“I am not certain, either,” said Yone. “I only just woke up before you did.”
“I remember a curving hallway,” Farley said. “Running down a white curved hallway with both of you. After we left the machine.”
“The machine.” Yone’s head cocked like the RCA Victor dog.
“Are you kidding me? Jesus, it was the size of a battleship.” Farley heard the note of desperation in his voice.
Yone shook his head.
Farley turned to Wennda. “Tell me you remember.”
Wennda squinted and frowned.
“The curving white hallway?” Farley pressed. “The chair in the door?” The details came back to him as he said them as if conjured by their incantation. He turned to Yone. “The stairs that went down two hundred feet? The locus?”
“A coffee cup!” said Wennda. And looked delighted at the memory’s retrieval.
“A coffee cup,” Farley agreed. “On a desk in a room that opened out into a huge space that held an enormous machine that held the locus. It was very small.”
“But you just said it was enormous.”
“The machine was enormous. The locus was small.” He held his fingers an inch apart.
Wennda looked on the verge of tears. “I don’t remember.”
Yone looked away from the vast sink of the well. “But we are here,” he said. “That is the important thing, yes? We are here! We are alive!” He nodded at the dark recess of the northern fissure. The upper line of the western cliff paling as the gradient of imminent day grew in the east. “We can rejoin your men,” Yone told them. “It may not be too late.”
“You don’t have to talk me into it,” said Farley. “Let’s go.”
*
Molten gold was welling in a foundry of ring-wall cleft as they walked down the slope with the steady knee-bend of descending hikers, their resurrected shadows leaning toward the west. A faint warm wind began to stir.
Farley stopped suddenly. His head cocked and his eyes narrowed as he took some inner measure.
“Joe?” said Wennda
Farley held up a hand.
Yone closed his eyes and stood listening. A faint drone grew in the distance.
Wennda glanced around. There was nothing to hide behind or under, nowhere they could run to except back into the massive well. “We have to find cover,” she said. “We’re too exposed here.”
Farley looked at her like a man jerked suddenly awake. “We aren’t exposed nearly enough,” he said.
Yone opened his eyes and saw Wennda’s perplexed look. “It isn’t the Typhon,” he told her.
Farley’s grin was startling. “Not unless it grew radial engines, it’s not,” he said, and pointed north.
As if summoned by the gesture, the Fata Morgana shot out of the distant northern fissure like something fleeing the gate of hell.
thirty-eight
“They are turning,” Yone announced.
Farley lowered Wennda’s com panel, which he had been using as a signal mirror. “They sure as hell are,” he said.
A third of the way around the crater rim, the Morgana was banking hard right and peeling off from the rim wall. The unmistakable drone of four Wright Cyclone engines carried across the upcurved plain, the only sound there was to hear. Farley watched in mute wonder as his ship leveled off and headed straight for them. She flashed her landing lights and waggled her wings, and Farley felt his heart set sail. She was absolutely beautiful, and she was coming to take them home.
He turned to Wennda with his first carefree grin in what seemed like months. “Let’s go hitch a ride,” he said. They got on either side of Yone and practically carried him the rest of the way down to the crater floor.
A mile out the bomber banked to their right and descended. The landing gear lowered and Wennda and Yone let out a cheer. Farley laughed like a kid at a fireworks show. “Come on,” he shouted.
He and Wennda skip-carried Yone toward the descending Flying Fortress like contestants in some picnic game. “We’ll get sunburned on ten beaches back in the States,” Farley promised Wennda. “We’ll go dancing at the Avalon on Catalina. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller. We’ll drink a pint in this pub in Thurgood, Yone. English beer! It’s like motor oil. You’ll love it.” He was babbling, giddy, nearly stumbling as he watched his bomber angle down toward the ground. He could make out someone standing in the right waist window. Everett? It had to be. Everett! Farley tried to wave and nearly fell. He laughed.
The Morgana touched down. Dirt kicked up behind her tires.
