The Gods of War

by Christopher Stasheff

  Micha'el shook his head. No advice, for once, he said to the night.

  Silence.

  For a long time he stood there, unmoving.

  If he can bear it, he thought at last, and him a mortal, without even any certainty about the levels of life above and below his—then I, who know better, can hardly do worse. 'Go down shooting,' as he says. At least I know what I'm shooting at.

  He looked up at the stars.

  But oh, this is hard!

  No answer now, either. His own commander, like other good ones, once the order was given to an experienced officer, had the sense to stand back and let him execute it.

  Never mind, he thought at last. Some habits were too old to break . . . he hoped. He leaned back, and closed his eyes to start work.

  Forgetting the body itself was always the hardest part. You didn't dare dissolve your connection to it entirely—it might not be possible to re-establish it. But at the same time, it got in the way: its perceptions were geared only to this level of being . . . and Michael had business higher up.

  He let the body fall away, and very cautiously felt around him in the dark, the way someone might who had dropped something valuable on a floor that was also covered with broken glass. He didn't want to give an alarm. This by itself was so counter to his usual way of operating—the obvious entry, the straightforward challenge, directly given—that he had astounded himself, earlier, by even thinking of it. The idea had come to him after they had jumped him in the dark, preparatory to his being spraypainted. It had been (he had noted to himself, ruefully, about the third can of paint thinner) extremely effective.

  Gently, gently he felt around him. Gods left a sort of signature in the "field" of physicality, a result of the casual way their natures overrode the physical around them. The signature was not a hard profile, but a locus of nexi, a sparkling fuzziness that looked to those who could see such things much the way chaff looked on radar. When a god was embodied, the signature was more muted still. But Micha'el felt sure he knew within three guesses where Tek would be. A radar installation: the best-equipped, shiniest, newest one of all of them; and, if embodied, in the person of the greatest potential power there. Tek was unsubtle, and liked to throw his weight around on every available plane.

  Micha'el smiled, a still small effusion of power in the dark void through which he moved. Carefully he laid the "hand" of his mind, testing, over the radar installation at al'Arish, on the coast. Nothing there but a general, muted sense of unease, disturbance. He removed it, slowly, waited for any signs that he had been noticed. Nothing: he was alone in the dark and the silence.

  Carefully he reached out to the radars at al-Qusaymah. At first he almost jerked back, thinking he felt something sharp and hot; but it was plain old human emotion, this, someone's fear or hatred, or both, piercing through into the higher levels in dream. I suppose someone there might be asleep, he thought, though it seemed a little odd. Surely if this was the day—and it was—the whole place would be roused and on alert. But no matter.

  He withdrew his probe of thought and turned his attention to his third guess. Very slowly, very delicately indeed, he reached out toward Jabal al-Misheiti. He felt, as he had felt in the other two installations, the hard sharp crackle of the radars combing the fabric of things as they looked sideways at the world. But there was something extra, a faint taste or smell, of something in the radar beams—the same way bioelectricity can be felt to have a little something extra about it when it carries thought.

  Micha'el smiled again. He knew what that something was. He took a deep breath—and laughed at himself: how the body began to change one's idiom after a while, even when you were out of it—and concentrated on making himself seem as little there as possible. In the void, he was void as well; the faint radiance that had been about him now went out. His darkness moved over the face of things, low, following the radar, pretending to be returning radiation, the familiar bounce. Packets of radiation passing him carried that signature, the one he was after, more and more strongly. A cold scent, a taste of metal, the nerveless buzz and whine of captive electrons being scourged along gouged-out pathways by a pitiless taskmaster. Tek was there, all right, and not totally embodied, or not in one place. Some of him was in the radars themselves. That's Tek for you. He's the type that can never resist becoming his tools. He controlled his elation. It was the best possible advantage for him . . . as long as he could keep Tek from noticing him, and changing the status quo.

