The Miocene Arrow

by Sean McMullen

  “I can’t afford to favor anyone,” Bronlar said after responding with a forced giggle. “Men get jealous about me, so I must live as if neuter. Ramsdel is seeing that medic girl, and Alion still overnights in the nurses’ hostel and returns looking guilty. Some girls do admire you, so why not—?”

  “No. No, it’s you I fancy, not a body for a body’s sake. I’ve worried about you for years, that’s why I … bothered you, I suppose. When you came back with nine clear air victories I was so proud of you, I wanted to hug you, vomit and all.”

  “I never knew. I’m … sorry.”

  “Would you consider me for after the war, or at least let me be in the queue?”

  Bronlar walked in silence for a time. She loved Serjon, but not like this. His sudden declaration was unexpected, and almost annoying.

  “One day I’ll be in the courting mood. Until then I make no promises to anyone and I live as one of the boys. It’s my defense.”

  Now Serjon walked in silence, considering.

  “Stepfather Jeb used to tell me that women spend their courtship years picking and choosing and testing to find the ideal man, then marry whoever is to hand when the mood to marry visits them.”

  “Did he say what men do?” asked Bronlar, unimpressed.

  “They spend years hunting an ideal spouse, then grow weary and beg to be hunted.”

  They were close to the tents by now, and Bronlar stopped at the edge of the lamplight’s reach.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I think it’s foolish to court a stranger when you could court a friend. You know what you’re getting with a friend.”

  “With some friends that’s a good reason not to court, Big Brother. Here is your coat. Thank you, and night’s compliments.”

  Her fingers brushed against his, warm and dry in the darkness. Warm fingers: Serjon found that intensely alluring. He stood with the greatcoat in his hands until Bronlar was out of earshot, then softly said, “Ouch.” As he put the greatcoat on he noticed that her warmth and body scent lingered in it, and he wandered back into the darkness to be alone with that trace of Bronlar.

  In the morning they were still waiting. The sky now featured scattered cloud, but the air was mild again. Were I a Bartolican, I might attack our carbineer defenders at Seminoe Pass on a day like this, Serjon thought with a mixture of eagerness and dread. Guildsmen kept the compression engines warm with hot air bellows, and every flyer, warden, and squire on the wingfield was within a few. steps of a wing. A sailwing droned into view, high overhead. It did a series of rolls, then dropped a cannister trailing red smoke.

  As one, the Air Carbineers scrambled into their wings as their guildsmen set the engines spinning with compression charges. The wingfield’s adjunct had set off on his pedalframe before the cannister had even hit the ground and all eyes were on him as he opened the message and read. A moment later he raised a signal gun and began to fire off red flares. Serjon counted five as he buckled his straps.

  “Air attack, class five!” shouted his guildmaster above the engine.

  “Very large air attack!” Serjon shouted back.

  “Mind your turns, sair, you’ve got higher speeds now,” his guildmaster called. “Every circle will be wider, and pulling out of a dive too late could buy you a synthetic funeral.”

  The chocks were pulled away and the gunwing rolled forward. Serjon pulled the glass laminate canopy down and clamped it. A siren sounded, but every gunwing and sailwing on the wingfield was already in motion.

  As Serjon buckled his harness straps he saw the adjunct waving the old Jannian estate pennant on the flightstrip. Serjon was flockleader. The red flag in his other hand came up, then slashed horizontally. General order, ascend and intercept. Serjon gunned the compression engine and began rolling down the dusty flightstrip, and as he reached the pace line he opened the throttle. The gunwing rolled faster and faster, tilted, and lifted into the air.

  This attack was not expected by the traditionalists, as it was late in the dueling season. A sudden change in the weather was as likely to drop aircraft out of the sky as the enemy. Serjon climbed quickly to gain height over the approaching Bartolican flock, not mindful of saving fuel. The flock was clearly visible, circling the Seminoe Pass, where the Yarronese carbineers had the Bartolicans pinned down. The Bartolicans were at least nine dozen gunwings and sailwings strong, while a mere thirty sailwings and ten gunwings were ascending to engage them. Starflower was very responsive to the higher power and Serjon found himself ascending faster than any gunwing should have been able to. The Yarronese circled for the east, distancing themselves from the wingfield and looking to put the sun at their backs. Serjon led the dive, directly at the gunwing escort, but to the surprise of the Bartolicans all but five of the Yarron sailwings followed them.

