by Guy Haley
This was unkind. Kasia did not share Sand’s antagonism to authority, and worked well as an intermediary between the council and the chief pilot when Sand’s temper got the better of her. But for those few days before the Mark IV plane was cleared for regular flight, she became more like her guardian, and there were those who feared she would turn viper-tongued permanently. There was general relief when Kasia returned to her normal, thoughtful self, once the Mark IV was ready for regular use.
Sand didn’t give a damn for what others thought. She laughed at Kasia’s pleading to be allowed to fly the IV, although not unkindly. She kept her disappointment from Kasia, and most of her fear for her safety. No point making the girl terrified, she thought, resolving to train her as well as she could. Sand figured she could go one of two ways with her protégée: keep her from harm, or train her to minimise it. She opted for the latter. Sand was delighted how much Kasia loved flying, and was keen to goad her to greater need. In short, Sand was lonely, even if she did not realise it, and was happy to see Kasia, who she already regarded as a daughter, growing into a kindred spirit.
Once Kasia’s flying lessons in the heavier plane commenced, their bond as airwomen grew. Kasia was an avid student. The two of them flew as often as time, weather and fuel allowed, and when they could not, Kasia studied. In the meantime, work commenced on the Mark V, the heaviest aircraft yet, and closest to a true terran aeroplane. It was to have a co-pilot station, an enclosed cockpit, and a separate gun turret, for away from the radar noise of First Landing, the wildlife remained a problem.
The Mark V aeroplanes were delayed, three months became four. Despite her desire to train her students, Sand got cold feet, and when the planes were ready, she protested that Kasia and Piotr were not. They flew endless sorties in the new aeroplanes, practising the refuelling manoeuvre over and over until even the most risk averse among them could see planes and pilots were ready.
The council grew impatient. Kasia grew impatient. They argued. Eventually, Sand relented.
“There’s one more thing we have to do,” she said to Kasia. “We have to fly into the weather front and back out again. I want to see you do it.”
They set out into the gathering night, the sun at their backs. The plane was performing well. It was strong, Sand told herself: woven skeleton, woven wings, proper technology. They were going to need it. When the Lublin had blasted through the Veil of Storms that marked the terminator, she’d barely noticed it. This would be different.
The scrub changed to glossy grassland, the near-black grass rippling in the breeze, accentuating Evening Country’s dreamlike quality as they passed into Twilight. The rain fell more frequently here, so close to the storm band. It pattered on the cockpit.
“Kasia,” Sand said. Her apprentice was concentrating, but there was an ease to her flying that impressed her. Her heart swelled with pride and affection for her charge. “Be careful, here, okay? I’ve no idea how big this storm is, and I don’t know how powerful it is.”
Kasia adjusted her trim, checked the instruments. She shot Sand a reassuring smile. “We’ll be okay.”
“I have to grab that stick just once, you’re not going, do you understand?”
Kasia nodded. “You won’t have to.”
Darkness pulled itself in on them quickly. The boiling clouds of the storm belt sucked the vestiges of Evening Country’s wine-gold sunlight from the sky. They were in Twilight, and the ramparts of True Night were ahead of them, sinister as nightmare. Lightning lit up the rolling curves of the clouds from within, or stabbed down in rod-straight lines. The hot air of the dayside, laden with moisture from the sea, ran into the cold air of the nightside. There was little Coriolis effect on the tidally locked planet; strong winds blew from high to low pressure in straight lines. They pushed at the plane, hurrying it on to the stormfront.
“Be careful, honey, okay?”
Kasia did not respond, but accelerated.
The dividing line between storm and calm was as pronounced as the line between night and day. The Veil of Storms remained roughly in the same place all year round, only moving during the erratic rainy seasons. It was like flying into a wall.
