“Yes. Had some issues to clean up here before I hunted down the radio.”
“Everything all right with you?”
“We’re alive here.”
“Did you hear Dorner?”
“The tail end. Rendezvous at boat five?”
“Yes.”
“I’m shutting down to conserve power. See you on the ground.”
“See you on the ground.” He shut down his own transmission.
When the PA gave him the ten-minute warning, he had already stowed everything in the cabin and strapped himself into an acceleration couch. Mallory felt the rotation of the cabin as it turned the bulkhead he was strapped to toward the direction of motion.
The planet’s atmosphere announced itself with a vibration and the beginnings of pressure in his gut as the lifeboat began to decelerate. The vibration continued, intensifying. The fist in Mallory’s gut kept pressing, joined by invisible thumbs pressing into his eyes and a choking pressure in his throat. His pulse throbbed in his ears, vying with the sound of his cabin shaking apart.
Another sound joined the vibration, a demonic wind. The sound of superheated atmosphere shredding past the shielding of the lifeboat. Mallory’s vision grayed, and the cabin plunged into darkness. He didn’t know if his eyesight failed or if the emergency lighting died.
The vibration, the roaring of the atmosphere, and the pressure all increased until it felt as if the lifeboat was about to collapse into a crumpled ball and burn up.
It didn’t, and after a short eternity the shaking stopped and the pressure eased. The boat had made it into the atmosphere, and the braking hadn’t incinerated it. He felt weightless again, but this time it was because he was in free fall.
The lights flickered back on and he felt the drag of gravity as the lifeboat hit its terminal velocity.
Mallory swallowed and waited for the jerk of the drag chute. For several long moments he imagined the chutes failing, and the lifeboat slamming into the ground at full speed. The wait was long enough for him to pray that the shock of the initial impact would kill him instantaneously, before the bulkhead above him slammed down like a boot crushing a cockroach.
He tensed, fists clenched, eyes closed, expecting the fatal impact at any moment. His implants drove adrenaline through his system enhancing his perception and reaction times to absolutely no effect except to distort his time sense to the point he had no idea how long he had been falling.
When he felt the sudden deceleration pressing into his gut, it took him a few seconds past the panicked shock to realize that he hadn’t slammed into the ground. The chute had deployed.
The boat slammed into something, rolling forward until something snapped, resonating through the cabin. The whole lifeboat slid forward, shaking and tumbling. The cabin flipped over completely four times before coming to a rocking, unsteady rest.
It took five seconds after the boat stopped moving for Mallory to get his bearings. The lifeboat had rolled so that the original floor was at a forty-five-degree angle sloping down from his feet toward the ground. He dangled from his acceleration couch, facing down.
He undid the straps, one by one, feeling the whole descent in every joint. That combined with the crashing fatigue that was the aftereffect of his implants hyping his metabolism. Climbing out of the couch was a complicated maneuver, disengaging himself from the acceleration couch without falling the three meters into the bulkhead below him. He had to hold onto the crash webbing while he undid the buckles. Even though he was prepared for the drop, he released the last buckle too fast and almost dislocated his shoulder rolling out.