  Closer and closer he crept with the strengthening signal. Shortly he was seeing what he had desperately wanted to see; that bloom of light in the void which meant a significant part of a god's being was in one spot, embodied. The bloom of light beat steadily, inturned, concerned with itself, and paid him no attention at all. The timing of the beat reassured him; it cycled in seconds rather than milliseconds—a human body, not a mechanical one. A good thing this era's computers are still too stupid to be any good to inhabit, Micha'el thought: Tek could have made dreadful use of anything much smarter than a PC.

  He paused just long enough to be sure of his target, for when he struck, the body-shell might die: he had no wish to kill any more innocents than necessary. There was indeed the pale, weak glimmer of the body's original soul, unconscious, crushed down and helpless against what overrode it. It couldn't be helped now. Micha'el gathered himself and his power, and flung himself down out of the void onto the chilly, shiny bloom of light, smothering it.

  The other fought him, of course. They clutched one another, and he was almost stifled by the cold grip of metal around throat and heart, half blinded by the icy glint off the mirror-glazed eyes. What the other saw, he had no idea; his whole business now was to hang on, to hold Tek helpless for a good while. Past dawn, anyway. It would not be easy, for Tek was a god, and he was rather less than one, by choice.

  What the people in the radar installation thought of it all, he could only imagine: they doubtless saw their Soviet advisor crumple to the floor and lie there helpless, barely breathing. Micha'el felt sorry for the poor invaded body, but had less time to worry about it than about the radars. They were paralyzed: there was enough of Tek in them to make sure they weren't controllable by the humans in the installation—but not enough of Tek for him to activate them. Tek thrashed and pushed and tried to pry enough of himself out of Micha'el's grasp to free the radars up; but Micha'el held on grimly and would not let him go. He was burnt by Tek's cold, scorched by his fire: but he would not let go. He had had cold before, in the outer darknesses, and fire like no one had experienced since, and survived them both. He might not be divine, but it was going to take more than this tinkertoy god to make him give up.

  The morning star was setting: even here, outside the physical world, he could feel the light changing, the dawn coming up. Humans were moving about, concerned, in the three radar centers; things didn't seem to be working, and they couldn't understand why. Shortly they would be running about like ants in an overturned anthill, as the alert came through from Cairo, as the tanks started to roll north over the border. The alert came, and the panic began. And still Micha'el held onto Tek, scorched and blinded, and would not let him go.

  The sun was about to come up. Across the desert, faintly, with the ears of a body leaning almost unconscious against a wall, Micha'el heard the klaxons at the base, heard the frantic scrambling of pilots heading for their planes. He let go, reeled away. Tek reared up and reached out for him, and seeing the weak point, Micha'el whispered sorry! and swept a knife-edge hand at the faintly silver-shining connection winding from the bloom of power that was the god, to the radars. It snapped. Tek fell fully back into the poor human body: it would live, all right, and it would lukr liim some time to re-establish his connection with the radars. If he bothered—

  Gasping, Micha'el flung himself back to his own body. It was a terrible feeling, as always, this cramming of one's essence back into a container too small, too simple, crumbling at the edges every time you moved. Someone was shakin
g him. "Wake up! Dammit, we've got to—"

  "Leave him—"

  "It's all right," he mumbled, and managed to get his eyes open. Duvid was shaking him; Micha'el reached out, grabbed his arms, stopped him. "I was asleep on my feet."

  Duvid shoved Micha'el's helmet into his hands and ran for the flightline.

  They flew, all of them. It was ten minutes to Tabal al-Misneiti, riding the flaring thrust of full reheat. They met no resistance as they crossed the border: their own radars registered the presence of no others. It was bizarre. The tanks had started moving into the Gaza less than an hour ago. The air should have been full of planes.

  It was not. They dove down out of the bright morning into a valley empty of anything but lovely runways. Each of the Mirages had nearly five thousand pounds of bombs slung under it; they used them there, lavishly, the commander making helpful suggestions as to placement, and sounding happy for the first time Micha'el had ever heard. Before the Cyrano air-to-air radars noticed even the first MiG approaching, the runways looked like the surface of the Moon, and the hangars were rubble, with at least thirty planes inside them.

  "They got at least one flight up from down south," the commander said calmly. "I see twenty. No more runways, gentlemen."

