by Bill Adams
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Was that right? I’ll never know. I don’t even know how long the racecourse was, or how fast we were going; there were no marks to judge by. But the minutes—an hour, then the better part of another—streamed past. We held our formation. I in front, scanning; Foyle and Harry higher up, hooks streaming, waiting for me to point out targets; Ariel and Lagado trailing a little, defensively close together, with Mishima covering them from slightly behind. The birds waved whitely in passing, small clouds sailed by like clippers, and the mercs cut across the narrowing V to intercept us at the fifth pylon.
Chapter Twenty-six
At first I hoped they were a lone pair, two white-winged men in green fatigues. I ordered my helmet to give me a zoomed view. The leading merc carried a strangely bulky handgun, his companion a crossbow. The rims of their visors were a dead black, meaning that they weren’t even trying to use the tricky verbal controls of their scanners.
And so I considered letting them pass to one side of us on their present course. Always a chance we wouldn’t be seen. But suddenly the lead merc’s head jerked up, and he fired his pistol—away from us.
It was a flare gun, streaking orange fire; these two scouts were out to summon the whole wolf pack.
But the damage wasn’t necessarily done, not if they couldn’t use the scanners. One flare might go unseen. But the man who’d fired it had to be stopped now—which meant that the trooper who was covering him, the crossbowman, had to be taken out first.
My hand signal had been anticipated. I hadn’t realized how far ahead of me Foyle had gotten, at her higher level. And, too late, I was learning one of the basics of flying. Her downward course was inescapably faster than my level one; I wasn’t going to close the gap in time to give her the support she’d expect. My engine dragged me forward at its usual pace, and I could do nothing but watch.
Foyle came down on her target at a raking diagonal. It must have been a preset course, because she needed both hands to make her strike. The winged trooper saw her at the last second and turned into the line of attack, just as she’d intended—a fish into her hook. He sheered off as she overflew him, but the grapnel had been thrown and had caught, somewhere in the rear of one wing close to the body. She deliberately pulled up into a near-stall, and seconds later her victim hit the end of the supercord line.
I saw him wrenched sideways, but the image was flickering as my helmet tried to keep all the actors in the frame—because the victim’s buddy, the one with the flare pistol, had circled back into view, leveling in on Foyle. And perhaps he would have struck her if the yank on the hook-line hadn’t pulled her up like a kite, out of his path.
But he had an instant at close range, and rolled over in passing to fire the flare gun at her as if it were a weapon. He was quick, and as I watched the flare streak upward I feared he might be lucky, too…
But then the three of them shrank to dots as my helmet picked up something nearer, more imperative, and my steering hand automatically banked my wings before I’d registered what had been coming down on me. A hawklike shadow of camouflage color slashed high, then low, spiraling far to my left, the advantage of height gone, looping away for another try again later. I focused on this new enemy before he was too far away to worry about, and ordered a zoom.
Bad news: this one’s scanner was lit—after all, you didn’t have to be a linguist to use it, just a quick study at repeat-after-me—and he carried what appeared to be a rifle. I assessed the new facts, though it was like trying to file papers in a dust devil. Our seven enemies were apparently organized as three buddy-pairs and one rover—the latter probably their leader, with his helmet and superior weapon.
The computer gave me a better view. Our linguistic advantage still held; this merc didn’t know any better than to fly with his emergency release disk unlocked, red tabs showing. Unfortunately, there was little likelihood of his jerking the rifle back into it hard enough to trigger it.
My close inspection told me something else. I saw the black bloodstain on one leg, a lock of orange hair escaping from the helmet. Principato. He hadn’t had that rifle the last time I’d seen him; he must have commandeered it from a lower-ranking merc. My opposite number, he might also become my responsibility, but first I had to see to Foyle.
I resumed my original course, with a slight climb. My scanner couldn’t find the flareman again, but picked up Foyle immediately. The trooper she’d hooked was doing tight circles below her, standing on one wing as he tried to dislodge the grapnel. But that was the least of her worries. Her own wings were on fire.
