Land and Overland - Omnibus (89 page)

It was ironic that only minutes earlier he had been privately bemoaning the humdrum nature of interplanetary flight, but if there were to be dangers he wanted them to be of a type which could be challenged and overcome. There was precious little glory to be wrung from casual extermination by a blind instrument of nature, a commonplace fragment of rock speeding through the void from…

Toller raised his head, directing his gaze to the south-east, to the part of the sky where the meteor must have originated, and was intrigued when he picked out what looked like a tiny cloud of golden fireflies. The cloud was roughly circular and was expanding rapidly, its individual components brightening with each passing second. He stared at it, bemused, unable to recall having seen anything similar amid the sky's sparkling treasures, and then—like the abrupt clarification of an image in an optical system—his sense of scale and perspective returned, and there came a terrible realization.

He was looking at a swarm of meteors which appeared to be heading directly towards the fleet!

His understanding of the spectacle transformed it, seeming to increase the tempo of events. The shower opened radially like a carnivorous blossom, silently encompassing his field of vision, and he knew then that it could be hundreds of miles across. Unable to move or even to cry out, he gripped the ship's rail and watched the blazing entities fan ever outwards, racing towards the peripheries of his vision, still in utter silence despite the awesome energies being expended.

I'm safe,
Toller told himself.
I'm safe for the simple reason that I'm too small a prey for these fire-monsters. Even the ships are too small…

But something new was happening. A radical change was taking place. The obsidian horsemen from the far side of the cosmos, who had pursued their courses through total vacuum for millions of years, had at last encountered a denser medium, and they were destroying themselves against barriers of air, the gaseous fortifications which protected the twin planets from cosmic intruders.

Favourable though the encounter was for any creature living on the surface of Land or Overland, it boded ill for travellers taken by surprise at the narrowest point of the bridge of air between the two worlds. The meteors, racked by intolerable stresses, began to explode, and as they shattered into thousands of diverging splinters they were bound to become less discriminatory in their choice of targets.

Toller flinched as, with a wash of light and overlapping peals of thunder, the disintegrating meteors momentarily filled the whole sky. Suddenly they were behind him. He turned and saw the entire phenomenon in reverse, the great disk of radiance contracting as it raced into the remoteness of space. The main difference in its appearance was that there was less corpuscularity—the circle was a nearly uniform area of swirling flame. On leaving the last tenuous fringes of the twin worlds' atmosphere, the fiery bullets were deprived of fuel and quickly faded from sight. A numb silence engulfed the tower of ships.

How did we survive?
Toller thought.
How in the name of…?

He became aware of shouting from somewhere not far above him. There came a blurry explosion, typical of the pikon-halvell reaction, and he knew that at least one of the ships had been less fortunate than his own.

"Put us on our side," he shouted to Lieutenant Correvalte, who was frozen at the control station. Toller clung to the rail, impatiently straining to see upwards past the curvatures of the balloon, while Correvalte began the regulated intermittent firing of one of the lateral jets.

A few seconds later Toller's eyes were greeted by the bizarre spectacle of a bluehorn drifting downwards in the sunlit air, against the background of daytime stars. The explosion must have hurled it clear of the gondola in which it was being transported. It was barking in terror and lashing out with hoofed feet as it imperceptibly fell towards Land.

Toller turned his attention to the stricken ship, now coming into view. Its balloon had been reduced to a formless canopy of fabric panels. All four sides of the gondola had been blasted away from the base, and were still spinning slowly as part of an irregular ring which was made up of the figures of men, boxes of stores, coils of rope and general debris. Here and there among the floating confusion were flashes and fizzlings which emitted billows of white condensation as small quantities of pikon and halvell encountered each other and, not being confined, burned harmlessly against the pastel background of Overland.

