Endgame by Dafydd Ab Hugh

became “down,” the stern “up.” I drifted against the for’ard bulkhead, now floor, with about 0.2 g, which quickly escalated to full, then more than full gravity. Two, three times our normal g! The inertial dampers were offline, probably out of juice; we suffered through the full deceleration phase. Four g’s, four and a half.
    The air-braking went on forever. I was crushed to the deck by about eight hundred pounds of weight! Then the gravity began to slide along the deck toward the ventral bulkhead. Sears and Roebuck were pitching the nose upward to expose more of the hull to the atmosphere.
    We shed airspeed even as we gained more weight. I heard a horrific explosion astern of us—the ship swerved violently, hurling us across the new floor! Arlene fell against me, but I was stunned. I shook my head. “What the freaking hell—!”
    She stared out a porthole, face ashen. “Jesus, Fly! Freakin’ ship splitting!” She slid her hand along the deck and pointed. I just barely saw a huge piece of the Fred ship below us, tumbling end over end, shattering into “tiny” splinters scores of meters long.
    It was getting hard to talk. We needed all our breath to bear down, forcing blood back into our heads. Thank God we were lying down—at now six g’s, sitting up we might have passed out. I knew what was happening: the Fred ship, strong as it was, was never intended to burn through the atmosphere like this! It was fracturing along heat seams, separating into the components that had been attached by the Freds when they assembled the vehicle, probably in orbit. The damned thing was way too long for this sort of monkey crap.
    â€œForward!” I shouted, nearly blacking out with the effort. Arlene stared, confused—lack of oxygen-bearing blood in her brain, maybe—so I repeated, “Forward! Nav Room One!”
    If any component of the ship was to survive the fiery reentry, it would be the biggest, strongest section—the decks and compartments where the engines actually burned, shook, and vibrated. Besides, if that section went, we would all die anyway—no pilot!
    We weren’t far from it, maybe a couple of hundred meters. But it was a marathon! Arlene strained and slithered forward, like a snake; I tried to follow suit,but the best I could do was a humping motion that wrenched my back something fierce. God, to be young again, and supple. The monstrous gravity squeezed us to the ventral deckplates like an enormous boot stamping on our backs. Each compartment was connected to the next by a flexible rubber bottleneck that could easily be sealed to isolate a puncture. The rubber mouths became jaws of death, smothering and suffocating us as we wriggled through them. We could have used some petroleum jelly; I had plenty . . . about a kilometer behind us in my seabag.
    After the first four rooms, my muscles were so sore I grunted with pain with every meter crawled. Arlene was crying; I’d almost never seen her cry before, and never from sheer physical pain. It scared me—the world was ending!
    The groans from the ship as it tore itself apart sure as hell sounded like the end of the world, the universe grinding down noisily . . . long drawn-out moans, a loud noise like the cry of a humpbacked whale, shrieks and sobs, the wailing of the damned in hell, gnashing their teeth. The devil himself danced around me in hooves and pointed tail, laughing and capering, pointing at me in my mortal distress. Or was it a hell prince minotaur? A horrible hallucination; my Lord, I surely did see him, in flesh of red and reeking of sulphur and the grave. Then a steam demon and a boney leapt through the walls! Old home week for Fred monsters!
    But I knew where salvation lay, for’ard, for’ard to Nav Room One. When Arlene faltered and tried to lie down and die in front of me, I put my hand on her flattened derrière and shoved with a