Fata Morgana

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Fata Morgana Page 8

by Steven R. Boyett


  *

  Inside the silent tunnel the front end of the Messerschmitt began to tumble on two axes in the weightless white, propeller still turning, bright metal edges of severed engine and yellow cowling glinting where they had been cleanly cut. Spilling fluids separated into drifting spheres.

  Far ahead the heavy bomber Fata Morgana hurtled mindless and unpowered through the weightless void, speeding without motion across a span that was not space. A twenty-ton projectile fired from the world to pierce a membrane unimaginably vast, immeasurably thin, imperceptible because it did not exist by any marker for determining existence.

  And yet. And yet.

  Fata Morgana hurtled mindless and unpowered across that barrier—

  part two:

  the detour

  seven

  —and out the other side.

  *

  The sky went dark. The floating bloodpearls splashed down. Air rushed through the fuselage. Fata Morgana pitched forward and began to dive.

  *

  Farley pulled back on the yoke and the ship responded. The damaged elevator was still monkey-wrenching everything, and he kept the bomber in a shallow dive. He glanced at the panel as Broben toggled the batteries. Every indicator was zeroed out.

  “Jerry,” Farley said calmly, “give me auxiliaries and see if you can restart Number One.”

  Broben flicked the auxiliary generator and got no light at all, red or green. “Negative,” he said.

  “Feather the props.”

  Broben tried to lock the blades in place and pivot them edge-forward to reduce drag. None of the propellers would respond. “No soap, Joe,” he said.

  “Do we have any lights on the board at all?” Farley asked.

  Broben surveyed the main panel, the center console, the overheads. “Negative.”

  “Okay, so no power and no hydraulics.” He looked at his copilot. “Unless we get a restart we’ll be deadsticking this brick in about five minutes.”

  “You looked out a window lately?” asked Broben.

  Farley looked out the window. The sky was jet black shot with hard unwinking stars, yet the sun was visible as a harsh white circle like a spotlight in the sky. It looked like what Farley imagined outer space looked like.

  The bomber flew above an enormous jagged canyon that looked like a crack in the foundation of the world. The crevice walls were sharp-edged and obsidian black, descending to a valley floor in shadow far below.

  “It looks like we blew up all of Germany,” said Broben. Farley didn’t look away from the window as he asked, “Altimeter working?”

  “Hey, it is!” said Broben.

  “Fuel?”

  “Just over fifty percent.”

  Farley nodded absently. “So everything electrical got knocked out. Fuel gauge is mechanical and the altimeter works on air pressure. What’s our altitude?”

  “Sixteen five.”

  Farley frowned. “That plateau can’t be four thousand feet below us. Where the hell are we?”

  He turned his head and raised his voice. “Wen, you back there?” With the engines out, buffeting wind and creaking metal was all the noise there was.

  Wen climbed down from the top turret and stood in the pit behind Farley and Broben. The bottom of his face was streaked where he’d wiped blood from his nose. “Here, boss,” he said.

  “Tell Everett to crank the turret and get Martin out of there,” Farley ordered. “You get the gear crank and start winding the wheels down when I give the word. Get some help with it. And send Shorty up here.”

  “I best check out that rear wheel.”

  “Get to it.”

  “You got it, cap.” Wen dropped down into the lower cockpit.

  “What the living hell just happened to us, Joe?” said Broben.

  “No idea. But it’s still happening, and I need you in the game. All right?”

  Broben nodded. “I’m in,” he said.

  “Good man.” Farley glanced out the window again. Everywhere he looked the ground was black and featureless as a sheet of smoked glass. The canyon directly below was a darker crack, some violent interruption in what otherwise would have been a vast smooth plain.

  “You see anything out there?” Farley asked.

  Broben shook his head. “Looks like an eight-ball,” he said.

  “I’m gonna try for the canyon, then,” said Farley. “Maybe there’s a river on the valley floor where we can ditch. Or maybe it opens out into a broader space. In any case it’ll buy time.”

  “Hell of a gamble,” said Broben.