Crew members from the other three ships of the same echelon were already launching themselves out from the sides of their vessels to begin rescue work. Toller scanned the struggling human figures which were part of the central chaos, and felt a pang of relief as he reached the unexpected conclusion that none of them was dead. He guessed that the gondola had received a glancing blow from a tiny meteor fragment and had turned on its side, thereby causing some of the green and purple power crystals to mingle and ignite, perhaps in the engine hoppers.

"Are we under attack? Are we to die?" The quavering words came from Commissioner Kettoran, his long pale face appearing at the door of the cabin.

Toller was about to explain what had happened when he noticed a movement at the rail of Vantara's ship. She had come to the side, accompanied by the smaller and less impressive figure of the lieutenant who had been with her at the time of their inauspicious meeting. Even at a distance the sight of the princess was enough to disturb Toller's composure. He saw that Vantara and her officer seemed to be concentrating their attention on the still-struggling bluehorn. The animal had lost all the momentum imparted to it by the explosion, and was apparently in a fixed position roughly midway between Vantara's ship and Toller's.

He knew, however, that the permanence of the spatial relationship was an illusion. The bluehorn and the ships were all in the grip of Land's gravity, and all were falling towards the surface thousands of miles below. The all-important difference was that the ships were receiving some degree of support from their hot air balloons, whereas the bluehorn was falling freely. This close to the weightless zone the discrepancy in speeds was hard to detect, but it was there nevertheless, and in accordance with the laws of physics was steadily increasing. Unless corrective action was taken quite quickly the bluehorn—a valuable animal—would be condemned to that fatal plunge, lasting more than a day and a night, which every skyman had experienced in bad dreams.

Vantara and the lieutenant, whose name Toller had forgotten, were busy with their hands and within seconds he realized why. They propelled themselves over the rail with weightless ease, and he saw they had donned their personal flight packs. The units, powered by miglign gas, were a far cry from the old pneumatic systems hastily invented at the time of the interplanetary war, but in spite of their advanced design they were tricky enough for the unpracticed operator.

Evidence of that fact came almost immediately when Vantara, failing to keep the thrust in line with her centre of gravity, went into a slow tumble and had to be righted and steadied by her companion. It occurred to Toller at once that the two women, obviously intent on retrieving the bluehorn, could be getting themselves into real danger. The terrified beast was still lashing out with its plate-sized hooves, one blow from which would be sufficient to pulp a human skull.

"We had a close call," he shouted over his shoulder to Kettoran as he snatched a flight unit from a nearby rack. "Ask Correvalte about it!"

He went over the rail and sprang out into the sunlit air with the unit still in his hand. The twin worlds with all their intricate detail filled most of the sky on each side of him, and the space between was largely occupied by ranks of bulbous ships, plus wreaths of smoke and condensation through which miniature humanoid figures could be seen going about their enigmatic errands. Daytime stars and the brightest of the nebulae and comets effectively completed a full sphere of visual phenomena.

Toller, who had made a point of mastering the standard flight unit, used his drift time to strap the pack securely around his torso. He brought himself into a good alignment and fired a long burst which took him directly towards the bluehorn. The fierce chill of the mid world region, enhanced by slipstream, clawed at his eyes and mouth.

Vantara and her lieutenant were now close to the bluehorn, which was still barking and crowing in terror. They edged nearer to it and were beginning to uncoil the rope they had brought when Toller used his retro jet to bring himself to a halt close by. It was a long time since he had been within speaking distance of Vantara, and—in spite of the bizarre circumstances—he felt a tingling awareness of her physical presence. The very molecules of his body seemed to be reacting to an invisible aura which surrounded her. Her oval face, partially shaded by the cowl of her skysuit, was as lovely as he remembered it—enigmatic, utterly feminine, unnerving in its perfection.

"Why can't we meet in ordinary places, the way other people do?" Toller said.

The countess eyed him briefly, turned away with no change of expression and spoke to her lieutenant. "We'll bind the back legs first—it would be easier that way."

"I would like to try calming the beast down first," the lieutenant replied. "It's too risky to go behind it while it's so fretful."

