Land and Overland - Omnibus (65 page)

Toller's mind was filled with that heady prospect as he watched the sky being transformed and sullied by conflict. The vapour trails were a complex skein of white tangled around an irregular, granular core of smoke and flame, and as successive fighter groups dived into action it became difficult to impose any sense of order on the scene. The carefully drawn up battle plan was being obscured by frenzied scribblings of condensation.

When it came the turn of the penultimate trio of fighters to set off Toller made a broad curving gesture with his free hand, signifying that they should swing outwards during the descent and intersect the column of skyships below the worst of the chaos. The pilots nodded and roared away on their diverging courses. They were just beginning to swing inwards again when from somewhere in the midst of the havoc came the sound of a powerful explosion.

Toller guessed that a Lander weapon, probably a pikon-halvell bomb, had detonated accidentally—a catastrophic event for the ship carrying it, but one which could benefit the invasion fleet as a whole. The report would have been heard far down the stack, alerting the lower echelons to the fact that all was not well. On hearing it any prudent pilot would use his lateral jets to turn his ship on its side so that he could observe the sky above.

Toller glanced with a new urgency at the other two squadron leaders, Daas and Umol, who were now his only two companions in the serenity of the upper air. "Are we ready?" he shouted.

Daas placed a hand on his lower back. "The longer we sit here the worse my rheumatism gets."

Toller blew crystals into his engine, felt his head being pulled back by acceleration, and watched the battle zone expand to fill his field of view. He had never before been so conscious of the jet fighter's speed. The vapour trails rushing towards him had the semblance of sculpted white marble, and he found it difficult not to flinch as the solid-seeming walls slammed in on him from one side and another, sometimes converging in a promise of certain death. Entire arctic kingdoms had streamed by him before he began to glimpse the wrecks of Lander ships. Their upward momentum had carried them into the flaming tatters of their balloons. He saw soldiers frantically ridding their gondolas of swathes of burning linen and wondered if they understood the futility of their actions. The ruined ships, although apparently locked in place, were already yielding to the gravitational siren call of their parent world, already embarking on the plunge to the rocky surface which waited thousands of miles below.

Toller had expected a considerable gap between the layers of burning ships, and was surprised to find them in a single loose conglomerate, sometimes almost in contact with each other. He realised that the first ships to be attacked had shut down their engines, and those below—still under way—had blundered in among them, vertically compacting the scene of destruction. Floating here and there among the smoke-shrouded leviathans were human figures, some struggling and some quiescent, pathetic debris from the gondola which had been exploded.

Toller barely had time to check that they were not wearing parachutes, then he was through the crowded volume of sky and bearing down on a group of four ships. At the edges of his vision he could see Daas and Umol riding in parallel with him. The Lander pilots must have reacted quickly to the sound of the explosion, because three of the ships were already tilted and he could see rows of faces lining their gondola walls. Far below them other ships, layer upon receding layer, were also turning on their sides.

Toller closed his throttle and allowed the fighter to coast while he snatched an arrow from one of his quivers. The oil-soaked wad at its tip caught fire as soon as he thrust it into the hooded igniter cup. He nocked the arrow and drew the bow, feeling heat from the warhead blowing back on his face, and fired at the balloon of the nearest ship, using the instinctive aiming technique of a mounted hunter. Even at speed and with swiftly changing angles the vast convexity of the balloon was an absurdly easy target. Toller's arrow needled into it and clung like a spiteful mosquito, spreading its venom of fire, and already he was plunging down past the gondola and its doomed occupants. There came a spattering of flat reports and splinters erupted from the wooden engine cowling scant inches from his left knee.

That was quick,
he thought, shocked by the speed with which the Landers had brought their muskets into action.
These people know how to fight!

He steered his machine into a right-hand turn and looked over his shoulder to see two of the other balloons beginning to crumple and wither amid wreaths of black smoke. Daas and Umol, riding on brilliant plumes of condensation, were swinging into wider curves which would bring them into the cluster newly formed by the three squadrons.