  “If we land on that plain we’ll still be at twelve thousand feet. You see anything to live on down there? Any objective to reach?”

  “I don’t even see a rock.”

  “All right, then.”

  The bomber began to buffet as it caught updrafts spilling over the sheer cliff tops. Fata Morgana descended silent as a balsa glider into the enormous crooked canyon. The fissure looked to be about a mile wide. The bottom lay in shadow and Farley saw no gleam of water. He kept the aircraft centered between the sheer cliff walls and muscled her along the sharp contours.

  Shorty stuck his head up from the lower cockpit. He was carrying the second of their two walkaround oxygen bottles. He lowered his mask and said, “Radio’s out, captain.”

  “So’s everything else,” said Farley. “You’re my relay, got it?”

  Shorty swallowed. “Got it,” he said.

  “Tell Boney and Plavitz to stay in the nose and look for a place to land. We’re coming in unpowered, so we’re gonna need some room. Jerry, call out altitude.”

  Shorty nodded. He relayed Farley’s order, breath smoking in the freezing air, while Jerry announced their altitude as fifteen thousand.

  At his desk behind the bombardier station in the nose, Plavitz looked up from his charts and compass and lowered his oxygen mask. “Do we have any idea where the hell we are?” he yelled.

  Shorty looked up at the command seats. “Navigator says he can’t get a fix on our position,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter where we are,” said Farley. “We’re landing on it.”

  “Fourteen five,” said Broben.

  Shorty saw Everett undog the hatch and swing it back. Martin struggled out and Everett helped him into the cabin. “Martin’s out of the ball turret,” Shorty called up.

  “Fourteen,” said Broben.

  “Tell Martin to get on the oxy feed in the radio room and stay put,” said Farley. “Tell Everett to seal the turret and crank it till the guns are level. Ask Wen if that rear wheel’s gonna lower.”

  Shorty relayed the orders calmly but with growing horror at their predicament.

  “Thirteen five,” said Broben.

  “Bombardier wants to blow the Norden,” relayed Shorty. “Navigator sees lights ahead.”

  “Affirmative on the Norden, but wait till we’re at a thousand feet. Some detail on the lights would be nice.”

  Shorty felt faint and realized his face was numb with cold. He had to remember to keep using the walkaround. “He says it’s green pinprick lights on the valley floor in the far distance straight ahead,” he replied. “He doesn’t think it’s an airfield.”

  “Thirteen thousand,” said Broben.

  Farley held the bomber level as he could to keep the glide ratio as high as possible. More speed would give him more control, but would also put them on the ground sooner. Luckily a steady updraft of warm air from the valley floor was helping to keep their glide path shallow.

  The cockpit darkened as the bomber descended into shadow. The stark sky now a crooked path between black borders of mountain-high cliffs.

  “Twelve,” said Broben.

  A few miles ahead the dark edges of the massive cliffs framed a large open area, and Farley thought he could make out tiny pale-green lights in the far distance on the opposite side. Plavitz had good eyes.

  They were going to break out into the open area at around eleven thousand feet. Another stroke
of luck. The surface would be sunlit and Farley would be able to order the crew off oxygen and get the landing gear cranked down while he found a place to set her down. He hadn’t relished setting twenty tons of aircraft on the floor of a pitch-black canyon on zero engines, no lights, and an unexploded thousand-pound bomb stuck in the bay.

  At eleven thousand feet they broke into the open and everything went to shit.

  Vortex winds that curled around the fissure entrance assailed the heavy bomber. Farley fought for control. The aircraft banked a sharp right and Farley felt the right elevator barely hanging on. He sailed her in a wide right turn and straightened out and then had to take her left because more cliffs rose dead ahead. The open area in which they now glided was a vast bowl ringed by sheer, planed walls with jagged peaks. A circular mountain range. In the center of the bowl rose a conical mound with a flattened top.

  “Navigator says negative on a landing site so far,” reported Shorty. “Bombardier says we’re in a bomb crater.”

  Broben looked back at Shorty. “Bomb crater? This thing must be ten miles wide.”

  Shorty shrugged. “It’s what he said.”

