6
The Eaters
Horza was weightless for a second. He felt himself caught by the eddying wind swirling through the rear doors, drawing him
toward them. He
grabbed at the channel in the wall he had held on to earlier. The shuttle dipped its nose, and the roar of
the wind increased. Horza floated, his
eyes closed, his fingers jammed into the wall slot, waiting for the crash; but instead
the shuttle leveled out again, and he was back on his feet.
“Mipp!" he shouted, staggering forward to the door. He felt the craft turning and glanced out through the rear doors. They
were still falling.
“It’s gone, Horza," Mipp said faintly. “I’ve lost it." He sounded weak, calmly despairing. “I’m turning back for the island.
We won’t get there,
but… we’re going to hit in a few moments…. You’d best get down by this bulkhead and brace yourself. I’ll
try to put her down as soft as I can…."
“Mipp," Horza said, sitting down on the floor with his back to the bulkhead, “is there anything I can do."
“Nothing," Mipp said. “Here we go. Sorry, Horza. Brace yourself."
Horza did exactly the opposite, letting himself go limp. The air roaring through the rear doors howled in his ears; the shuttle
shook
underneath him. The sky was blue. He caught a glimpse of waves…. He kept just enough tension in his back to keep his
head against the
bulkhead surface. Then he heard Mipp shout; not words—just a shout of fear, an animal noise.
The shuttle crashed, slamming into something, forcing Horza hard back against the wall, then releasing him. The craft raised
its nose
slightly. Horza felt light for a moment, saw waves and white spray through the open rear doors, then the waves went,
he saw sky, and closed his
eyes as the shuttle’s nose dipped again.
The craft smashed into the waves, crashing to a stop in the water. Horza felt himself squashed into the bulkhead as though
by the foot of
some gigantic animal. The wind was forced out of him, blood roared, the suit bit at him. He was shaken and
flattened, and then, just as the
impact seemed to be over, another shock sledge hammered into his back and neck and head,
and suddenly he was blind.
The next thing he knew there was water everywhere about him. He was gasping and spluttering, striking out in the darkness
and hitting his
hands off hard, sharp, broken surfaces. He could hear water gurgling, and his own choked breath frothing.
He blew water out of his mouth and
coughed.
He was floating in a bubble of air, in darkness, in warm water. Most of his body seemed to be aching, each limb and part clamoring
with its
own special message of pain.
He felt gingerly round the small space he was trapped in. The bulkhead had collapsed; he was—at last—in the flight-deck area
with Mipp.
He found the other man’s body, crushed between seat and instrument panel, trapped and still, half a meter under
the surface of the water. His
head, which Horza could feel by reaching down between the seat head-rest and what felt like
the innards of the main monitor screen, moved too
easily in the neck of the suit, and the forehead had been crushed.
The water was rising higher. The air was escaping through the smashed nose of the shuttle, floating and bobbing bow-up in
the sea. Horza
knew he would have to swim down and back through the shuttle’s rear section and out through the rear doors,
otherwise he’d be trapped.
He breathed as deeply as he could, despite the pain, for about a minute, while the rising water level gradually forced his
head into the angle
between the top of the craft’s instrument panel and the flight-deck ceiling. He dived.
He forced his way down, past the wreckage of the crushed seat Mipp had died in, and past the twisted panels of light metal
which had
made up the bulkhead. He could see light, vaguely green-gray, forming a rectangle beneath him. Air trapped in his
suit bubbled round him,
along his legs, upward to his feet. He was slowed for a moment, buoyed up by the air in his boots,
and for a second he thought he wasn’t going
to make it, that he was going to hang there upside-down and drown. Then the air
bubbled out through the holes in his boots punched there by
Lamm’s laser, and Horza sank.
He struggled down through the water to the rectangle of light, then swam through the open rear doors and into the shimmering
green depths
of the water under the shuttle; he kicked and went up, breaking out into the waves with a gasp, sucking warm,
fresh air into his lungs. He felt his
eyes adjust to the slanted but still bright sunlight of late afternoon.
He grabbed hold of the shuttle’s dented, punctured nose—sticking above the water by about two meters—and looked around, trying
to see
the island, but without success. Still just treading water and letting his battered body and brain recover, Horza watched
the uptilted nose of the
craft sink lower in the water and tip slowly forward so that the shuttle gradually floated almost
level in the waves, its top surface just awash. The
Changer, his arm muscles straining and hurting, eventually hauled himself
onto the top of the shuttle, and lay there like a beached fish.
He started to shut off the pain signals, like a weary servant picking up the litter of breakables after an employer’s destructive
rage.
It was only lying there, with small waves washing over the top surface of the shuttle’s fuselage, that he realized that all
the water he had been
coughing up and swallowing was fresh. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Circlesea would be anything
other than salt, like most planetary
oceans, but in fact there was not even the slightest tang of it, and he congratulated
himself that at least he would not die of thirst.
He stood up carefully, in the center of the shuttle roof, waves breaking round his feet. He looked around, and could see the
island—just. It
looked very small and far away in the early evening light, and, while there was a faint warm breeze blowing
more or less toward the island, he
had no idea which way any currents might be taking him.
He sat down, then lay back, letting the waters of the Circlesea wash over the flat surface beneath him and break in small
lines of surf
against his much-damaged suit. After a while he just fell asleep, not really meaning to, but not stopping himself
when he realized that he was,
telling himself to sleep for only an hour or so.
He woke up to see the sun, though still high in the sky, looking dark red as it shone through the layers of dust above the
distant Edgewall.