Frontera

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For E.

With less than five minutes left, Kane tugged nervously at his shoulder harness and tried to remember gravity.The feel of his arms dragging by his sides, the blood pooling in his legs, his head jerking forward in fatigue—it all seemed distant, clumsy, irrelevant.

“You’ve gone soft, Kane,” Lena whispered, but her eyes were afraid of him. She locked her cleats into the gridded floor, peeled the plastic sheath from a hypo, and pushed 15 milligrams of Valium into his left arm.“You look like hell.You’re about nine-tenths crazy and you haven’t got any muscle tone at all. I don’t think you’re going to make it.”

“Four minutes,” Takahashi said.

“I’ll make it,” Kane said.

Not just gravity, he thought, but eight Gs, wrenching, crushing, suffocating him while the ship threw off 10,000 feet per second of velocity by diving into the thin atmosphere of Mars.The ship’s computer would sail them through a narrow, invisible corridor, balancing air drag against the strength of their reinforced carbon-carbon aeroshell, slowing them just enough to put them into a high, elliptical orbit around the planet and not send them crashing into the frozen Martian wastes.

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