Land and Overland - Omnibus

by Bob Shaw

  The gateway, as the bridge of breathable air came to be called, had a cross-sectional area of more than ten thousand square miles—and it was apparent that no achievable number of fortresses could bar it to intruders by gunnery alone.

  Once again it had been Zavotle, the dogged eroder of problems, who had come up with a solution.

  Inspired by the success of the personal flight units, he had proposed the simplest form of fighting craft possible—a jet tube which a man could sit astride as though he were on a bluehorn. Engines taken from ordinary airships would be about the right size, and when powered by pikon and halvell crystals would enable a warrior to range out many miles from his base. Zavotle's preliminary calculations, assuming an effective fighter radius of only twelve miles, showed that the entire area of the gateway could be covered by only twenty-five fortresses.

  Drifting in the soft confines of his sleep-net, Toller recalled the look of wonder and gratification on King Chakkell's face as he was given the unexpected good news. There was no doubt that he could have forced through the construction of the hundred fortresses originally envisaged, but the strain on material and human resources would have been severe. Chakkell had been faced by an additional problem in that a large proportion of his subjects were too young to have had any first-hand experience of the terrors of the pterthacosis plague and were not inclined to accept punishing work loads, especially in the cause of a war which seemed so unreal. The concept of the jet fighter craft had therefore been embraced by Chakkell with a boundless enthusiasm which had led to the completion of the first batch in the remarkably short time of five days, thanks to nature having done most of the construction work in advance.

  The jet engine was basically the lower part of the trunk of a young brakka tree, complete with the combustion chamber which had powered its pollination discharges. Pikon and halvell crystals were admitted to the chamber under pneumatic pressure, where they combined explosively to produce great quantities of miglign gas which was exhausted through the open end of the tube to drive the engine forward.

  To convert the basic engine into an operational craft, it had been given a full-length wooden cowl which made for the easy mounting of equipment. A saddle-type seat had been installed for the pilot, aft of which were pivoting control surfaces. They looked like stubby wings, but in the weightless condition their sole function was to control the direction of flight. The fighter's armament consisted of two small breech-loading cannon, fixed to the sides of the cowl, which could only be aimed by aligning the entire craft with the target.

  Toller, hovering between wakefulness and sleep, vividly remembered his first ride on one of the strange looking machines. The bulkiness of his skysuit had been augmented by his personal jet unit and parachute, and it had taken him some time to adapt to the seat and familiarise himself with the controls. Acutely aware of being watched by the skymen in and around Fortress One, he had pumped the pneumatic reservoir to maximum pressure, then had advanced the throttle lever. In spite of his having been modest with the power demand, he had been astonished by the surge of acceleration which had accompanied the roar of the exhaust. It had taken him perhaps three minutes, with an icy slipstream tearing at his face, to get the knack of keeping the fighter from doing a slow spiral as it howled through the sky. He had then shut down the engine, allowed air resistance to bring the craft to a halt and had turned in the saddle, laughing with acceleration rapture, to solicit the applause of his fellow pilots waiting by the fortress.

  And the fortress had not been there!

  That shock, that exquisite stab of pure panic, had been his introduction to the new physics of the jet fighter. It had taken him many seconds to locate and recognise the fortress as a tiny mote of hard light, almost lost in the silver-speckled blue of the universe, and to realise that he had been travelling at a speed previously undreamt of by man.

  The nine fighters of Red Squadron were ranged line abreast, their upper surfaces gleaming in the sunlight. A short distance above them was what had been the first fortress, recently extended by the addition of three new sections to make it a command station. Other fortresses comprising the Inner Defence Group were positioned nearby, but they were insignificant objects, hard to see in the deep blue even though reflectors had been added to increase their visibility. Overland, flanked by the sun, was a fire-edged roof for the universe, and the vastness of Land made a circular floor, blue and green dusted with ochre, scrolled with white.

  The other object of significance for the fighter pilots was the target ship. Although it was more than a mile away from them the hugeness of the balloon made it an important feature of the celestial environment, one with the apparent solidity of a third planet. It had been positioned well outside the theoretical plane of weightlessness, in the direction of Land, so that cannon balls fired at it would be drawn down into Land's gravitational field. Of the two fatalities which had occurred thus far in training, one had been that of a young pilot who had been making a highspeed practice run when he had been swept off his machine by a cannon ball which had hit him squarely in the chest. At first it was thought that he had been accidentally shot by another flier, then had come the realisation that the two-inch iron ball had been hanging almost motionless in the air, a deadly residue from an earlier practice firing. To prevent similar incidents, Toller had issued a general order that cannon could only be discharged when angled towards Land.

  He was sitting astride his fighter, Red One, watching the target ship through binoculars and waiting for the pilot who had positioned it to return to safety. More than forty days had passed since the arrival of the first two fortresses in the weightless zone, and still there was no sign of a Lander invasion fleet. In some quarters there were rising hopes that King Chakkell's prognosis had been wrong, but Toller and Zavotle refused to be complacent. They had decided to use the strategic leeway to maximum advantage, and to that end were prepared to have a skyship whose balloon was nearing the end of its useful life sacrificed as a target.

