by John Varley
They had been setting up for it for kilorevs. It was unpleasant. They did not like the stink of kerosene. But they did it, for the Demon.
And now the code word had been spoken by the radio. The plan had to be executed instantly, so it would be simultaneous all over Gaea. Any other way would be perilous to the Supras, Gaby had been quite emphatic about that.
“Oh, such dynamite there will have been,” one of them said.
“Bouquets of Chrysanthemums,” one gasped, a bit previously.
“Showers of flowers.”
“Break out the soothing salves,” one worried.
“Casualties are to be expected,” another encouraged, referring to the dastardly attack on the nest in Tethys.
“The sword cuts both ways.”
“That’s a pyrotechnicality.”
“Is there film in the camera?”
They dropped away from the cable and plunged toward the nest of vipers clinging below them.
***
The Luftmorder was only peripherally aware of the angels until they got within fifty meters. They had been around so much, his perceptions had simply edited them out, like smart radar erasing the signatures of birds.
Then they were among the squadron, chittering and chattering, actually coming close enough to touch his vassal aeromorphs. He saw one put something against the side of a buzz bomb. He heard something rattle down the exhaust pipe of another.
With a screech, he launched himself into the air, fell to ignition speed, and lit up all four engines. Behind him his squadron was following….
One exploded. The limpet mine attached to its side tore a hole down to the combustion chamber, and the buzz bomb lurched to the side and went spinning endlessly down, trailing flame and smoke.
Another never made it away from base. As its engine turned on, the dynamite bomb lodged in its afterburner burst it apart. Only pieces were left to flutter toward the ground.
The Luftmorder banked hard and began to climb. He felt no hatred, only an overpowering urge to explode every angel in Gaea.
He worked at it for a time. He loosed a few sidewinders, managed to score one hit on an angel in flight. He sent a missile into their nest. From the look of the explosion, it was already empty.
And the angels were impossible to hit. He watched as his underlings twisted through the air, trying to get them. Before long there were no angels to be seen. They had flown to the cable and crawled into tiny spaces there. It would be futile to shoot at them, and it might endanger…
So great had been his concentration that only then did he notice the base was on fire. Great gouts of fuel flowed from the attachments he had so recently abandoned. It spilled down the side of the cable. He knew it would continue to burn until the Source—whatever that might be—ran dry.
His brain clicked this piece of information into place, and he formed his next tactic around it.
He had no fire extinguishing capability. He had not been informed of any other being in Gaea equipped to fight such an inaccessible blaze. Therefore, the base was lost. Therefore, he must defend the upper base. He climbed…
Soon he could see that it, too, was on fire.
Click. Another bit of information filed.
He called upon his squadron to form up around him. There was a base in Thea. He would take them there, provisionally. He radioed a terse description of the engagement to Gaea, and awaited her Orders, confident that a flight to Thea was the only logical choice.
He was not worried.
***
In the six remaining regions of Gaea that supported air groups, Luftmorders and buzz bombs fell away from burning bases. The Tethys squadron got off with the lightest losses: only two buzz bombs. Crius lost three buzz bombs and their Luftmorder, and milled aimlessly around the flaming cable, unable to think where to go. Hyperion was hit hardest, with six of the nine buzz bombs crashed or disabled in the initial attack.
The Dione Supras suffered casualties, as they had known they would. In a few decarevs they would gather to mourn them, after enough time had passed to cherish their memories.
In the meantime, they put their own losses out of their minds.
It had certainly been a delicious joke.
***
“Big Canuck, all the bases are burning. Repeat, all. Every survivor is in the air. Right now there is a great deal of confusion.”
Conal swallowed hard. He knew they’d get it sorted out eventually. Some of them would get here. Perhaps a lot of them.
He listened as Cirocco relayed the reports of damages, added them up in his mind, and matched them mentally against his own forces. Allowing for the unknown variables—maximum range, and the possibility of fueling stations the Supras didn’t know about—it came out pretty good.
Rhea and Hyperion squads would head for Cronus, and the army. It was their only possible target. His fliers were waiting for them in Mnemosyne. There was the possibility of an ambush there, though he wasn’t counting on it.
Crius could go either way—though if their estimates of maximum range were right, it would do them no good.
The Thean squadron could probably reach Cronus. Tethys might make it, too. Phoebe couldn’t, but would have a shot at Bellinzona.
Conal’s big advantage, tactically, was that he’d be able to take them on in waves. He thought it highly unlikely that the closer ones would orbit in place, wasting fuel, waiting for the stragglers to catch up. He didn’t think Luftmorder minds worked that way, for one thing. They seemed to fixate on a target and then go to suicidal lengths to reach it and destroy it.
He deployed his squads accordingly.
***
Orders came. The Luftmorder had guessed correctly…up to a point. He had expected to be assigned the city as his target. But the Orders, relayed through the Thea Luftmorder, were short and explicit. He and his squadron were to fly to Cronus and attack the army. He was to fight until there was not an enemy plane in the sky, and not a bomb left to drop on the army. Only then was he to consider his further survival.
