"I thought Owen was supposed to be their Redeemer," said Bonnie.
"Yeah, well," said Owen, busily activating every defensive shield the Sunstrider II had, "after Brahmin II, I think we can safely consider that particular title obsolete." He hit the intercom switch. "Moon! Get your silicon ass up here!"
"I'm already here," said the grating tones of the augmented man. Tobias Moon strode over to stand beside Owen, studying the image of the vast golden ship on the viewscreen with his glowing golden eyes. "My people have found us again."
"Wonderful," said Owen. "Some days things wouldn't go right if you paid them. Shields are up, weapon computer systems are all on-line. Hazel?"
"I've put us into a dive, heading for cloud cover. Maybe we can lose them."
"Unlikely," Moon said calmly. "Hadenman sensors are far in advance of anything the Empire has. Also, that golden ship has enough firepower to vaporize a small moon. Or a large one, if they were patient. I suggest you concentrate on speed. The improved stardrive from the original Sunstrider is still far superior to anything the Hadenmen have."
"Thank the good Lord for small mercies," said Hazel. "Hang on to your breakfast, people. We are going straight down."
The Sunstrider II punched through the swirling atmosphere, the huge golden ship of the Hadenmen right behind her, like a whale pursuing a minnow. Both ships plunged down through Lachrymae Christi's atmosphere at dangerously high speeds, ignoring the violent weather systems that heaved and crackled around them. The golden ship opened fire, and the Sunstrider II's shields flared brightly, absorbing as much of the terrible destructive energies as they could.
Inside the yacht, all the alarm sirens were howling at once. The lights on the bridge went out, replaced after a heart-stopping pause by the dull red glow of emergency lighting. Owen's gaze darted across the control panels, looking for good news and finding none. More and more systems were shutting down as the main computers rerouted power to sustain the shields. Hazel managed to get off a few shots at the pursuing Hadenman ship, but they made no impression on the huge ship's fields. Owen kept one eye on their speed and elevation, and didn't know which worried him the most. If he couldn't throw off the Hadenmen pursuit soon, the Sunstrider II would be hard pressed to cut her speed back enough to be sure of a safe landing.
"Can someone please kill those damned alarms!" he said harshly. "I can't hear myself think in here!"
Hazel hit a section of the control panels with her fist, and a sudden blessed silence fell across the bridge. "Better?"
"Much," said Owen.
"Can we do anything to help?" said Bonnie.
"Prayer is probably a good idea about now," said Hazel. "Any good deities where you come from?"
"What's our exact situation?" said Midnight.
"Bad, and getting worse," said Owen. "We are outgunned, and pursued by a much larger ship with power to burn and one hell of a grudge against us. And if we don't figure out how to slow down real soon now, some unfortunate part of the planet below is going to end up with a crater you could drop a small moon into. Does the phrase deep shit ring any bells? Oz, any suggestions?"
"You could always offer to surrender," said the AI calmly in his ear. "Of course, they'd probably kill you slowly and turn you into Hadenmen… but it is an option you haven't considered."
"Thanks a whole bunch," said Owen.
"Can't we fight back?" said Bonnie.
"We don't have anything powerful enough to hurt them," said Hazel. "And anyway, our targeting systems just went offline. We need the extra power for the shields. Which are currently on the brink of collapse."
"There must be something we can do!" said Midnight.
"I am open to suggestions!" said Owen. "Moon, those are your people. Can't you… talk to them or something?"
"The augmented men undoubtedly consider me a traitor," said Moon, his thick, buzzing voice calm and unmoved. "Of us all, they want me dead the most. Our situation would appear to be hopeless. I estimate our shields will collapse in the next thirty seconds."
There was an explosion at the rear of the yacht, and the whole ship shuddered. The alarms came back on again for a few seconds before Hazel shut them up, running her hands frantically across the control panels.
"Hull breach, Owen! We're losing pressure, and we'll have to drop a hell of a lot farther into the planet's atmosphere before the pressures equal out. We have a small fire, but the automatic systems seem to be handling it. Rear shields are down, mid shields… are holding. For the moment. Twenty percent systems failures all across the board. We can't afford to take any more hits like that."
