Broken Wing: A million deaths were not enough for Cassandra!

by Konig, Artor

  I had not asked whether or not I could climb onto the hull to reach the higher parts, rather deciding that all this nuclear business was a bit of a risk and I wouldn’t make things more dangerous by coming into contact with the hull while it was being irradiated. I decided as well not to suggest a tea-break; I saw quite clearly that the Doctor wouldn’t even hear me, so intent was he on his labours.

  With a small sigh I set about the most difficult part of the job, the upper surfaces. This involved clambering up the ladder, zapping everything within reach, clambering down, moving the ladder, clambering up again and so forth. I soon learnt that ladders were easily as frustrating as stairways; maybe even more so. Doing the hub was a wearisome bit of work, leaning my weight onto the comforting strength of the rotor and waving my ray delicately forth, trying to give the impression that the fifteen-pound gamma source and filter was really only a baton or something equally slight. By the time I had finished with the upper reaches and put down the irradiator, I was trembling with fatigue. I pointed the ray away from the Wren. It was but a moment’s work to open up the pilot’s door and reverse the aspect of the rotors so I could get at the upper surface of the wide blades. After that had been dealt with I turned my attention to the interior of the craft.

  My greater height put me at the advantage; I had finished irradiating Number One a good while before the Doctor had finished with Number Three. I beguiled this free time with the production of a midnight snack although the light of the late winter’s dawn was showing around the bend of the passage leading out of the Nest. I put the tea and cake where he would notice it and had a go at doing the interior of Number Three for him. When he had finished with one surface of the rotors I reversed them for him, much to his surprise. It took him a moment to connect the details together and then he waved cheerfully at me.

  “I’d forgotten you were there.” He told me confidingly, “What a thing to do.”

  “There’s tea over there in lower control when you’ve finished.” I replied, stepping out of the craft to deal with the other rotor.

  “Thank you, Cassandra.” He replied, immersing himself in his esoteric labours once again.

  I shut down my gamma source and put my back into clearing up the Nest, shoving the tools into the storeroom off lower control. By the time this was done we were both quite prepared to call it a day. Half asleep I followed the Doctor up the stairs, intent only on getting to my room as quickly as convenient. The weight of the filters and irradiators slowed us down a bit as we went up the stairs. The Doctor put the chemistry disc back as I locked the radiation cupboard, glad to see the last of those lumps of lead.

  We made our way up to the kitchen where Byrtle was shaking himself carefully into the scheme of the day. The Doctor trotted off to the roundhouse while I fed the irate bird, soothing him with a slice of mango; I fed myself with the rest of that large fruit. I peeped into the scullery, seeing that most of the clothes were dry. Those garments which no more knew their owners I folded up and put into the little-used airing cupboard. The rest I left hanging on their lines to be attended to when I had the time. I nosed around a bit, finally finding some more milk-powder from which I made my traditional cup of hot milk. That being done, I left the kitchen and Byrtle to their means and went quietly to bed.

  17. Preparations

  It was hunger that awoke me when at length I awoke; after all, I had gone to bed without having a solid meal, something that I wasn’t ever supposed to do. I looked grumpily around me, still feeling tired but knowing well enough that there was no rest for the hungry. There was nothing edible within reach; even my cup of milk was depressingly empty. I had not taken any cake or biscuits with me when I had retired, an oversight that took on the proportions of a major transgression. I dragged myself to the shower, arguing quite logically that if I got my morning routine out of the way there would be no need for me to come back to my room. It only occurred to me to have a look at the time when I had revitalised myself somewhat in the shower. Once the fact that it was after sunset had sunk in, I trotted down to the kitchen in rather a bad mood. I wondered when the Doctor would show up, if he hadn’t already and what his plans would be for the rest of the night.