  Broben looked at the altimeter. “Nine five,” he said. “Those turns were expensive.”

  “Everybody off oxygen,” said Farley. “Get those wheels down.”

  He glanced at Broben as Shorty relayed the order. “It’s going to be close,” he said.

  Broben nodded. It would take several minutes for a team working furiously with the hand crank to lower the landing gear one at a time. “When isn’t it?” he said.

  “We’re still flying and we’re still in one piece,” Farley pointed out.

  “Well, look whose glass is half full.”

  “Look who still has a glass.”

  Broben snorted. “You win.”

  Farley nodded at the front window. “Unless you have any better ideas, I’m heading for Plavitz’s lights on the other side of the bowl there.”

  “All my better ideas involve being somewhere else right now.”

  “Roger that.”

  Shorty popped up again. “Martin says there’s a bandit shadowing us at eight o’clock level,” he said.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” said Broben.

  Through the control wheel Farley felt a faint shudder. The slowly lowering landing gear was adding drag.

  “Get Martin on a waist gun and tell Boney to get in the top turret,” Farley ordered. “If it’s not one of ours, it’s history, got it?”

  “Seven thousand,” Broben said.

  “And tell Wen I need an engine, dammit.” Farley steered the bomber across the enormous bowl while Shorty relayed his orders. The surface looked rippled in places, waves hardened into rock formations splashed out from a common center. A crater? Ten miles wide? More like the caldera of some inconceivably large volcano. But this was no gouged mountain, it was a huge hole ripped out of a vast plain and radiating cracks bigger than the Grand Canyon.

  He heard Boney climb into the top turret stand behind him.

  Reflections played off the front windshield, and Farley realized he was looking at a shimmering column of air above the shadowed center of the crater. It looked the same as the disturbance in the air beneath the flak field above Zennhausen, and he didn’t want any part of it. He pointed it out to Jerry and turned to glide around it even though it would cost them even more altitude.

  Above and behind him Boney called, “Bandit! Bandit eight o’clock level!” as Martin yelled, “What the hell is that?”

  The jackhammering of .50s filled the cockpit.

  “Shorty,” Farley began, and then something hit the bomber so hard it tore the controls from his hands. Fata Morgana slewed sideways and pitched right and began to plane down toward the ruined surface of that shifted world.

  eight

  Wennda crouched behind a rockfall on the valley floor and studied the vast translucent wall of the massive Redoubt a kilometer away. Sunlight gleamed the wall’s top third. Canyon shadow slanted across its gridded surface below. The wall was made of large rectangular panels of some dense glasslike substance with a faint green tint. Panels here and there were cracked and chipped, some missing outright and covered with metal or plastic.

  The Redoubt wall ran the width of the fissure, and rose up five hundred feet. The wedge of canyon behind it had been roofed over with the same material.

  A cluster of tall buildings rose within that space. As if some enormous dam of pale green glass across the canyon had drowned a city and left it on display like some cruel god’s aquarium. Random lights glowed steady in the stark towers.

  Wennda glanced at the other three members of the small reconnaissance party crouched beside her. Arshall and Sten were good soldiers and hard workers, fast, efficient, and skilled. Arshall farmed a plot with his older sister and their parents. Sten was a machinist who fabricated replacement parts for old equipment. Reliable men who trusted her to lead. They did their job and didn’t argue. Well, not much. In any case, they weren’t a worry.

  The fourth member of their party was the worry.

  Yone leaned against the rockfall and studied the translucent wall with Wennda’s priceless binoculars. He was small and thin and dark-haired, absorbed in his surveillance. Among them but not of them, as likely he would always be.

  Wennda frowned at Yone’s back as he surveyed the place where he’d once lived. Will I really kill him if he runs? Will I have a choice? Maybe that’s why I brought Arshall and Sten. Because they won’t hesitate if it comes to that.

  She glanced at Arshall and saw him frowning at Yone, and wondered if he was thinking something similar.

