by John Varley
He had the plane in a nose-dive, the throttle back all the way. Still the plane gained speed. They closed in again behind the deathangel who turned away with a contemptuous flicker of his ratty tail feathers. Conal zoomed by, pulled up, turned left and Nova found herself hanging by her fingernails, her feet having slid off the transparent wing surface.
Conal did a tricky little flip-flop that left her momentarily weightless, and she scrambled to get her boots down, felt weight returning, and looked up to see they were about to hit the angel.
This time, when Conal was through with his frantic maneuvers, she was holding on with only one hand. He leveled out and throttled back again, and she climbed up breathing hard.
"It's no good," Conal said. "I almost hit him."
"I know," she said, getting back in.
Conal was holding the loose end of the safety line and looking angry. He was about to say something, but Cirocco's voice came over the radio.
"He's still dropping, Conal. Why don't you level out and join us?" He turned, spotted Cirocco's plane following the angel, which now descended at a more leisurely rate. He followed them down.
The deathangel went down for a long time. When it finally leveled out, it was at an altitude of one kilometer.
"Well," Cirocco said, dubiously, "it had to be tried. If we hadn't tried it, we'd all have been kicking ourselves forever."
"Is it over, then?" Robin asked.
"It might as well be," Cirocco said. "My dears, that thing has reduced our chances of catching Adam by a factor of ten."
"Worse," Nova said.
"Okay, worse. And worse than that, if it does drop Adam, it's our fault he's down so low."
"We had to try it," Chris said.
Cirocco nodded thoughtfully.
"Folks, we just got sent a message. Gaea will not hurt Adam. But she's willing to let us kill him, if we get too cute. So let's back off, like about a kilometer, and hope that son of a bitch gets up a little higher."
They did, and after a short time the deathangel rose to two kilometers and leveled out there. Then another appeared from the bright yellow sands of Mnemosyne and took Adam. They watched as the second one disintegrated just as the first had, and the third flew tirelessly on.
"Cirocco, I'm going to have a fuel problem," Conal said.
She watched as the figures from his computer filled her screen. Then she sat back and thought it out, going over it all three times, until she felt sure she had the right course of action.
"I'm going to give you some fuel now," she told Conal. "Leave myself enough to reach the base in the north wall. I'll leave the Four there, and come back in something bigger and meaner."
"Got you."
So Conal dropped down to the level Cirocco was maintaining, went below her, then put his plane on autopilot as he crawled out to catch the fuel hose dangling from the larger plane. He plugged it in and watched the fuel fill his own tank.
"Stay behind and below, as we discussed," Cirocco told Conal. "I won't be away long."
"Don't worry about us, Captain," she heard him say. She dipped her wings and turned to the north.
What followed was no more amazing than a mosquito turning into a hawk.
Airplanes are a series of trade offs. The designer has to pick which characteristic is most important, and work around that, knowing the other parameters will suffer for it. A slow-flying high-altitude plane needs a lot of wing surface to provide lift in thin air. A very fast plane doesn't need much wing, but must withstand atmospheric heating. Either way, there are problems of structural strength. The very fastest planes usually have a short range because they burn fuel extravagantly.
The Dragonfly series was the best attempt human engineers had yet made at planes that could do all things well. They had been designed for Earth conditions. Gaea's environment was different, but most of the differences worked to the advantage of the Dragonflys.
The powerplants were small, light, and almost one hundred percent fuel-efficient.
The airframes were very strong, light, heat-resistant, and of variable flight-geometry.
On Earth, a Dragonfly stalled at ten kilometers per hour. At Gaea's rim, where the air pressure was two atmospheres, a Dragonfly could stay in the air at walking speed. They could reach seventy thousand feet on the Earth; in Gaea that ability was wasted, as even in the hub the pressure was one atmosphere. They were acrobatic, able to pull more turning gees than a human pilot could withstand without blackout. They were ultra-light, idiot-proof, high-capacity, low-maintenance, fuel-efficient, high-altitude, long-range ...