“Come on, come on!” Farley shouted. Wennda laughed.
The Morgana slowed to a stop and then turned smartly and began to rumble back their way. They were breathing hard by the time the bomber swiveled a quarter-turn right and came to rest a hundred feet away. Shorty’s artwork nearly glowed beneath the pilot window in the early morning light. Floating rocks that looked like castles, the uncanny likeness of the woman who now stood beside Farley ethereal and impossible on the riveted hull. Worn out and beat up as he was, Farley could not stop grinning.
The pilot window slid aside and Jerry stuck his head out and doffed his cap. “Taxi, mister?” he yelled. His own grin big enough to unzip his head.
The crew came spilling out as if the bomber were on fire, Everett and Garrett and Sten from the waist, Martin and Shorty hopping out after them, Francis emerging from his own rear hatch. All the crew in thermal suits and headgear, Sten in cling-fitting body armor. Farley and Wennda and Yone were caught up in the press of bodies and grinning yelling faces and hard slaps on the back, and Yone was hoisted up by Everett and Garrett and carried toward the bomber like some visiting noble. Plavitz and Boney dropped from the forward hatch and waved at Farley and grinned at Yone upon the big men’s shoulders. Boney bent to the landing gear and chocked the tires. Their own mother hen who saw to all the details.
Farley laughed and looked to Wennda to say something, but Wennda seemed to be having a serious talk with Sten in the midst of all the shouts and laughter.
Francis’ goofy face filled Farley’s vision, joyously yelling something Farley couldn’t make out. His gauze eyepatch was gone and his eye looked perfectly normal, not a scar, not a scab, not even a bruise. Farley grabbed the lanky tail gunner’s shoulders and gave him a good squeeze and shake. Past him Farley saw Wen hop down to the crater floor. Wen! Son of a bitch. He looked like he’d had the living hell beat out of him, face swollen and bruising. But Wen! Alive! Wen saw Farley gaping at him and he smiled his slanted smirk and touched his cap bill.
Everybody was telling Farley what had happened all at once. “Tell me at the Boiler Room!” Farley shouted. “First round’s on me!”
Wennda was looking upset now as Sten spoke to her. Farley realized that Arshall was missing. Sten looked insistent and a little wild-eyed. He pointed north, toward the fissure that led to the Redoubt. Farley strained to hear.
Shorty saw his worried look. “He’s probably telling her about that aquarium,” he told Farley.
Farley looked at him.
“That joint’s kaput,” Shorty said. “Finished. They were barely hanging on as it was, and Wen got their repair bugs to turn against them. Can you believe it? It’s all over but the mop-up.”
Wennda turned toward Farley and looked at him in utter dismay. He felt the bottom drop out of his gut. “Not if her people don’t find out about it, it isn’t,” he realized. “And there’s only Sten to tell them.”
He glanced up at the cockpit window. Jerry saluted him somberly, then grinned like a fox with a weekend pass to Henville. Farley felt the engine’s guttural rumble through his feet.
He frowned. No. Not the engines.
He looked down. Glanced north and oriented himself from his memory of the underground complex.
The rumbling intensified. Farley turned toward the blunted cone of the well half a mile away. From its throat he heard a rising turbine whine, the voice of the devil calling from the Pit. He opened his mouth to yell a warning
just as the Typhon streaked massive and hellbent from the well and up into the injured sky.
*
The men were turning toward the bomber even before Farley yelled for them to get on board. Farley glanced up at the streaking weapon banking as it climbed the sky and saw the great loop that the Typhon meant to make. They had a minute at the most before it hit its strafing run.
He waved for Broben’s attention, then made a cranking motion. Broben raised a gloved hand.
“Everybody on board!” Farley yelled. “Let’s go let’s go!”
He saw Wennda and he stopped.
She stood rooted to the crater floor and looked at him from far away. From two hundred years away. Her expression a forlorn resolve that wrenched his heart.
Farley could not move. Could not speak. The engines revving up behind him. Crewmen calling to his back. In the air the living weapon reckoning the calculus of their destruction.
