Land and Overland - Omnibus (63 page)

Berise's ideas were strange to Toller, and yet her words seemed to find their mark somewhere far inside him, particularly the references to emptiness. As a young man in Ro-Atabri he had always enjoyed the setting of the sun and the gentle approach of darkness—but of late, even with Gesalla at his side, the once satisfying experience had become oddly flat and disappointing. No matter how beautiful the sunset, there was no longer any pleasure in reviewing the achievements of the day, no anticipation of the morrow. The associated emotion, had he ever acknowledged it, would have been a poignant sadness. Overland's western sky, as it deepened through gold and red to peacock green and blue, had seemed to ring with …
emptiness.

The word had been a curiously apt one to come from a comparative stranger. He had been attributing his feelings to some unrecognised inner malaise, but had he just been offered a better explanation? Could he be an aesthete at heart, troubled by a growing awareness that his people lacked a cultural identity? The answer came quickly as the pragmatic, practical side of his nature reasserted itself.

No,
he thought.
The worm which eats out the core of my life is not concerned with poetry and art—and neither am I.

He half-smiled as he realised how far he had strayed, in an unguarded moment, into realms of fanciful thought, then he saw that Berise was staring at him.

"I wasn't smiling at your ideas," he said.

"No," she replied thoughtfully, her gaze still hunting over his face. "I didn't think you were."

And, of all the scenes which were played and replayed in Toller's memory, the brightest and most clearly incised were those from the day which saw the war's true beginning…

Seventy-three days had passed since the positioning of the first two fortresses. It was not a long period of time by the standards of men and women going about their routine affairs on the surface of Overland, but evolution was swift in the unnatural environment of the central blue.

Toller had completed his daily flying and archery practice, and had felt disinclined to return too quickly to the oppressive confines of the station. His fighter was floating about five hundred yards outside the datum plane, a vantage point from which he could observe the ebb and flow of activity in the Inner Defence Group and the surrounding space. To his left he could see a supply ship crawling up from Prad, its balloon a small brown disk sharply outlined against the convex patterns of Overland; to his right was Command Station One, flaring with sunlight against the indigo of the sky. Close to it were lesser three-section habitats which were used as workshops and stores, and in a loose swarm were the fighters of Red Squadron. Dozens of human figures, moving purposefully, could be seen in perfect detail in spite of being so tiny, mannikins from the hand of a master jeweller.

As always, Toller was impressed by the sheer amount of progress which had been made in the time available, since the first naive scheme to blanket the entire weightless zone with fortresses which would have relied on guns to repel an invasion. The invention of the fighter craft had been the major step forward, their astonishing speed having rendered obsolete the idea of each fortress being an isolated and self-sufficient entity. They had ceased to be fortresses, and were now assigned specialised roles—dormitory, workshop, store, armoury—in support of the all-important jets.

No matter how clever was the theoretical planner working on the ground, Toller had realised, innovation and development were usually products of practical experience. Even Zavotle, his thinking conditioned by normal gravity, had not foreseen the problems which would be posed by weightless debris and waste matter. The death of young Argitane, the fighter pilot killed by a drifting cannonball, had been a dramatic example, but the pollution of the environment by human wastes had become a matter of increasing concern.

The psychological stress of life in the gateway was augmented by the indignity and sheer unpleasantness of attending to one's bodily functions in zero gravity, and no commander could countenance the prospect of each station being surrounded by a thickening cloud of filth. Carthvodeer had been obliged to set up a collection team—quickly and mercilessly dubbed the Shit Patrol—whose unenviable task it was to trawl all offensive material into large bags. The bags were then towed a few miles down towards Land by a fighter and released to continue their journey under the influence of gravity—a practice which occasioned much ribaldry among the fortress crews.