... and supersonic.
Cirocco had cracked the sound barrier a few times in Gaea, but there was not much point in it. At the rim the speed of sound was between thirteen and fourteen hundred kilometers per hour, depending on air temperature. The longest possible trip was about an hour and a quarter at that speed.
When Cirocco pushed the throttles forward in southern Mnemosyne she was about two hundred kilometers from her destination. The engines roared, the wings folded back and pulled in and the fuselage constricted at the waist, and in three minutes she was doing a thousand kilometers per hour. A few minutes after that she had to begin her deceleration.
Her destination was a cavern about a mile up the side of the sheer northern highlands cliff.
When she declared war on the buzz bombs, Cirocco had bought enough weaponry to arm a medium-sized banana republic. It had not been cheap, and the freight charges to Gaea had tripled the price, but it meant nothing to her. She had a great deal of money on Earth, earned mostly because she had lived so outlandishly long, and it was just paper-less than paper; you could use paper to start a fire. It had pleased her to at last find a use for the stuff. Killing all the buzz bombs had not taken long. She could have used just the Dragonflys to do it, but she had bought a lot more than that. Most of it was still there, waiting to be used.
She let the plane's brain bring her in until the last hundred meters, then took control herself and barriered into the cave, directing the jet exhaust to bring the plane in vertically. They got out quickly, and she directed Chris and Robin to take out all the personal gear. Then she selected another plane.
It was a big cave. There were thirty aircraft in it.
She chose a Mantis Fifty. It was of the same generation as the Dragonfly, but its mission was not primarily transportation. Its name came from the fact that it could carry fifty people and a little armament. Or, it could carry twenty-five, and a lot of armament. Then again, it could carry ten, and enough firepower to shoot down a squadron of older planes and level a small city.
Counting Chris as two people, Cirocco was going to be taking off with four. She planned her payload accordingly.
The three of them spent the next half-hour attaching missiles to the wings, loading cannon, and stowing bombs. The lasers would take care of themselves.
The thing clinging to the vertical surface of the central Mnemosyne cable was not a buzz bomb, just as an alligator is not an iguana.
He was built along the lines of a 707. His wings were swept back, and four ramjet engines depended from them.
Gaea, who had dreamed of him three myarevs ago and then seen her dream spring to life, as they so often did, had named him and his brothers and sisters Luftmorder. The name was visible, in English script, on his slim fuselage, which gurgled happily with a full load of kerosene. The name was in white, and the rest of him was the color of drying blood. There were not many like him. In all of Gaea, only ten. All of them hung from cables, like barnacles.
His had been a dull life, so far, but he was patient. He had never tried his wings. But the day would come. He looked forward to it.
The Luftmorder was not a particularly bright being, but it would have been wrong to call him stupid. He was single-minded, and quite canny in the pursuit of his goals. He had clung for three myriarevs, feeding on the kerosene drip from the cable. He could cling that long again, and more, but did not think he would have to. He se
nsed Gaea's excitement. Orders would come.
Clinging to him in turn, squabbling among the rows of cold nipples that lined the undersides of his wings, were scores of creatures called sidewinders and red-eyes. They were quite stupid; a necessary nuisance. Red-eyes were larger, sidewinders were faster-at least, that was the theory. Each would get only one chance to find out, as they were not reusable. Each was an organic creature built around a solid-fuel skeleton. Their brains rode on cores of explosive. They saw in the infra-red spectrum, and they loved bright things just like moths love flames.
The Luftmorder was not a buzz bomb, though he was related. The nine aeromorphs that clung to the cable quite near him, however, were much like buzz bombs, in the same way a greyhound or a Doberman is much like a Chihuahua.
The Luftmorder was undisputed flugelführer of the squadron. He watched with infra-red-eyed concentration as the two planes dallied by far beneath him. He saw them come together for a time, saw the larger begin to burn much faster and pull away to the north. The buzz bombs wanted to go, but he counseled patience. When the larger plane was far away, when it had landed in that kerosene-source which his Gaean instincts told him must be there, he detached five of his underlings, one by one, and watched them fall toward the bright sand.
