The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  Something hissed querulously from the other side of the thin door, and jumped back against the latch. A rank reptile stink filled the air around them.

  "We'll have to abandon ship," Blair said, sounding indecently cheerful. And then, oddly: "And it's not my fault."

  "Just bad luck," Marc agreed.

  His mind was working fairly well, as long as he kept it focused, but that was adrenaline, and there were limits to how long you could keep going on that. Better to hurry. He looked into one of the cabins and pulled out the thin mattress.

  "Get Tyler on that," he said. "Strap him down. This is going to be tricky."

  Another thump came from the side of the gondola. He glanced back into the cabin; it was Jadviga's, and there was a picture of her with a tall, lanky-looking blond man and a small boy resting by the bunk. Just outside the porthole, a slitted yellow eye the size of his fist looked in.

  He pulled the rest of the bows out of the arms locker, sharing them out—no sense in wasting them—and they all hustled down the corridor, lifting Tyler's unconscious body with them into the hold. Above them more thumps and hisses sounded as the monstrous flying vermin tore their way into the Vepaja's hull and gondola, crawling with folded wings into its spaces.

  Blair kicked the door closed behind the injured man. Tahyo had greeted the humans with a hysterical outburst of wulfing, roughly translatable as: There are bad things out there! Bad! Bad! A sharp command from Marc sent him flat on his belly, but a thin, anxious whining persisted. His tail wagged in feeble hope whenever Marc's eyes happened to cross his.

  Blair and Marc nodded to each other and set about tearing up the railings to prop against the door. None too soon; there was a thumping and screeching from just beyond it seconds later. The hold was stuffy and dim. Cynthia's face almost disappeared in it, save for her eyes and the white smile she flashed at him with a thumbs-up.

  Marc took a deep breath. "Want to do the honors?" he said to Blair.

  "No, no, you can kill us all with my blessing."

  "Oh, very much thanks," Marc said, feeling long-held resentment vanish, at least for the present.

  He walked over to the curving wall of the hold. An aluminum box was fastened to it, and an armored cable ran up from it. Auxiliary buoyancy controls—emergency use only! was stenciled in red over the gray surface.

  "I think this qualifies," Marc said, and opened it. "Stand by, everyone. And pray these still work!"

  Inside were a line of switches. Marc flipped the red one—the master-switch—then went down the row, clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk.

  For a moment nothing happened; then a slight falling-elevator sensation began at the pit of his stomach. Jadviga leaned over the small port in the keel door.

  "Well under a thousand meters," she said. "We are descending. Gradually—less than a meter per second. Open terrain with occasional trees… a small river… more steppes."

  Below the switches that opened the exhaust valves on the upper keel was another marked: Deploy anchors.

  Marc whistled lightly through his teeth as he looked at it. There were two anchors forward, lodged forward of the control gondola and secured to the reinforced structure of hull ring frame two. Normal procedure was to come into the wind and establish zero speed relative to the ground before dropping the anchors—and to put a landing party down first so that they could be secured manually before any strain was put on them. That wasn't really practical this time; he just hoped that they'd drop and not rip right out of frame two the instant the strain came on them.

  "Everyone secure yourselves," Blair said. "And Captain Tyler."

  "Good idea." Marc nodded.

  They did, snapping their quick-release safety lines to one of the eyebolts that were scattered thickly around the hold, for good reason. Jadviga and Cynthia lashed Tyler down to the surface of the emergency hatch itself, which was an excellent idea. Marc unfastened Tahyo and brought him over beside the injured man.

  "Down, boy," Marc said, before snapping the line from the greatwolf's harness to an eyebolt on the hatch surface. "And stay."

  "You've got that beastie working for you, haven't you?" Cynthia said.

  "Mais, I'm lucky with canids." He added a chuckle, and found it was genuine.