The flare must have started it. I caught sight of her at the moment the smoldering crossed some heat threshold and mushroomed outward in red and yellow.
Flicker zoom, shutter back; no, I was still hundreds of meters away, could only watch the jiggling image.
Nothing to see but a ball of pale fire. But before the shock of her death could register on me, she dropped back into the world of the living. She’d hit the emergency release disk at her chest just in time, and the heat of the burning wings carried them up and away from her. For an instant the slender figure was etched against the empty blue of free fall, her hair streaming like a last lick of red flame as she began to drop…and I was thinking, Smart girl, wait to pick up some speed before deploying your parachute—but, incredibly, she had something else in mind.
For as the hooked merc below her tried to fly clear of his kill, he once again jerked into a sideways stall, and the line of Foyle’s fall broke just as violently—into a downward slant straight toward him.
She’d never dropped the supercord—or her attack! But it was just as well that she didn’t quite have the momentum to crash into him bodily, instead grabbing one of his legs from below as she tumbled past. That spilled the last of the air from under his wings, and the two of them spun away in a falling-leaf pattern, wrestling in midair. I thought I saw the flash of a knife blade before I lost them again in flickering planes of focus.
Where was I? Within a hundred meters of them, I thought, and most likely above. At the moment I saw nothing but blue sea and sky, and I came around in a tight loop for fear I’d overshot. That saved my life.
My visor went black for an instant, overzooming, then flickered into a windowpane view of a flier coming at me head-to-head, only fifty meters away. It was the merc with the flare gun. He must have been coming up behind me, hoping to attain the same point-blank range that had served him so well against Foyle. But our wings were as maneuverable as they were slow; my double-back had been too tight for him to follow.
And now—thirty meters distant—he knew I’d seen him, and he had to fire before I could jink away. He went into a slight climb to bring his head and arms down into a more familiar position. Then he disengaged the steering hand to brace it against the arm that held the flare pistol. I flinched to see the gun spit gray smoke, and—ten meters—instantaneously felt a little tug at my own gun arm, too soon for him to have hit me, his wavering flare going wide anyway, but something had in fact passed between us in that instant: a straight black bolt that struck past the merc’s helmet into the base of his throat—
—And then I snapped out of it, rolling to one side just in time to avoid colliding with him.
He passed over me like a sailboat’s boom, with the same sound and shadow and swash of air. Out from under, I dove forward to pick up a little speed, then executed a passable Immelmann turn to face him again. But there was no reason to hurry.
He remained in that upward slant, his engine revving higher in support of a course that would not change—a course fixed, like his life, on the point of an arrow.
I hadn’t even been aware of pulling the trigger. But that was what had made the shot good. He was the one who hadn’t had a chance, thinking and aiming as if he were using a handgun on the ground. In the air, our only good chance to hit each other with light arms was to direct the shot straight ahead along the path of flight. I’d achieved it without thinking, carrying t
he crossbow that way because it offered the least wind resistance. And even my freezing up had helped me, preserving the true line. But luck wouldn’t be good enough next time; I wasn’t the only one learning these lessons.
A sailboat, abandoned at sea, will tack back and forth as if someone were at the helm. The dead merc kept flying in that way, arms and legs swinging limply from side to side in unison, while a black plume of blood waved from his throat until it was too thin, too far away, to see.
I disengaged my steering long enough to reload the crossbow with one of the spare bolts stored behind a heavy rubber stopper in its hollow butt. But first I set myself in a tight circle until I had a new line on my comrades.
Scanning, zooming…
Just a glimpse of crumpled white wings, smeared with red, before they crashed into the sea far below. Foyle’s adversary, I could only hope—and there! there was a parachute that might be hers. And it looked like a parafoil, maneuverable. If she could find some updrafts to ride, it would give us a little longer to reach her with a towline. But where were the others?
