The Starchild Trilogy

�s, it still seemed to Sam that he was falling more slowly than he expected until he realized that he and the slabs near him were falling together, gaining speed and momentum as they plunged toward the distant canyon floor.

Following his initial panicked reaction, Sam shucked his protective boot covers and tapped his big toes to activate hypergolic nozzles in the ball of each TBH Propulsion Boot. Twenty newtons of force began to slow his fall, and he tucked his knees slightly to arc himself out and away from the tumbling boulders—not enough deceleration to stop his plunge, but maybe sufficient, for Saracen to catch him.

“Saracen, hark!” This was Sam’s prearranged signal to control his hyper-V craft remotely. “Locate and approach my position…match my velocity with the hatch as close to me as possible…open the hatch and scoop me up!!” The detached, rational part of his mind could hear the double exclamation point. The panicked part said, “I have perhaps a hundred seconds before I crash into the canyon floor…so hurry!”

“One hundred and two-point three seconds, actually, Sam,” the Resident onboard system quipped as Saracen’s shadow passed over Sam’s position.

The saucer-shaped craft slid in beside him, falling at the same rate as Sam. The hatch slid up, but just as Saracen began to glide toward him, a boulder half the size of the craft struck Saracen’s rim, causing it to spin away, and nudged Sam back toward the cascading rockfall only a few meters behind him. He splayed his toes in shock, extinguishing his boot jets. Because of the initial braking action of his boots, Sam was falling slower than the rocks just out of his reach. If he got sucked into the fall, he would be dead for sure. Sam tucked his knees and tapped both toes, projecting himself as far out from the rockfall as possible. He calculated thirty seconds or less before he hit the ground.

“Sam…above you!”

Sam looked up to see Saracen settling down over him, forming a protective shield. Sam continued to jet away from the falling rocks as the Resident brought the craft between him and the rocks, hatch wide open.

“Kill the jets!” the Resident commanded and slid sideways, scooping Sam into the lock with just meters to spare before he would have splashed onto the rocky surface.

With Sam inside its acceleration field, Saracen instantly reversed its direction, its field acting on everything it contained—the craft, Sam, the air, each molecule and atom, everything, and came to a hover over the central canyon floor, safely removed from the still tumbling rock. Sam waited for the pressure lock to cycle and removed his helmet and gloves. Once inside, he sat before the control console, watching in fascination as it seemed most of the canyon wall was still in motion. The leading edge of the falling rock mass smashed into a vast fan of debris left over from previous falls, about a thousand meters above the floor. Millions of tons of rock continued down the flattening fan for another five minutes, slowing as the main body of the fall crashed into the top of the fan, splitting into two branches, one pressing northward toward the western face of Nectaris Montes where it petered out at the north-western extent of that small mountain range. The other, larger branch seemed to be aimed directly at Lone Star Base, located in a partially hollowed-out, two-kilometer-high rocky mound about three kilometers from the canyon’s north wall. The mass of rock carried on for another ten minutes, finally coming to a halt a few tens of meters from the base entrance.