  The swirling melee of aircraft allowed none of the tactics that the Yarronese had used over the weeks past. Serjon made a side attack first, slashing at a turning gunwing, which puffed black smoke as he passed. He came up behind another gunwing, walked shots across to its engine, and pulled away to the sight of a splintering propellor.

  “That’s fourteen!” he suddenly realized. “And I’m alive. I’m free, I’m safe!”

  The minutes that followed were desperate and deadly for both sides, but the far lighter Yarronese wings proved to be difficult targets with very superior rates of climb. The Bartolican wardens continued with the attack, thinking that their scheme of drawing the Yarron aircraft away from the mountain pass was working. As the sailwings laid down supporting fire, the Bartolican carbineers attacked.

  The fight in the air drifted down, and near the mountains. Both sides were attacking, but there were only fifty Bartolican gunwings in the flock, and the Yarronese gunwings were proving to be impossible targets due to their speed. Serjon banked to the left, cutting around a rocky peak smeared with gleaming snow, then came in low through a patch of cloud. Nine gunwings were ahead, turning in a leisurely sweep and climbing. He opened the throttle wide, came up behind the hindmost, and fired a short, well-placed burst. The enemy gunwing’s engine died at once. His winger was just turning for a better look when Serjon’s second burst slashed through his engine and cockpit. The gunwing slewed away toward the ground, the warden already dead. His third burst was too well placed, and the gunwing burst into a gout of messy smoke and wreckage in midair. Three of the other wardens noticed and banked sharply for the open air. Serjon sat for several seconds on overboost, went for a long deflection shot, and was rewarded by a streamer of smoke and fire trailing from the fourth warden to cross his sights.

  Serjon was now aware of a problem with his engine. The long, damaging seconds on overboost had burned or melted something, for the power was down and its response sluggish. The whole Bartolican sub-flock was alerted now, and the surviving gunwings were wheeling and swooping for a dangerously low battle. With all five surviving wardens now swarming after the lone gunwing the advantage was actually with Serjon. He doggedly stayed within their wheeling, roiling flock, making sure that they were never able to get him in the open and chase him like hounds after a hare. They do not fight well as a team, he thought with something like serene detachment. Another burst from his guns tore harmlessly through wing fabric until it ruptured a fuel tank. The warden’s gunwing did not catch fire, but compression spirit poured into the air. The warden broke off at once to flee south for Kennyville. Serjon let him go. With that volume of fuel gone he would not get twenty miles; the reserve tank was good for only a few minutes.

  Some miles away the main battle was still roiling in the sky like a fantastic fireworks display, but Serjon did not heed it. Inevitably one of the gunwings pursuing him clipped a treetop, crumpled, then vanished amid the branches only to reappear as a ball of flame. Six down, thought Serjon as he rolled on open throttle, then banked sharply, the sky and mountains gyrating insanely. Stall turn, shudder as bullets thudded through his port wing’s empty outer tank, dark shape ahead, shoot, roll, bank, climb
. That had been a miss, and his arms were aching by now. They were getting the feel of the fight, Serjon realized, while the peak had been sliced off his engine’s performance. Farewell to certainty, time for chances.

  Selecting a warden almost at random, he cut around as he dived for him and plunged after him with his engine screaming on open throttle. He flew through a shallower dive than the Bartolican, catching him as he was climbing again, closing in and firing a sustained burst into the gunwing until it became a comet of dark smoke. The others were behind him now and stray shots tore through the gunwing’s fabric with dull thuds as he rolled and broke, rolled and broke. The damage to the wings would snap them if the punishment continued. One more trick, one trick for a light, struggling gunwing.