"Do we have escape pods?" said Bonnie. "Grav sleds? Any way off this wreck?"
"I don't believe this," said Owen. "I've already had one ship shot out from under me, and been forced to crash-land in a jungle. Why is this happening to me again? Moon, think of something!"
There was another explosion in the rear. The ship's engines were shrieking horribly. Warning lights blinked all over the control panels, and then everything shut down. Owen looked at the dead panels before him, and didn't have a clue what to do.
"Oh, shit," said Hazel. "Main computers just went down. Shields are down. All weapon systems off-line. Life support is failing. The engines are running out of control. This isn't a ship anymore, it's a missile. Owen, with all the computers down, we have no way of landing this ship."
Everyone looked at each other. Owen thought hard. He had to stay calm. Think it through. "We're all Maze survivors," he said hesitantly. "Maybe if we just bailed out, and hope we hit a deep enough part of the ocean…"
"No," said Hazel. "Not at this speed. We're tough, but we're not that tough."
"Oz?" said Owen. "There must be something we haven't tried."
"Sorry, Owen. Nothing I can do. Doesn't this remind you of our arrival on Shandrakor? I'm almost nostalgic."
"That's it!" said Owen, turning quickly to Moon. "When the Imperial starcruisers shot the hell out of the first Sunstrider, you integrated yourself with the ship's computers directly and guided us down! Can you do the same again?"
"Wait a minute!" said Hazel. "The last time he tried that, we still bloody crashed, and we were lucky to walk away alive!"
"Do you have a better idea?" said Owen.
"It's moments like this make me wish I'd stayed a pirate," said Hazel. "Moon, get on with it."
"I have already established a connection with the surviving computer systems," said Moon, just a little distantly. "A plan has occurred to me. It is somewhat extreme, but offers a seventy-three percent chance of success. All other alternatives present distinctly lower chances of survival."
"Oh, hell, go for it," said Owen. "But if you smash up my ship again, I'll melt you down to repair it."
"Oh, ye of little faith," said Moon calmly, and he shut down the engines. The few remaining controls went dead, and even the emergency lighting went out. It was very dark on the bridge, and very quiet.
"Moon," said Hazel in a dangerously calm tone of voice. "What have you done?"
"I've shut everything down," said the augmented man, his golden eyes glowing brightly in the dark. "I am hoping to convince the Hadenman ship that we are dead in the water. They should then call off their pursuit and remove themselves from the gravity well while they still can. Once I've estimated enough time has passed for them to be safely out of range, I will restart the systems and attempt a landing. Of course, with the sensors down I have no way of knowing whether they'll have left or not. And we will be very close to the surface of the planet by the time I restart the engines. Still, it's these little moments of drama that make life worth living, isn't it?"
There was a long pause in the utter darkness of the bridge. "I'm going to shoot him," said Hazel finally. "Moon, say something so I know where to aim. You're completely bloody insane!"
"Quite," said Moon. "Which is why the Hadenman will be fooled. They are incapable of such imaginative leaps. Fortunately, I am no longer limited to merely logical thinki
ng."
"Oh, great," said Owen. "A Hadenman who's acquired a taste for Russian roulette. I feel sick. How much longer do we have to free-fall before you can restart the engines?"
"Ah," said Moon. "Now, that is the tricky bit."
"What?" said Bonnie. "What did he just say? And why have I got this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'm really not going to like his answer?"
"Well," said Moon, "to be absolutely sure the golden ship is out of range, I will have to leave it to the last possible moment, and then hope there are enough functional systems left in the ship to restart and control the engines. There will not, unfortunately, be any room for error."
"Right," said Midnight. "That is it. Time we were leaving, Bonnie. A good warrior always knows when to cut her losses and head for the horizon. Hazel, nice to have known you, but I think this would be a really good time for you to return Bonnie and I to our own dimensions. Not that I don't have any faith in your demented friend, but I really don't think I want to be here to see how this all turns out."
"Yeah," said Bonnie. "What she said."
