The Gods and their Machines

by Oisin McGann

  ‘Shanna forgive me,’ he breathed, closing his eyes and laying his head on the steering wheel.

  Riadni gazed in dismay. It was one of the boulders they had used to block in Paronig’s truck. She had forgotten all about it. It seemed an age ago. Paronig and his men had moved the stone blocking their way back to Yered, but not the one behind them. Sostas would never be able to move the obstacle with only her to help. He threw the car into reverse and backed up the road. They would have to find another way.

  Chamus had been airborne for nearly an hour. The night was still clear, but he was already doubting that the gliders would come, or that he would even see them if they did, for that matter. He could have been wrong about the whole thing, or he could have been wrong about the route they were going to take. The idea was so fantastic that he was not sure he even believed it anymore. And even if he did, Riadni and Sostas would surely get the message out in time. And the military were bound to be monitoring radio traffic. And they would stop it once they knew they had been found out. They had to.

  He pulled his collar up. It was cold, and he had lost his scarf at some point during his journey through Bartokhrin. With all the waiting, he now had time to feel the weariness of the last few days creep over him, the hunger and thirst and the throbbing of his wound. The pain in his leg made using the rudder bar difficult and the exhaustion was affecting his concentration. But the fact that he was flying again made up for all of it. Something moving in the corner of his vision made him look around, but he could see nothing. Then he spotted them – three willowy, black shapes without lights, soaring above him to the north-east. He turned towards them, but his hand hesitated on the throttle. He had not really expected this. They were not supposed to be here. Even after all this time spent waiting for them, he was not sure what he was going to do. What if the fact that he was buzzing them was not enough to put them off? What if they were determined to carry out their mission no matter what he did?

  He shoved the throttle forward. There was no time to think. He would have to make it up as he went along. He closed in on the three aircraft quickly. They spotted his bright yellow biplane with its navigation lights long before he could get to them and swung away to evade him. It was a waste of time. He had the advantage of power and speed. He swept in under them and climbed up right through their path, splitting their formation. They peeled away right and left. He clung onto the leader, harrying him by swinging to one side and the other in front of him and buffeting him in his prop-wash. Wherever the glider tried to turn, he swooped into his path to block him. He was aiming on getting it through to them that he knew their plan. If they radioed their base to report what was happening, they might get called back. Then it occurred to him that they might be under orders to maintain radio silence, or they might think he was just some prankster.

  He let go of the leader and raced ahead to catch the others. They had not gone far. They were hard to spot though, their sleek black shapes could not be seen against the ground, he had to get level with or below them to be able to make them out. He banked left and right, trying to steer them round in circles. The manoeuvres were fun. He had never had a good enough reason to bully other flyers before. They were excellent pilots to stay aloft against all his antics, but he kept the upper hand. It was a little like herding sheep.

  After a while, however, the gliders were still trying to make their way to Kemsemet and he was finding it hard to keep them together. He would stick with one and the others would split off and fly well apart from each other. In the darkness, they had the advantage of being able to see and hear him, while they were nearly invisible from some angles. He started to panic. They were not going to turn around; this was not working. He was going to have to get serious. The thought of forcing another pilot down terrified him, but they would be flying over inhabited areas soon, where he would not be able to risk bringing them down. If he was going to do it, it had to be now.

  He banked hard, flying a circle round the nearest glider and came in behind it, slowing almost to stalling speed as he closed on the aircraft’s tail. His propeller bit into the wood and fabric fin and tore it apart with a sound like a lawnmower catching a paper bag. He pulled up before he drove right up the back of the glider, missing its canopy by inches. He could see the glider’s pilot wrestling with the controls, spiralling slowly downwards towards the dark ground. Chamus thought his chances of making a landing were pretty good. He could not afford to worry about him. He sought out the next one and crept up on its tail. The pilot saw him coming in his mirror and banked away. Chamus turned with him, but could not slow down enough. He overflew and had to come around again. In his haste, he came in too fast this time, so instead of trying to take out the aircraft’s tail, he brought his landing gear down hard on the glider’s canopy. The slim fuselage lurched and tipped to one side. Its right wing came over, swinging straight at him and smacked the side of the biplane. He pulled away in time to stop it dragging backwards and ripping off his tailplane.

  The glider tumbled towards the ground, and he watched anxiously as it disappeared into the darkness. He rolled over and followed it down. He saw it level out and swoop down into a field. He smiled as he admired the pilot’s skill, but his smile disappeared when he flew over the end of the field. It was too short, and there was a deep gully at the end of it. The glider landed, bouncing a couple of times, rolling along the ground, and then, still moving at full tilt, it pitched into the gully and smashed against the opposite wall. Chamus swallowed what felt like a stone in his throat and gained some altitude. There was still one left. Weaving right and left down the bombing route, he searched desperately for the remaining glider. He switched his navigation lights off to make himself harder to see and flew lower, scanning the sky. There was no sign of the last flyer.

