Harpoon anchor?”
She nodded. “Modified. It’s an unstable platform, so we had to make it a tripod with quick-release breakaway.”
Rand grabbed at his keyboard as it started to drop to the ceiling. He was starting to notice his head trying to keep up with the movements of the ship. “Upside down is going to be a problem. Another ten or so rotations and we’re both going to be too dizzy to fly out of here if we need to.”
“Agreed. We need to shut down and turn off the gravity. Then we’ll be in the middle, and the ship can turn around us. It’ll save on fuel – maybe enough to be able to take a second run at the weapon if we miss the first time.”
He nodded, anxious to get out of the cramped navpit and move his legs. “We should try to get some sleep in the zero-g bags. It’ll probably be four hours before we’re close enough to the planet to risk charging the weapons.” And five hours until what would be the most challenging nav job of his life.