(eng) Patrick Ness - Chaos Walking 0.5 by The New World

(eng) Patrick Ness - Chaos Walking 0.5 by The New World

Author:The New World [World, The New]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


***

The scout ship feels like it’s going to fly apart at any second. The atmosphere is bashing us around and it’s all my mother can do to keep us upright.

She calls occasionally for my dad, but there’s still no answer.

‘Viola, where are we?!’ she shouts, wrestling with the controls.

‘We’re coming back around!’ I shout over the roar of it all. ‘We’re going too fast, though. I think we’re going to overshoot it.’

‘I’ll try to get us down as best I can. Can you see anything on the scanners? Anything beyond that bit of the river where we can land?’

I press through my screens but they’re jumping around as much as everything else on the ship. The engines are still firing us forward and so we’re pretty much falling towards the planet, too fast, with no way to slow ourselves down. We’re zooming over a huge ocean right now and I can tell my mother is worried that we’ll have to put down in the middle of it-

But the continent’s coming up on our screens now, looming dark as night and way too fast and suddenly we’re over it, the ground whipping by down below us.

‘Are we near it?!’ my mum yells.

‘Hold on!’ I check the mapping. ‘We’re south of it! About 15ks!’

She wrestles with the manual controls, trying to turn us a bit more north. ‘Dammit!’ The ship lists and I slam my elbow into the control panel, losing my maps for a second.

‘Mum?’ I say, worry and fright in my voice as I try to bring the maps up again.

‘I know, sweetheart,’ she says, grunting with the controls.

‘What about dad?’

She doesn’t say anything but I can see it all on her face. ‘We’ve got to find a place to put down, Viola! And then we’ll do everything we can to save him!’

I turn back to my maps. ‘Looks like a prairie of some kind first,’ I say, ‘but we’ll probably overshoot that.’ I dial through some more scans. ‘A swamp!’ I say. My mother’s got us heading north again, back towards that river we saw, which seems to peter out into swampland.

‘Will we be low enough?’ my mother yells.

I dial through a few more screens and projected landing arcs. ‘It’ll be close.’

The ship gives a huge jolt.

And then there’s an eerie quiet.

‘We’ve lost the engines,’ my mother says. ‘The vents never opened. The fire choked out.’ She turns to me. ‘We’re gliding in. Program me a flightpath and hold on tight.’

I dial quickly through a few more screens, locking in a landing arc into what I’m hoping will be a nice soft swamp.

My mother pulls the manual controls hard with her fists, lining up her screen with the path I’ve laid out. Out the portholes I can see the ground far too clearly now, treetops getting closer and closer below us.

‘Mum?’ I say, watching as we get lower in the sky.

‘Hang on!’ she says.

‘MUM!’

And we hit.



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