"Tough," said Hazel. "I'm not entirely sure how I do what I do, but I'm pretty sure that if I were to send you back right now, you'd both still be traveling at your present speed. Which means you'd probably reappear at the exact spot I took you from, only traveling at something well past the speed of sound. When you eventually hit something solid, they'd have to scrape up your remains with a palette knife. Of course, if you really want to risk it…"
"Oh, hell," said Bonnie. "We wouldn't think of deserting our friends in their hour of need. Would we, Midnight?"
"Of course not," said Midnight. "Perish the thought. I think I feel sick."
"Moon," said Owen. "I'm really very sure the golden ship is gone by now. Start the bloody engines."
"Actually," said Moon, "I have been attempting to restart the engines for the past twenty-two seconds, to no avail. I can only assume the damage to the computer systems was more extreme than I conjectured."
Hazel made a noise in the dark. "Think of something, Owen!"
"Mostly I'm thinking about strangling Moon," said Owen.
"I have come up with another plan," said Moon. "Your stardrive is derived from alien technology, and therefore has its own, separate, systems. These appear to be intact. I believe I can maintain a connection long enough to use the alien drive to jump-start the standard engines."
"Hold everything," said Bonnie. "You want to activate a hyperdrive this far into a planet's gravity well? You could collapse the whole star system! Bad as things are, I have no desire to see what the inside of a black hole looks like!"
"Trust me," said Moon. "I'm almost sure I know what I'm doing."
There was a moment that seemed to last forever. Space turned inside out, stretching and almost tearing, and colors slowed to a crawl. There was a brilliant light coming from somewhere, but they weren't seeing it with their eyes. Angels were singing a single sustained chord, in a harmony almost too perfect to be borne. And then everything snapped back to normal, and the light was just the bridge's normal lighting and the song was the roar of the ship's engines as Moon fought to slow the Sunstrider II's plummeting descent. Owen looked dazedly about him, and slowly realized some of the control panels were back on-line again.
"We have sensors!" said Owen. "No sign of the Hadenmen ship, but the surface of the planet is coming up awfully fast! Brace yourselves, people! This is going to hurt!"
The Sunstrider II came howling down out of the clouds, slicing through the pouring rain so quickly that the water evaporated before it could even touch the hull. And then the jungle reached up and the battered yacht tore a ragged path through the trees, slowing gradually until finally it slammed to a halt in a cloud of steam and ripped-up vegetation. The engines shut down, and all was quiet for a while, save for the gentle, continuous hiss of rain falling on the super-heated hull.
Inside, the yacht's passengers sat slumped in their crash webbing, letting their heartbeats and breathing slow gradually back to normal. Apart from Moon, who had already thrown aside his webbing and was leaning over the control panels, studying the sensor readings. Owen sighed heavily.
"Well, there goes another bloody yacht. Let's all pray that the damage is repairable, or we're going to be spending an extended holiday in this charming little paradise. There isn't another supply ship due here for months. Moon, any life-form readings out there?"
"Just the jungle," said Moon. "Plant life in various forms. No animals, or insects. And no humans in sensor range. We are alone."
"Finally, some news from Moon that I can live with," said Hazel. "How far are we from Saint Bea's Mission?"
"Main computers are still down," said Moon. "I am currently unable to access that information."
"Oz?" said Owen.
"If the ship followed the trajectory I plotted, we're not too far from where we should be," murmured the AI. "The Mission should be located some ten miles north-northeast of here. Though that is of course an estimate. Things got a little hairy there at the end. Allowing for error, we could be talking a twenty-mile hike. Still, what's a few miles trekking through impenetrable jungle? The exercise will do you good."
Owen shook his head tiredly. "This is Shandrakor all over again, I just know it."
"Not necessarily," said Moon. "At least this time there are no hungry killer aliens out there. There is no animal life on the entire planet, apart from the colonists. Though the files do contain some rather disturbing accounts of encounters with large and mobile vegetation displaying a distinctly antagonistic attitude."
