by Brian Craig
“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, still reeling under the blinding flash of inspiration. “The bastards are going to hit us from up top!”
“That’s crazy!” complained the co-pilot. “Ground-aimed sat weapons are strictly one-shot wonders—who’d waste a laser zapping a cargo-plane?”
“I don’t care how crazy it is,” Pasco retorted, angrily. “They’re going to do it!” To the radio-man he said: “Warn the guys at base to start whatever procedures they’ve got. I know what I’m talking about, believe me! They have to be ready.”
“You want me to divert to Dallas?” said the pilot. “No sense flying into a battlefield, if we don’t have to.”
“That may be what they want,” said the co-pilot quickly. “The remotes could be a feint, and the Maniax may not signify anything at all. Maybe they want us to go to Dallas—we haven’t time now to organize proper cover there.”
Pasco felt his stomach getting tighter and tighter. He knew that the co-pilot could be right, and maybe ought to be right. M-M had the disc already, and Kid Zero was nothing to them. Common sense said that they wouldn’t waste a satellite and risk an escalation of hostilities which would surely leave them at a big disadvantage. On the other hand, common sense also said that the only winners of an all-out two-handed conflict between GenTech and Mitsu-Makema would be the uninvolved corps, and that both sides ought to back off. Whatever the blue dots were, they weren’t evidence of M-M backing off.
“Tell the base to expect a sat attack,” he insisted. “Now!”
The radio-man shrugged, and put the call through. There was a pause while he listened to his opposite number. “The base won’t go to red alert,” he reported eventually. “Something about the danger of over-reaction. They want us to come in as planned.”
Pasco became suddenly very calm—unnaturally calm; he’d been over-ruled, and he knew that there was no point arguing about it. When the sky did fall in, someone else would have to carry the can for not passing the buck even further along—but that wasn’t his concern. His concern was to save his own life, in spite of the fact that his masters thought he was crazy. He had not the shadow of a doubt that his instincts were right. Common sense or no common sense, M-M were going to hit back and hit back hard, and he didn’t want to be in the firing-line.
In the meantime, the flock of coloured dots had moved a lot closer. The screen could now put the plane and the remotes on the same map-segment, and Pasco could watch them closing. His finger was aching to be on a FIRE button, real or pretend. At the end of the day, it was all arcade fun: dot against cross…zap, zap, zap! But the co-pilot had no FIRE button—he only had a computer, which was telling him that the targets were too small and too close to the ground.
The simulator wasn’t clever enough to display the third dimension but Pasco knew well enough that the pilot was starting his approach, and coming down. By the time they got down to the same near-ground level as the incoming flyers they’d be all together on the screen—but what that would entail he had no idea. He didn’t know what the remotes were carrying and he didn’t even know whether or not they were aimed at the plane.
The sense of being in danger without being able to act reminded him very strongly of being in a horrorshow booth—but this was for real and he was facing death as well as fear. There had to be something he could do, to get himself out of the frying-pan.
“Slow up,” he said to the pilot. “Don’t take us down yet. If you have fuel enough, circle. Those things don’t have time on their hands to hang about for us, and there’s no sense in flying into them.”
The pilot glanced at the radio-operator, who was already relaying the suggestion to the base. The radio-man listened to the reply, then nodded.
Then Pasco leaned forward to put his hand over the radioman’s mike. “For your ears only,” he said, as inspiration struck him. “The channel may not be secure. We’re going to jump—Preston, the Kid, and me. Whatever they have planned for a landing party, we aren’t going to play.”
The radio-man didn’t try to move the hand, but he was quick enough to say: “You’re crazy! You can’t just jump into the freakin’ desert!”
“We just scrambled the mercy boys to see off the Maniax. When they’ve done that, they can come out after us—but don’t tell them we’re down until we’re down. Sure it’s crazy, but it’s the one thing M-M can’t possibly expect—and I still think they’re going to hit us hard. I’ve skydived before—it’s no big deal.”