  The Wrens had to be tested on all major and minor functions; that I knew, and night was just as good a time as day; better in some respects. I greeted Byrtle, who told me to sod off in a friendly fashion. His reward for this kindly suggestion was a poisonous look and a biscuit. I scouted the castle on the wires to locate the Doctor; he was asleep and I certainly wasn’t going to interrupt whatever dreams he was having. The washing I sorted out, the dishes which were cluttering up the dishwasher I cleaned. I had a careful look over our perishables, seeing that the fruit in the cold room would last us for quite a while but bread, biscuits and cake were beginning to look a bit on the thin side. Of Bread there was enough, but my favourite biscuits were all but non-existent.

  We had made serious inroads into the cake as well. I decided to do a bit of a bake, just to keep the old hand in. June had taught me a good deal about baking, speed being her speciality. She had known everything there was to know about getting a cake out of the microwave; but it was strictly on the understanding that the cake would be consumed quickly. Now, however, I was after baking that would endure its sojourn in the cake tin in the best of good will. To this end I dug up one or her more sober cookbooks, bent on producing a no-flop chocolate cake. The kitchen of the castle was singularly well-suited to this sort of labour, its various appliances and gas-ranges being conveniently juxtaposed.

  I bent my back to this labour, having a go at making biscuits at the same time. Byrtle watched me in silence, obviously not really in favour of all this midnight oil but not knowing how to express this sentiment. He had never been too frightfully keen on either cages or covers so I didn’t really see how I could help him. But long exposure to the busy and dynamic life in the kitchen had more or less inured him to such activities. I found him a few grapes in the hope it would put him into a cheerful mood. A good cup of tea went a long way towards settling the gloom that I had awoken with. My stern efforts were at last commended to the benevolence of the ovens and I sat back to take further stock of our supplies. In so doing I remembered that I was still very hungry. This I dealt with rather shortly, creating a series of unusual but undoubtedly very nourishing sandwiches.

  I poked my nose out of the kitchen door to see how the storm was doing, rather pleased to find that it had made its merry way elsewhere. I trotted out onto the darkened balcony and had a good look at the winter sky, speckled with brilliant stars. The night was fairly quiet; the darkness unchallenged but for that celestial horde. What I could see of the ocean was limned by the moon somewhere behind the castle. I galloped back into the kitchen in good time to rescue my biscuits. I peered through the glass oven door at the cake, seeing it doing its stuff more or less as the book had told me to expect. I then turned my attention to the rather more complicated business of getting some icing together in readiness for the cake’s return. The biscuits I turned off their tray to cool, sampling a few to see how they had come out. After the icing was made I sampled a few more biscuits, to confirm hasty first impressions.

  The cake was removed and dumped onto the cooling rack, then the biscuits were shoved into a convenient tin. I dug up another cup of tea before taking myself back out into the cold night air to have a look at how the rest of the world was coping. Down the stairs to the courtyard I went, looking up at the darkness of the roundhouse and the south tower.

  My mood was the gloomier for my thoughts as for the first time I made my way to the balcony below the roundhouse. I posted myself by the rail overlooking the northern ocean, peering down the heady cleft of the cliff to where the restless ocean pounded far below.

  My tea went cold; my thoughts were already so; the tingling dread of past and future gave my mind no rest; the urge to get into action seethed in vain. There was nothing I could do at that point in time; I was helpless even to direct my
thoughts. The familiar faces, the voices I had learnt to love, the cheer and good humour that made those past days so bright for all the solemn weight of our duties; all gone.

  The duties doubled and redoubled; the weight more than my soul knew to bear, the emptiness huge in its silence and the forbidding fear. A small sigh I sighed, not knowing how else to express my fear as I turned away from the awesome, back to the mundane; this I knew how to handle. It was then that I realised that the out-runners of the black wave I had feared for so long were already washing around me, finding me unprepared. But there was no way I could have prepared myself for this; only now there was the one deed I could face, the one deed that was all I could do to avert this peril.