  Chamus finally caught sight of the glider, catching thermals off a long ridge that ran in the direction of Kemsemet. He charged forward and cut across the black aircraft’s path, causing it to swing over the ridge and down into the valley on the other side. He tried catching the other pilot’s tail, as he had with the first glider, but this pilot was exceptionally good and was using his slower speed to jink out of Chamus’s way, forcing him to fly past each time or risk stalling. Chamus surveyed the valley in the poor light. It was a long, narrow passage with steep walls of rock and thin soil. If he could keep the glider between the two ridges, he could eventually run it into the ground.

  He concentrated on trying to hold himself on top of the glider, gradually pushing it lower, but each time he managed to force it down, he had to give up as his engine hiccuped and threatened to stall. He had to fly past and pick up his speed again. Each time that happened, it meant coming around again and catching up once more. He was losing ground. Each failure took them closer to the villages and farms at the edge of the desert. Then the glider pilot changed tactics.

  As Chamus closed on the lighter aircraft, the air-force pilot pulled right up in front of him, nose up, slowing so abruptly that Chamus’s vision was suddenly filled with the slender black shape. He found himself staring right into the other man’s face. He jerked the stick to the left and rolled the biplane hard over, missing the other aircraft by inches. He stamped on the rudder bar and leaned back the other way to straighten out the roll, looking back, expecting to see the glider falling from the sky. But the other pilot had miraculously stayed airborne. He was amazed. Gliders were not made for aerobatics. He circled and tried to catch up again, but again the other pilot threw himself into Chamus’s path, forcing him to fling the biplane over to the side to save himself from smashing straight into the glider and killing both himself and the other pilot. When it happened a third time, he pulled away and hung back cautiously. The glider pilot had raised the stakes. He had realised that Chamus would not sacrifice himself and had turned each potential clash into an act of suicide, so that Chamus could not tackle the glider without giving up his own life.

  Chamus scowled, cursing to himself. One part of his mind had co
ntinued to think of this all as a game, even when he had seen the second glider crash. But now he was faced with failure. He had never considered any cause important enough to risk his life – that was to say, no cause that he was ever likely to actually be involved with. But now he tried to weigh up everything that would happen if this pilot succeeded and he found that it was so big, he could not even relate to it. Plagues and war were huge, historic things that seemed to bear little relation to this bizarre dogfight, up here in the dark. Alone in his cockpit, he knew it would be easy to turn around and let the glider go. He was a schoolboy who was supposed to be worried about homework and acne and embarrassing himself in front of girls. He had nothing to do with war and terrorists.

  Then he thought of the people he had met in the last few days. Of Riadni, and Sostas and Leynid, and Paronig and the others and he thought about what was about to happen to them. Riadni’s family was right in the centre of the glider’s target, and she and her father would rush back to save them as soon as they had spread the message over the radio, how could they not hurry back to their family? In truth, he didn’t even like the ones he’d met, and they obviously didn’t like him. But the difference was that he knew Riadni, and he knew she and Sostas, and everyone close to them, were going to die if the glider pilot succeeded in dropping his payload. They would die slowly and painfully because two lots of fanatics could not sort out their differences. And so Chamus, who could not bring himself to give his life for the good of thousands, brought his bright yellow biplane high up over the tail of the black glider and banked hard, bringing the nose of the aeroplane to bear on the path of the other aircraft – to save the lives of a bunch of near-strangers.

  He opened up the throttle, relishing the roar of the big, oily, smoky engine, watching the glider desperately jinking right and left to try and avoid him, but Chamus had learned from his opponent. He had learned the importance of committing himself to his goal. He did not try to clip the other flyer’s tail, or attempt to herd him in a different direction. He brought his aeroplane screaming down at the cockpit of the glider, roaring at the top of his voice, the wind dragging at his face, pressing the goggles against his eyes. The glider grew larger and larger in his sights, and the pilot was looking up at him, trying to pitch himself sideways to avoid the oncoming biplane, but he was too slow and too late.

  The biplane smashed right through the glider’s cockpit, the lighter aircraft shattering apart, the crippled biplane plummeting on down, starting to roll, debris from the glider still being chewed and spat out by the broken shards of the propeller. Chamus’s engine coughed and died, choking on fragments of its enemy, and the yellow biplane continued to tumble down into the dark silence.

  Vel Sillian was flying in a school trainer over western Bartokhrin, part of the massive search that had been launched for Chamus Aranson. On top of the official search and rescue teams, the Aransons had called on every pilot they knew, including those in Chamus’s school, to join the hunt for Chamus’s biplane.

  Two days had passed since the now infamous gliders had set out on their mission. The first message had been heard broadcasting from a radio out here, an aid station in a town called Yered. That had been started by a Bartokhrian girl and her father, who had been the last people to see Chamus alive. The story of the gliders and the radioactive dust had spread far and wide, ham operators and then news stations taking up the message. The military had denied the story, and people believed them at first, but then the first glider had been found smashed up in a gully and aid workers had reached it before the military could. The lethal payload had still been sealed securely in its lead reservoir.

