Land and Overland - Omnibus

by Bob Shaw

  "Today we will smite the invader hard—harder than he can ever have dreamed of—but I will not countenance any losses on our side. Not a single pilot, not a single fighting machine! If you expend all your arrows do not be tempted to attack with your cannon. Retire at once from the battle and console yourself with the knowledge that you will be an even more skilful and more deadly opponent on a future occasion."

  Nattahial, the pilot of Blue Three, nodded and vapour wisped through his scarf. "Whatever you wish, sir."

  Toller shook his head. "Those are not my wishes—they are my direct orders. Any pilot I see behaving like an idiot will have me to answer to afterwards, and I can assure you that will be a more harrowing experience than facing a few scrawny Landers. Is that understood by all?"

  Several of the pilots nodded vigorously, perhaps too vigorously, and others chuckled. With few exceptions they were young volunteers from the Air Service. They had been adventure-hungry to begin with, and the boredom of the long wait for this day had turned them into overwound human springs. Toller genuinely wanted them to heed his warnings, but he knew from combat experience that a balance had to be struck between prudence and passion. A warrior with too great a commitment to self-preservation could be even more of a liability than a glory-hunting fool, and the minutes ahead were likely to reveal how many of each were in his command.

  "Is it your opinion," he asked, drawing his goggles down into place, "that I have devoted enough time to the making of speeches?"

  "Yes!" The loudness of the general assent briefly filled the sky.

  "In that case, let us go to war." Toller pulled his scarf up to cover his mouth and nostrils, and put the fighter into a curving dive which centred Land in his field of view. The sun was barely clear of the planet's rim, hurling billions of needles of light against him without creating any warmth. Amid a swelling roar of engine exhausts the other fighters took up their assigned positions, each squadron creating a V-shaped formation.

  Slightly behind Toller on the left, leading the Blues, was Maiter Daas, and on his right at the apex of the Green Squadron was Pargo Umol. He wondered what the two middle-aged men—veterans of the old Skyship Experimental Squadron and the Migration—felt as they dropped towards the planet of their birth in circumstances they could never have envisaged. Analysing his own emotions, he was again disturbed to find that he felt youthful, fulfilled, totally alive. Part of him longed to be at home with Gesalla, making amends for all the ways in which he had failed her, and yet within him was the knowledge that, given the impossible opportunity, he would prolong this moment indefinitely. In a magical, irrational universe he would choose to live this way until he died—forever riding out through sprays of cold pure light to face exotic foes and unknown dangers. But in the real universe this phase was likely to be brief, perhaps encompassing only one battle, and when it was all over life would be a thousand times more humdrum than before, with little for him to do other than passively wait for an unremarkable death.

  Perhaps, the thought came softly slithering, it would be better not to survive the war.

  Shocked by where the bout of introspection had taken him, Toller forced his thoughts to bear on the task in hand. The plan was to engage the enemy ten to fifteen miles below the datum plane, but as always he was bedevilled by the impossibility of estimating distance or speed in the featureless oceans of air. When he looked over his shoulder he saw that the twenty-seven fighters had laid down a kind of aerial highway with their condensation trails. It narrowed to a distant point, vaporous white threads gathered into perspective's fist, and already the clustered stations and habitats were hard to see, even though he knew exactly where to look. The condensation would later disperse into invisibility, and when that happened the three squadrons would be in danger of becoming lost.

  How far had they descended? Ten miles? Fifteen? Twenty?

  Swearing at the sun for capriciously aiding the enemy, Toller screened off the blinding orb with his hand and searched for the ascending fleet. The combined speeds of the two forces had brought them much closer in a short time, and now the array of gleaming crescents could easily be resolved by the naked eye, each a perfect miniature of the fire-cusped planet behind it. They were concentrated in a small area of the sky, like glittering spawn.

  This is far enough, Toller told himself. We wait here.

  He spread both his arms in a prearranged signal and shut down his engine. The absorbent silence of infinity abruptly pervaded the scene as the other pilots closed their throttles in unison. The fighters coasted for some time, gradually becoming uncontrollable as air resistance robbed them of their speed, the V-formations loosening and distorting while they came to rest. Toller knew the appearance of being at a standstill was illusory—the machines had entered Land's gravitational field and were falling, but this close to the datum plane their speed was negligible.

  "We will fight here," he called out. "It will profit us to be patient and allow the enemy to come to us, because the longer he takes the farther the sun will move out from behind his ships. Be sure to keep your igniter cups in good trim, and do not allow your hands and limbs to stiffen with the cold. If you think you are becoming too cold you are permitted to make short circular flights to put heat into your machines and warmth into your backsides, but remember that your crystals have to be conserved as much as possible for the battle."