  "Five hundred meters. We are drifting at… I can't be sure. Perhaps five kilometers an hour ground speed, perhaps a little more. A rocky hill covered in brush. More grassland…"

  Jadviga lay hugging the surface of the hatch as she kept up the commentary. It went on smoothly in her accented English, even when a beak slammed through the doorway that led down into the hold and withdrew with a crackle of breaking wicker. Tahyo whined louder; the hissing screeches were very loud now, and the stench of rotting meat. Marc came up to one knee and reached for an arrow. Blair did likewise.

  "After you, Alphonse," Marc said.

  "No, after you," Blair said.

  They drew and shot together. Both arrows punched through the wicker without slowing perceptibly; the screeching on the other side went from loud to earsplitting, and a huge thrashing and thumping accompanied it. Ripping and tearing sounds followed, and blood leaked under the bottom of the door; at a guess, the rest of the flock/pack/whatever were dining on their fallen friend. That might just distract them for long enough…

  "Not bad, Alphonse," Marc said.

  "Not bad if I do say so myself. And I do; oh, I do!"

  Jadviga's voice went on, flat and calm. "One hundred fifty meters. We are dropping faster. One hundred. Seventy-five. A large clump of trees. Fifty meters…"

  Marc reached over and untied the slipknot that held the spare anchor. "Everyone get a hand on the quick-release catches," he said, stripping himself of all his gear and lashing it down to the hatch. "When I give the word, release them."

  He stationed himself by the control box, his thumb poised. Jadviga's voice chanted as the distance to the ground lessened; the screeching hisses of the pterosaurs built to a crescendo, as they thought their prey was mortally wounded and falling fast.

  "Ten meters! Five!"

  Marc took up the slight tension on the button, feeing the ball of his thumb pressing against the hard synthetic. The keel brushed hard on the ground for an instant, making them all lurch. He pushed, and heard the double bang! of the anchors being fired by their explosive bolts.

  "Now!"

  Marc leaped for the hatch. He landed on it and grabbed for an eyebolt just as the smooth, gentle drift turned to a lurching twist. The Vepaja pivoted as one anchor caught and then the other; huge rending and crackling sounds came from up ahead. The hatchway came loose with a crang and dropped eight feet, striking the ground with a blow like being whacked full-body with an oak board. Everyone clutched his or her handholds as it slid backward and twisted, tobogganing down a grassy slope. Most of them yelled; Marc knew he did. Cynthia's cry was one of alarm as fresh blood broke through Tyler's latest bandage.

  The spare anchor whipped off the hatchway, dragging coils of rope out of the cargo hold as the airship bucked and shot upward. The forward port anchor did rip loose then, with a gunshot crackle and a shower of fabric and frame scattering debris that fell or drifted like a midair explosion. The ship slewed around the hold of the starboard anchor, and as it did, the dragging emergency hook caught under a huge log. The four rope-wound wicker crates shot out of the hold and landed bouncing and rolling.

  "Uh-oh," Marc murmured.

  The Vepaja shot upward again, as weight came off faster than the emergency valves could bleed lifting gas. The last anchor ripped out of the frame, and the whole forward third of the airship forward of the gondola bent upward as the keels broke, two hundred feet arching up until the pointed bow faced the white-blue haze of the sky. Metal would be grinding on metal amid a miasma of hydrogen… what was known on Earth as a fuel-air explosive, only air was more reactive here.

  "Look out!" he cried, and buried his head in his arms.

  Everyone flattened themselves. Cynthia arched her body over th
e unconscious captain.

  WHOOMP!

  Heat washed over them, enough to dry Marc's eyes amid the sudden glare of orange-red light; he gritted his teeth against the expectation of pain, but his skin merely prickled. When he looked up, the airship had broken in two; the forward part was high in the sky, the pale hydrogen flame running over the surface as it drifted away westward and downwind. Dense black smoke came up from over a hill.

  Some of the pterosaur flock had escaped; one crashed nearby as he watched, its body-fuzz charred black and smoking. The rest rose hissing from the airship wreck and vanished. A great silence fell, with the chorus of birds gone and even the insects distracted from their crinkling and buzzing for a moment. Marc felt his throat constrict for a second; it was only a machine, but it had served them well and kept them alive through the storm.

  "Guys," Cynthia said. "Guys, this doesn't look good."

