Land and Overland - Omnibus (56 page)

"Before we part, captain," he said, checking his stride, "why are you so anxious to climb to the midpoint?"

"There will never be another opportunity, my lord—and I have as much right as any man."

"How long have you been flying airships?"

"Three years, my lord." Berise was carefully observing the formalities of address, but her stern expression and heightened colour made it clear that she was angry at him, and he liked her for it. He had a natural sense of kinship with people who were unable to disguise their feelings.

"My ruling about the assembly flights is unchanged," he said, deciding to show her that the years had not robbed him of his humanity, that he could still sympathise with youth's ambitions. "But when the fortresses are in place there will be frequent supply flights, and the fortress crews themselves will be rotated on a regular basis. If you can curb your impatience, albeit briefly, you will have ample opportunity to prove your worth in the central blue."

"You are
very
kind, my lord." Berise's bow seemed deeper than was necessary, and her smile could have suggested amusement as much as gratitude.

Did I sound pompous?
he thought, watching her walk away.
Is that young woman laughing at me?

He considered the questions for a moment, then clicked his tongue in annoyance as it came to him how trivial was the subject which had diverted him from his major responsibilities.

The parade ground at the rear of the palace had been chosen as the launch site, partly because it was fully enclosed, partly because it made it easy for King Chakkell to keep a close eye on every aspect of the sky fortress project.

The fortresses were wooden cylinders—twelve yards in length and circumference and four in diameter—each of which had been built in three sections. Two prototypes had been produced in the initial war effort and the sections comprising them were lying on their sides at the western edge of the ground, looking like giant drums. The huge balloons which were to carry them into the weightless zone had already been attached and were lying on the baked clay, their mouths held open by ground crew, and hand-cranked fans were being used to inflate them with unheated air. It was a technique which had been devised at the time of the Migration to lessen the risk of damage to the linen envelopes when hot gas was fired into them from the burners.

"I still say it's madness for you to go aloft at this stage," liven Zavotle said as he crossed the parade ground with Toller. "And even now it isn't too late for you to appoint a deputy."

Toller shook his head and placed a hand on Zavotle's shoulder. "I appreciate your concern, liven, but you know it can't be done that way. The crews are terrified as it is, and if they thought I was afraid to go up there with them they would be completely useless."

"Aren't
you afraid?"

"You and I have been in the weightless zone before, and we know how to deal with it."

"The circumstances were different," Zavotle said gloomily. "Especially for our second visit."

Toller gave him a reassuring shake. "Your system will work—I'll stake my life on that."

"Spare me the jests." Zavotle parted from Toller and went to confer with a group of his technicians who were waiting to observe the take-off. He had proved himself so valuable to the sky fortress project that soon after their first meeting Chakkell had appointed him Chief Engineer, thus making Toller redundant to a large degree and freeing him for the first ascent. As a result, Zavotle felt responsible for thrusting his friend into dangers whose extent could hardly be guessed, and he had been increasingly morose over the past few days.

Toller glanced up at the sky, to where the great disk of Land was poised at the zenith, and once again it came to him that he might die up there, midway between the two worlds. On analysing his reaction to the thought, the disturbing thing was that he felt no real fear. There was a determination to avoid being killed and to guide the mission through to a successful conclusion, but there was little of the normal human sense of dread at the possibility of having his life snuffed out. Was that because he could not envisage Toller Maraquine, the man at the centre of creation, meeting the same fate as all ordinary mortals—or had Gesalla been right about him? Was he really a war-lover, as the long-dead Prince Leddravohr had been—and did that explain the malaise which had begun to affect him in recent years?