  Icing a chocolate cake at half-past ten at night, the only wakeful person in the castle but for Byrtle struck me as being incongruous. I wasn’t even sure why I had gone to the trouble of baking a cake, although I was in no uncertain mind about the biscuits. Maybe I should have a slice, I told myself thoughtfully. I was still a bit hungry, after all. That insecurity I felt in knowing that if I didn’t prepare a meal I would go hungry seemed to be making an impact on my already sensitive nerves. That there was nobody in the castle but the Doctor and myself and that bird, made it that much more clear how important my willingness to cook actually was. But even then it didn’t make it clear in my mind why I had chosen then to make that cake. Having iced it and cut myself a generous slice, I shoved it into a tin that I had remembered to clean a few days before. I created some more tea, helped myself to some biscuits, said good night to Byrtle and hurled myself up the steps back to my room.

  I settled down at the desk and took up a clean notebook; began to write while my tea went cold. Just before midnight I finally went to bed but not to sleep; not properly. I set the comlink for an unearthly hour before dawn then turned my face into my pillow, already damp and salty.

  The comlink didn’t give me a chance; it seemed bent on active malice as it gave tongue in the frigid dark. I stumbled out of the warmth of my eiderdown, slammed the comlink to silence and staggered to the western window, shrugging on my dressing gown.

  The orange orb of the moon glared balefully at me, its majesty shrouded in a dawn mist as it settled upon the surface of the sea. I glared back at it, my head throbbing slightly. The air beyond the glass, when I thought to savour it, was still, fierily cold, damp with a sentiment of snow. I shut the window somewhat hastily and hit the shower. I padded around my room clad only in a towel, looking for another tracksuit. I found a biscuit first, only discovering suitable clothes when it occurred to me to look for them in the cupboard. I fumbled through the ordeal of making myself presentable, wondering why I did so; there was only the Doctor there after all; and he seldom noticed what I looked like.

  However I brushed out my platinum hair and made sure my tracksuit was clean and not creased before I took up my dirty clothes and discarded dishes and headed down to the kitchen with them. The Doctor was there already, having shown signs of being there for a good long while. Breakfast was nearly ready and a pot of tea was waiting for me. His smile was warm and he mentioned the cake I had made the previous evening.

  “My favourite.” He confided, “How did you know I was pining for it?”

  “I’m very good at reading minds.” I told him wistfully, “My own at least; I thought a chocolate cake was just what the Doctor ordered for lifting of spirits and all of that.”

  “Good show.” He chuckled, “Spot of bacon and sausages over here; let’s have a tuck-in before we get to work.”

  “What’s the program for today?” I asked him as I served the meal.

  “Ground and flight tests to begin with; I’ve been working on the design of those space-systems; it’s going to be rather a tricky setup basically because of radiation shielding. The microchips I have here are not suitable for space, being quite sensitive to short-wave interference; so the circuitry of the stations is going to have to be rather carefully shielded. It’s a sticky situation but I really don’t see any other way round that problem.” I let him babble on about that and related problems, finding it suddenly rather hard to keep my eyes off his face. My thoughts had nothing to do with what he was talking about, but he fortunately took it as flattering attention to his erudite explanations. This seemed to encourage him to further depths of detail on all the problems associated with creating a radio-telescopically targeting X-laser battle station complete with reactor and pulsar-maser carriers and basic rocketry, one that wouldn’t go haring off after the moon or the Earth but would wait until it could see just where the aliens were going before blasting them. The more he went into details, the more my mind drifted along its newfound groove; and the less I followed what he was on about.

  We cleared up; a habit we had fallen into almost out of sheer loneliness now that it was just the two of us. We both knew or seemed to know that any jobs left till later were likely never to get done or would build up to a point where they would become an active nuisance. As well as that, lurking in the back of my mind like some cancerous wound was the notion that there wasn’t all that much later with which to play around. I was not used to fear; it was an emotion to which I had seldom been exposed in my sheltered home life. It was an emotion that I didn’t like, one that I didn’t know how to deal with.

