Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Farley made out the bulge of weapon pod beneath the Typhon’s right wing.

  Broben was pressing back in his seat as if he wanted to crawl over the back.

  But you went up against a different bomber in your little game. That’s what I’m banking on.

  The black core of the pod sparked white.

  Farley cut the wheel hard right and hauled it back as he mashed the right rudder to full. The twenty-ton bomber groaned its shuddering length and cut a quarter-turn snap roll to the right, broad wings going knife-edge vertical.

  “Now,” said Farley. He was already giving opposite aileron as the nose came down into the hard evasive right no bomber in Creation should have made. Broben heard rivets pop. The crew were pressed against the hull like clothes in a spinning washer.

  No one saw the depleted-uranium shell tear past the belly of the bomber at five times the speed of sound. No one saw the Typhon roll to its right and veer in the opposite direction, both aircraft passing belly to belly like jousting gods.

  No one but Martin. Curled in the ball turret like some creature waiting to be born, massive fissure walls rushing past him in a dizzying streak on either side, twin guns aimed straight ahead, grips in his hands familiar as the stitches on a baseball. Feeling the old worn leather of the medicine bag against his chest and thinking of his grandfather’s words about Wakínyan Tanka the Thunderbird when he was a child. And praying to whatever gods there were that he would not let his crewmates down.

  The world turned ninety degrees as the bomber snap-rolled right. In his ears his captain’s voice said Now, and as Martin pressed the firing button something shot along the bomber’s length so close and fast it left a hole behind it in the air. Martin rotated after it, chasing vapor, shooting ghosts, and just as the guns rolled perpendicular to the belly of the bomber standing on its right wing, the entire Typhon filled his world, a prehistoric shark streaking by a minnow, itself planed right and veering, mottled belly nearly raking bomber belly. And Martin’s guns still fired pulverizing rounds the size of grease pencils that stitched along the exposed length of living weapon, that ripped divots of metal and flesh and tore through the elegant engineering of the thing’s insides—

  —and past.

  *

  The Flying Fortress peeling off and arcing down into the chasm.

  Martin panting. Staring at an empty space. Medicine bag rising and falling underneath his thermal suit. Twin barrels hot and cutting through the empty air.

  *

  The nose dropped down and Farley kicked the aileron left and gave her hard left rudder and pushed forward on the yoke, the bomber falling sideways out across the canyon in a massive peel-out. He righted her and brought the rudder to neutral and kept her diving to pick up speed as she headed toward the western cliff wall half a mile away.

  “Pilot to belly gunner, report.”

  Farley brought her around in a broad and gentle curve, losing height but gaining speed. He still had a thousand feet to spare.

  “Belly gunner, report,” Farley repeated. “What’s the story, Martin?”

  Everybody heard the belly gunner breathing in their headphones. Then:

  “Up and in, captain.”

  Farley exhaled. “Nice pitch, chief.”

  “Nice call, sir.”

  “Tail gunner to pilot,” came Francis’ adolescent voice. “That thing’s at six o’clock low and headed away down the canyon. It’s pretty low. I think it’s kind of busted up.”

  The sudden cheering over the headphones made Farley wince. “Roger that,” he said. “We did some fancy dancing there. Everybody report in. Wen, give me a status check.”

  He glanced at Broben. The copilot was staring at him in total disbelief.

  “What?” demanded Farley. He glanced at the air speed indicator and leveled off.

  “ ‘What?’ ” Broben looked around: You believe this guy? “You can’t do what you just did, is what.”

  Farley shrugged. “I hear bumblebees can’t fly,” he said.

  *

  Jogging south along the sunlit crater floor, Wennda suddenly paused. Sten slowed and looked back questioningly. Wennda frowned and held a hand up.

  A faint drone grew in the distance.

  Sten looked around the bare and sunlit ground. No shadows and no cover.

  “We have to find cover,” Sten said. “We’re too exposed here.”

  “It’s not the Typhon.”

  Sten frowned. “It’s not?”