EIGHTEEN
"You'll have to take a close look at those one day," Conal said, when he saw Nova staring out at the south-central Mnemosyne cable. "I doubt you've ever seen anything quite like it."
"It looks so small from here," Nova said. "Just a thread."
"That thread is about five kilometers thick. It's made of hundreds of strands. There's animals and plants that live on them and never come down to the ground."
"My mother said Cirocco Jones climbed to the top of one once." She craned her neck and discovered the point where the cable joined the arched roof of Mnemosyne. "I don't see how she did it."
"She did it with Gaby. And it wasn't one of these. These go straight up. The one Cirocco climbed angled like those ahead of us. See how they bend up and go into the Oceanus spoke? You can't quite see into the spoke from here. She tells me they're what hold Gaea together."
"Why is everything so dead here?"
"It's because of the sandworm. He could pick his teeth with Mount Everest."
"Do you think ..." She had to pause, and yawn hugely. "... you think we'll see him?"
"Say, why don't you get some sleep?"
"I'll be okay."
"No, really. You ought to. I'll wake you if anything important happens, and if nothing does, then you can spell me in a couple revs."
"How long is a rev?"
"Near enough to an hour."
"All right. I will. Thanks." She turned slightly in her seat.
"How's the hand? You want those bandages wrapped again?"
"It's okay. I banged it while I was hanging onto the wing." She gave him a sleepy, friendly smile, then seemed to catch herself at it. Conal suppressed his own grin; she was definitely improving. She had to remember to be surly. Maybe she'd forget entirely one of these days. Could happiness be too far behind?
She closed her eyes and fell asleep in no more than ten seconds. Conal envied her. It usually took him at least a minute.
Feeling a little guilty, he studied her as she slept. Her face was relaxed, and she looked even younger than her eighteen years.
She still had a little girl's face, with a lot of cheek and a protruding lower lip. Conal could see her mother's features in her upturned nose and large jaw. With her eyes closed that unsettling resemblance to Chris was hard to find.
He resolutely turned away when he found his eyes straying to the full curves of the breast, the round hips, the long legs. Suffice it to say she had a child's face on a woman's body.
"Advisory," the computer said. "Hostile aircraft have been known to-"
Conal hit the override, and glanced at Nova. Her eyes fluttered, then she made an un-ladylike sound and nestled deeper into the cushions.
Once again, a nuisance. The damn computer had a long memory. The results of Cirocco's air war with the buzz bombs had been fed into it, so now it tried to warn Conal of a base that had been empty for eighteen years. The buzzers had liked to congregate at central cables. They could hang for years, nose down, waiting their chance. They had to hang like that, as they couldn't start their engines without first having some forward motion. Primitive ramjets, that's all they had been, nothing like the ultra-refined torch that hummed quietly in the back of the Dragonfly.
He was glad they were all dead.
Still, wouldn't it be funny if ...
He glanced at the central cable, and saw a tiny speck falling toward the sand. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and it was gone. He kept looking at the cable, then shook his head. It was easy to forget how gigantic it was. What did he expect to see? Buzz bombs clinging to the side?
On the other hand, just what the hell could that speck have been?
He fiddled with the radar, but nothing came back. He glanced up at the angel carrying Adam. Nothing wrong there.
On impulse, he fed power to the engine and climbed rapidly to six kilometers.
And the radar pinged.
"Alert," the computer said. "Four-correction, five unidentified aircraft approaching. Correction, three unident-correction, four-"
Conal overrode the voice, which was just a distraction. The graphic display would tell him a lot more.
But it didn't. He saw two blips clearly, down on the deck, moving rapidly in his direction. Then there were three, then another popped into being, "RADAR COUNTERMEASURES IN EFFECT," the computer printed on his screen.