Another problem, one yet to be resolved, had come with the attempts to establish an outer defensive ring. The original intention had been to place stations on a ring thirty miles across, greatly extending the area of interdiction, but with separations of more than about four miles they had become almost impossible to locate and keep supplied. A second fatality among fighter pilots had occurred when a flier, perhaps with substandard eyesight, had simply become lost while returning from an outer station, and had burned up all her power crystals in vain attempts to locate her base. Deprived of the heat generated by her engine, she had perished of hypothermia, and had been found purely by chance. Since that time the policy had been to concentrate all stations in the central group and rely on the fighters to extend their area of influence as required.

As was the case with all the other fliers, Toller had found that his lung capacity had increased to deal with the rarefied atmosphere, but it was impossible to adapt to the relentless cold of the weightless zone. By the time he had been drifting and meditating for twenty minutes all residual heat had leaked away through the wooden cowling of his engine, and he was beginning to shiver despite the protection of his skysuit. He was pumping up the fighter's pneumatic reservoir, preparatory to returning to the command station, when his attention was drawn to a star which had suddenly increased in luminosity for a second and now was emitting regular pulses of brilliance. No sooner had he deduced that the star was actually a distant station, and that it was sending out a sunwriter message, when he heard the sound of a trumpet, its repeated blasts fast-fading in the thin air. His heart stopped, lay quiescent for a subjective eternity, then began a rhythmic jolting.

They're coming!
he thought, sucking in air.
The game begins at last!

He fed his engine and swooped down towards the command station. As the slipstream began to bite at his eyes he pulled his goggles into place and instinctively searched the area of sky between him and the curving vastness of Land, but was unable to find anything unusual. The slow-moving ships of the enemy armada could be as much as a hundred miles away, visible only in telescopes.

As Toller neared the station the trumpeter, positioned in the newly-added pressure lock, ended the warning call and retreated inside. Fighter pilots, distinguished by the squadron colours on their shoulders, were issuing from the nearby dormitory tube, and swaddled auxiliaries were sailing towards the dart-like machines in their care, propelled by the hissing jets of their personal units.

A mechanic swam to meet Toller with a tethering line, leaving him free to dive straight into the long cylinder of the station. Both doors of the pressure lock had been left open and he found himself suddenly translated from a boundless sunlit universe to a dim microcosm which was fogged with vapours and crowded with human figures and the appurtenances of their continued existence.

Carthvodeer and Commodore Biltid, the operations chief, were hovering by the look-out post, deep in discussion, Biltid, directly appointed by Chakkell, was a stiff-necked and formal individual who was equally embarrassed by his inability to get over the fall-sickness and the ambiguity of his relationship with Toller. The fact that Toller was his superior and yet insisted on riding a jet like an ordinary pilot frequently placed him in dilemmas he found it difficult to resolve.

"Look here, my lord," he said, espying Toller. "The enemy comes in force."

Toller drew himself to the binoculars and looked into the eyepieces. The image which washed into his eyes was of a fiercely brilliant background, blue and green whorled with white, in the centre of which was a meagre sprinkling of black dots, each ringed with prismatic fringes caused by imperfections in the optical system. By narrowing and straining his eyes, Toller found that he could distinguish even smaller specks mingled with the others, and suddenly the scene acquired depth, became vertiginous. He was looking downwards through a vertical cloud of skyships, a cloud which was many miles in depth. It was impossible to say how many ships it contained, but there could not be less than a hundred.

"You are correct," he said, raising his head to look at Biltid. "The enemy comes in force—which is what one would have expected."

Biltid nodded, covered his mouth with a handkerchief, and suddenly the sour smell which usually surrounded him intensified. "I … I'm sorry," he said, gulping noisily. "We must make ready."

How astute,
Toller thought, then became sorry for a man who had been thrust willy-nilly into an unenviable situation as an instrument of the ruler.

"We retain our two great advantages," he said. "We are in sight of the enemy, but he is not aware of us; and we have the fighter craft—something the enemy cannot have even envisaged at this stage. It is now up to us to press home those advantages while we may."