Wennda, Farley said. Thought he said.
They hurried to each other.
“I have to go,” he told her.
“I have to stay,” she said.
Farley’s puppet heart unstrung. He looked back at the bomber. Everett and Garrett beckoned to him from the waist hatch. The languid motions of their arms like underwater fronds. Wen’s silhouette in the upper turret. The twin guns slowly swiveling and angling up.
“Wennda—” he began.
She put a hand to his cheek and shook her head.
A wave of grief washed over him that nearly buckled his knees. He felt gutpunched.
“Doing the right thing feels lousy,” he said.
“Doing what we want would feel worse.”
“It still feels lousy.” He shook his head bitterly. “We’re not people who could sit on a beach while the world burns, anyhow.”
“Maybe there’s a world where we are.”
“It isn’t this one.”
“No.” She shook her head again. “This is the one where duty wins.”
From the cockpit Broben slapped the metal right above the painting of her face. “For the love of God!” he yelled. “Kiss her, already!”
Farley turned back to her. Tears brewed in her eyes and she smiled the most burdened smile he would ever see. “Time,” she said.
They held each other close and closed their eyes and kissed. The promised moment finally fulfilled. The whole world halting. Warm wind on the crater floor. Insistent engines growling. Their artificial world dissolving. I want more time.
He leaned back and looked at her and fixed her firmly in his heart. “I’ll never forget you, Wennda,” he said.
She took his hand and kissed his fingers and then set them over her heart. Then they let each other go and turned to shape their separate paths. Goodbye. Goodbye.
Farley glanced at the sky. He held a hand up to Jerry and started running.
Broben pulled his head back into the cockpit and slid the window shut. “Thank Christ,” he muttered.
Everett reached out to hoist Farley on board. For a moment just before he stepped up into the hatch Farley let his hand linger on the thin metal hull.
thirty-nine
Farley skidded in a congealed mess on the deck. Bright red blood was splashed all over the main compartment. The smell was unbelievable.
Near a bulkhead Yone was pulling on a smartsuit one of the crew had given him as he warily eyed a spidery repair drone that seemed to be manning the right waist gun.
Farley accepted this without question and hurried past Shorty at his table. There was blood all over the radio room floor. He moved carefully over the bomb bay catwalk and saw blood splashed on the bomb doors. It looked like a cow had been butchered in the lower pit.
Broben was already preflighting in the copilot seat. “Left throttle at fifty percent,” Farley said as he climbed into his left-hand seat and reached for his headset. “I want—”
He stopped. Glanced around.
“Captain?” Broben said. He was already walking the left throttle forward, and One and Two were smoothly revving up.
Farley shook his head. Something felt different. He’d sensed it the moment he sat down. But he couldn’t place it and there sure as hell wasn’t time to hash it out. “I want your hand on the brake,” he finished. “When I say now, release it and give her full right throttle.”
“Release the brake, full right throttle, roger,” said Broben.
Farley checked the props and cowlings on Number One and Number Two. Not a hint of smoke or oil. Wen had done a hell of a repair job. Or someone had, anyway.
Through the window he saw Wennda and Sten running toward the rising cone that ringed the well. He craned his head and saw the Typhon. Seven o’clock high and coming hard around into its strafing dive.
“Top gunner to pilot,” came Wen’s voice.
“I see it,” Farley snapped. “Everybody quiet.”
The distant wedge of living weapon grew with frightening speed. The wings cupped and went rigid and the Typhon came even faster. A thin beam of bright green light stabbed out from one curled wing and held steady on the fuselage.
“Joe?” said Broben.
Farley could make out features now. The curved raked wings, the sweptback head, the pinioning patches of eyes. You hate me, don’t you, you son of a bitch. The green targeting beam held steady as the mythic Fury plummeted. You hate my airplane. Something bulged from beneath the Typhon’s right wing. Nothing ever hit you back before, and you don’t like it one damn bit.
