POV: nomad
Summary
Nomad fights his way back across the deck of Beacon in growing darkness as the dead city falls down the back of the mountain range. The flight has gone catastrophically off-plan — they ran out of water far ahead of his guesses, and everything he and the engineers worked out before launch was layered on layered guesswork — but he buys one piece of luck from the disaster: the ship cleared the summit before the engines starved, and as she plummets she slides into the long shadow on the lee side of the mountain. Up on the deck the wind is at least no longer a problem; he and the city are falling together at the same speed. He uses Auxiliary as occasional handholds along the deck, and eventually reaches the hub and hauls himself up to the Dawnchaser's door. He had braced for the city to crunch into the slope on the descent, and it has not yet. Small mercies — the lee face is so steeply cratered that the city is falling clear of stone for now.
He drags himself through the cabin, which has fully decompressed in his absence, gravity meaningless inside the long free fall. Elegy lies unconscious — or, he hopes, only unconscious — slumped in the corner. He kicks off through the chamber and reaches the control panel. The conventional engines should bite again once they fall back into thicker air, since they need atmosphere to bleed heat into; instead he finds them locked up entirely. The water that had been the working fluid was also the coolant, and running it dry while the system was superheated in vacuum has fused the works. The kind of damage, he thinks bleakly, that can simply destroy machinery for good. Lights blaze warnings across the entire board.
Jeffrey Jeffrey had pointed out, almost in passing, a single restart switch for the whole engine bank. After all of Nomad's effort to get Beacon this far, the entire flight comes down to one button — that and waiting for the right moment to press it. Push it too soon, while the engines are still vacuum-hot with no air to bleed heat into, and they will not light at all. Push it too late and the city makes a crater on the slope. He hooks his feet under the chair to hold himself in zero g, watches the readouts crawl from red toward orange, and waits while the slope outside the window picks up speed. The acceleration he feels in the falling city is its own form of clock — the faster they drop, the more outside air is rushing past the open door, which means more air for him to breathe and the engines to cool with.
Aux becomes increasingly anxious in his head, asking what he is doing, then begging him to press the stupid button. There is not enough air in the cabin yet for Nomad to answer. As soon as actual atmosphere is rushing audibly past the door he manages one full breath and one word out — *not yet* — and waits a few more seconds while the heat dial limps down toward the safe line. The instant it touches the line, he slams the switch.
Four of the ten remaining engines fire, kick hard enough to rattle his teeth, and try to slow the city. They do not have enough authority. Beacon hits the ground.