signal to warn Metcalf without breaking com silence. At least the plants shouldn’t be on-line for long, she told herself, and the counter-grav would make it much, much safer—and easier—to get the shuttles down.
'I’ve got power to the counter-grav, Ma’am,' Tremaine reported, breaking in on her thoughts, and she nodded.
'See that ‘S’-curve to the south?' she asked.
'Yes, Ma’am.'
'It looks like the widest break in the tree cover we’ve got. See if you can get us in there on its west bank.'
'Yes, Ma’am.' Tremaine almost managed not to sound dubious, and Honor felt the right side of her mouth quirking in another grin as he banked again and came back around. Her hand dropped down beside her to rest on Nimitz’s flank, and she felt a wiry, long-fingered true-hand pat her wrist in reply, and then Tremaine was dumping altitude and speed alike.
Despite his comments about the shuttle’s controls, he brought the big craft in with a delicacy a Sphinx finch might have envied. The counter-grav let him fold the wings, which had been swept fully forward for their low- speed examination of possible landing sites, back into their high-speed position without losing control, and she heard turbines whine as he held a moderate apparent weight on the shuttle and vectored thrust downward. The sixty-three-meter fuselage slid almost daintily towards the ground, hovering with ponderous grace, and Honor peered through the armorplast windscreen.
The break in the canopy was a river, and shallow water rushed and tumbled over mossy boulders in a torrent of moon-struck white and black. The trees grew right up to the banks, but the humidity was far lower here in the center of the continent than it had been at their peninsular landing site, and the growth looked less lush and thick. Or she hoped it did, anyway. It was hard to be sure, and the last thing they needed was to suck something into a turbine.
'Over there, Ma’am. To port,' Tremaine said. 'What about there?'
'Um.' Honor twisted in her seat to look in the indicated direction. It looked like one of the trees—and a titan among titans, at that—must have fallen and taken two or three others with it. The result was a breach in the overhead cover that seemed to offer a way under the remaining canopy.
'All right,' she said finally, 'but take it slow. And take some more weight off her so you can cut back on the VT. Let’s try not to kick up trash and FOD a turbine.'
'Yes, Ma’am. That sounds like a
'Hey, the heck with Chief Barstow,' Harkness growled over the com. 'This here is
'I stand corrected—or at least chastened,' Tremaine said in a somewhat distracted tone, his hands flickering over his controls with the precision of an absent-minded concert pianist while his eyes never left his intended landing site.
The pilot in Honor wanted to help him, but she knew better than to try. Her single hand would make her slow and awkward, and it was better to let him handle the entire load rather than risk getting in his way.
The shuttle came in very slowly, gleaming in the moonlight, and the black shadow of the jungle reached out for it. Tremaine slid it forward, no more than half a dozen meters above the ground, and Honor watched with carefully hidden nervousness as foliage rippled and danced below them. Even with the reduction in downward thrust, there was a lot of small trash flying around down there, and foreign object damage to a turbine could have deadly consequences this close to the ground.
But the turbines continued their whining song of power, and Tremaine eased the shuttle carefully down and forward. The long fuselage slid in under the tree cover, and he fed in some side thrust, edging to port.
'We’re not going to be able to get as deep as we were at Site One, Ma’am,' he observed through gritted teeth. His voice was still conversational, despite the sweat glistening on his taut face, and his hands moved the stick and thrust controls with smooth delicacy. 'Best I can do is scrunch over as far as I can this way and let Gerry have the right side.'
'I’ll go with your call, Scotty,' Honor said softly, without commenting on the fact that he’d given himself by far the tougher landing spot. But he was a better natural pilot than Metcalf—as good as Honor herself, but with more recent practice and two hands—and he brought his shuttle another twenty meters to its left, then nodded to himself.
'Deploy gear, please, Ma’am,' he said. That much she could do, one-handed or not, and she pulled the big handle. The landing legs deployed quickly and smoothly, and Tremaine let the shuttle sink slowly down onto them. There was one scary moment as the outboard starboard leg flexed alarmingly and a red light flashed on the panel, but assault shuttles were designed for rough field landings, and the computer controlling that leg adjusted quickly. The red light died, and Tremaine gradually reduced his counter-grav, watching his readouts carefully for several taut seconds. Then he exhaled explosively.
'We’re down, Ma’am,' he announced. 'Chief, kill the fusion plant.'
'Aye, Sir,' Harkness replied, and Honor reached across her body to pat Tremaine on the shoulder.
'That was good work, Scotty,' she told him, and he smiled at her. Then she turned away to watch through her side window as Geraldine Metcalf brought Shuttle Two in on the far side of the opening. From here, it looked almost effortless, but Honor could imagine exactly what it felt like from inside that other cockpit. After all, she’d just experienced it herself.
'All right, people,' she said as the other shuttle finally settled and its turbines died. 'We’re going to have to work faster than we’d expected to get the nets up. Senior Chief O’Jorgenson?'
'Yes, Ma’am?' Senior Chief Tamara O’Jorgenson was a fellow Sphinxian who had been a senior environmental tech aboard
'You’ll man the dorsal turret while we get squared away, Senior Chief,' Honor said.
'Aye, Ma’am.'
'Very well, then.' Honor hit the release on her own straps and stood. 'Let’s be about it, people.'
Chapter Eleven
It was almost dawn before they had the nets in place once more, and Honor was more nervous about the quality of their camouflage than she cared to show. The climate was definitely drier here, and the soil seemed to be less rich. There was far less undergrowth than the ferociously fecund four-canopy jungle in which they had originally landed had offered, and the trees, for the most part, tended to be smaller. It was much harder to snuggle the shuttles in under them, and there were fewer natural vines and lianas to complement the cammo nets. She knew McKeon was as unhappy about the situation as she was, and they’d already made plans for most of their people to spend the coming night weaving more natural elements into the nets, but for now they’d just have to hope the concealment was good enough.
'If things work out, maybe we should consider sending at least one of the shuttles back to Site One after all,' she said quietly as the two of them sat under a wing and watched the sun come up. He glanced at her, and she shrugged, knowing that he would recognize her oblique apology for what it was.
'Maybe,' he agreed after a moment. 'I suppose we could use tight beam off one of the Peeps’ comsats to stay in touch without their noticing if we were careful. Bit risky, though.'
She made a soft sound of agreement and leaned back against the seat cover Harkness and Andrew LaFollet had removed from the shuttle for her. Her energy levels still hadn’t come back up to her precapture standards, and she felt utterly wiped out.
'You shouldn’t have pushed yourself so hard,' McKeon growled softly as Nimitz limped over to her and curled up on chest. She tucked her arm around the ’cat and closed her eyes wearily.
'Had to do my part. A CO has an example to set. I read that somewhere when I was at Saganami Island,' she told McKeon, and he snorted with the fine fervor of an old friend.
'Sure you did. But while I realize you may not’ve noticed that you’re shy an arm,