This was no surprise, at least the last part wasn’t. It hardly needed saying, as it was part of the standing Orders. What failed to click properly into his tactical computer was what had not been said. He had not been told to re-fuel at the Thea base.
He came as close as a Luftmorder could come to disobeying Orders. He decided that, as he neared the base in Thea, he would request permission to re-fuel. This could not in any way be seen as disobedience. All proprieties were satisfied by this decision.
Then he reached the Thea central cable and saw the base was burning. It explained everything.
Once again, he was not worried. He pressed on toward Cronus.
***
Conal’s Fifth and Sixth squads stayed in the radar shadow of the Mnemosyne cable. When the Hyperion Second came streaking by, intent on Cronus and the army four hundred kilometers away, the smaller planes fell on them like hawks swooping from a great height, and tore them to pieces.
The Hyperion Luftmorder, before dying, managed to warn the Rhea squadron about the trap in Mnemosyne. They would arrive in about twenty minutes.
The Second and Fourth squads of the Bellinzona Air Force tried a similar trick in Dione, but had to wait to be sure the enemy was not heading for the city. The Thea squadron had a little more warning, and gave a good account of itself. Conal, back at the base in Iapetus, ready to bring the First Squad up in relief, listened as three of his pilots died and a fourth was forced to eject. One of his squad leaders was among the dead, so he combined the six remaining planes of the Second and Fourth into one squad and ordered them back to Iapetus for re-fueling.
He took off for Dione at the head of the First squad—five of his eleven remaining planes in the East.
Tethys was going to make a try for Bellinzona, that seemed certain. It would be insane for them to push on into Cronus.
***
The First squad, from Rhea, was already getting low on fuel when they met Conal’s Sixth and
Seventh—the Seventh consisting of only two planes which had been assigned to guard the Mnemosyne base while the Hyperion squadron was being attacked. Now the Fifth was re-fueling, and would not come to help out. There was still the chance of a last wave arriving from Crius, and the base had to be defended.
Thea began firing missiles from a great distance. Flights of sidewinders came streaking out of the west before the squadron was even in sight.
It turned out to be a good tactic. Three Bellinzona planes were hit and downed. Two pilots managed to bail out over the sands. Then the dogfight began, and within ten minutes the sky was cleared of buzz bombs.
The Mnemosyne detachment didn’t know it yet, but the war was over for them.
***
In Crius, the surviving buzz bombs still orbited the remains of their Luftmorder, burning on the ground. From time to time one would send a red-eye into the wreckage, as if hoping to stir it back to life.
With pitiful keening sounds, they stayed over their fallen leader until, one by one, they ran out of gas and crashed.
***
The Phoebe Luftmorder and his attendant buzz bombs cruised into Metis. He noted that, like in Tethys and Thea, the base on the central cable was burning.
The Luftmorder had a tactical problem. He had been assigned to attack the Bellinzona Army in Cronus, two thousand kilometers away. He had a range of eighteen hundred kilometers.
He saw now he could have made it had he flown up the Phoebe Spoke, through the hub, and down over Cronus. It would have made a nice surprise, too.
He had counted on re-fueling in Metis. Nobody told him there would be no fuel stops along the way, and standing Orders had been to proceed along the rim for all engagements unless specifically instructed. Something about noise abatement procedures in the hub. Gaea was up there—or part of her was—and perhaps Luftmorders gave her a headache.
But there was no such word as hopeless in the Luftmorder’s vocabulary. He cruised on through Metis, into Dione—seeing the burning corpses of the ones who had gone before him, supremely confident that the mission would be accomplished. His buzz bombs, with only one engine each, had a range of twenty-one hundred kilometers. They would live to fight.
Over Iapetus he ran out of fuel—and into a dilemma.
Buzz bombs were not bright. There was a small repertoire of commands he could give them. “Follow me,” “Attack,” “Set up for bombing run,” “Take defensive action,” “Engage the enemy”…things like that. He searched through the list. There was no Order for “Go on without me.”
It was an interesting problem. He considered it all the way down to the ground, flying as a big glider, surrounded by the low roars of his troops in echelon behind him.
About two meters above the ground, he entertained the first doubt of his life. Maybe this isn’t going to work, he thought, and he hit, and began to roll end over end.
Behind him, the buzz bombs flew into the ground, one after the other.
Above him, Conal’s Second squad watched incredulously.
***
Just about twenty minutes before the death of the Phoebe Eleventh, Conal had watched in horror as the Tethys Tenth ignored Bellinzona and arrowed into the west.
He and the other planes of the First had been hiding near the Dione central cable, in perfect position to ambush the Tenth and demolish them. Now the enemy had a good head start on him—and his other squads were at base re-fueling, with even less chance of getting the jump on them. He gave his orders to his squad, and they quickly went supersonic. It wouldn’t leave them much fuel for dogfights when they caught up. Then, his hand trembling, he punched in the code for Cirocco’s army.
“Rocky Road, this is Big Canuck,”
“Go ahead, Canuck.”
“Rocky…Cirocco, the Tenth has gone through Dione. I’m afraid you may be seeing them in a few minutes.”
“We’re as ready for them as we’ll ever be.”
