by Bill Schutt
Even from the other side of the sky, Hanna could see faint signatures of an early thaw across the Ukraine.
An early thaw.
That is how it began.
CHAPTER 27
Daedalus Wept
The heavens call to you, and circle around you, displaying to you their eternal splendors, and your eye gazes only to Earth.
—DANTE ALIGHIERI
During the minute leading up to Maurice Voorhees’s launch of the Silverbird II, explosions lit up the mist on every side. Amid the mental checklists and prelaunch preparation, he marveled at the bravery of a technician who calmly drove the Silverbird II’s miniature locomotive to set the craft into its proper launch position, then gave the “Go!” signal before scrambling away from his steam engine.
They’re going to blow the track, Voorhees told himself, knowing that the margin of error between successful launch and total destruction would probably be measured in tenths of seconds.
As Voorhees prepared to “light the candle,” he watched Wolff sprint past the starboard side. He gave a passing thought to the possibility that the colonel, his mission now complete, was simply getting out of the sled’s blast range; but a sudden commotion on the port side told him otherwise. Someone dressed in a filthy Allied uniform dropped an empty backpack and was running away from the track. He fired at Wolff and anything else that moved. Something about the running man’s movements—was it confidence?—made him suspect that this guy had just jammed the contents of his backpack very close to where he currently sat, strapped in and helpless.
“Go! Go! GO!” Voorhees screamed to himself, punching the red ignition button. And as the sled engines flared to life with a deafening roar, his head was yanked backward against the protective cushion.
Once again his eyes were drawn to the port-side window, where he caught a glimpse of the running man, who had changed course and was now aiming a pistol at his rocket. The filth-covered shooter looked more like a wanderarbeiter—a hobo than a soldier. He imagined the hobo emptying his pistol at the Silverbird but then the ship had disappeared into a wall of smoke and flame.
As the sled-propelled space-plane raced down the track, Voorhees’s own body mass all but paralyzed him. That quickly, the g-forces had turned the front of the rocket—though the ship was still traveling horizontally along the rail—into what he perceived as “up.” Those same forces were now pressing his back into the “floor” with an apparent weight gain of a quarter ton or more.
Voorhees was terrified, but it had nothing to do with the stresses the launch had placed upon his body. He feared that, at any given second, a bomb attached to the rail or to the sled itself would detonate, sending the ship careening broadside and at bullet velocity into the trees. The image and its meaning—instantaneous nonexistence—reawakened memories of standing in a bomb crater, clutching a single warm shoe.
In bullet-time, close calls came and went without realization as his space-plane and its rocket sled accelerated down the monorail with reptilian indifference. The shock wave of the first bomb had been no obstacle to the Silverbird, for it detonated more than half a second after the ship passed over it, along the rail. Another blast was far enough behind that vibrations from the shattering rebar and wood never reached the pilot at all. The third device blew a hole in the rail a full two seconds after the sled had climbed the ramp and become airborne.
Lastly, the bomb that had been planted onto the sled itself by the camouflage-clad man detonated, turning the core of the sled’s engine cluster into flaming shrapnel that shredded its nose cone; but by then the sled had been used up and jettisoned, and was already following its own trajectory, groundward and into the forest.
The Silverbird II was safely away, still accelerating and climbing higher.
Roughly two minutes after Voorhees had punched the ignition button, his “bottle rockets” peeled away and spun earthward, followed by the empty hypergolic fuel pods. With the ship accelerating toward the ionosphere, powered now only by its internal fuel tanks, the atoms through which the hull passed vibrated redder and brighter with each notch upward on the vehicle’s speedometer. Inside the cockpit, the engineer shielded his eyes against the glare, but as the atmospheric gases rarefied to near extinction, the glow grew weaker and then went out.
Voorhees checked his stopwatch, counting down until he had arrived at the appointed moment. Then he reached down and eased back on the throttle. Immediately he felt a wonderful sensation of buoyancy—the first manifestation of free fall.
The freshly minted astronaut allowed himself the hint of a smile. “I’ve made it,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “I’ve made it.” The violence on the ground had been left far behind.
Directly ahead, the stars blazed forth so brightly that, even through tears, he could resolve Mars and Jupiter as actual disks, and not just points in the sky. Far to the port side, the lights of Caracas shimmered faintly, like a delicate, phosphorescent cobweb draped over the land. To starboard, the Atlantic spread before him, revealed in its immensity by the first predawn rays of the sun. Then, within seconds, the new day illuminated land and ocean alike, as if someone had switched on a floodlamp.
The wonder of it all held him spellbound for another minute, until the fiery glow of hydrogen and ozone returned, and the space-plane’s nose began to swing earthward.
Below Silverbird II, in the shadows, Voorhees saw dawn’s earliest light creeping toward Florida. But none of that was important anymore. He checked his stopwatch again, calculating a course correction that would have stunned Dr. Eugen Sänger, had he been there to observe it.