  He dived out of a roll. The three wardens came after him as he plunged for a wooded plateau, gaining distance before their superior diving speed closed the gap again. Rocks and trees swayed and danced before him like a diorama of jelly. Standing on the plate and heaving back on the stick Serjon dragged the gunwing out of its dive in time to skim the needles of the tallest pines as bullets zipped past and sprayed dirt up from a bare stretch of ground. Serjon gained enough height for a stall turn and counted two gunwings. Two. Down to the right a column of smoke was rising from the plateau where one of the heavier but less powerful gunwings had not been able to pull out of its dive. Serjon’s arms were heavy and glowing with fatigue, but he banked and closed to get among the Bartolicans again, only to see them go into a dive and flee. Their nerve was gone, they thought they were being lured into a trap by a demon that was just playing with them.

  Now Serjon found himself lost amid broken cloud, and the battle was somewhere out of sight. He looked for reference peaks, checked his compass, fuel, and ammunition, then began to climb for the trip back to the wingfield. Far below him he noticed something moving rapidly, a flock of birds perhaps, or … he dived. The Bartolican sailwings had lost hardly any of their number to groundfire, and were still circling the battlefield on the ground.

  Serjon lined up behind the stragglers. His ammunition was low, so he had to be careful. Approaching to within no more than a wingspan’s distance, he fired a brief, economical burst at the sailwing’s pusher engine.

  The day was not kind to the Bartolican flock. Thirty-one wardens had been lost, and another forty armored sailwings for the price of eleven Yarronese aircraft. The Yarronese adjunct was making his assessment when the sound of an approaching gunwing engine became audible. Serjon’s name was scratched from the list of those missing as the gunwing circled once and landed. It was riddled with holes and trailing strips of fabric. The adjunct ran across as the guildsmen helped the flyer out of the cockpit. Serjon stood by himself, although chalky with strain and exhaustion. He focused on the adjunct.

  “Seven wardens down or seen falling,” he reported, after thinking for a moment.

  The adjunct looked from Serjon to the ravaged gunwing, then back to the flyer.

  “Anything else?” the adjunct asked in astonishment.

  “Ah, six sailwings,” Serjon muttered through clenched teeth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “Thirteen victories!” the adjunct exclaimed.

  “Can you keep your humping voice down!” hissed Serjon, but people were already gathering and pointing. “I ran out of ammunition. I hit one more sailwing, but he kept flying.”

  Yarronese carbineers later reported an amazing battle between one gunwing and two dozen armored sailwings while the ground battle raged. They confirmed six sailwings brought down. A Yarronese agent at the Kennyville wingfield reported just three sailwings returning. Serjon was adamant that fourteen had escaped him. After all, would he lie about anything that would have given him even one more kill, and rescued him from the hated thirteen? Bad weather had not brought them down, the winds had been light and it was cloudless south of Casper.

  At Seminoe Pass the Bartolican carbineers had meantime made the biggest mistake that one possibly can in warfare: they had believed their own propaganda. They were footsore after marching through the mountains for days, for it was fifty miles from the Kennyville tram station. Many had never marched fifty miles in their lives, as they were tram-based. Even attacking the Yarronese with sailwing support was not enough when faced with a well-armed enemy almost blind with rage over what had been happening in Yarron for the past two months. The Bartolicans wanted an objective, but the Yarronese wanted revenge. If such a thing is possible in war, it was a fair fight, and even with initial air support the Bartolicans broke and fell back after forty minutes of bloody and ferocious fighting. Serjon’s help was welcome, but not vital.

  The Casper adjunct was tempted to assign twenty-five victories to Serjon for that day but the figure was plainly ludicrous, even for Serjon Feydamor in a hybrid gunwing. The figure 13 appeared beside his name on the pennant board, but the possibility that he had caused another twelve sailwings to be lost was appended to the report that went to Chancellor Sartov. Sartov read the report when he arrived at Casper the following day.

  “So twelve sailwings are unaccounted for, Chancellor,” the adjunct concluded as Sartov handed the report back to him.

