Storm Over Saturn by Mack Maloney

Author:Mack Maloney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9780441011919
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2004-08-29T12:00:00+00:00

6

He was falling.

Tumbling…

Out of control.

Hunter tried to get his wits about him, but it was hard to do. There was darkness all around. All he could see was an inky black sky above and very dark shadows below.

He'd spent so much time inside flying machines, his body could tell just how high he was by the thinness of the air and the sensation of the air pressure around him. Both of these indicators came to one dreadful conclusion now: he was about a mile high and dropping very, very fast.

What went wrong? Had he jumped to a moon that was no longer there? Or had it moved off its orbital plane for some reason? Or had this been a trap all along?

He began falling faster.

What could he do? He was the Wingman, but he didn't have wings. Flapping his arms would be a ridiculous way to spend his last few seconds of life. But he just couldn't go limp, either.

He managed to right himself somehow, which from his point of view, was body horizontal, head down. He was wearing his flight suit again, his boots, his crash helmet. He ripped open the front of his suit, allowing the air to collect underneath. This slowed his velocity, but only by a tiny fraction. So he would impact going thirty-one feet per second per second instead of Nature's well-established thirty-two?

What good was that?

All this fussing and physics took time, and before he knew it, he could see the ground, his splat spot in sight. But then something strange happened. What was below him was not rocks or hard ground or even water. He wasn't sure what the hell it was. But in the last instant before impact, he realized maybe it was actually… soft.

He hit a moment later. It felt like his spine had come right up out of his skin. But at the same time he knew that if he could think at all, the fall had not killed him. Not immediately anyway.

He hit hard on something soft—hit and kept on going. Down ten feet, fifteen, twenty. Finally he stopped burrowing and shot back up, all this happening in the span of a second or two. Next thing he knew, he was in the air again, fifty feet high and tumbling once more. He came back down, hit the surface hard again, bounced a second time, then finally came down for good.

Now it felt as if his heart was coming out of his throat. How could he have survived such a fall? And what the hell did he fall into?

He lay there for a full minute, waiting for his ticker to start beating normally again. Facedown, he had the taste of old cloth in his mouth. Finally lifting his head, he realized he was lying in a pile of cloth. Hundreds of separate pieces of it. Different colors. Different textures. But all just about the same size.

It was still dark out, but he managed to grab of few of these things and hold them up to his eyes.

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