The plane lurched immediately, bouncing through air cells of differing temperature and speed. Kasia fought the stick to bring it back into line. Rain hammered off their cockpit roof, streaking the windshield. Thunder boomed nearby. Spears of lightning stabbed past them. Electricity coursed over the plane’s fuselage, dissipating from the five static wicks affixed to the bottom. “Don’t worry about the lightning too much,” Sand said. “Concentrate on staying level. Airflow’s going to be chaotic, all over the place in here. Stay level!”
Kasia and Sand used the artificial horizon, as it was impossible to get a visual bearing. The plane dropped and bucked, thrown up almost as quickly as it went down. Kasia wrestled with the stick.
“Don’t fight it too hard!” said Sand. “If you overcompensate you’ll lose control. Hold it gently. Respond, don’t anticipate.”
The whine of the twin props’ engines rose and fell as the plane’s airspeed shifted unexpectedly. Sand glanced at the stick. Her hand twitched toward it more than once. She hated being a passenger, hated not being in control. She had no influence over her own fate this way, she was in another’s hands.
Forty minutes the tossing went on, before suddenly it ceased and the plane levelled out. The engines stopped complaining. One final bump that made them both gasp, and they were clear. Fog carpeted the ground below them.
“Holy fuck,” said Sand. Kasia crossed herself. Sand laughed and let go of the edge of her seat. She hadn’t realised she’d been gripping it. “That was one hell of a ride. Well done, Kash, well done. What’s the fuel situation?”
Kasia glanced at the gauge. “Two-thirds full.”
“Not bad, we can count on another four hundred kilometres with the buddy plane before they have to turn round. Better range than I expected. It’ll get you most of the way there.” Sand patted the inside of the cockpit. “Not a bad little flier. You too, Kasia.” She frowned.
“What? I thought I did well.”
“You did.”
“Then why do you look so worried?”
“Because you’re ready. I’m going to have to let you make the trip. I’ve delayed enough. And I don’t want you to go. Once Piotrek’s shown he can do the same thing, that’s it. You’re going.”
Kasia yanked the stick over and sent the plane into a wide bank.
“Don’t get too mushy, Sand,” said Kasia. “I have to get us back through the storm first.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Into the Night
FOUR DAYS BEFORE the aerial expedition into the nightside, a small convoy of militia and fuel trucks crossed the river and headed north, towing a bulldozer on a flatbed behind them. Sand, Kasia, Piotr and the other pilots spent the next few days in preparation, checking and rechecking the planes. Their conversation stuck rigidly to the matters at hand, except for now and then, when Sand or Kasia would remember something funny, and they would laugh. But the task ahead was sobering in its immensity – their shared recollections only made it seem more so – and for the most part they worked in professional silence.
The majority of the town’s inhabitants turned out and came down to the landing field to see them off. Amir made a speech, his thinning hair and council tabard flapping ridiculously in the wind. Dust was getting in all their eyes.
Sand paid little attention to his words. Instead, she cast her eyes over the airfield. Seven aircraft now sat in their reinforced hangars. The doors were open, and other members of Sand’s coterie of pilots and engineers leaned against the craft, watching the departure. Her daughter was there, watching calmly from the arms of Gosia, the traffic control girl. She was untroubled by the affair. The hangar was her home, the engineers her family, and she was independent as her mother already.
The wall to Airtown bounded the edge nearest to First Landing; a long chain link fence and ditch su
rrounded the rest. The shuttles, useless, squatted like bad memories at the far end of the runway. The airfield had grown. The whole place had. It looked like a proper town now, she thought.
First Landing was a prison to Sand. They were not so much keeping the wildlife out as keeping themselves in. Only her planes set her free. A shudder ran through her, the aftershocks of tension draining away. She had been tense for a long time, before the planes had been built, and then when Kasia had been chosen to go. The expedition aircraft were proper machines, worthy machines for her apprentice. Her young daughter cheerfully waved from the hangar; she waved back, and her heart twinged. She glanced at Kasia. Her hand strayed to her stomach. She was leaving her daughter behind. Amir was right, it didn’t feel right. But nor did letting Kasia go.