"Killer plants," said Bonnie. "Wonderful. Look, will somebody please fill me in on what the hell we're doing here? I was quite happily halfway through a four-day drunk when I got your message. You made it sound quite sane at the time."
"The state you were in, you would have volunteered for a mission to Shub," said Midnight. "How can you abuse your body in such a fashion?"
"Practice, darling, practice." Bonnie dropped the black warrior woman a wink, and she looked away, exasperated. Bonnie laughed. "Come on, somebody fill in the blanks for me. Do I at least get to kill somebody? Preferably lots of somebodies?"
"We're here on a mercy mission," Owen said patiently. "Mother Superior Beatrice Christiana, better known as the Saint of Technos III, resigned from running the reformed Church to come and run a Mission here for the leper colonists. Being who she is, she soon turned the Mission into a social and communications center for the whole planet, and combined the various scattered settlements into one people at last. They were actually on the verge of becoming a viable, self-sustaining colony when the Hadenmen attacked. Which is presumably what that bloody golden ship was doing here. Anyway, there's a force of Hadenmen down here, concentrating their attacks on Saint Bea's Mission. We are here to protect the Mission and its people."
"Why us?" said Bonnie. "Why isn't the regular army here, earning its pay?"
"Because the regular army doesn't give a toss about a colony of lepers. Everyone Saint Bea approached was busy elsewhere. Finally she approached me personally, and," said Owen, smiling ruefully, "I find it kind of hard to say no to a Saint."
"Next time ask me," said Bonnie. "I'll coach you. There are no Saints where I come from, Deathstalker. We eat them."
"Right," said Midnight. "One of the first things we did after overthrowing the Empire was to dissolve the established Church, and replace it with the Mystical Order of Steel. We are warriors, and we follow the warrior way."
"Sometimes I wonder if our worlds have anything in common apart from the Maze," said Owen.
"Well, there's always you," said Midnight, smiling a little too warmly for Owen's liking. "Wherever there's one of me, there's always one of you. We were fated to be together."
"Right," said Bonnie, idly tugging a gold ring piercing something Owen preferred not to look at. "Right…"
"Now, that is interesting," said Moon, still bent over the control panels. Everyone looked
around quickly.
"I really hate it when he says that," said Hazel. "It nearly always means something quite appallingly nasty is going on."
"No, this really is interesting," said Moon. "I don't know what it means, but it definitely is interesting."
Owen moved over to join him and studied the sensor displays. "This makes no sense at all," he said finally. "It's like something is slowly… enveloping the Sunstrider. Some kind of organic material."
"Hold everything," said Bonnie. "Are you saying there's something on this benighted world big enough to swallow a starship?"
"Not as such," said Moon. "Nothing here but plant life, remember?"
"We're going to have to go out and take a look," said Hazel. "See what else can go wrong on this bloody mission."
"Better watch your language when we meet Saint Bea," said Owen, smiling. "She'll make you do penance."
"I already am," growled Hazel. "Ever since I met you."
For a while the airlock outer door refused point-blank to open. All the systems were functioning, but the door wouldn't budge. They tried cranking it open with the manual release, but all that happened was that Hazel broke two fingernails trying to shift it. She lost her temper completely and shot out the locking system with her disrupter. Owen and Moon dragged the door halfway open, and the party took turns squeezing through and dropping down to the surface below, gun and sword in hand.
Outside, the jungle was a riot of color, all of it in shades of red. The black trees had scarlet leaves, the shrubbery and foliage were a blushing crimson, and the thick, curling vines were a disturbing shade of pink. The local vegetation never saw any sun, so chlorophyll never really got started. Red was the order of the day in Lachrymae Christi's jungle, and a hell of a lot of it was determinedly draping itself over the Sunstrider II.
Owen and his companions cut and hacked their way clear of the airlock, were drenched immediately by the pouring rain, and finally turned and looked back at their ship. A network of shocking pink vines had already covered much of the outer hull from stem to stern, and more vines were crawling into position, inching doggedly forward like lengths of animated intestine. Thick leaves like scarlet palms slapped against the hull from all sides, adding still more layers, as though the jungle was trying to bury all traces of the intruding ship.