Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(8)

He thumbed the jets once more, again imagining smoothing the airflow around the lander. Surprisingly, the lander climbed slightly, and Nylan permitted himself a slight grin.

The DRI pointed to the right, and the engineer eased the, lander rightward, wincing as the lifting body lost altitude in the maneuver.

All too soon, the high alpine meadows appeared in the screens as green dots-small green dots, but the southernmost one grew rapidly into a long dash of green set amid gray rock.

The lander arrived above the target meadow, except the meadow showed gray lumps along the edges, and a sheer drop-off at the east end that plunged more than a kay down to an evergreen forest.

From what Nylan could tell, the wind was coming out of the east, and he dropped the lander into a circling descent that would bring the lifting body onto a final approach into the wind. He hoped the approach wouldn't be too final, but the drop-off allowed the possibility of remaining airborne for a bit if the long grassy strip were totally unusable.

As he eased around the descending circular approach, the lander began to buffet. Nylan kept easing the nose up, trying to kill the lifting body's airspeed to just above stalling before he hit the edge of the tilted high meadow that seemed so awfully short as he brought the lander over the ground that seemed to have more rocks than grass or bushes.

He eased the nose up more, letting the trailing edge of the belly scrape the ground, fighting the craft's tendency to fishtail, almost willing the lifting body to remain stable.

The lander shivered and shuddered, and a grinding scream ripped through Nylan's ears as he eased the craft full onto its belly. The impact of full ground contact threw Nylan against the harness straps, and the straps dug deeply into flesh and muscle. The engineer kept compensating as the lander skidded toward the drop-off, slowing, slowing, but still shuddering eastward, and tossing Nylan from side to side in his harness.

With a final shudder, the lander's nose dug into something, and the craft rocked to a halt.

For a long moment, the engineer just sat in the couch. "We're down." Nylan slowly unfastened the safety harness, trying to ignore the spots of tenderness across his body that would probably remind him for days about the roughness of his landing.

"Did you have to be so rough?" asked Fierral. "Any emergency landing that you can walk away from is a good one. We're walking away from this one."

"You may be walking, ser, but the rest of us may have to crawl." The squad leader shook her head, and the short flame-red hair glinted.

"Are you sure he's done?" asked another marine. "We're done." Nylan touched the stud that cracked the hatch. There wasn't any point in waiting. Either the ship's spectrographic analyzers had been right or they hadn't, and there was no way to get back to orbit, and not enough supplies in the ship to do more than starve to death-especially since no one knew where they were and since there were no signs of technology advanced enough to effect a rescue.

The air was chill, almost cold, colder even than northern Sybra in summer, but still refreshing. A scent of evergreen accompanied the chill.

With a deep breath, Nylan stepped to the hatch on the right side of the lander and used the crank to open it the rest of the way, "It smells all right."

"I can't believe you just opened it. Just like that," said Fierral.

"We didn't have any choice. We're not going anywhere. We can breath it, or we can't." Because the lander had come to rest with the right side higher than the left, Nylan had to lower himself to the ground.

". . . can't believe him . . . kill us all or not..."

"... least he doesn't dither around . . ."

"Neither does the captain . . . probably why they get along ..."

Leaving the voices behind, the engineer slowly surveyed what was going to be their new home, like it or not.

The landing area was a long strip of alpine meadow, perhaps five kays long and a little more than two wide, bordered on three sides by rocky slopes that quickly rose into the knife-edged peaks that had shown so clearly on the screens. To the north was a ridge, lower than the surrounding rocky areas, almost a pass, through which he had brought the lander. The entire meadow area sloped slightly downhill from the northwest to the southeast, one of the reasons the landing had seemed to take longer than necessary, Nylan suspected. To the southwest, beyond the rocky slopes, rose a needle peak, impossibly tall, yet seemingly sheathed in ice.

"Freyja ... blade of the gods," he said quietly.

"It is, isn't it?" said Fierral from behind his shoulder. "How did you get us down?"

"It wasn't too bad."

Fierral glanced back to the west, along the trail gouged out by the lander. "That's not exactly a prepared runway."

"No." Nylan laughed. "Would you give me a hand? We need to set up the beacon for the others."

"They can land here?"

'The beacon makes it a lot easier. You can lock in a direction and rate of descent."

"I would get the hard landing."

"We're here."

"Wherever that is." Fierral wiped her sweating forehead and glanced around the high plateau. "At least it's not too hot."

Behind them, the other marines dropped from the lander.

Nylan looked at the track he had made. From what he could tell, most of the rocks were small, nothing that would create too many problems. Rising from the grass between the rocks were small purple flowers, shaped like stars, that rose on thin, almost invisible, stems.