  Marc felt a prickle of alarm. She was working over Captain Tyler again, and this time it didn't look like it was working. The man was conscious, but the last fall had jarred something loose—even hard pressure wasn't halting the bleeding. Into the silence, he spoke in a breathy whisper.

  "Come… here."

  All four of them knelt around the dying man. Tyler closed his eyes and gathered his strength for a moment. "Something… weird happened as we got close," he said. His voice was just audible if you strained. "Something… different. Like an autopilot we didn't have…" Another pause, and then he spoke more strongly for a moment:

  "Lieutenant Vitrac, you're in charge. Get my people home. Tell my wife—"

  A catch in the slow, labored breathing, a hesitation, another breath, and then it stopped. Cynthia checked the pulse, then sighed and closed his eyes. Marc crossed himself; so, somewhat to his surprise, did Jadviga.

  He rose and looked around. "We'll make camp and scout around and see to our gear," he said. "Then we'll head towards the coast and back towards Jamestown."

  Jadviga flushed. "But our mission—"

  Marc raised a hand in a soothing gesture. "By the last VPS readings, we're just about on top of the shuttle crash site. But the satellites never got a visual, and we don't have an aircraft anymore. We'll do some scouting, but we can't delay long. The odds on us getting back alive are short enough as it is."

  Cynthia frowned. "I don't suppose a rescue mission might come for us?"

  She didn't look too disappointed when he shook his head; neither did anyone else. Their last message had them about to be hit in a dangerous storm; if a satellite happened to be overhead and managed to get an image through the haze, it would show the Vepaja crashing and burning. Sending the only other working airship at Jamestown to rescue the rescuers would be foolhardy, and whatever you thought of the General, nobody had ever called him that type of idiot.

  "They'll cut their losses," Marc said.

  Jadviga nodded; that didn't surprise Marc, either. By comparison with her bosses, the General was a save-the-baby-seals sentimentalist.

  "It's up to us, then," Blair said quietly.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 16th Edition University of Chicago Press, 1988

  SPACE RACE: Implications for Earth

  As the twentieth century enters its last decades, it has become increasingly clear that our focus on space has fundamentally reshaped our life on Earth as well. Most obviously, the knowledge that we were not alone in the universe has had a profound effect on Earthly philosophy, religion, and culture, compounded by the discovery via space-based telescopes in the 1970s that Earth-like planets with oxygen-rich atmospheres are common in nearby star systems. Technologies developed for the space effort shape our lives; increasingly, manufacturing in and energy from space affect the global economy.

  However, the discoveries which began in the 1950s have affected us not only through increased scientific knowledge and technological spin-offs, but also through the shaping of national rivalries. Few now remember how real the threat of another global war was in the 1950s, or how serious conflicts on the periphery of the blocs remained as late as the early 1960s. Many contemporary analysts credit the Space Race, as much as nuclear weapons themselves, with breaking the twenty-year cycle of the World Wars.

  The knowledge that life existed on both Mars and Venus prompted increased research spending, but proof in the early 1960s that human life existed on both planets made interplanetary travel a matter of maximum priority. As the 1960s wore on, spending on research, development, and deployment of space systems gradually came to match and then exceed that of the military budgets of the two great power-blocs.

  The deaths of the two Communist dictators Joseph Stalin (1953) and Mao Tse-tung (1956) and their replacement by the relatively reformist regimes of Khrushchev and Chou En-lai assisted the deterrent effect of thermonuclear weapons and ICBMs in the reorientation of EastBloc policy away from direct military confrontation and into competition for space, under the slogan Proletarians of All Worlds, Unite!

  Paradoxically, the increasingly severe competition to establish a presence in space and on Earth's sister-worlds led to increased pragmatism and cooperation on Earth itself, where both major blocs desired no distractions. Among the first fruits was the peaceful settlement of the Quemoy-Matsu island dispute in 1958. The USA/UK/USSR/PRC demarche which imposed the Treaty of Nicosia on the parties to the last Arab-Israeli war in 1967, and the inter-bloc peacekeeping force which enforced it, were among the most spectacular. The Middle East, a scene of instability throughout the nineteenth century and into the postwar period, became a sleepy backwater.