  The magnified image in Toller's binoculars showed the pilot leaving the skyship's gondola and bestriding a tethered fighter belonging to the as yet incomplete Blue Squadron. The pilot cast off, his craft surged away on a white plume of condensation, and seconds later came the powdery boom of his engine. He swept the fighter into an upward curve and disappeared in the radiant needle-spray of light emanating from the sun.

  "Go in without delay," Toller shouted, gesturing to Gol Perobane, pilot of the furthermost left in the line of fighters. Perobane saluted and drove his machine forward, the roar of his exhaust swelling as it engulfed the remaining craft. His fighter swiftly shrank in apparent size, swooping down on the doomed skyship, and as he was flaring out of the curve both of his cannon streamed vapour. Toller, following the action with his binoculars, judged that Perobane had fired at exactly the right moment. He turned his attention to the balloon, expecting to see it quake and deform, and was disappointed when the serene curvatures appeared to be unaffected.

  How can he have missed? he thought, giving the signal for the next fighter in line to blast off.

  It was not until the fourth machine, flown by Berise Narrinder, had completed its ineffectual attack that he called a halt to the exercise. He blew crystals into his own engine and flew down to the target ship, cutting the power off early so that air resistance would bring him to a halt close to the huge balloon. At short range he was able to discern several holes in the varnished linen envelope, but they were surprisingly small—almost as if the material had partially healed its wounds—and were far short of the catastrophic damage the cannon should have inflicted. The balloon was beginning to show some slight wrinkling and slackness, but Toller attributed it to natural loss of heat as much as to the insignificant punctures. It was apparent to him that the skyship retained the capability of making a safe descent to ground level.

  "Does this mean we have to start firing at the gondolas?" said Umol, drifting into position beside him on Red Two. His chest was visibly labo
uring to deal with the rarefied air.

  Toller shook his head. "If we attack the gondolas we expose ourselves to return fire. We must attack from above, staying within the enemy's blind arc, and destroy his balloons with … with…" He paused, striving to visualise the weapon his fliers needed, and at that moment a large meteor struck across the sky far below them, briefly illuminating the scene from underneath.

  "With something like that," Umol said, pulling down his scarf to unveil a smile.

  "That is somewhat beyond our capabilities, but…" Toller paused again to let the meteor's tardy thunderclap roll by them. "But your thoughts fly in the right direction, old friend! Have somebody go back on board the ship and put heat into the balloon. Keep everything as it is until I return."

  He placed his foot on the side of Umol's fighter, which had been nuzzling up to his own machine in stray air currents, and pushed hard. The two machines parted with a lazy wallowing action. Toller advanced his throttle lever, using an extreme sensitivity of touch developed since his first flight, and the fighter growled its way forward to pass within a few yards of the target balloon. As soon as he had gained enough speed to render the control surfaces effective he brought the nose up and around, and made a soaring return to the command station.

  The weapon he brought back a short time later was a simple iron spike with a bundle of oil-soaked oakum bound to the blunt end. He ignited it by means of a phosphor wick and, whirling the spike to feed the flame, put the fighter into a shallow dive which took it close to the balloon's upper hemisphere. When he hurled the spike it flew down cleanly, with the stability of a dart, and sank its full length into the yielding material of the envelope. The varnished linen caught fire at once, producing a thick brownish smoke, and by the time Toller had come to a halt a sizeable area of the crown was alight. In less than a minute the balloon was beginning to fold in on itself, pulsing and losing symmetry, while the watching pilots shouted their approval. Without convection currents to bear it away, the smoke gathered around the stricken skyship in a strangely localised cloud.

  Toller rejoined the group of fighters. The line was uneven, with no two machines parallel to each other or sharing the same up-down orientation, but that was something he had learned to accept. Unless the fighters were on the move there was little the pilots could do to control them, and several of the gifted youngsters—the ones who were already at home with the new form of flying—seemed to get a mischievous pleasure from conducting conversations with him in mutually inverted positions. Toller made no attempt to curb their high spirits—he had already decided that when war came the best fighting pilots would be those who were least shackled by traditional military customs and outlook.

  "As we have just seen," he shouted, "fire is a good weapon to use against a balloon, but that was all too easy for me. I was able to go in very close, and at low speed, because there were no defenders on the ship and no enemy ships nearby trying to wing me. The low speed meant that I was able to stay in the ship's blind arc during the whole attack, but in battle things are likely to be very different. Most attacking dives will probably have to be conducted at high speed—which means you will not be able to pull out so quickly and will sink into the defenders' arc of fire. You are going to be very vulnerable at that stage—especially if the Landers have developed instant-fire cannon, like their muskets."

  Perobane pulled down his scarf. "But it will only be for a few seconds if we're moving fast." He winked at the nearest pilots. "And I can assure you that I'll be moving very fast."

  "Yes, but you might be heading straight towards another ship," Toller said, quelling some laughter.

  Berise Narrinder signalled that she wanted to speak. "My lord, how about bows and arrows? Fire arrows, I mean. Wouldn't an archer be able to flare out of a dive much earlier and stay out of danger?"