  Yesterday their small recon team had quietly left the Dome and made the crater crossing. There was no foraging to be done. No game lived here, and none of them would have known how to hunt it if it had. Sparse weeds and vines had taken root in carbon-rich patches of crater floor, but there was nothing to eat or drink except what the team brought with them. It was unforgiving going. They slept in their clothes in the shelter of oddly undulant rock formations, smooth curved berms that once had briefly moved as ripples until they’d cooled to stone. At night the party lit no fire, and by day they traveled in the narrowing arc of shadow that crept eastward on the canyon floor until high noon, then thickened west to east as the unremitting sun shrank toward the blunt horizon. They followed the perimeter because no one dared go near the mound at the center of the crater. A vast well lay in its middle like a hole punched through the world. By day a column of air shimmered above it, as if a pillar of heat rose from the pit, or some great agitation in the deep churned what lay above. At night the vast bore glowed a faint pale green. Over it the insubstantial column glimmered in the nighttime air, distorting the hard sprawled stars that passed behind it.

  Everyone knew what lived down in that well. If it was alive. A weapon from the old world, protecting something stored deep in the well like a dragon guarding treasure. Sometimes it emerged to soar across the blighted air. The Typhon, it was called. Parents warned their children, Behave or the Typhon will come after you, and its vague menace stalked their dreams.

  These were the fixtures of their bleak and fractured landscape, rough-hewn icons in a broken world: A living machine guarding a deep well in the center of a vast crater radiating canyon cracks. Opposing cities on opposite sides, self-contained and struggling to survive a world stripped bare. This dire tableau a rude-carved history of catastrophe.

  But in the last few days there had been odd changes in the shimmering column. Flickers and flares and undulations. Brief solidifications like some textured shaft of coruscating glass. Wennda thought it could be an indication that the Redoubt had managed to defeat or evade the Typhon and gain access to the crater well. Something down there was powering that vast display, perhaps the thing the Typhon protected. And if the Redoubt had got hold of that kind of power, there was no telling what they might unleash.

  Two years ago the column had exhibited similar behavior.
Wennda had wanted to lead a recon team then, too. But then Yone had arrived, escaped from the Redoubt to seek asylum, and the ensuing argument over what to do with him had eclipsed any suggestion of an investigative team.

  Now the massive fixture of their landscape was acting up again, and the man whom many of her people thought might be a Redoubt spy was crouched before her studying the very place he might be trying to return to—and Wennda had practically escorted him here.

  But no one knew the Redoubt as Yone claimed to, and if her people’s ancient enemy had finally managed to gain access to the crater well, Wennda definitely wanted him along. If it turned out Yone had lied to them and really was a Redoubt spy, then only three of their party would be coming back. Wennda would have some explaining to do, but she was used to that. And she doubted anyone would grieve too much about the loss of a spy and an unplanned mouth to feed.

  Yone flattened the binoculars and turned away from the Redoubt, frowning as he sat back against the shattered boulder.

  Wennda held out a hand and Yone gave her back the prized binoculars. “See anything different?” she asked. “It can’t have changed very much in two years.”

  Yone gave his characteristic quick nod and twitch of a smile. “Nothing I can see from here,” he said. He had an odd accent and a precise way of speaking. People in the Redoubt were very different, Yone had said. Different speech, customs, organization.

  “I want to go in,” Wennda said. She ignored the startled looks from Arshall and Sten.

  “That would be very difficult,” said Yone. “They are always watching.”

  “It’s amazing that you got away at all,” said Wennda.

  “Fortresses are built to keep things from getting in,” he said. “Not from getting out. But yes, I was very fortunate.”

  “Can we get in the same way you got out?” Wennda waved at the bottle-green wall a kilometer away.

  Yone raised an eyebrow. “It doesn’t seem likely. I walked out the front door.”

  “You walked, or you were pushed?”

  He shrugged, refusing to rise to the bait. “You have heard my story many times by now,” he said. “I can tell it again, but you have already made up your mind. I came with you when you asked me to. I am trying to help.” He held up a hand to stop her interruption. “Yes, I have my own interest,” he said. “Anything I can help you learn about what they may be trying to do here will only aid my credibility. Anything I can do to help our city also helps me.”

 

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