  Similarly, the ever-closer integration of British Commonwealth and United States foreign policy after the joint intervention in the Suez Crisis (1956) received another major boost when the United Kingdom agreed to merge its space efforts with those of the USA in 1961.

  More controversially, some scholars attribute the increasing neutralism of Gaullist France and its close European allies Italy and West Germany (and Spain, after the fall of the Franco regime in 1968) to the waning of the threat of invasion from the East. In recent years, the European Union, as this alliance has come to be known, has embarked on space efforts of its own. As yet these have produced little practical result…

  Teesa scowled and stamped her foot. "When fire fell from the sky before, the beastmen got these,'' she said, waving the metal death-weapon. "Shall we let them have more?"

  The women and warriors looked at her dumbly. They were a bedraggled lot. The attack on the village had come so swiftly that none had had time to do more than snatch up children and weapons, and the other settlements of their people were only a little better off. Now they crouched in the little hollow, bodies bare of ornaments, eyes of hope, despite the sweet warm wind of springtime and the bright sun. She could tell that they only wished to flee misfortune.

  Teesa's hand touched the pouch by her side where the Cave Master lay. I could compel them, she thought. Then with a shake of her tawny mane: No. They are grown folk of the Cloud Mountain People. It would not be right.

  Besides, it wasn't reliable with so many. She did draw it forth, hold it high until all the three-score at the gathering had bowed their heads in reverence. Then she set it on her brow, checked that the curved-metal-pouch-of-darts was clicked firmly into the weapon, slung it over her back by the strap, touched fingers to her knife and blowgun and dart pouch, and turned to trot northward. She knew where she was heading, roughly; it was twenty miles, half a day's run without forcing the pace. If she sent out runners to other Cloud Mountain settlements and waited for fighters to come, it might take two days.

  If anyone will follow me, she thought, anger burning bright. If my own village will not back me, there would be little use in sending a summons to the others.

  Her sister, Zore, was the first to follow; Teesa could feel the girl's bright confidence in her, which was worrying in itself. Then a clutch of strong warriors came after, shamed that a girl-child should go where they feared. Most of the rest followed
them, some more from fear of being left than from courage. By the time Teesa was half a mile from the gathering spot, the only folk left behind were mothers and some of the older fighting men to guard them back to the shelters.

  Teesa halted in a dell, where a creek ran beneath trees and a cliffside reared three times man-height above.

  "I am glad you have found your courage, my people," she said formally; many winced or shuffled their feet. "Now let four swift runners step forward, Taldi first among them."

  Her lost mate's brother was a good runner, particularly over a long track. And it would be a good idea to get his obsession with curses out of her war band; he wouldn't speak so before strangers.

  "We've got one basic problem, and that's mobility," Marc said, sitting on a chunk of log not far from the fire, with his rifle resting between his knees.

  "Well, yo," Cynthia said. "We're on fucking foot, man." Even close to the cheery light, the campfire seemed very small and very lonely in the Venusian night; there was a cool breeze from the south, but above there was only darkness, with the haze too thick for stars. The circle of light at their hilltop camp showed a huge basalt column that made a natural polygon, lighting the dark rock and the small tree that grew in a crevice on its top. That was a palm of some sort, and its fronds rustled dryly, a background to the buzzing and clicking, the hoots and howls and occasional squalling roar. A brace of quail-like birds the size of small turkeys roasted at its edges; every so often one of the four Terrans would lean forward to give the green-wood spits a twist. Tahyo lay not far away, his eyes shining green-yellow when he glanced occasionally at the flames, licking his chops plaintively despite having crunched down the heads, guts, and feet. Marc still felt better with Tahyo's better-than-bloodhound nose at the ready.

  All that Marc could smell himself was the spicy, cedarlike scent of the burning wood, roasting meat, and a bit of his own and his companions' sweat. Blair and Cynthia sat together on the other side of the round circle of stones that marked their temporary hearth; Jadviga was off a little to one side.