  I put a generous supply of food and water at Byrtle’s disposal before turning my attention to sandwiches for us. The Doctor worked efficiently beside me, his head bent to this labour though it was already below my own. I shrugged my hair impatiently over my shoulder once again, wondering why I hadn’t plaited it as I normally did, especially since I would be flying that day. I was an unusual pilot in more than my natural skill; most pilots had their hair cropped short as a matter of course, to fit into their flight helmet and not get into their eyes. It was seen as almost a mockery, or it had been, especially by the boys, that I flaunted that tradition yet still flew better than any of them ever had. And today I was proposing to fly with my hair not plaited; as if there was nothing that could stop me whatever handicap I chose to mock them with. But they were beyond that, I recalled, nibbling at my lip as I packed the satchel with the sandwiches.

  We left Byrtle to mind his own sombre avian thoughts, turning off the lights in the kitchen and leaving the door ajar, should the urge to go outside overwhelm him. Down those terrible stairs we went, down to the Nest where the Wrens waited patiently for us. I narrowed my eyes at the gloomy aspect the craft presented; under the flood of lights they were rather hard to make out as we stood by the stairway. The Doctor glanced at them before turning to lower control. I followed after him, dumping our lunch on the small table next to the kettle and forgotten teapot. The Doctor logged the test sequences, both for the ground test and the flight test afterwards. I peered over his shoulder at the meteorological report from the Pacific stations. I saw that he had logged a full combat test for both craft, one to be conducted in the void with a mapping of redundant satellites as targets. I sighed thoughtfully as we turned away.

  The signals had gone from lower control to the craft; they seemed lively and expectant after the trauma of their gloomy lot the previous day. The Doctor went to Number One; I trotted over to Number Three. The dark green of the interior somehow fitted very well with the lustreless black of the hull. Number Three suddenly looked more like what she was; a very dangerous war machine. I greeted her warmly as I went through the pre-flight and light-up routine. She responded eagerly, pulsing with energy and power. I balanced her thrust and retro-thrust carefully before going through the stages into the super-stages. She strained against herself, the blazing torches of overwhelming, eye-aching flame converting the Nest into an inferno as the slow seconds ticked past. Once I was satisfied with the functioning of all her systems, I tested hub and rotor response before flickering through the higher modes; defence, pilot assist, combat and autopilot before putting her into her ultimate war mode. All her systems checked out in the green; the damage that had so nearly destroyed her was soothed
and repaired. I eased her back to her basic flight mode then looked across to where the Doctor was completing the routine in Number One. “Fly when you’re ready.” He told me over the comlink.

  “Flying.” I responded.

  “Aye, aye.” He confirmed. I keyed in the rotors and pushed up the thrust. Gently she climbed and turned, nosing her way delicately out through the passage, into the wide skies beyond. She responded eagerly as I put her through the test routine, each stage and each function activated smoothly. She danced; a stately and powerful movement that stirred the soul. We went higher and faster, her power and grace augmenting my skill with her own. The sky went from blue to black; the sun from yellow to scalding white, a ball of unanswerable flame, a celestial catastrophe arrogant in its futile splendour. I read the map, seeing the targets that I was supposed to destroy, seeing against that the crowded skies above the world; the people who knew not I passed, the space stations and rockets, the tiny satellites and lumbering shuttles, each filled with its own sublime purpose, oblivious to anything beyond its path. It was simple, routine; each laser system keyed in, each target shuddered to vapour by the invisible rays, from the masers right up to the X-lasers. There was nothing wrong with Number Three; she was fit and capable, almost alive beneath my gentle guidance.

  The last test then; this test was one of my own devising. I keyed in the ultra-ranger of the radio-telescope on its broadest band. Quickly but carefully I narrowed it down until I had found those unmistakable motes. I wasn’t really clued up on intra-stellar navigation beyond such details as what planets there actually were. Where each planet was supposed to be on the stellar disc I hadn’t a clue. I stared at the seven traces on the monitor for long enough; Number Three became as concerned as a machine could be; for a war machine. She posted a request for direction; must she engage combat mode or what? I reassured her as best I could, realising then that this was the very first time I had flown a Wren entirely solo. The first time anybody had. It made me nervous for all this craft was hugely capable, well able to augment the solo pilot, well able to complement my abilities to the full extent of her power.