The Peace War Read Online Free PDF

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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 — 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. She
dropped to the ground, Quiller a second behind her. "Damn stupidity," she heard him say
as debris showered down on them, "us standing here gawking at a bomb. Let's move out."
    Allison tried to stand, saw the red oozing from the side of her leg. The pilot stooped
and carried her through the damp brush, twenty or thirty meters upwind from the crater.
He set her down and bent to look at the wound. He pulled a knife from his crash kit and
sawed the tough suit fabric from around her wound.
    "You're lucky. Whatever it was passed right through the side of your leg. I'd callthis a
nick, except it goes so deep." He sprayed the area with first-aid glue, and the pain
subsided to a throbbing pressure that kept time with her pulse.
    The heavy red smoke was drifting steadily away from them. The orbiter itself was
hidden by the crater's edge. The explosions were continuing irregularly but without great
force. They should be safe here. He helped her out of her pressure suit, then struggled out
of his own.
    Quiller walked several paces back toward the wreck. He bent and picked up a strange,
careen shape. "Looks like it got thrown here by the blast." It was a Christian cross, its
base still covered with dirt.
    "We crashed in a damn cemetery," Allison tried to laugh, but it made her dizzy. Quiller
didn't reply. He studied the cross for some seconds. Finally he set it down and came back
to look at Allison's leg. "That stopped the bleeding. I don't see any other punctures. How
do you feel?"
    Allison glanced down at the red on her gray flight fatigues. Pretty colors, except when
it's your own red. "Give me some time to sit here. I bet I'll be able to walk to the rescue
choppers when they come."
    "Hmm. Okay, I'm