As far as Toller could ascertain, all his fliers had survived the first strike and all of them could claim victories, but the nature of the battle was changing and would no longer be so one-sided. The time for calculated and cold-blooded executions had ended, and from now on individual temperament would come into play, with incalculable results. In particular, there could be no more leisurely swoops through the skyships' blind arcs. Not only were the ships far below turning on their sides, they were doing it in such a way that the vulnerable upper hemispheres of their balloons were facing the centre of each group. Toller had no doubt that rim-mounted cannon were already being loaded, and although the Landers had no metals their traditional charges of pebbles and broken stones would be highly effective against the unprotected fighter pilots.

"Strike where you can," he shouted, "but be…"

His words were lost in the roars of multiple exhausts. The air around him became fogged with white as the most impetuous of the young pilots darted away in the direction of the apparently motionless skyships. Cannon began to boom almost immediately.

Too soon,
Toller thought, then it came to him that the sheer speed of the fighters could actually be a disadvantage in this kind of aerial warfare. Long after a skyship's cannon had been discharged it would be surrounded by relatively static clouds of rocky fragments, harmless to the slow-moving ships, but potentially deadly to attacking fighter pilots.

Pushing the thought aside, he gunned his machine into a downward curve which took him on a dizzying plunge in parallel with the vertical conflict. In the ensuing minutes the sky became a fantastic jungle, crowded with thickets, ferns and interlocked vines of white condensation, hung with the bulbous fruit of skyships, garlanded with black smoke. The slaughter went on and on in a frenzy incomprehensible to anyone who had never known the bitter passions of battle—and, as Toller had foreseen, the Landers began to draw blood.

He saw Perobane, on Red Nine, make a reckless dive on two ships and pull out of it with such force that his control surfaces were ripped off. The fighter did an abrupt somersault, throwing Perobane clear of it into a course which took him within twenty yards of a gondola. Soldiers on board fired at him with their muskets. The jerking of his body showed that many were finding their mark, but the soldiers—perhaps aware that their balloon was on fire and that they were bound to die—kept on shooting at Perobane in futile revenge until his skysuit was a mass of crimson tatters.

Shortly afterwards, the pilot of Green Four—Chela Dinnitler—made the mistake of slowly coasting past a soldier who was drifting free some distance from a gondola which was wrapped in the blazing material of its envelope. The soldier, who had appeared to be unconscious, stirred into life, calmly levelled his musket and shot Dinnitler in the back. Dinnitler slumped over his controls and the fighter's exhaust spouted vapour. The machine, with the pilot freakishly locked in his seat, went into a twisting descent which carried it through the lower fringes of the battle. It dwindled into the backdrop of Land, passing through a sprinkling of circular white clouds which resembled balls of fluffy wool.

The soldier who had killed Dinnitler was fitting a new pressure sphere to his musket, and—incredibly in view of the death-fall facing him—was laughing as he worked. Toller advanced his throttle and drove straight at the man, intending to ram him, then came the thought that even a fleeting proximity might prove enough to infect him with pterthacosis. He hit the plunger on one of his cannon, shattering power crystal containers in the breech, and held a steady course until detonation occurred. The gun had not been designed for precise marksmanship, but luck was with Toller and the two-inch ball hit the soldier squarely on the head, cartwheeling him away in spirals of blood.

Toller banked the fighter away from the corpse and was about to enter the main battle again when, belatedly, his memory of the odd-looking circular clouds began to trouble him. He flew well clear of the column of turmoil and studied the sky below its base. The clouds were still there and now there were more of them. It took Toller several seconds to realise that he was looking at the exhaust plumes of skyships—seen from "below" their gondolas. Pilots in the lower echelons had inverted their ships and were fleeing the scene of destruction upside down. It was something no commander liked to do, because when the thrust of an engine was augmented by gravity a ship could quickly exceed its design speed and tear itself apart, but for the Landers the risk was an acceptable one in the circumstances.