“And on this historic occasion...” Amir droned. Sand figured he lacked a podium. He certainly looked like he wanted one. Pompous was one word Sand used for him; the rest were less kind.
There were seven aeronauts. Kasia, of course; Piotr, who would pilot the refuelling plane; Marcin and Malgorzata, their co-pilots; then Günther Plock and a Dutch girl named Kim, who would man the rear gun mounts. Sand had argued and argued with the council until they’d relented and allowed her to go to the temporary airstrip, outside the Veil of Storms. Plock was going through, as gunner on the fuel plane, despite Amir’s great protest. He’d threatened to resign from the council if he wasn’t allowed along. Sand had tried the same trick, but had been voted down. Plock was either more persistent, or Amir didn’t feel he was irreplaceable.
The twin mounted machine guns poked out from a clear shield behind the cockpit. They had little idea what was on the nightside, heavy calibre guns seemed an appropriate precaution. Sand had insisted the planes also carry a weaponised EM deterrent, just in case. This had sparked some talk of using Anderson’s technology on the ground again, but the background emissions of the town kept most of the lifeforms away anyway, and so reinstating the radar fence was not a popular idea.
Amir finished his speech with a dry platitude. The crowd applauded with sincerity. All we need is a fucking brass band, Sand thought.
Kasia said thank you, and promised to do her best. The crowd cheered again.
“Right,” said Sand irritably. “Let’s get going.”
They clambered into the airplanes. Kasia and Sand sat up front in theirs, Marcin taking a backseat for the trip to the temporary airfield.
They started their engines. Talk went back and forth with traffic control. The crowd retreated. The planes taxied out onto the runway, Piotr behind Kasia, twin propellers dragging corkscrews of dust from the runway. With admirable skill, the two young pilots took them into the sky. They cleared the virgin fields and firing zone around the mesas fast, the circle of scraped earth ending in a line as severe as the terminator. First Landing fell away behind them, untamed scrub rushed by below. Night beckoned.
They flew a straight course through empty skies. The wind was strong, but behind them as always, and so they went quickly. Sand barely paid attention to Kasia’s flying any more. She stared out of the window instead, watching the procession of bushes and low trees whisk by, their shadows long on the ground. Vegetation thickened. A family of the ruminants they called heavy feet walked below. Spines on their backs waved in stately manner from side to side as they plodded through the thorns, heads down. They did not look up at the sky as the planes passed.
Sand saw the broken mound of the natives’ home, still fire-blackened from the purging. She felt ashamed looking at it. They had encountered no other natives, and she was dogged by the idea they’d wiped out the planet’s only indigenous intelligent life almost without thought. She wondered too what would have happened had they not found the machinery within. Would Dariusz still be with her?
She took off her headphones and rested her head on the cockpit plastic. She didn’t like to think about that; she had never organised her feelings for him satisfactorily, and bearing his child only made it more confusing.
The buzz of the engines lulled her to sleep. She did not wake again until they were coming in to land at the temporary airstrip near to the Veil of Storms.
SAND SLEPT BADLY that night. She left the tent where Kasia slept and paced the inner perimeter of the camp until she was sent back to her tent by the militia. “It’s not safe,” they said. “Please return to your tent, ma’am.”
She was about to protest, but then figured they had enough on their hands patrolling the camp without having her to worry about.
The landing field was flat. That was all that recommended it as a landing field. Thick, tubular grass covered the land around it, so dark with photosynthetic compounds as to be almost black, and tough enough to foul landing gear. The sun was a hint, a pale glow to the south. This was Twilight Country. To the north was only the night, and the storm that was its teeth.
Sand tugged at the tube grasses. On the strip, the preparation crew had burned them back, then bulldozed them so the planes could operate. It was an ugly stripe of earth, made uglier by the harsh white of the spotlights trained upon it. Humanity wounds the land wherever it goes, she thought. After a couple of years here, she was beginning to understand how the Earth might once have been, and what it had lost in bearing its children.