“I doubt that Preston has,” said the pilot drily, “and I’m certain that Kid Zero hasn’t.”
“Preston will take his chance with me,” said Pasco grimly. “And if Kid Zero breaks a few bones I won’t be crying for him.”
The radio-man was listening to this exchange, but only with half an ear. Something was coming up, and he had to uncover the mike to acknowledge it. “The Maniax are on the move,” he said. “Heading for the wire. They just shot down two birds and scattered the rest—they’ve got a whole battery of first rate target-seekers, just like the one the Kid had when this whole affair kicked off. They’re dug in better than we thought, but we’re deploying counterstrikers.”
“M-M bastards,” muttered the co-pilot. “Selling guns to the freakin’ indians!”
Pasco didn’t wait. It was all too obvious that things were going wrong. “I’m on my way,” he said, as he ducked back out of the cabin.
He already knew where the chutes were stored, and he pulled three out, hurling one at Carl Preston. “Get into that,” he ordered. “Then cut the Kid’s hands loose from the seat and get him into another. But don’t untie his feet, and when he’s rigged up, tie his wrists again.”
The expression of panic and alarm that crossed Kid Zero’s face did Pasco a power of good. There had been just a chance that the Kid might leap at the opportunity, thinking of it as a chance to escape, but he obviously wasn’t that ambitious.
“I’m going to have my gun on you the whole way down, Kid,” Pasco said, in a tone as menacing as he could contrive. “Remember that.”
“I’m not going to jump,” said the Kid, in a tight-lipped fashion which seemed pleasantly absurd to Pasco, given that the Kid didn’t have the slightest choice in the matter.
“You won’t have to,” he said maliciously. “Because I’m going to throw you out—and if you break your legs because you don’t know how to land, that’ll be just too bad. And if you open your smart mouth one more time, you’re going down without the chute, right?”
The Kid’s face was as white as a sheet, and Pasco knew that his inspiration had at last allowed him to find the weak spot in the Kid’s imperturbability. Kid Zero was finally afraid!
“Hell, Ray,” Carl Preston was saying, “I don’t know….”
But there was no way that Pasco was going to allow the BioDiv man to mess up his big scene. He turned on Preston wrathfully, giving the smaller man the full benefit of his intimidating face, and he said, in a tone which could not and would not be denied: “Do it!”
Preston got the message, and shut up—but he was frightened too. He’d jumped off the diner roof and he’d jumped from the copter, but this was different. Pasco didn’t mind; he wasn’t fond enough of Preston to want to save him from his own nerves—the chips were down now, and it was time for the tough guys to show just how tough they were.
When he’d finished buckling on his own chute Pasco helped Preston get the Kid into his. It wasn’t easy, but the Kid didn’t put up too much resistance—he clearly believed what Pasco said about dropping him without the chute if he wouldn’t put it on. But when they were all ready to go Preston was still getting paler.
“Whose orders are these?” whispered Preston, as Pasco tied the Kid’s wrists together behind his back.
“Does it matter?” countered Pasco. “I figure we have the easy end of it. There’ll be a far hotter reception at the base, if I’m right about what’s coming down.”
Neither of the others was in a hurry to move, so it was Pasco who p
icked his way along the cluttered fuselage towards the jumping-port. Preston picked up the Kid, who couldn’t walk because his legs were tied together.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” said Preston, arriving some seconds after Pasco had pulled the seal free and hauled the door inwards.
“Sure,” said Pasco, “haven’t you?” He knew full well that Preston hadn’t. Pasco had only done it a couple of times himself, but two-nil seemed like a very big advantage at this particular point in time, and any second thoughts he might have had were out of the question now. He suppressed his own giddiness as he looked down, and then looked at the others to see what expressions were on their faces.
The Kid’s eyes were averted—he couldn’t even look. Pasco grinned, savagely, as the tautness in his stomach-wall turned to exultation. “Welcome to the horrorshow, Kid,” he said happily.