Toller's first impulse was to reverse his original battle plan and go after the most distant of the enemy ships, but an inner voice sounded a warning. In the heat of combat he had lost track of time, and his fighters had been burning crystals at a prodigious rate all the while. He pumped up the pneumatic reservoir of his fuel feed and knew from the number of strokes required that the amount of solid material within the system had been greatly depleted. Looking up towards where the battle had begun he saw that the earliest condensation trails had faded. The squadron's home base was totally invisible, concealed somewhere in the trackless immensities of the space between the worlds, and finding it could be a lengthy job which would require ample reserves of power.

He ignited one of his remaining arrows and slowly waved it above his head. During the next few minutes the other pilots, recognising the signal, detached themselves from the ferment of smoke and cloud to join him. Most of them were intoxicated with excitement and were loudly exchanging stories of daring and triumph. Legends had been born, Toller knew, and were already acquiring the embellishments which would be further elaborated upon in the taverns of Prad. Berise Narrinder was one of the last to arrive, and there was a cheer when it was seen that she had managed to put a line around Perobane's crippled machine and had it in tow.

When it was apparent that disengagement had been completed, Toller counted the fighters and was disturbed to find there were only twenty-five, including the one Berise had salvaged. He ordered a squadron by squadron check, and there was a lull in the hubbub of talk as it was realised that Green Three, which had been flown by Wans Mokerat, was missing. At some point in the whirling turmoil of the battle Mokerat had met his fate, unobserved by any of his comrades, and had disappeared completely, perhaps engulfed by a burning skyship.

The sobering effect of the discovery was as brief as Toller had expected, with the noise level among the other fliers quickly swelling to what it had been. He knew the youngsters were not heartless by nature—it was simply that, although physically unscathed, they too had become victims of war.
The same thing must have happened to me long ago,
he thought,
but without my understanding. And only recently has it been revealed to me what I am—a fleshly automaton whose essential hollowness renders him incapable of sustaining warmth or joy.

Directly ahead of him, but a considerable distance away, was the gondola of a ruined skyship. Its occupants had successfully cast adrift all remnants of their burning balloon, which now hovered above and around them in great flakes of grey ash. The gondola and the fighter squadrons remained in fixed relative positions, because all were falling at the same speed.

Again Toller wondered if the Lander soldiers fully understood that their rate of descent, although insensible at this stage, would show an inexorable increase which would guarantee their deaths. Some of the soldiers were still firing their muskets in spite of the fact that the fighters were out of range, and—in one of the flukes which so often occur in seeming defiance of probability—a bullet came slowly tumbling towards Toller and came to rest within arm's length.

He plucked it out of the air and saw that it was a stubby cylinder of brakka wood. He put it away in a pocket, feeling a strange affinity with the alien marksman.
From one dead man to another,
he thought.

"We have done enough for this day," he shouted, raising his gloved hand. "Now let us find our way home!"

At the sound of the wagon approaching Bartan Drumme stood up and went to the mirror which hung on the kitchen wall. It felt odd for him not to be dressed in work clothes, and even the face which regarded him from the glass seemed unfamiliar. The boyish, humorous look—which had once earned him the farmers' mistrust—was no longer present, and instead there were the hard, sun-darkened features of a man who was no stranger to solitude, sorrow and relentless toil. He smoothed down his black hair, adjusted the collar of his shirt and went to the farmhouse door.

The Phorateres' wagon was drawing to a halt outside, amid much snorting from an elderly bluehorn which was sweating after the journey in the midday sun. Harro and Ennda waved and called a greeting to Bartan. They had actively befriended him since the grim incident at their farm, and it had been at Ennda's insistence that he had agreed to take some hours off and go into New Minnett to relax. He assisted her down from the tall vehicle and, while Harro was leading the bluehorn to the water trough, slowly walked with her to the house.

"What a handsome young toff you look today," she said, a smile erasing the look of tiredness on her face.