Children. Her daughter, Dariusz’s daughter, had brought her much joy and much heartache. Once she had thought there was a great mystery to parenthood. Having her own had only confirmed that there was. She still didn’t have a clue, only now she understood the big secret: nobody else did either.
She twisted a grass stalk hard, idly seeing if she could break it. She couldn’t. She looked at the row of tents, black against the pale southern heavens, the trucks parked neatly behind them. Things moved out there, things with their own lights blinking. They kept away.
She watched the animals of the twilight move around the camp, their lightshows blazing, and came to a decision. She acted without a moment’s hesitation, never one for reflection.
She went to Piotr’s tent and woke him up. She felt bad disappointing the kid, but it had to be done; for her own peace of mind, if nothing else.
FIRST THING IN the morning, Kasia went to check on the filling of the refuelling plane’s tanks. Men and women bustled about the aircraft, thick pipes leading from the tankers they had driven to the plane.
Piotr stood to one side, sullen but uncomplaining.
“Piotr?” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m supposed to be ill,” he said.
“Supposed to be?”
“Sand,” he said. He shrugged.
Plock laid a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, little man, she does it because she cares. You’re a good pilot, from what I hear, you’ll get your moment.”
“You know about this?”
Plock shrugged. “You can’t tell me you’re surprised.”
Kasia went off to find the pilot. She found her in their tent, suiting up.
“What are you doing?” said Kasia. “Sand!”
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
“But the council... It’s too dangerous, Sand, please!”
Sand tugged hard at the fastening on her clothes. The days of automatically sealing clothes were long behind them. “Fuck the council, and fuck the danger. I can’t let you go alone.”
“Sand –”
“Leave it, honey.” Sand walked up to Kasia and put her hand to the girl’s cheek. Her voice hushed. “I can’t let my baby girl go through the storm alone.”
“I’m not your baby girl,” said Kasia. “She’s at home.” She said it very quietly; it was a fact, but not an emotional truth. She pressed her face into the older woman’s hand.
“Yes, you are.” Sand smiled sadly. “I wish it were me going instead, honey, but it isn’t, it’s you. I suppose you deserve it; it’s a big adventure, the kind of thing that made me want to be a spacer in the first place, the kind of thing that makes you want to fly. I’ll come through the storm, refuel you,
just to make sure you get through okay. Then I’m going to wait right here until you come back.”
Kasia nodded, her eyes closed; Sand withdrew her hand.
“Hey! You, Ayvazian is it? I’m stepping in as second pilot. The boy Piotr is feeling ill. Aren’t you Piotr...”
There was less ceremony at the makeshift landing field than there had been at First Landing. Breakfast. Little chat. A brief farewell, a message from Amir. Sand gave Ayvazian the darkest look she could muster when he suggested informing Amir of the change in flight crew. The Veil of Storms oppressed them all. From time to time they heard the crack of its thunders, faint but threatening.
Kasia was glad to get into the plane. It responded well, lifting them up into the sky smoothly. Their camp dwindled below, becoming an oasis of light in the gloom until the curve of the world shut it off. The dark thickened with every metre until the last afterglow of the sun vanished below the horizon and they were at the very edge of True Night.
“Airspeed 130kph,” said Marcin. His voice was broken and high-pitched through Kasia’s headphones. He held a map upon his knees. He gripped instruments in his hands; more hung from strings on his chest. The plane bounced. He looked up.
“It gets worse from here on in,” said Kasia.
The aeroplane jounced constantly, so hard it made her teeth clack. Lightning blasted at them every few seconds, so often she felt she was under fire. They were not hit. The planes were designed to be non-conducting, to deny a bridge between the electrons streaming up from the ground and the lightning’s leaders. The static they picked up bled away from the wicks under the plane. But it was frightening, and Kasia heard Kim exclaiming in fear over the radio.