The thought was a disquieting and depressing one, and he pushed it aside to concentrate on his immediate duties. All day there had been intense activity around the six fortress sections as supplies were loaded and secured, and last-minute adjustments were made to engines and equipment. Now the area was comparatively empty, with only the launch teams and the flight crews standing by their odd-looking ships. Some of the latter exchanged words and glances as they saw Toller approaching and knew that the 2,500-mile ascent was about to begin. The pilots were all mature men, selected because of their flying experience during the Migration; but most of the others were youngsters who had been chosen for their physical fitness, and they tended to be highly apprehensive about what was to follow. Understanding their worries, Toller put on a show of being relaxed and cheerful as he reached the row of slow-stirring balloons.

"The wind conditions are perfect, so I will not detain you," he told them, raising his voice against the clattering and whirring of the inflation fans. "I have only one thing to say. It is something you have heard many times before, but it is so important that it is worth repeating here. You must remain tethered to your ships at all times, and wear your parachutes at all times. Remember those basic rules and you will be as safe in the sky as you are on the ground.

"And now let us be about the work with which the King has entrusted us."

His closing words were far from being as inspirational as he would have liked, but a traditional speech delivered in high Kolcorronian would have seemed incongruous in the context of the strangest war in human history. In past conflicts the common man had always been emotionally involved—largely through fear of what an invading horde would do to his loved ones—but in this case most of the general populace were quite unaware of any threat. In a way it was an unreal war, a contest between rulers, where a few gladiators were thrown into the ring like tumbling dice to bring about an arbitrary decision, largely influenced by their ability to endure pain and deprivation, on the viability of a political idea. How was he to explain, justify and glorify that to a handful of hapless individuals who had been lured into the King's service, originally, by the prospect of steady pay and a soft life?

Toller went to his own ship, giving the signal for the five other pilots to do likewise. He had chosen to fly a fortress midsection because it looked less airworthy than the closed endsections and its crew needed an extra boost to their confidence. A temporary floor had been installed a short distance below one rim, and on that were the crew stations and lockers containing various supplies.

The centrally mounted burner was one which had served in the Migration and had been lying in Chakkell's stores for more than twenty years. Its main component was the trunk of a very young brakka tree which had been used in its entirety. On one side of the bulbous base was a small hopper filled with pikon, plus a valve which admitted the crystals to the combustion chamber under pneumatic pressure. On the other side a similar mechanism controlled the flow of halvell, and both valves were operated by a common lever. The passageways in the latter valve were slightly enlarged, automatically supplying the greater proportion of halvell which had proved best for sustained thrust.

Because the section was lying on its side the floor was vertical and Toller had to lie on his back in his chair to operate the burner's controls. His sword, which he had not thought to discard, made the attitude all the more awkward. He pumped up the pneumatic reservoir, then signalled to the inflation supervisor that he was ready to begin burning. The fan crew ceased cranking and pulled their cumbersome machine and its nozzle aside.

Toller advanced the control lever for about a second. There was a hissing roar as the power crystals combined, firing a burst of hot miglign gas into the balloon's gaping mouth. Satisfied with the burner's performance, he instigated a series of blasts—keeping them short to reduce the risk of heat damage to the balloon fabric—and the great envelope began to distend further and lift clear of the ground. The inflation crew raised it further by means of the four acceleration struts, which constituted the principal difference between the skyship and a craft designed for normal atmospheric flight. Now three-quarters full, the balloon sagged among the struts, the varnished linen skin pulsing and rippling like a giant lung.

As it gradually rose to the vertical position the crew holding the balloon's crown lines came walking in and attached them to the section's load points, while others gently rotated the section until its axis was perpendicular. All at once the section was ready to take to the air, held down only by the pull of the men holding its trailing ropes. The remainder of the flight crew scaled its sides on projecting rungs and took their places.

Toller nodded in satisfaction as he glanced along the line of craft and saw that the other crews had gone aboard in unison with his own. It was a departure from established Kolcorronian practice for a group of ships to take off simultaneously, but successful assembly of the fortresses in the weightless zone was going to depend on precision flying in close formation. Zavotle had decided that a mass take-off would help the pilots familiarise themselves with the technique, and also give an early indication of where problems could lie. There had been no time for trial ascents, and the crews would have to learn new skills under the tutelage of the severest and most unforgiving taskmaster of all.