The mission had called for attacks on the American capital as well as the city of Pittsburgh, the center of the Allied steel industry. After that, the rocket would turn hard to the east, with the last bomb released on a trajectory toward New York City. Sänger had chosen the Empire State Building as a hypothetical ground zero, but all any of the rocket men could really say about the Silverbird’s targeting capability was that “it made sense—in theory.”
Finally, if everything went as planned, the pilot would have a choice of either bailing out or trying to land the rocket, something like a seaplane, minus a seaworthy keel, off the southern coast of Long Island, where a submarine would be waiting to pluck the rocketeer from the Atlantic.
“Or at least, some of his body parts,” Voorhees had joked, upon hearing Sänger’s U-boat rescue plan for the first time. For some reason, his little joke didn’t seem quite so funny anymore. Voorhees knew that if the North Atlantic presented so much as a one-foot swell (and when didn’t it?), the underbelly and the wings would rip the multiton rocket into a thousand pieces. If he survived, the standard U-boat was not equipped to save the plane even if it floated perfectly intact. Either way, land it on water or bail out, his beautiful space-plane would die alone and pilotless, on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean.
But those plans had been drawn up long before Voorhees found himself the only man still alive who could fly the rocket. And not long after that, Maurice Voorhees had devised his own plan.
With limited time to work out the details, Voorhees decided to keep it simple: Kimura’s bombs would be ditched over the Atlantic, where they could harm no one. He would then steer the ship’s nose toward land, Virginia or Washington, D.C., itself, where he hoped to find an airstrip, or at least somewhere flat to set down for a long, long belly-scrape of a landing.
The engineer shook his head. Yes, that’s going to be a bit of a poser. But I would rather ski across flat concrete or through a field of corn than rough water.
If he vented all of his fuel ahead of time, he might survive the landing. The ship’s insides were, after all, mostly insulated, balloon-like tanks, filled with the liquid natural gas they’d collected from the river itself. With the tanks empty, the ship would be as light as a feather, more or less. Voorhees was confident that he could land the Silverbird intact and that, maybe, just maybe, the spacecraft could be saved, or at least replicated
from its wreckage. Certainly, the Americans would see, in this ship, the world to come. And hopefully, they would find something better to do with it.
Now, less than a hundred kilometers below, Voorhees could make out roads and towns in the dim, pre-sunrise light, and he could distinguish clouds marching before the winds.
As the rocket-plane continued on its course, a hammerhead of air strengthened around the hull, bringing a sensation of weight back to Voorhees’s feet and snapping him out of sightseeing mode. Voorhees made another course correction, just before the Silverbird II made a perfectly timed skip off the outer atmosphere, like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond.
High above coastal South Carolina, the horizon receded from the pilot—again, and the sky above became blacker as he regained altitude; but alarmingly, the glow outside the ship did not diminish as much as he had anticipated.
There’s more gas outside than there ought to be, he thought, craning his neck to get a better view of the port side of the fuselage. What he saw plunged him into instant despair.
To anyone standing directly below, the fleck of light over North Carolina would have resembled a comet rising against the morning stars: a wisp of vapor nearly a third of a mile across, with a tail streaming tens of miles to the south.
But the apparition over the United States was not a comet—at least not a normal one.
Voorhees settled back into his seat, letting out a deep breath.
“One of the gunshots punctured a fuel tank,” he said to himself, his mind flashing back to the takeoff and the determined hobo, firing his pistol as he ran.
Probably started out as a flesh wound, he reasoned. Until the first “stone-skip.”
At that point, the “blowtorch” effect, as the ship bounced off the atmosphere, would have widened even a small hole into a full-fledged puncture. And now the unwelcome glow was a result of vented gases, excited by solar radiation.
The rocketeer glanced back, hoping that the flare of escaping gas might have ceased or at least gotten smaller.
It hadn’t. The dial from one of the main propellant tanks continued to notch downward.
“Shit!” he said, gauging his position as the northeastern border of North Carolina rose on the port side.
“I can make it to Washington, D.C.,” he told himself. “I will make it.”
The second “stone-skip” was, as predicted, weaker than the first, and it gave Voorhees a small measure of hope that the wound in the hull would not worsen.
Thankfully, gravity was beginning to exert itself again and Voorhees was able to move his limbs more normally. He had found the disorientation of high-g and even zero-g interesting, but not entirely pleasant.
The engineer checked his watch and prepared for the next course correction. Soon, if the fuel tank lasted just a little longer, he would be able to make one final course change, jettison the bombs on a path toward the mid-Atlantic, vent off any remaining propellant, and set a glide path toward Washington.
“All right, time to—”
tap, tap, tap
“What the—?”
The sound, barely audible, had come from somewhere behind him. Voorhees craned his neck but it was impossible to see the bulkhead.
tap, Tap, TAP
It’s definitely coming from inside the cabin.