  "Yes, but…" Toller paused, realising that his objection had been a reflexive one based on the fact that he personally had never taken to the bow as a weapon. The proposal was sound, especially if the arrows were given fish-hook warheads which would trap them in the balloon material. And even a mediocre airborne archer—as he suspected he was likely to be—should find little difficulty in hitting a target as large as a skyship's balloon.

  "But what, my lord?" Berise said, raising herself up on her footrests, encouraged by the other pilots' evident approval for her suggestion.

  Toller smiled at her. "But would it be fair to the enemy? Armed with bows and fire arrows we would be able to shoot them out of the sky with the ease of a child bursting soap bubbles. It goes against all my sporting instincts to adopt such a…" His words were drowned out in a general shout of laughter from the line of pilots.

  Toller bowed slightly towards Berise then turned away, not begrudging the fliers their moment of jubilation. He was the only member of the company with first-hand experience of warfare, and he knew that—no matter how well things might go for the Overlanders—there were some present whose time for nonchalance, merriment and optimism was drawing to an end, whether they lived or died.

  At the midpoint between the two worlds the terms "night" and "littlenight" had lost their meaning. The diurnal cycle was divided into two equal spells of darkness of slightly less than four hours each, while the sun was being occulted by Land or Overland; and two daytime periods of just over eight hours. Toller had given up making any distinction between night and littlenight, foreday and aftday, being content to let time roll by him in an unremarkable sequence mileposted only by the fallbag returns to Overland. Especially when he was off duty, drowsing in his sleep net, there seemed no way to mark the passage of time but for the slow veering of the beams of sunlight from the portholes, and dreamy reprises became as real as life itself…

  The sound of an argument slowly drew Toller back to full consciousness.

  It was not uncommon to hear members of fortress crews in disagreement, but on this occasion there was a woman involved and Toller guessed it was Berise. For some reason he could not explain, he was interested in Berise Narrinder. There was no sexual element involved, of that much he was sure, because when Gesalla had made it clear that the intimate side of their marriage was over his capacity for physical passion had abruptly died. The process had been surprisingly quick and painless. He was a man who had no need for sex, who never thought of it or regretted its absence from his life, and yet he was aware of everything that Berise did. Without making any effort, he usually knew when her duty spells corresponded with his, where she was and what she was likely to be doing at any given moment.

  He opened his eyes and saw that she was on watch—an obligatory duty for all personnel—tethered close to one of the large fixed binoculars which were permanently aimed at Land. Beside her was the tall angular figure of Imps Carthvodeer, the Inner Defence Group administrator, who normally stayed behind a wicker screen at the far end of the command station, in a cramped room he liked to refer to as his office.

  "You can either draw pictures, or you can be on watch." Carthvodeer was saying peevishly. "You can't do two things at once."

  "You may not be able to do two things at once, but I find it very easy," Berise said, her accentuated eyebrows drawn together.

  "That's not what I mean." Carthvodeer's long face showed his frustration over the fact that although fighter pilots had the nominal rank of captain they were effectively senior to all non-combatants. "On watch duty you are supposed to concentrate all your attention on looking out for enemy ships."

  "When the enemy ships come—if they come—they will be visible for many hours in advance."

  "The point is that this is a military installation and has to be run on military lines. You are not being paid to draw pictures." Carthvodeer scowled at the rectangle of stiff paper in Berise's hand. "You don't even show artistic ability."

  "How would you know?" Berise said, becoming angry. Farther along the cluttered tunnel of the station the crewman on bellows shift snorted in amusement.

  "Why don't you two stop bickerin
g and let a man get some rest?" Toller put in mildly.

  Carthvodeer squirmed around in the air to face him. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you, sir. I have to prepare at least a dozen reports and requisitions in time to go down in the next fallbag, and I find it quite impossible to work and listen to the squeak-squeak-squeak of the captain's charcoal at the same time."

  Toller was surprised to note that Carthvodeer, a fifty-year-old officer, was pale with emotion over the trivial incident. "You go back into your office and continue with your reports," he said, unfastening his net. "You won't be further distracted."

  Carthvodeer, lips quivering, nodded and propelled himself away with poorly co-ordinated movements. Toller launched into a lazy flight which ended when he grasped a handhold close to Berise. Her green eyes triangulated on him in calm defiance.

  "You and I are in a privileged position compared to a man like Carthvodeer," he said in a low voice.

  "In what respect, my lord?" Of all the fliers in his command she was the only one who continued to address him formally.

  "We wanted to come here. We leave the murky confines of these wooden boxes every day and fly through the air like eagles. This waiting and waiting is hard on all of us, but consider what it must be like for someone who had no wish to be here in the first place and who has no escape."

  "I didn't realise the charcoal was so noisy," Berise said. "I'll find a pencil and work with that—if you have no objection."

  "I don't mind at all. As you say, the Landers cannot take us by surprise." Toller craned his neck to see the drawing in Berise's hand. It showed the interior of the station in an atmospheric style, with strong emphasis on the parallel bars of sunlight slanting from the row of portholes. Human figures and machinery were suggested rather than detailed and in a manner Toller thought pleasing, although he was not qualified to judge the picture's merit.