The extrusion lit up white from deep within the bore.
Farley gave the bomber hard left rudder. “Now,” he said.
Broben released the brake and the bomber wheeled left and rolled forward in a narrowing turn as the right throttle came up to full.
White light bleached the world. The ground behind them erupted into dust. The blast wave lurched the bomber forward. The Typhon streaked overhead and arced away.
“We need to be in the air before it comes around again,” said Farley. And pray like hell there’s nothing in the way, Captain Midnight, because this is your runway now.
“Speed eighty-five,” said Broben.
Farley glanced at him in disbelief and then checked the gauge himself. Eighty-five. “How much did Wen hotrod this thing?” he asked. “She’s driving like a Cadillac.”
“Shit,” said Broben. “Wait till you fly her.”
A few seconds later Broben called out one fifteen. “One fifteen, roger,” Farley said, and pulled back on the yoke.
Fata Morgana regained the sky.
*
The instant she was back in her element and Broben brought her wheels up Farley understood that he was leaving with a lot more bomber than he’d arrived with. She climbed faster. Her engines ran smoother, cooler, quieter. But the more important difference wasn’t something that the gauges showed. It was something he felt. A difference in the metal body that his brain controlled. He didn’t muscle her, he didn’t even steer her, really. He suggested. The Morgana he had flown here had been a dependable draft horse. Now she was a thoroughbred.
*
In the top turret Wen tracked the Typhon with the twin .50s as it banked right, climbing skyward like a rocket-powered mockingbird. He reported this to the captain and the B-17 immediately banked left.
“That thing’s gonna have another go at us,” Farley announced. “I’m heading for the canyon to cut down its options. Things are probably going to get hairy, so everybody stay sharp.”
Wen patted the metal beneath the plexiglas blister. “Don’t you embarrass me, now, girl,” he said.
*
“So you got a plan?” Broben asked as fissure walls shot by on either side and the Morgana flew into twilight.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Farley, and thumbed the mike. “Everybody listen up. That thing’s going to come in high and behind. We’re going to hang a U and head right down its throat. Everybody strap in, tie down, and hold on.” He eased the aircraft close to the right-hand cliff wa
ll streaking by. “Call in when you get a sighting. Martin, it’s your turn in the barrel.”
“Roger that, captain,” Martin responded from the belly turret. “What do you need me to do?”
“I want you to shoot the son of a bitch in two,” said Farley. He banked a tight left in the steep corridor of jagged canyon. Broben nervously watched the cliff face blurring by. Pilot training hadn’t covered hairpinning a bomber in a friggin hallway.
Farley looked at Broben as he told Martin, “Be ready and be quick.”
“Nine o’clock high,” came Everett’s voice. “Holy gosh it’s fast.”
Farley gripped the wheel and brought them around tight and noted as they lined up on the fissure that the bomber was squarely in the center of the canyon. She had turned with tons of room to spare.
“Balls to the wall, Jer,” he said.
They walked the throttles forward. The Morgana leveled off and sped to meet the diving Typhon. Farley saw it now, a distant wedge framed in the ragged strip of canyon sky.
“It’s gonna hit us high, Joe,” said Broben.
Farley shook his head, remembering the simulations the Typhon had run in its hangar bay. You figured out what the Luftwaffe pilots learned, didn’t you? Farley thought at the oncoming shape.
The Typhon plunged below the level of the bomber, then shot up with a suddenness that would have killed a human pilot.
Farley held steady. We’ve got one gun up front and we can’t get out of the way. That’s what you know.
The Typhon leveled off and came straight at them, wings raked back and level.
You can come in faster and hit harder and veer off closer than a Messerschmitt can, Farley thought, and thumbed his mike. “Pilot to belly gunner,” he said, and heard the measured calm of barrage flying in his voice. “On my signal.”
The Typhon was two miles off and growing in the windshield.
Farley took a deep breath. Held it. And all we can do up front is shoot and pray, he thought. That’s what you’re counting on, isn’t it?
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