Having assured himself that the other five pilots were ready to fly, Toller waved to them and fired a prolonged burst to initiate the climb. The roar of the burner was magnified in the vast echo chamber of the balloon which now blotted out most of the sky, and at the end of the blast the handlers released their lines on command from the launch supervisor. As the ship began to drift vertically upwards, with no breeze to impart a lateral component to its motion, Toller stood up and looked over the rim of the section into the slowly receding parade ground. He picked out the compact form of liven Zavotle, easily distinguishable because of his prematurely white hair, and waved to him. Zavotle did not respond, but Toller knew he had been seen and that Zavotle was wishing he could exchange places rather than have another man put his ideas to the test.

"Bring in the struts, sir?" The speaker was the rigger, Tipp Gotlon, a lanky gap-toothed youngster who was one of the few volunteers on the flight.

Toller nodded and Gotlon began working his way around the circular deck, drawing in the free-hanging acceleration struts by their tethers and securing them to the rim. Mechanic Millyat Essedell, a competent-looking, bow-legged man with several years of Air Service experience, was not required to do anything at this stage of the flight, but he was crouched at his equipment locker, busily sorting and checking the tools. The midsection ships had three-man crews—as compared with five in the end-sections—because they were burdened with the extra weight of the armaments the fortresses would use against invaders.

Satisfied that his companions were reliable, Toller directed all his attention into finding a burn ratio which would give a climb speed in the region of twenty-four miles an hour. He settled on a rhythm of four seconds on and twenty seconds off—well remembered from his first interplanetary crossing—and for the next ten minutes the pilots of the other ships practised keeping exactly level with him. They made a striking spectacle, being so huge and close, with every detail sharply etched in pure light, while the world gently sank into the blue haze of distance.

The ships had become Toller's only reality.

Looking down on the sketchy geometries of the city of Prad, he could feel little affinity with the place or its inhabitants. He had again become a creature of the sky, and his preoccupations were no longer those of mere land-locked beings. Affairs of state and the posturing of princes now mattered little in comparison with the condition of a rivet or the correct tensioning of a rope or even the strange ruminative sounds which a balloon would sometimes emit for no apparent reason.

By the time the practice period had ended the squadron had attained a height of two miles and Toller gave the signal for a vertical dispersion to take place. The manoeuvre was carried out quickly and without mishap, changing the tight horizontal group into a loose stepped formation which could face the onset of night with little risk of collision.

Toller had driven himself to the point of exhaustion before the take-off, sometimes getting only two hours sleep in a night, and it was during the enforced idleness of the ascent that his body claimed its due compensation. Even while operating the burner he would sometimes lapse into a torpor, counting off the rhythm by instinct, and much of his rest periods were spent in dozing and dreaming. Often when he awoke he genuinely had no idea where he was, and would gaze up at the patient, looming curvatures of the balloon in fear and confusion until he had deduced what it was and where it was taking him. At other times, especially at night when the meteors flickered continuously all around, he would not succeed in awakening fully and in his tranced condition imagined that he was on an ascent of long ago, in the company of men and women who had long since died or been turned into strangers by the processes of time, all of them voyaging into the future with varying degrees of trepidation and hope.

The changing patterns of night and day enhanced his temporal disorientation. As the ascent continued Overland's night grew shorter and its littlenight expanded, slipping towards the equilibrium which would be attained midway between the sister planets, and Toller found himself almost losing track of the sequence. The surest measure of time's passing became the ship's altimeter—a simple device consisting of nothing more than a vertical scale, from the top of which a small weight was suspended by a delicate coiled spring. At the beginning of the flight the weight had been opposite the lowest mark on the scale, but as the climb continued and the pull of Overland's gravity diminished, the weight drifted upwards in a perfect analogue of the flight, a miniature ship sailing a miniature cosmos.