  “Not unless it grew radial engines,” Wennda said. And smiled.

  “Grew what?” asked Sten.

  Wennda wiped her eyes and pointed north. Five miles away the Fata Morgana flew out from between the northern fissure walls, morning sunlight glinting from her cockpit windows, and began to trace the crater’s rim, and began to climb.

  I’m with you, Joe.

  She kissed her fingers and patted her heart, and turned to start the great work of shaping her new world.

  forty

  “Sixteen five,” called Broben.

  The gyros were out, the azimuth indicator rolled, the compass spun, and every indicator was topped out except for altitude. Wen had said the ship would come through better this time out, and Farley had no choice but to believe him.

  “Sixteen five, roger,” Farley said. He looked from the crazed instrument panel to the violent colors traced with frozen lightning in the air three miles away. His eyes hurt with the colors’ throbbing and he looked away. Below, the vast bowl of crater curved up to the notched rim wall.

  “Speed two two five.”

  “Two two five, roger.” Farley looked at Broben. “You ready?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Farley smirked. “Pilot to crew,” he said. “We’ve got no reason to think that going back will be any different than getting here was, so get ready. Someone’ll probably want to give Yone a hand.” He paused a moment, thinking how to put what he wanted to say. Finally he just said, “If anybody wants to pray or do their lucky dance, now’s the time. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “There’s a couple ways you can take that,” Broben pointed out.

  “I mean all of them,” said Farley. He brought the ship around to bearing one hundred sixty-eight degrees and headed for the maw of crackling light.

  *

  Yone sat on the canvas duffel cradling a green walkaround oxygen bottle. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, and the lethal cold reached through the insulating smartsuit Shorty had given him. His teeth would not stop chattering and the scrape along his face felt pressed by a flatiron.

  Garrett handed him a strip cut from a handkerchief and lowered his oxygen mask to show how he had twisted the ends of another strip and shoved them into his nose.

  “Listen!” Garrett shouted. “You’re gonna get a splitting headache and your nose is gonna bleed like you got punched!” He pointed at the U of fabric hanging absurdly from his nose. “If it gets into your mask, it’ll freeze and you won’t be able to breathe!”

  Yone nodded and began twisting his handkerchief strip. Garrett patted him and yelled “Attaboy!” and Everett gave him a thumbs-up.

  The fuselage began to shake. Bright blue threads of light crawled on the right-side machine gun.

  Garrett lowered his mask again. “Interphone’s out!” he announced.

  The bomber bucked hard. Yone lifted up from the deck and nearly landed on Garrett. The light outside the ship was bright and shot with violet and dull red.

  Yone winced at a sudden splitting headache. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He tasted metal and realized that his nose was bleeding heavily.

  Everett made a pained face and lifted his mask and spat an alarming clot of red.

  The hull around them shuddered.

  The repair drone, Rochester, flowed into the compartment from the radio room. The bug was lit up with webbed lightning like a madman’s Christmas tree. Suddenly the drone stopped moving as if it had hit
a wall.

  An all-consuming roar as the bomber slammed out of the world.

  part three:

  the mission

  (continued)

  forty-one

  The Flying Fortress was, as the Americans would say, a sitting duck.

  The squadron of Messerschmitt Bf 109s circled high above the deadly array of exploding antiaircraft shells, and when the Allied bombers completed their run on the high-security munitions plant and turned out of the dense flak field, the fighters were ready.

  Squadron Commander Adler dove down to take on the lead bomber. Oberleutnant Jürgen Große followed a hundred meters behind his commander’s left wing. The third in their group, Leutnant Jaeger, flew behind Große in line with the commander’s right wing.

  Flak had crippled the huge enemy aircraft. The rear gunner’s canopy was shattered and the right-side elevator was a dangling amputation. Evasive maneuvers were out of the question for the laboring bomber; the German fighters would be able to take their time and pick their damage.

