Zero Hour by Craig Alanson

Author:Craig Alanson [Alanson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2017-11-17T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

It was getting damned chilly in the cockpit. That was a problem I could do something about. The helmet engaged with the collar of my flightsuit; I had only to make a couple adjustments to get it fully sealed. The booties were already sealed to the pants, and after I pulled gloves out of a pocket, put them on and sealed them at the wrists, I pulled a red cord at the waistband to inflate the flightsuit. There was a hissing, and a thin gap of air filled the space between inner and outer layers of the suit. That made me feel warmer almost immediately. The flightsuit had a heater powered by a battery in the waistband, but I didn’t want to drain power yet. Flightsuits were intended to be used only as short-term emergency protection against loss of cabin pressure in the vacuum of space. Heat would leak away from my suit much faster in cold water than in the vacuum of space.

I was still shivering and my fingers and toes were numb; it was a good sign they were tingling as warm blood seeped back in. Now that I wasn’t feeling like I would freeze to death quickly, I turned my attention to other matters. What worried me more than my own fate was what the hell had happened. Who had fired a missile at us, on a planet that was supposedly uninhabited? Could there still be Elders hanging around Gingerbread? Had they or their ancestors overslept and missed transcending their physical form? I found that difficult to believe. If there were Elders still on Gingerbread, surely they had weapons better than an antiaircraft missile?

That was another puzzle. Only one missile had been fired at us, and even though we had been flying slowly without stealth, the missile had failed to score a direct impact. Its warhead had set off a proximity detonation, perhaps when it realized it was going to fly too low and miss us. When Reed called out the missile warning, I had accelerated and pulled the nose up. That simple maneuver should not have caused any advanced-technology missile to miss its target. Yet the missile fired at us had failed to hit a big, fat target. None of it made sense.

Beyond what had happened, I worried about the three crewmembers who had made it out the door. Where were they? Had they been able to swim to shore? They might be injured, certainly they were in shock although we all trained to act in high stress situations.

What worried me most was if the beings who fired a missile at our Dragon were a danger to crash survivors.

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