Something has come loose, he assured himself, even as he felt a flutter in his belly.
Voorhees quickly ran through a mental checklist. There were pipes and ductwork back there but not much more. What could be—
TAP, TAP, TAP
It was coming from under his seat.
The flutter in his guts transformed itself into a worm.
Voorhees leaned forward, straining against the canvas harness, but he could see no farther back than the tips of his boots.
For a moment, he felt an odd vibration run through the seat frame, accompanied by a faint clicking sound. And then silence.
Kommen sie nicht herein.
But Voorhees knew that something had come in.
“It’s all right,” he said, trying to calm himself.
Then, without warning, he kicked back violently and felt the back of his boot impact against something soft.
Voorhees heard a snap, and a mass of flesh skittered backward.
He flinched as his uninvited passenger scrabbled against the aft bulkhead.
The scrabbling and skittering stopped. And then . . .
Nothing.
With both rockets now away and Eugen Sänger having set off on a final mission, Colonel Gerhardt Wolff gave the order to abandon the base. A minute later, a frightened-looking soldier handed him the backpack he had been ordered to retrieve from the Nostromo. Little more than a boy, the private helped Wolff slip the pack on, but before he could muster the courage to ask the colonel where he should go or what he should do, the officer slipped into the mist and disappeared.
After abandoning his bewildered underling, Wolff met up with an Indian guide at a prearranged point along a narrow trail leading out of the compound. The man was nearly nude, his body painted red and black. Without a word or an acknowledgment, the local turned and set off down the trail at a fast jog.
Wolff was unconcerned with his guide’s appearance. The only thing that mattered was that the man was clearly knowledgeable about the escape route they were taking; as they zigged and zagged through impenetrable haze, the sounds of occasional gunfire and explosions began to fade behind them.
The rockets have been launched successfully, Wolff thought, breathing hard now as he chased the younger man. And maybe . . . just maybe . . . I too will get out of here.
Several minutes later, the colonel slowed as the guide came to an abrupt halt. Catching up to the painted man, Wolff could see that the trail ended at a small clearing, perhaps five meters across. In the center of the clearing, someone had lit and was maintaining a small fire.
“What is this?” he said, gesturing toward the forest beyond the fire. “We must keep moving.”
But the painted man said nothing, and before Wolff could respond, a dozen Xavante tribesmen materialized out of the mist.
It was immediately clear to the colonel that his guide knew these men, each of whom was similarly unclothed and garishly painted.
The officer could sense someone coming up behind him as well. I will not turn around, he vowed. For a moment he actually thought about bolting into the forest. But there was something about the way the tribesmen were watching him that made him decide against it.
They want me to run, he thought. They have even left a gap for me to—
Almost gently, Colonel Wolff felt the weight of the backpack being lifted from his shoulders. Simultaneously, someone removed the Luger from its holster and, a moment after that, he could hear one of them rummaging around in his pack.
They’d love me to run. They—
Click. Click.
The sound had come from behind Wolff and he identified it instantly.
“No!” he said, and turning, he saw his former guide removing the Stradivarius from its case.
Wolff’s eyes widened as the man clumsily stripped off the violin’s protective wrapping and casually tossed the pads of desiccant to the ground. Then he did something that chilled the Nazi even more than the mishandling of his precious instrument. The Xavante tribesman looked up and smiled. There was something about his smile that brought with it an instantaneous sense of recognition.
I have seen it—practiced it in the mirror, Wolff thought, even as the Xavante extended his arm—holding out the violin as if bestowing a gift.
It is my smile.
Without thinking, Wolff took a step toward the violin, and immediately winced as the men who had been standing behind him each grabbed him roughly by an arm.
Still, he tried to pull free. “The humidity,” he cried. Then he turned his head from side to side as if to convince his captors. “The moisture will damage the violin!”
But the Xavante showed little interest
in the strange musical instrument, or the even stranger, misplaced pleas of their captive. They were far more interested in one of their own brethren, a man kneeling on the opposite side of the fire.
And so Colonel Wolff watched as well.
He watched through the low flames and shimmering air as the man unwrapped something from a bound leather pouch.
He watched as the Xavante began to pass around pieces of obsidian.
He watched as his former guide tossed the Stradivarius into the flames.
He watched it burn.
CHAPTER 28
Watch the Skies
The bay trees in our country are all wither’d.
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth—
And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II
Nostromo Base was a smoking ruin, with bodies and parts of bodies strewn about, on the ground and in the trees.
MacCready and Thorne made sure to keep Yanni between them as they picked their way through the rubble. Both men carried their weapons at the ready.
Thorne spoke up: “Mac, do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Nothin’. This party’s over.”
The gunfire and the explosions had stopped but they still moved cautiously through the wreckage of the compound—perhaps even more cautiously.
“Yeah, could be,” MacCready replied. Maybe this is over, he thought. Wolff’s men have scattered. And why not? They’ve accomplished their mission.