Blue sea and sky, white cloud and spray. Landmarks: a few dun patches of phony island in the distance below, and the Magrittesque hulk of a floating pylon in another direction, another dimension. Pan, zoom, shutter back…looking for wings, fooled once by a few of those big birds.
How had we come to be so separated? The battle to date had lasted only a few minutes. Yet the sole figure my scanner could lock onto was that Flying Dutchman, the merc I’d killed myself, far above me now and drifting higher, higher…
There was a great flash of silver light, accompanied by a noise like a thousand canvas sheets tearing apart. I could only stare as the merc’s feet followed his legs and body into the silver flame, and it went out, leaving nothing behind.
The dead man had flown too high. He’d hit the upper limit, the blue plane we saw as “sky,” and had come to the end we’d been warned against. Disintegration? Electrocution? I glanced at my own altitude buckle, then began to search for the others again.
I finally found something. A group of three dots strung out vertically, lower than me and not too far away. Something about the way the upper one was swooping down made me zoom on the one in the middle.
It was Ariel, her tidy figure recognizable even in the computer mockup. But the next instant a gaping hole appeared in one of her white wings and she was torn out of my sight.
My scanner picked up another object coming into frame. It was the merc flyer from above, leveling after his successful dive attack. He carried a short-barreled shotgun, and I swore at it: the perfect weapon for imperfect aiming. I locked a computer course onto the gunman. No one could rescue Ariel until he was taken out.
My legs floated up; my wings shifted forward; I began to fall toward my enemy. As the breeze in my face freshened, I brought my crossbow up into firing position. Now I had a few seconds. Scan down, find Ariel’s dot a hundred meters lower.
Zoom, and it was her. Ejected, thank God, the parachute already in full bloom. But her ski-pole weapon was gone, and a second attacker, the third dot, was barreling in from the side with a crossbow perfectly aligned. Her parafoil was maneuverable, but unpowered. She couldn’t evade him.
The air moaned in my wings.
And then, at the last second, when the bowman had to fire or slam into her, she made her move: a violent yank on a single shroud line of her chute. It collapsed, all its air spilled—and she plummeted out of the bowman’s line of fire, silk streaming behind her like a flag.
I saw the bowman overfly where she’d been and yank off a shot downward. But before I could see whether her chute had reopened safely a new image eclipsed the whole scanner view. I’d overtaken my original target.
I’d hoped to come in from above and behind, the shotgunner’s blind spot. But he’d banked into a tight downward spiral in pursuit of Ariel, wings nearly straight up and down. A glance to one side let him spot me.
I leveled off to save the advantage of greater height. I’d overfly him in a moment…But he snapped over onto his back, matching my horizontal course on his lower level, still leading me as the shotgun swung up to draw a bead. What now?
And in one icy splash it came to me, like the rhyme that brings two lines together in a terminal couplet, the unexpected cleverness that seems so much like fate.
I rapped out an order to the helmet, one that committed me to an interception course.
It was a dive—an overdive, technically, steep enough to send waves of panic fluttering in my belly—and as my feet lifted higher, I disengaged the glove’s steering control and aimed the crossbow with both hands. He was close enough to see that, but I’d guessed his response correctly. He disengaged himself in turn, freeing his steering hand to steady the short barrel of the shotgun.
I hurtled toward him, cocked and aimed, but I don’t think he was afraid of a civilian like me. A professional, he would have seen the difficulty of shooting away from his angle of flight, and he was experienced and cool enough to wait for point-blank range instead. He knew my course was locked; he held his fire confidently as I plunged closer, closer…
I cleared my mind. Nothing left but a target in the blue, and the wind and keening of gathering speed, and my image of myself as a spear-shaft extending back from the cutting-edge shape of the crossbow. Always aiming just ahead of him, allowing for his motion…Down and down, faster and faster, and hell, the timing was wrong, those were the whites of his eyes, he would surely fire, but Now! I heard it—
—that skirl along my wings—
—and squeezed the trigger in that last instant—Got you!—before the wing computer overrode my orders, as I’d known it would have to, and pulled me out of the too-dangerous dive. At my unexpected change of course the gunman did yank his own trigger. But it was already too late, probably just a reflex twitch as the crossbow bolt hammered into him like a tent peg. I heard the bang, loud, but the cloud of pellets went wild, a gray smear in the air I may just have imagined.