That would seem to indicate Dragonflys, or Cirocco returning in the Mantis. He supposed she could be flying three planes on autopilot, but what for, and why hadn't she mentioned it to him? But buzz bombs couldn't jam radar.
"Hold on there, Conal," he muttered to himself. The plain fact was he had never seen a buzz bomb. He had never fought one. And believing that things always stayed the same in Gaea was a quick way to be dead.
"Wake up," he said, shaking Nova's shoulder. She was alert very quickly.
"Cirocco, I have some unidentified blips on my screen. At least four, probably five. They don't reply to transponders. They are closing on me at about ... five hundred kilometers per hour, and they are employing radar countermeasures. I have climbed to six kilometers in case... in case they take hostile action. I-" he paused, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Hell, Cirocco, what should I do?"
They both listened, and heard nothing but static. Nova was searching the sky above them, but he doubted she would see anything. Then, bless her, she turned quickly and began digging out the rest of their flak suits.
"Cirocco, do you read?" Again, silence. She was probably out of the plane, gathering weaponry, doing a check-out. Maybe she could hear him, and was on her way to the radio.
"Cirocco, I'm going to lead them away from Adam, and then I'm going to shoot them down. I'll leave this channel open." Nova was handing him a helmet and leggings. He put the helmet on, then waved the rest away. "Forget about that, we don't have time. Tighten your straps and hold on." The instant she had the strap pulled tight around her lap, Conal pulled back on the stick and pushed the throttle forward. The little plane leaped forward and curved up like a rocket.
Nova was looking forward, and side to side.
"The ones on the radar were under us," Conal said. "They were hugging the ground. So they'll be behind us now, and I don't think-"
"Right there," Nova said, pointing forward and to the left.
It was heading straight for them, plunging like a hawk, growing bigger.
Conal turned right and pulled back, and they flipped over. The buzz bomb screeched by them, howling. Conal had a glimpse of a shark's mouth, gulping air, and of wings that arched high and then swept down and back. They were buffeted in the heated air from the buzz bomb's tailpipe, then Conal got them turned around and dipped a wing for a better view.
"Why didn't you shoot?" Nova asked.
"I ... I forgot I had guns," he confessed. "You see them down there?"
"Yeah. The first one is pulling around, the other four-"
"I've got 'em." The four were climbing in tight formation. It took Conal back to a cold winter day. He had been ten, and the Snowbirds, Canada's precision flying team, had put on a show. They had flown wingtip to wingtip, turning as a unit. And they had climbed just like these were doing, and at the top of the climb the buzz bombs spread out, trailing black plumes of exhaust, quartering the sky.
Conal had picked them all up on radar now. The images were clear; the computer, fooled at first, was learning the new radar signatures. And it was a damn good thing he had radar, he realized. It was amazing how quickly the devils flew out of sight.
He felt rather helpless. The two of them watched the radar blips twist and turn without apparent pattern. Conal felt he should be preparing some maneuver, as the buzz bombs so obviously were. But he didn't know anything about aerial combat.
He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, and started to work it out.
What did he know about buzz bombs?
"They're big, clumsy, relatively slow, and they weren't equipped for air-to-air encounters." He could hear Cirocco's voice in his memory. She had not talked a lot about the creatures. "Their big tactic was ramming. I had to watch out for that, since they didn't seem to care whether they lived or died. One got me that way, once, and I was damn lucky to walk away from it."
That was all very well, and the one that had almost rammed them had certainly been big-possibly three times the length of the little Dragonfly. But clumsy, and slow? He looked again at the twisting trails in the sky. He thought he was faster than they were, and certainly more maneuverable, but these didn't look all that clumsy.
"There's one coming in behind us," Nova said.
"I see him." He tried a few things, feeling it out. All he could remember was dogfights in movies. There, they came out of the sun-but that wouldn't work well in Gaea. And they got on your tail and shot you down. Since buzz bombs didn't have guns, that wouldn't work.