  "Gotcha, Boss," said one pilot after another. And Duvid sang out: "Eyeballs!"

  They were streaking along low; the MiGs knew where their best maneuverability lay. Almost as one the Mirage pilots yanked on their sticks and went for altitude. Not too much—

  The MiGs closed. It got busy in the air. The commander had specified a weapons mix for the group that would leave them something to do with after the bombs were all gone: everyone had at least two air-to-air under the wings, and everyone had full loads in the twin 30 mm DEFA cannon-packs. The morning became full of tracer as the MiGs tried to keep heading north. The flight had no intention of letting them do so. One tried to go under the group; Micha'el saw a Sidewinder head for the 21's tailpipe, and hatch, like a phoenix's egg, in fire, bursting the silver shell—

  There was no way to keep an eye on Duvid, although Micha'el desperately wanted to do so; wanted to see him go, and bid him farewell, if he could not stop it. But the air was too full of bogies, twisting and spiraling. The Cyrano radar shouted for his attention. Someone streaked across his twelve, right in front of him, he could hardly believe it—the vertically-split maw of a MiG-19's nose intake, almost straight on, running away from one of the other pilots: he pulled back hard on the stick, 4 G turn at least, followed almost side by side, popped his airbrakes for just the merest instant to let the MiG overshoot, and let the cannons speak. A bloom of fire in front of him, he veered away, his shoulders itching as they always did—

  "Eight left," the commander said. "They're trying to break. Don't let them!"

  The whole fight was indeed drifting northward. Micha'el broke right, saw a tailpipe so close even the radar didn't see it first, and sent a Sidewinder after it: broke hard left and up, felt the shudder against his tailplane and wings as the MiG blew. Seven. The fight was drifting upwards as well, the MiGs trying to prevent it, unsuccessfully: they had no guidance from their radars, their GCI was silent, and the Mirages pushed them up and up into their optimum operation area, where they no longer turned like bullets, where their engines worked better than the MiG's—

  And Duvid went down past him. No more warning than that, just the one-winged shape spinning downward, the canopy a charred crater, blasted away; a silver glint, spiraling, then a smoke and a pillar of fire, fire in the sand. Micha'el didn't swear; it was not in his job description. But he went up to kill what had killed his friend.

  Another Mirage came down past him as he arrowed up. Someone good was up there; or someone who knew how to do without GCI. Or someone who had never needed it, he thought, seeing the topmost MiG as it dropped toward him, closing nose-on. Micha'el angled in towards the MiG, making for a close pass so that it couldn't turn onto his six. He blinked then at his own mistake; the triple 23mm cannons on the MiG lit up, sending tracer looping out in lazy, incandescent blobs that accelerated insanely as they whipped over the cockpit canopy. An Atoll AAM flared out from under its left wing and went scything past him. It was a pointless thing to do, because the missile was unable to make a lock at point-blank range, but lock or not it still came so close that Michael flinched, seeming almost to feel the heat of its rocket exhaust as it roared by. He could feel another heat as well, one he recognized. Angry, he thought, don't fly angry! He pulled the stick back and pushed the Mirage into a 6-G climb, straight up.

  He can't follow that, Micha'el thought. He'll turn off horizontal, or bug out, if he's got brains. Cannons for him, when I level out—He looked back over his seat, and was horrified to see the 19 only a hundred yards away, climbing with him cockpit to cockpit. Mirrored goggles flashed at him in the sun.

  Tek, he thought, horrified. Whatever pilot had been in that plane before, he wasn't there now. Micha'el throttled forward, but not fast enough to elude the other's fire, with his own six exposed while he climbed vertical. Desperately Micha'el rolled off the top and spiraled downward, Tek following and firing. They dropped into a classic rolling scissors, each trying for an angle on the other. The tight turns were losing Michael his speed, pulling him down into the range where the MiG could turn and handle better—

  He saw a break, found it, ran nearly miles downhill, getting some separation, getting his momentum back. Two miles—but barely six seconds at the rate he was going. Time to suck in a couple of breaths, blink, fight the G. He turned, went after his pursuer, fired the cannon: clean misses—then angled up at sixty degrees again. Again the MiG came up after him. He shouldn't be able to do that in that plane—Micha'el thought, annoyed. But then maybe the plane had a little help—