  Hauptmann Adler lined up on the tail of the wounded bomber. Große and Jaeger hung back to let him draw first blood. The Flying Fortress and three trailing Messerschmitts looked locked in place as they made a sweeping right turn that brought the flak field back in view above and ahead of them.

  A shock went through Große’s gloved hands. He flinched back and saw bright blue lines come alive across his compact instrument panel like a little lightning storm. All the gauges were in the red and the indicators were going crazy. At first Große thought that the panel had short-circuited. Then he looked up from the instruments and saw the damaged bomber caged in lightning.

  Directly behind it, Adler fired his wing guns. The rounds shot past, a low near miss. The ball turret spun and returned fire.

  Große’s earphones screeched piercingly. Große winced and raised a gloved hand to tear the headset off. The hand stopped.

  Angry colors churned the air ahead of the descending bomber. Hauptmann Adler’s Messerschmitt was outlined in bluewhite light.

  As Adler fired another burst the struggling bomber vanished.

  An instant later the entire front section of Adler’s fighter simply disappeared. The Messerschmitt looked sawn in two across the wing line in front of the cockpit. The open front end of the severed fuselage lifted in the sudden barrage of air and began to spin.

  Große stared as Adler unbuckled from his seat and climbed up from the truncated cockpit and stepped out into empty air. Adler shot backward in the slipstream and tumbled. A ribbon of lines and drag chute deployed above him and a white parachute blossomed in the thin and freezing air.

  A slit formed in the air in front of Große. The edges parted like the gaping mouth of an ocean predator scooping prey—and the Flying Fortress he had been pursuing erupted back into the world from the opposite direction, shedding molten sparks like some feral hound uncollared by an angry god of war.

  Große yanked the stick and snap-rolled right to corkscrew over the looming Flying Fortress impossibly hurtling toward him. As he spun he looked up at the bomber below him trailing embers like some awful metal comet streaming fire into the world, looked up to see two men in the cockpit gaping back at him in similar astonishment.

  *

  Farley and Broben stared up as the German fighter corkscrewed overhead and past, the hard roar of its overthrottled engine fading in an empty vista of pale blue sky.

  For a moment the gliding bomber creaked in a bed of wind. Then came a sound like distant popcorn popping, followed by a steady thud of 20-millimeter cannon fire.

  Farley made a gentle turn and the sky ahead became full of approaching American bombers and streaking German fighters and exploding flak. Wisps of black smoke hung suspended in the air like flimsy jellyfish.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Broben.

  Guttural coughing from the left side made Farley look to see Number One prop spinning up. Number Two engine suddenly belched and fired up.

  Broben looked right. “Three and Four are coming up,” he called.

  On the instrument panel all the gauges topped out and then swung to measure correctly.

  “We got juice,” Broben announced.

  Farley felt the bomber come alive around him, felt it supple through his gloved hands on the wheel. He increased their dive to pick up speed and head below the oncoming bomber formation—the formation he’d been leading seven days ago.

  Huge columns of smoke roiled from the ground ahead. The bomb target. They had made their run above it half a life ago, it seemed, and now there it was ahead of them only seconds after the drop. He saw that Martin had been right when he’d reported that the munitions plant had been hit but not seriously damaged.

  Static screeched in Farley’s ears. Then Everett’s voice was yelling, “Bandits bandits five o’clock high seven o’clock low!”

  The waist-gun Brownings started hammering.

  “I’m on the high one,” Francis called out.

  “Top turret here,” came Wen’s harsh twang. “Those two Me’s are comin’ back around. Another one’s spinning down to the deck. I see a parachute.”

  Farley looked left to see if he could glimpse one of the fighters coming around for another run at them. Beside him Broben said, “Hey, what are you doing up here? You gotta get—”

  A gun went off two feet away from Farley’s head. He flinched, and the bomber lurched. A warm pistol barrel was shoved beneath his jaw. Farley went absolutely still.

  A tight voice spoke in his ear. “Lower your wheels and turn on your lights,” said Yone.

  *

  “Are we hit?” Wen called in Farley’s headphones.