  “Ah, but they are accounted for, Sair Adjunct,” replied Sartov. “I had been expecting this since speaking with a man named … since speaking with a very helpful man. Now kindly provide my aide with a strand of your hair.”

  “Your pardon, Chancellor?”

  “A hair, if you please?” demanded the aide, who was flanked by two armed carbineers with the safety catches of their assault carbines released.

  Later that day the weather abruptly closed in. Serjon, Bronlar, and Ramsdel were sheltering from a fall of freezing rain in one of the maintenance tents when a regal with Air Carbineer markings but no number made a dangerously rough landing and taxied up the dispersal track. Two men were marched through the rain by the Chancellor’s own guards. Their heads were hooded and their hands were bound.

  “Is that to do with the little man who asked everyone for a hair?” asked Serjon.

  “Yes, Big Brother. Liesel heard they found traces of Bartolican dye in their hair,” Bronlar explained.

  Ramsdel was embroidering the symbol of another Bartolican warden on Serjon’s detachable collar while Bronlar watched closely.

  “They were probably spying on our Sentinel cloaking things,” ventured Serjon.

  “I was thinking of green plush for your collar’s underlining,” declared Ramsdel, holding up his jacket with the collar clipped back on. “Where can I get green plush with Forian under siege?”

  29 September 3960: Condelor

  Even after nearly a month of work by his linguists, Vander Hannan knew no more about the documents found at the scene of his father’s death. Although many of the words and grammatical conventions had echoes in his own language, they were like nothing in any of the known domains in any of the four known Callhavens. Certain words were underlined, and these words were particularly strange. Hannan’s linguists guessed that the language was based on Old Anglian, but was highly evolved.

  “As from a Callhaven cut off for two thousand years?” Vander asked the linguist who had presented him with the status report.

  “There could be no such Callhaven,” the woman replied.

  The weather was cool and blustery as he strode across the plaza before the Convocation Galleria. He entered the administrative chambers behind the auditorium where the envoys met formally once a week. A clerk bowed as he reached the office of the Warden of Envoys and explained that although the warden was not there, instructions had been left to show the acting Inspector General all possible cooperation.

  “As I have said before, I only want to trace three Bartolican servants of the late envoy from Veraguay,” said Vander with ill-disguised impatience. “Jeb Feytr, Martyn Harrit and Zoster Wragge.”

  “They made statements after the fire,” the clerk said without even checking the files.

  “As I said yesterday and the day befo
re that, I’ve read the statements and I want to question them further. I’m the acting Inspector General, I believe it could affect the dominion’s security.”

  The clerk tapped a decree by the Bartolican Airlord allowing merchant carbineer recruits to register under false names if they volunteered for front-line duty.

  “It’s a fine way to dispose of those with a past while boosting carbineer ranks,” suggested the clerk.

  “So three men with a past work in the envoy’s house, it burns to the ground, then they vanish into the carbineers and get sent to the war.”

  “Inspector! It is a pursuit of Yarronese outlaws, not a formal war.”

  “Forty thousand carbineers with two thousand cart cannons and carriage guns have Forian under siege!” said Vander angrily, banging the clerk’s desk at every phrase. “The palace decrees that it is an orderly operation, yet nobody can tell whether my mother is alive or dead.”

  “You have my condolences, Inspector, but we all know that Yarron is a lawless land, full of outlaws.”

  “Just how many outlaws does Yarron harbor?”

  “There’s no end of them, Inspector,” said the clerk with respectful calm.

  The Call that swept over Condelor early that afternoon was flagged as always by the sentinel towers, and the bells of the city rang an hour in advance to warn of its approach. Vander Hannan had returned home with copies of the city’s court records for the year past. He had only reached April by then and cursed at the impending interruption. Taking the records, he went downstairs to his Call suite.

  “Forlet, I don’t want any interruptions while I’m in here,” he told his footman. “Either before or after the Call passes.”

  He closed the door behind him. The lower six feet of the western wall of the suite was padded in red emu leather, and the floor thickly carpeted. At the eastern wall was a desk and chair, and a lightwell in the roof allowed him to keep working on his reports.