Shuddering with reaction, I banked to one side and looked back. I saw a twirling twig: the shotgun, dropped. The gunman himself was only a ghost; he sailed west on spectral wings, a stake through his heart.
Everyone else was lost again.
I had to reload the crossbow before toggling the steering; it took both hands to set the new bolt and crank the string back to cocked position. I banked sharply, circling back to Ariel—but back where? No locations in midair.
I scanned and scanned, fighting desperation, then found three new dots, reasonably close together. The largest one proved to be Ariel’s parachute, functional again. She looked unhurt, tugging on her shroud lines, trying to steer the parafoil’s glide.
And Mishima circled her protectively. I remembered his promises. A closer view of the third dot indicated that he was making good on them.
It was a ball of fire, and in the center of it writhed a man-sized silhouette that had to be a trooper, presumably the bowman Ariel had spilled to avoid.
So the first of Mishima’s incendiaries had worked—better than we’d dared hope; we hadn’t known how flammable the wing plastic was. Even as I watched, though, the brightness died, the blackened human husk dropped from sight, and the morbid spell was broken.
Three down. Incredibly, we were holding our own. But how to find the Lagados, or Foyle? Concentrate!
Well, Foyle would be at a low altitude now, in her parachute—and yes, combat would tend to drive all fliers lower, as they grabbed at the extra speed they got from descent. I looked downward for flecks of white against the sea, saw a few whitecaps—and found Foyle.
She was still a few minutes from splashing down, but it took me nearly that long to reach her. The descent felt good, like a ski run, and at the bottom I burst into a different zone of air, cooler, the ocean smell suddenly rich and tasty, wave chop and bird cries loud enough to hear despite a stronger churning from my engine.
I had to circle Foyle twice before she was ready to be
towed. We’d rationed out the supercord so that everyone had a length for this purpose. The trick was to fly on my back beneath her, close enough to see the thin stuff dangling and find the button she’d tied on the end to give it weight. Then I briefly disengaged my steering hand to grab it.
I rolled over and got ten or twenty yards ahead of her before she stopped giving me slack. When the line went taut, she began to rise like a kite while I nosed down. But it worked better when I went onto my back again, and it didn’t take long for my wing computers to adjust to the drag; our engines were safety-designed, with power to burn.
I had to wrap my end of the line a few times around the butt of the crossbow to free the steering hand and take the piano-wire pull more comfortably. But then I saw how hard this would make it to aim—too late.
Our other mistake had been not making the towline between us as long as possible. The white of my wings and her parafoil so close together had made us easy for Principato to spot. But at least I saw him, too, flying on my back.
Curving in from the west, Principato soon matched our northward course perfectly, higher, but not too high. Smart. Whether he’d seen my last attack or not, he knew his computer would override him if a steep dive went on too long. And he could afford to drive his shot all the way home. This time I was the one who would be firing away from his own flight line, almost certain to miss.
I zoomed on Principato. The computer-synthesized image was clearer than any telescope view. I’d been wrong before; his weapon wasn’t a rifle. That pump slide along the bottom of the barrel jogged my antiquarian memory. Skeet gun. The deadliest weapon he could have had: shot-pellet spread and precise aim, too.
I looked back at Foyle. We had no hand signal for this, even if I’d had a free hand, but I got the idea of a follower across with jerks of my head. She nodded. At least I’d towed her to a decent altitude for now.
