few centimeters and he would have been crushed. A harsh, crackling sound came
clearly through the thin shell of her helmet. She slipped Quiller's in place and
turned on the oxygen feed. She recognized the smell that still hung in her
helmet: The tracer stench that tagged their landing fuel.
Angus Quiller straightened out of her grasp. He looked around dazedly. "Fred?"
he shouted.
Outside, the improbable trees were beginning to flare. God only knew how long
the forward hull would keep the fire in the nose tanks from breaking into the
crew area.
Allison and Quiller pulled themselves forward... and saw what had happened to
Fred Torres. The terrible sound that had begun this nightmare had been the left
front of the vehicle coming down into the flight deck. The back of Fred's
acceleration couch was intact, but Allison could see that the man was beyond
help. Quiller had been very lucky.
They looked through the rent that was almost directly over their heads. It was
ragged and long, perhaps wide enough to escape through. Allison glanced across
the cabin at the main hatch. It was subtly bowed in; they would never get out
that way. Even through their pressure suits, they could now feel the heat. The
sky beyond the rent was no longer blue. They were looking up a flue of smoke and
flame that climbed the nearby pines.
Quiller made a stirrup with his hands and boosted the NMV specialist though the
ragged tear in the hull. Allison's head popped through. Under anything less than
these circumstances she would have screamed at what she saw sitting in the
flames: an immense dark octopus shape, its limbs afire, cracked and swaying.
Allison wriggled her shoulders free of the hole and pulled herself up. Then she
reached down for the pilot. At the same time, some part of her mind realized
that what she had seen was not an octopus but the mass of roots of a rather
large tree which somehow had fallen downward on the nose of the sortie craft.
This was what had killed Fred Torres.
Quiller leaped up to grab her hand. For a moment his broader form stuck in the
opening, but after a single coordinated push and tug he came through ў leaving
part of his equipment harness on the jagged metal of the broken hull.
They were at the bottom of a long crater, now filled with heat and reddish
smoke. Without their oxygen, they would have had no chance. Even so, the fire
was intense. The forward area was well involved, sending rivulets of fire toward
the rear, where most of the landing fuel was tanked. She looked wildly around,
absorbing what she saw without further surprise, simply trying to find a way
out.
Quiller pointed at the right wing section. If they could run along it, a short
jump would take them to the cascade of brush and small trees that had fallen
into the crater. It wasn't till much later that she wondered how all that brush
had come to lie above the orbiter when it crashed.
Seconds later they were climbing hand-over-hand up the wall of brush and vines.
The fire edged steadily through the soggy mass below them and sent flaming
streamers ahead along the pine needles imbedded in the vines. At the top they
turned for a moment and looked down. As they watched, the cargo bay broke in
half and the sortie craft slumped into the strange emptiness below it. Thus died
all Allison's millions of dollars of optical and deep-probe equipment. Her hand
tightened on the disk pack that still hung by her side.
The main tank blew, and simultaneously Allison's right leg buckled beneath her.
