Haze and the Hammer of Darkness Read Online Free Page A

descended to twelve thousand meters and was passing over the tallest of the peaks, less than three thousand meters below.
    Roget’s scans showed that the mountains were the center of a peninsula. To the east water stretched as far as the screens could show. He immediately banked to the north, paralleling the lower hills because of the short distance between where the hills ended and the ocean began.
    With that sharp a turn, the dropboat’s glide ratio began to approximate that of a flying brick hurtling downward toward the forested slopes below. Roget hurried through the landing checklist while scanning the terrain ahead, finally settling on a long brushy area some three klicks ahead.
    When the radalt alerted him at five hundred meters AGL, he eased into a partial flare, using the dropboat’s lifting body form to trade off speed to kill his rate-of-descent—but not enough to stall.
    Less than a hundred meters above ground, the dropboat shivered with a sudden crosswind. Roget corrected, angling the nose to the wind and easing the nose up just a trace.
    The power levels were at less than 7 percent when the dropboat’s tail touched the ground. Roget let the nose drop slowly, and the boat skidded and bounced across the uneven ground. It came to a stop less than a hundred meters from the tall evergreens to the north.
    The farscreens were fading. They showed no one and no large animals anywhere nearby. Given the sonics that had preceded the dropboat, that didn’t exactly surprise Roget. The diagnostics did tell him that the atmosphere composition was T-norm, or close enough that it made little difference. He doubted that the dropboat would be useful for much of anything after the descent and rough landing. Still, he went through the standard shutdown checklist before he unstrapped his bruised and sore figure from the pilot’s couch and eased himself out through the narrow lock hatches, one after the other. Once he was clear of the still-warm hull, he cracked his helmet. He could smell evergreens and charred vegetation. For all that, there were no fires around the craft. That suggested that the area wasn’t all that dry.
    For several moments, Roget stood beside the dropboat. All his implants and systems checked, despite the rough entry. There was one problem. They registered nothing beyond himself and the fading residual energies within the dropboat.
    No emissions. No signals. Nothing. Was there no intelligent life on the planet? Or had all his implants failed, despite the internal telltales that indicated they were functioning? That couldn’t be. He was getting indications from the dropboat.
    He shrugged.
    One way or another, he had a mission to complete. He needed to retrieve his gear from the sealed locker and get on with it—preferably before any locals showed up. If there were any.
    After a last set of scans of the area around the dropboat, Roget moved quickly, stripping off his pressure suit and helmet, then retrieving his gear and the modest backpack to contain it, and finally locking the boat. If the locks were forced, certain key parts of the controls would melt down. Since the screens and shields had been tried to their limits on the descent, the boat didn’t have enough power to carry Roget more than a few klicks, let alone return to orbit.
    He checked his equipment a last time, then paused, taking a deep breath. The air was heavy and damp and carried a faint scent, somewhere between a sultry perfume and the clean dankness of a virgin forest. He had a feeling that the sea-level atmospheric pressure was higher than T-norm, possibly as much as 10 percent. The oxygen content was a bit higher, and that might offset the slightly higher gravity.
    Finally, he strode into the forest, heading north. There certainly hadn’t been any signs of technology or habitation farther south on the peninsula. He decided against powering up the camouflage capacity engineered into his singlesuit.