  Another glider had been discovered, landed safely in a field a few miles away, with its payload also intact. There had been no sign of the pilot. Sillian was impatient. He had been assigned an area twenty miles from the nearest glider and saw little chance of finding Chamus. His schoolmate was now a hero, but two days after the event he was still missing and everyone was beginning to fear the worst. Sillian had been secretly impressed by the plan to seed the Bartokhrian towns with radioactivity, but now, flying over the area, he realised that if the glider had succeeded in releasing its payload, he would be in as much danger as anyone else should he be forced to land for any reason. Radiation did not distinguish between the good and the evil.

  A spot of bright yellow out to his right caught his eye and he turned towards it. As he drew closer, he could make out the broken body of the biplane lying on the north-facing slope of a hill, the wings on one side sheared off, its cheerful paintwork covered in dust. He flew in lower, saw the cockpit was empty and swung around to see Chamus lying under the shade of one of the wings. Sillian dipped his wings, but there was no answering wave. He tried again, but the body did not move. Sillian thumped the side of his cockpit and was just climbing back up to look around for a place to land, when he saw the tailfin of a glider lying less than a mile from the wrecked biplane. He swooped in to be sure what it was, then opened the throttle and pulled into a steep climb, his heart racing. Had he got too close?

  He checked the position of the biplane on the map and called it in, telling the search controller about the glider wreckage. Then he cast an uneasy eye on his fuel gauge, and not liking what he saw, set off for home.

  Benyan Akhna’s eyes opened, but nothing changed. He could not see. For a moment he panicked, but then the Lenttons spoke to him, reassuring him. They whispered into his mind, describing his surroundings. He was in a pale-green room, in a high bed with rails on the sides, a machine sat on a narrow wooden table beside him. The machine had buttons and lights on the front, and behind a rectangular piece of glass a line of light darted from left to right, zigzagging up and down as it passed the middle. There were wires stuck to his chest and a needle in his arm, to which a plastic tube was attached. The tube ran up to a bag of clear fluid that hung from a metal stand. There were curtains on the window, and it was dark outside. A small lamp was the only light in the room. There was a metal clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. His was one of a dozen beds in the room, most of which were empty; the rest held sleeping bodies. Benyan had heard of such places. He was in an Altiman hospital. So he was still alive.

  Thomex Aranson was here, the Lenttons told him. They could sense him. He was here with his son and grandson. All three were on the next floor. There was still a chance for him to reach paradise. Benyan went to sit up and grunted. A pain lanced through his chest and hip and he fell back, lying still until the pain passed. The ghosts hissed angrily. They had listened while the Altiman doctors had stood over his body, speaking in hushed tones, astounded that he was still alive, if only just. They had heard the arguments that he should be allowed to die, that there was no hope. The spirits had wrestled with death, using all their remaining power to keep this body breathing, hanging tentatively to life in the hope that they might still wreak their revenge. They would not be stopped now.

  Benyan cried out as a violent force sat him up and used his arms to prop himself as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. One hand went to his face, found a bandage over his eyes and pulled it up. He gasped as the dressing was peeled away from the blistered powder burn. But he was still blind. He started to sob, but the ghosts stood him up. He wheezed as another bolt of pain went through his chest and then he was wobbling on his feet. The broken edges of bone in his hip ground against each other as he started to walk, Benyan could only surrender to the will of the spirits. He sensed that they were weaker now, that their power was waning and that soon they would have nothing more to carry him, and he prayed to Shanna for that release.

  Chamus opened his eyes. He was in a room with pale-green walls, lit only by a small lamp. He was lying in a hospital bed in what must be a private room. His mother sat slumped and asleep in a chair next to his bed and there were flowers in vases on every flat surface except the floor. He let his mother sleep for a few minutes while he gathered his thoughts.

  He remembered hunting the gliders, but there we
re only flashes of the dogfights, and for a while he could not quite remember why he had been after them. His leg ached. He pushed the covers back and peeled off a dressing to see one large wound and a couple of smaller ones, all of which had been stitched. That had been the shrapnel from the cannon shells. The shin of his other leg itched and he pulled the covers aside to see his left leg in a cast up to his knee. There were scratches on his face and neck, his right forearm was bandaged up and he was bruised all over. A sharp pain in his side told him he had cracked a rib or two as well. Memories of crashing his biplane flickered in his mind and he groaned.

  Nita’s eyes opened drowsily and then she sat up. Her face lifted in a smile and she leaned forward and gave him a gentle hug.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  ‘Oh Cham,’ she said, her voice cracking, ‘we were so worried. Thank God.’

  He hugged her back, bursting with emotion and unable to speak.

  ‘You’re quite the hero,’ she sat back, wiping tears from her face and trying to be more reserved than she was. She knew he got embarrassed when she got motherly. ‘The whole country’s talking about you. There have been reporters looking for you and Riadni …’

  ‘You’ve met Riadni?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s here,’ Nita replied. ‘She came with that aid worker, Leynid, when they brought you here. Everyone’s here. Your father and grandfather are only down the hall, and Riadni and Leynid too.’

  A nurse looked in the door.

  ‘Ah! You’re awake,’ she observed. ‘I’ll fetch the doctor.’

  She left and Nita turned back to her son.