Biltid nodded even more vigorously. "All fighter craft are in a state of mechanical readiness, and will be fuelled and armed. I propose engaging the enemy with the Red and Blue Squadrons, and holding Green in reserve. That is, if you have no…"

"Those might be good tactics in ground warfare," Toller said, "but remember that we will never again be able to take the Landers by surprise. There is a possibility that we could end this war on the very day it begins if we deal the enemy a sufficiently devastating first blow. In my opinion we should deploy the three squadrons and give all our pilots experience of combat."

"You're right as always, my lord." Biltid finished dabbing his mouth. "Though I'd be happier if we had some means of estimating the enemy's rate of ascent. If they reach the datum plane during the hours of darkness there is a chance of some slipping past us unseen."

"Nothing is to slip past us," Toller snapped, losing his patience.
"Nothing!"

He moved away from Biltid and Carthvodeer, and went to another porthole where he could have an unobstructed view of Land. The sun was moving towards the Old World and would pass behind its rim in approximately two hours. Toller did some mental calculations and swore as he realised that the timing of the first encounter could be highly unfavourable for the defenders. The two daily periods of darkness had been named Landnight and Overlandnight, depending of which of the planets was occulting the sun, and although they were about equal in length they had important differences.

Landnight, which was coming next, would begin when the sun passed behind Land, but at that stage Overland would still be fully illuminated and the light reflected from it would be strong enough to permit reading. During the following hour that light would steadily weaken as Land's cylindrical shadow slid across Overland, then would come roughly two hours of deepnight, lasting until Overland was again kissed by the sun's rays. Throughout deepnight the heavens would be ablaze with stars, glowing whirlpools and the splayed radiance of comets, but the comparative level of general illumination would be very low—and even a ship's balloon would be hard to detect in the dim reaches of the weightless zone. The problem did not arise to the same extent during Overlandnight because Land was larger than its sister world and could not be completely swallowed by its shadow.

If the enemy ships were a hundred miles away, Toller reckoned, and were already at maximum speed, they could reach the datum plane during deepnight. He contemplated the prospect for a moment, then decided he was being unduly pessimistic. The Lander pilots would be nervous on experiencing the effects of weightlessness for the first time, and would also be apprehensive about the forthcoming inversion manoeuvre. It was entirely reasonable to assume that they would approach the weightless zone slowly and cautiously, and would plan to perform the supremely unnatural act of turning their ships upside down in good light conditions.

Having settled his mind, Toller left the chilling dank fug of the station and devoted the following hour to making a tour of the Inner Defence Group, calling at the other two command stations which were the bases for Blue Squadron and the newly completed Green. Reports from those on watch showed that the invaders were indeed advancing slowly, but the fighter pilots who had turned out prematurely were unable to resume their rest when darkness came. Some of them passed the time in noisy discussion or gambling by candlelight, while others hovered close to their machines, obsessively checking on the fuelling and arming procedures of the mechanics.

Finally a sliver of light appeared at the edge of Overland and rapidly expanded along it to form a slim crescent. As the sunlit area of the planet spread steadily into the gibbous phase, heralding the reappearance of the sun. Toller made repeated visits to the look-out post in Command Station One and peered through the binoculars. The vast disk of Land was bathed in a dim mysterious light, reflected from the sister world, which gave it the semblance of a sphere of translucent wax somehow lighted from within. Although brightening by the minute, the backdrop it provided refused to yield up a discernible image of enemy skyships, and—in spite of himself—Toller began to fantasise about the invaders having sustained a speed which had enabled them to pass through the datum plane under cover of darkness. The partial emergence of the sun flooded the interior of the station with light, and even then there was an instant during which the ships of the Lander armada remained hidden in the fringes of the planet's slow-swinging shadow.

Then, suddenly, they were
there.

Unexpectedly beautiful, they appeared in Toller's field of view as a swarm of tiny, perfect crescents of brilliance, level upon level of them, exquisite in their crafted uniformity. For a moment he was awe-struck by the achievement the spectacle represented. Given the audacity and courage to cross the interplanetary gulf in frail constructs of cloth and wood, his kind should be able to unite and turn their eyes towards the outer universe instead of squandering their energies in…