“Captain…I’m sorry. I misjudged them. I thought they’d—”
“Conal, don’t flog yourself. We thought we’d get three squads at us, minimum. So far, we haven’t even seen a contrail.”
“Yeah, but there’s still Crius, which I haven’t heard from, and Phoebe, which has been spotted twenty minutes behind me.”
“Crius is splashed, Conal. As for Phoebe…a little bird told me they’re going to run into trouble that has nothing to do with you. Tell your people to hang back, don’t engage them, and report on what happens.”
“…well, if you’re sure…”
“I’m sure. Now do what you can about Tethys, and let me tell everybody to get their heads down here.”
“Roger, Rocky Road.”
Ten
The Luftmorder was aware of the enemies closing in behind him. They had come out of nowhere, and they would reach him before he and his squadron could engage the enemy in Cronus.
There had been an overpowering urge to turn north toward the juicy, helpless target of Bellinzona. The city had seemed almost like a magnet. He wanted to turn north….
And then the tiny, contemptible planes had appeared, and he realized they had been in hiding all along. Gaea was great. Gaea was good. Gaea was wise, and had surely known he would be flying into a trap had he turned north.
Supremely confident, he flew on toward Cronus.
When the enemy fleet began to get within missile range, he detached four of his seven buzz bombs to go back and do battle. They peeled off quickly. He flew on, and with his hind-looking radar senses, watched them die, one after the other. He felt as much emotion as a rifleman who sees four bullets miss the target. It was annoying to have missed, but he never gave a thought to the bullets themselves.
Then he saw that one of the five enemy planes was going down. What was even better, three of the others were now far behind him, having wasted time and fuel downing the four buzz bombs. Only one still came on with a chance to overtake his reduced squadron before they spread death over the army.
Hesitating only a moment, he detached another buzz bomb to slow this enemy plane. He had no illusions it would shoot down the enemy.
The buzz bomb made a head-on run at the attacker…and missed. It was turning, but now would be taken by the three other pursuers. And still the other came on.
Click. So be it. He was almost in Cronus now. This plane behind him would take one, maybe two of the three remaining fliers of the squadron. He would not take three. Even if the Luftmorder himself was shot down, the buzz bombs had their Orders. They would attack until they ran out of fuel, and then kamikaze into the largest target of opportunity.
***
Just like an air show, Conal told himself, as the buzz bomb grew larger in his windshield, heading straight for him. The planes would fly right at each other and you thought there was just no way they weren’t going to hit, and then at the last minute one of them would flip one way and one the other and they’d go by a couple inches apart.
Only at an air show, the planes weren’t shooting at each other. Streaks of light came from the approaching buzz bombs, going by on all sides. Conal felt two of them slash through his wings, but he didn’t look away.
From the time he saw it until he made his move couldn’t have been more than two seconds, at the speeds they were traveling. It seemed like an hour. It grew and grew and he waited and waited, then he turned so hard he blacked out.
It was only momentary. When he lifted his head he was still in the air, and almost behind the remaining three, though they were still distant. Far behind him the attacker was screaming into a turn, but he could forget about that one. It would never catch him.
He tested the controls gingerly. The plane hadn’t been hurt badly. The right wing cannon wasn’t working, and some of the response was a bit sluggish, but he decided it would bear up. He closed in behind the three attackers.
It began to seem almost too easy. He picked off one buzz bomb, which didn’t even try to dodge. He zeroed in on the Luftmorder, but it twisted up and
away. That left him with the other buzz bomb, which also took no evasive action. He almost hated to take the time, but he gave the computer its scent, the computer instructed a missile, and it screamed away to bury itself in the buzz bomb’s tailpipe.
Conal looked up and saw the Luftmorder. He turned, shot another missile—then was turning even harder as he saw the sidewinder coming at him. He was still turning when it went off, taking a meter from the end of his left wingtip.
The little Dragonfly coughed, and he was pulled forward against his straps. He lost three hundred meters of altitude very quickly as the transparent wings strained and groaned, finding a new shape to compensate for the damage. At last—four, maybe five seconds later—he knew he was still airworthy, though not as fast as he had been.
He spied the Luftmorder. One of its four engines was missing, and black smoke trailed from that spot. But it didn’t seem to bother the Luftmorder. It was descending, and Conal knew that was purposeful, as he could see the scattered fires of the army not too far ahead.
He moved in above and behind.
Carefully, he lined it up in his sights and told the computer to blow it to hell.
Nothing happened.
Cursing, he switched to manual control and tried to shoot it down with his remaining wing cannon.
Nothing happened.
The computer was still running, but no messages were getting through to his armaments.
Shouting his outrage, he moved in even closer.
***
The Luftmorder was not worried.
He couldn’t shut off the flow to the missing engine, so the fire would not go out, and that hurt some, but pain would not divert him. A quick check of consumption assured him he was losing no more fuel than if the engine had still been in place. He would make it.
He would make it, so long as that little…
Where the hell was it? He’d had it on his radar just a second ago. It had been descending. He would have seen it if it crashed. He scanned the skies with radar and visual senses, and found nothing.
Finally, he began to worry.