Preston, who looked distinctly queasy, shrank back from the open hatch.
“Don’t just stand there,” said Pasco. “Throw the bastard out.”
But Preston didn’t throw Kid Zero out—his own muscles seemed to have frozen at the thought of what awaited them.
“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, and reached out to yank them both forward. Preston reacted reflexively, gripping the side of the hatchway to save himself, but Kid Zero had no choice but to fall. The Kid didn’t scream, but Pasco saw the expression on his face, and that was enough to make his day.
Pasco pulled again at Preston’s arm, much harder than before, and this time Zarathustra’s man accepted the pressure of the inevitable.
Before he jumped himself, Pasco drew his gun. He did it because he knew this had to be done properly, the hero’s way.
The rush of air which consumed him sent a stab of terror through him in spite of his resolve, but his horrorshow-trained reflexes took command, and by the time his chute opened he was sky-high on adrenalin, looking forward to a happy landing.
He knew that he had done the right thing, and was as proud of himself as he had ever been before, or ever hoped to be again.
4
For the first couple of seconds Carl felt utterly lost. His eyes were open but he could not make sense of what he saw; his mind was racing but his thoughts were jumbled and incoherent.
The most urgent, as well as the most hopeless, of his thoughts was the awareness that Pasco had not told him what to do. He had the vague notion that a parachute had something called a rip cord which the wearer was supposed to pull, but Pasco had not pointed out any such attachment or given him advice about its use. For this reason his hands were groping wildly about the straps of the chute, searching for something which—as things turned out—was not actually there.
The chute opened by itself, automatically, when he was clear of the plane. He had been tumbling in his fall until then, but the chute righted him, so that his feet were pointed to the ground and his head was in the right place to look down upon it.
Somehow he had expected to be able to see the entire southern U.S.A. spread out before him like a map, but he was much closer than that, and what was rushing up to meet him was more like a discoloured and wave-swept ocean than anything else he could think of. It was all sand and rust, speckled with fugitive flecks of green. In the middle-distance he could see the grey line of the Brazos river but the base for which the plane had been headed was surprisingly close to the horizon. He could make out plumes of sand which were being kicked up by vehicles of some kind—probably bikes—and by the whirling blades of ground-hugging birds. The machines themselves were difficult to pick out, and seemed quite unreal at this unaccustomed angle.
It all looked so odd and so unfamiliar that it might as well have been an image on a simulator screen. He seized upon that notion, and tried to tell himself that it was only a game, only a horrorshow.
That seemed to work, at least for a little while. The lie that it was all illusion was certainly preferable to the truth. In the distance, the clouds of sand began to dissipate and spread out, and though he still could not see the bike-riders clearly he readily deduced that they were scattering before the regrouped and vengeful birds, retreating in all directions in calculated disarray.
A poor excuse for a battle! he thought—but he knew that there had to be more to the situation than met the eye. Something had to be happening, or what was it all for?
He could see Kid Zero’s chute below him, not drifting far from the path which his own would take. The Kid, with his wrists and ankles tied, had no chance to alter the attitude of his body, and would have to hope for as soft a landing as chance could contrive for him. Alas, it looked like the landing might be anything but soft—the Kid was headed into the heart of a region of jagged rocks, full of sharp spurs and deep clefts.
Carl knew that he ought to have some degree of control over the direction of his slanting descent, if only he could figure out how to exercise it. He supposed that if he spread his arms and legs he could increase air-resistance and slow himself down a little, giving himself more time to drift—but he had no confidence at all in his ability to aim for a particular landing-spot. He looked up, trying to spot Pasco, but he felt a sudden lurch of vertigo and had to look quickly down again—the ground was his only perceptual anchorage, his nearness to it the only location he could judge.
He tried to take himself clear of the rocks so that he might land on open ground, but his unskilled efforts were hopelessly ineffectual.
It’s only a horrorshow! he told himself, lying with all the fervour he could muster. It’s only a game.