  The blunt barrel remained against the underside of his jaw but the pressure lessened. Farley carefully turned his head to see Yone standing in the pit behind him, holding a service .45. Broben slumped against the right window, crush hat fallen over half his face as if he were taking a nap.

  “Flight engineer to pilot,” Wen said again. “Did we get hit?”

  The top turret was behind and above them; Yone could hear Wen without a headset. “Tell him everything is fine,” he said.

  Farley could not look away from Jerry’s lifeless body as he pressed his throat mike. “Pilot here,” he said tonelessly. “Everything’s fine.”

  Yone brought the gun away just long enough to pull the headset from Broben’s head. Broben’s crush cap tumbled to the cockpit floor and Farley saw his friend’s slack features.

  The gun pressed the soft underside of his jaw again. “Tell the men to stay where they are.”

  Farley’s face was stone. “Stay at your posts,” he said.

  Yone quickly slid the headset on. “Now turn on your lights and lower your wheels.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Yone looked genuinely upset. “I know how hard this is, captain. But I can land this aircraft without you if I must. I would much prefer if you did it. You have been very kind to me. Lights and wheels, please.”

  Farley glared at the windshield. The pistol stayed on him as he leaned forward and watched his right hand flip on the landing lights and hit the left and right wheel switches. He sat back.

  “Belly gunner to pilot. Captain, the wheels are lowering.”

  The pistol barrel pressed. “Shorty and your flight engineer must go into the main compartment and close the door,” Yone said. “If it opens again, I will shoot whoever comes out.”

  “Wen,” said Farley. “Go into the radio room and take Shorty into the main compartment. Shut the door behind you and keep it shut.”

  “What’s going on, cap?” Shorty asked.

  Wen ducked out of the top turret and looked down at Broben’s body and the gun trained on the captain. His nose was purple and his lip was split and scabbed from the beating he had taken not an hour ago. “I knew something wasn’t right about you soon as they tole me you was from the Redoubt,” he said. “I shoulda said something.”

  “Go on, Wen,” said Farley.

&
nbsp; Wen glared cold hate at Yone and then went across the bomb bay catwalk. In front of the radio room he stopped and looked back. Yone shook his head at him. Wen spat on the deck and went in.

  “Tail gunner here,” said Francis. “Those bandits are back on us, five and seven o’clock, but they’re hanging back.”

  “The landing gear’s down,” said Martin. “They think we’re surrendering.”

  “Hell with that,” from Garrett. “I’ll give ’em a burst so they know better.”

  “Now you must tell them,” Yone said.

  Farley stared out at the horizon. “Pilot to crew,” he heard himself say. “Yone’s taken over the cockpit. He shot Lieutenant Broben. I’ve lowered the wheels to indicate our surrender. Do not fire on the enemy fighters.”

  Instead of outraged voices there was only bewildered silence. Then Shorty said, “You’re joking, right, captain?”

  Farley glanced at the .45 in the little man’s hand. At the body of his best friend sagged against the window. “Everyone stand down,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Yone. “I’m sorry, but I need you to tip your wings.”

  Farley did as he was told.

  A Messerschmitt came up to flank the bomber on the left. No one opened fire, and the fighter edged closer and drew alongside them. The goggled pilot studied the situation in the hijacked cockpit. Then he grinned broadly and saluted. He waggled his wings and moved ahead to take up shepherd position in front of the Morgana.

  A shadow fell across the cockpit as another Bf 109 slid into place a hundred feet overhead. A third came alongside their right wing, and the lead fighter began a shallow dive. Farley followed. Far below was patchwork landscape crossed with roads. No hint of the fearsome weaponry unleashed in the air and on the ground behind them.

  Farley’s eyes narrowed. What was it Yone had said?

  I can land this aircraft without you if I must.

  Farley’s knuckles went white on the control wheel. “That 109 on the crater floor,” he said.

  Beside him Yone gave a small and haunted smile. “I could not get the engine started after I came through,” he said.