"Nonsense!" Vantara spoke with the brisk confidence of one who had had extensive stables at her disposal since childhood. Forming a wide noose with the rope, she sailed closer to the bluehorn on a plume of miglign condensation. Toller was about to call out a warning when the animal, which was continually twisting its head around and had a full view of its surroundings, struck out with both hind legs. One of its enormous hooves grazed Vantara's hip, catching the material of her suit without impacting on her body. The imparted force put her into a spin which was checked almost at once by the cold-stiffened rope she was still holding. Had the bluehorn's hoof connected with her pelvis she would have been seriously injured, and it was apparent that she understood the fact because her face was pale when she regained a stable attitude.

"Why did you pull on the line?" she demanded of her lieutenant, her voice stinging with anger. "You drew me in! I could have been killed!"

The lieutenant's jaw sagged and she shot a scandalized glance at Toller, tacitly enlisting him as a witness. "My lady, I did no such—"

"Don't argue, lieutenant."

"I
said
we should calm the beast down before—"

"Let's not set up a court of enquiry," Vantara interrupted, her breath forming white wreaths of condensation in front of her face. "If you have suddenly become expert in animal husbandry you may retrieve this foul-tempered sack of bones. It's of pretty poor stock, anyway." She twisted in the air and propelled herself back towards her ship.

The lieutenant watched her depart, then looked at Toller, an unexpected smile plumping her already rounded cheeks. "The theory is that if this poor dumb creature had good breeding it would have known not to kick a member of the royal family."

Toller felt that the levity was misplaced. "The countess had a narrow escape."

"The countess brings these things down on herself," the lieutenant said. "The reason she took it on herself to retrieve the bluehorn—rather than leave the job to common hands—was that she wanted to demonstrate her natural control over bloodstock. She firmly believes in all the aristocracy's most cherished myths—that their males are born with an instinctive mastery of generalship; that the females are gifted in every branch of the arts and—"

"Lieutenant!" Toller's annoyance had been growing throughout the discourse and suddenly could no longer be contained. "How dare you speak thuswise to me about a superior officer! Don't you realize I could have you severely punished for that kind of talk?"

The lieutenant's eyes widened in surprise, then her expression became one of disappointment and resignation. "Not you, too. Not another one!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Every man who meets her…" The lieutenant paused, shaking her head. "I would have thought that after that business of the collision report… Do you know that the beautiful Countess Vantara did her utmost to have you deprived of your command?"

"Do you know that you are supposed to use the proper form of address when speaking to a senior officer?" Toller was vaguely aware that there was something ludicrous about his manner—especially when the two of them were poised in blue emptiness between the swirled disks of planets—but he was unable to listen passively while Vantara was subjected to such acidulous criticism.

"I'm sorry, sir." The lieutenant's face had lost all expression and her voice was neutral. "Do you want me to see what I can do about the bluehorn?"

"What's your name, anyway?"

"Jerene Pertree, sir."

Toller now felt pompous, but could see no way out of the web he had woven around himself. "There's no scarcity of experienced handlers on this flight—are you sure you won't get yourself sent flying?"

"I grew up on a farm, sir." Jerene opened the valve of her propulsion unit a short distance, producing just enough thrust to drift her towards the bluehorn's head. The animal's bulging eyes rolled as she drew near and shining strands of saliva gathered in the air around its mouth. Toller felt a stab of concern—those massive jaws could easily rend human flesh beneath the stoutest garment—but Jerene was making gentle, wordless sounds which seemed to have an immediate soothing effect on the bluehorn. She slipped one arm around its neck and began stroking the animal's brow with her free hand. It submitted to her touch, visibly becoming docile, and in a few seconds she was able to slide its eyelids down over the staring amber eyes. Jerene nodded towards Toller, signalling for him to come in with the rope.

He jetted forward, bound the bluehorn's back feet together, paid out a short length of line and repeated the process with the forelegs. He was not accustomed to that kind of work, and all the while was half-expecting a violent response from the captive animal, but it allowed him to complete the operation without mishap.