  He could do it himself. But the thought went across the grain. When you fought in-body, you fought with the weapons you came with. Usually. But Tek was not playing by the rules. Up he came, hot on Micha'el's tail, in a machine that shouldn't know how to climb like this—

  Cheaters never prosper, Micha'el thought. One more try. He would not lose his speed again the way he had last time. He turned, dived to get his momentum back, let Tek play with the 6 Gs again, as he was. Two more miles, six more seconds—

  He came about hard and came at Tek head on again, but this time with a little offset, just enough so that Tek couldn't fire his cannons. They passed again and both went vertical. There was no mistaking the sense of air being interfered with, something dark changing its density, making it behave differently. Micha'el frowned, played his card. The VIFF wouldn't be invented for a while yet, and it was at best the mark of a lazy pilot who shouldn't have allowed his enemy on his six in the first place. But he pulled in closer to Tek's line, let his throttle lean back to idle, and popped airbrakes and flaps together, dropping 50 knots of airspeed in a matter of a second. Tek viffed too, but not with his plane: the darkness about him heated the air, changed its viscosity; he dropped back.

  Damn! Micha'el thought then, seeing what his adversary would do, and finding no way to do his job, and fulfill his mission, but to match him. He would not need a miracle this time. But you told me there would be a price, didn't you?

  No answer. He had expected none; nor would there be one until the debriefing. Micha'el smiled grimly, resigned himself to an argument with his Boss, and had a word with the air himself.

  The other pilots, most particularly the commander, would never quite be able to describe what they saw. In clear air, the MiG seemed somehow to be in shadow: and in clear air, the Mirage going after him suddenly was wider than it was; a silver glitter, like ice in the sun, like great bright-feathered wings suddenly extended, shone all around it, and the Mirage dropped behind the MiG again. A tail of fire burst forward from it, the Sidewinder leaping away like a lance of fire. It seemed to miss. For a moment the commander thought he saw another Sidewinder—but that was impossible, the new man had already fired two. A burning line of light, like a lance of fire,
or a sword, caught the MiG halfway down the fuselage. Straight into the ground it flew, seemingly under control, and the blackness that had followed it dissipated.

  One other thing followed it; the Mirage, spiraling in. It was not out of control, either. There was a clear hesitation on each quarter of the roll; the commander thought of the insouciant maneuver of the man, the day before—and on the fourth quarter-roll, aircraft and ground met and became one. The commander blinked. Impossible to have seen what he thought he saw; thumbs up, the smile under the helmet. And now nothing but fire.

  Above them, the air was clear.

  Three hours later, there was no Egyptian air force. Three hundred of three hundred sixty planes were caught on the ground and destroyed after their runways were made useless. Of a total of thirty that managed to make it into the air from bases in the south, all were destroyed or crash-landed for lack of runways.

  Elsewhere, an archangel was reassigned, and an annoyed god, betrayed by technology not quite far enough along to be of use to him, sulked mightily, then curled up for a good long sleep. One that would last until another desert conflict woke him. In that regard, everything went exactly as planned. Tek would have had much too much fun with the proliferating and occasionally erratic atomic technologies of the '70s and '80s.

  As it was, the corridors of upper existence rang with a cheerful taunt:

  Cheaters never prosper.

  HEROES

  In the desert the Leader waited. He followed the laws of Allah, but he had seen the power of the desert spirits. Once more he was there to ask their aid. This made him very uncomfortable, but he had no choice. His nation was destitute. Worse than their overwhelming debt to the Americans and Japanese was the disgrace of being unable to pay back the monies borrowed from his fellow followers of Islam. The recent, unsuccessful war with their eastern neighbor had been costly. He controlled what was still unquestionably the greatest military power in their part of the world, but this would soon mean nothing. His creditors, other nations, also were meeting secretly on plans to impound the oil that was his nation's only wealth. With his people starving and no replacement parts, his magnificent military machine would collapse.