The ground rushed up to meet him, far more avidly than he could have wished.
He saw the Kid land and roll, the chute billowing gently down alongside him; he knew that he had to lake himself in hand for his own impact, and gritted his teeth against the instinct which told him—stupidly—that he ought to make himself rigid. He knew that the opposite was true—that he had to relax his muscles and get ready to curl up when he touched bottom, absorbing the shock into his whole body instead of his ankles and his knees.
His eyes wanted to close, but he kept them open. Absurdly, it was not until the last twenty feet or so that he had a real sense of falling, and felt the renewal of his vertigo in consequence. The impact hurt more than he had expected, and though he tried with all his might to distribute the shock as he knew he ought to do, his legs were nevertheless jarred. He had come down on bare rock, which was uneven enough to jolt and bruise all the parts of his body which came into contact with it as he rolled, and pain seemed to be rattling his entire being.
The chute came down on top of him, smothering him in artificial silk. For a few moments he was incapable of doing anything but lying there, enshrouded—but he knew that he wasn’t dead, and there was a certain relief and exhilaration to be found even in that simple fact.
When he was finally able to make the attempt to sit up, and then to stand, he did so very gingerly, not knowing which of his many aches might flare up when pressure was put on it. At first, it seemed that his elbows had taken the worst of it—but then he tried to transfer his weight from his right foot to his left and realized that he would not be walking properly for some time to come. His left ankle blazed with pain, and he knew that if it was not actually broken it was very badly sprained.
He cursed, but felt oddly unsurprised and resentful. It seemed somehow to be only fair that he should not have escaped from this lunatic adventure entirely unscathed.
He pulled the chute away and peered out, blinking against the glare of the late morning sun. The desert was not yet at its worst, but it soon would be. He limped to a rocky shelf and sat down, looking around for Kid Zero’s chute; but the ground was all ridges and spires and jagged outcrops of rock, and although he was high up—only just below the flat top of a curved ridge—he couldn’t see his erstwhile prisoner. He could see Pasco, though, floating down—apparently as lightly as a wind-borne feather—a couple of hundred yards away.
The SecDiv man obviously had skill enough to avoid the worst of the roc
ks. Carl churlishly expressed a private hope that Pasco might break his leg anyway, but he knew that his prayer had gone unanswered when the big man’s chute billowed, settled, and then was quickly swept aside as Pasco came swiftly to his feet. Although they were a long way apart Carl could see that the man with the ruined face already had his gun in his hand, and was looking furtively around for possible danger.
Carl didn’t move; he just watched as Pasco sprinted towards him.
“You okay?” the big man shouted up at him.
“No,” Carl shouted back sourly. “I’m not okay. Ankle’s gone.”
Pasco didn’t seem to be listening—he was looking round anxiously as he began to clamber up over the rocks.
“Where’s the Kid?” he demanded. “Which way?”
Carl shook his head. He didn’t know which way—he had lost his sense of direction while concentrating on his own troubles.
Pasco grimaced in irritation, but didn’t say anything. He moved away from the rock-face against which Carl was perched, looking one way and then the other before turning to crane his neck, peering at the top of the ridge behind him.
Carl saw the expression on Pasco’s face change even before he heard the engine of the bike, and he ducked as he guessed from the combination of signals that the machine was going to come straight over the top of him.
Pasco obviously thought that the leaping bike was going to crash right into him, because instead of standing his ground and firing he dived away to his left. Carl had never seen a bike-jump like it—the thing flew over him and soared into the air with unbelievable grace. Maybe it would have hit Pasco if he’d stayed where he was, but it would only have clipped his head, because it landed a full ten feet further on, bucking and bouncing over the rocks as the rider steadied it before bringing it around in a wide arc.
Its tires screamed as it came about, but the rider didn’t want to waste any time at all—which was a wise decision, considering that Pasco still had his gun in his hand and was getting madder with every moment.