  Toller settled into the wait, wishing he had a reliable means of measuring the time. Mechanical clocks were much too large for tactical purposes, and even the traditional military timepiece was of no value in the weightless zone. It consisted of a slim glass tube containing a cane shoot which was marked with black pigment at regular intervals. When a pace-beetle was put into the tube it devoured the shoot from one end, moving at the unchanging rate common to its kind, thus indicating the passage of time with an accuracy which was good enough for commanders in the field. In zero gravity, however, the beetle was found to move erratically, often ceasing to eat altogether. At first it had been thought to be an effect of the extreme cold, but the same unsatisfactory results were obtained when the tube was kept warm, leading to the remarkable conclusion that the mindless bead-sized beetle was disturbed by its lack of weight. Toller had been intrigued by the findings, which in his mind established a link between human beings and the lowliest and most insignificant creatures on the planet. They were all part of the same biological phenomenon, but only humans had the intelligence which enabled them to override the dictates of nature, to impose their will on the organic machinery of their bodies.

  Toller could hear the pilots of his squadron conversing as they waited, and he was pleased to note that there was none of the abrupt laughter which often indicated a failure of nerve. In particular he liked the demeanour of Tipp Gotlon, the young rigger he had promoted to pilot status against the counsel of Biltid. Gotlon, who had shown an instinctive grasp of the mechanics of flying, was exchanging occasional quiet words with Berise Narrinder and between times was scanning the sky ahead with shaded eyes. At eighteen he was the youngest of all the pilots, but he looked eminently calm and self-possessed.

  As the minutes dragged by Toller gradually became aware of another sound—a low booming which he identified as emanating from the exhaust cones of the approaching fleet. The balloons of the Lander ships were becoming easier to see as the source of illumination moved progressively to the side, and they had greatly increased in apparent size. Umol and Daas were frequently turning their heads in his direction, obviously impatient for the order to attack, but Toller had decided to hold fire until he could pick out some detail of the crown panels and load tapes on the enemy balloons, by which time the foremost of them should be less than a mile below the waiting fighter craft.

  The lack of spatial referents helped confuse the eye, but the skyships seemed to be ascending in groups of three and four, with quite a large vertical interval between the echelons. They formed an attenuated and elongated cloud many miles in depth, with those at the bottom of the sta
ck appearing remote and shrunken compared to the leaders. The arrangement was a logical one for considerations of flight safety, especially when flying in darkness, but it was almost the worst possible for the penetration of defended territory. Toller smiled as he saw that the Landers had unwittingly given him an advantage which more than compensated for the unfortunate positioning of the sun.

  Yielding to a sudden accession of battlefield humour, he drew his sword and used the incongruous weapon to make the downward stroke of the attack signal.

  What followed was not a concerted swoop on the invaders, but a deliberate and systematic process of destruction. In conference with Biltid and his two squadron leaders, Toller had decided that—in the first battle of its kind in all of human history—it would be unwise to have twenty-seven high-speed machines milling and plunging through a comparatively small volume of airspace. Also, for psychological reasons he considered important, he did not want a random pattern of success, with some pilots emerging as heroes claiming multiple kills and others failing to achieve the first blood so vital to their morale.

  Accordingly, the response to Toller's signal was that only the ninth pilot in each formation detached his machine and rode down to meet the unsuspecting enemy. The three fighters traced lines of vapour which converged on the uppermost of the Lander echelons, then swung across to the right, each one casting off a splinter of amber light. A few seconds later three of the leading balloons developed penumbras of smoke, became dark flowers with writhing centres of red and orange flame. Toller was surprised by the dramatic speed of their destruction compared with that of the balloon once used for target practice, then realised it was because the Lander ships were rising and creating a slipstream which not only fed the flames but directed them down the sides of the varnished linen envelopes.

  Another gift, another good omen, he thought as the second trio of fighters roared away on plumes of condensation. One of them picked off the remaining skyship of the four that had formed the top echelon and curved off to the right, while its companions speared on down to find targets in the next level. Their success was betokened after a brief interval by the blossoming of two more dark flowers.

  As the carnage continued, with wave after wave of fighters darting down into the affray, Toller began to speculate on the possibility of the entire Lander fleet being destroyed in a single catastrophic engagement. Due to the great size of a skyship's balloon in comparison to the gondola, an ascent had to be made blindly, with the occupants trusting that the sky directly above contained no hazard. When many ships were travelling together the roar of the burners drowned out all other sounds, therefore the members of any given layer could remain quite unaware of cataclysms above until it was too late to take evasive action. If the fighters were able to work their way down to the bottom of the stack, incinerating the skyships echelon by echelon, none of the enemy would survive to describe to their King how the destruction of his armada had been achieved. Such a total defeat could, indeed, end the interplanetary war on the very day it had begun.

  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.