Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  She was talking about the sort of environmental impacts a giant jellyfish could have when a gust of wind sent the Hopper before them staggering and a shadow fell across the road. She craned her neck to look out her window and up. “It’s a Sparrow!”

  The sound of the Sparrow’s jet engine swelled until it dominated the air. The shadow swept past the Tortoise, and the airliner was plainly visible. Long and sleek, the size of an old Boeing 707, its extended feet as large and stark as elm trees, stripped by death of all but major branches and turned upside down, it did not much resemble its rootstock. But its eye had the perky ancestral gleam and the feathers that showed on the wings and below the passenger pod were the proper streaky brown. Written along the side of the passenger pod, in both English and Arabic, was the Palestine Airways motto: “No Sparrow Falls.”

  The Sparrow sideslipped, swung broadside to their view, and landed in the road ahead. Its body spread across all six traffic lanes, its feet squashing a Roachster and a Hopper.

  “What the…?” The brake pedal was in the traditional place, and Nick stepped on it, hard. As the Tortoise stiffened its legs and skidded toward a halt, the man’s voice rose to a shout: “What are those idiots doing?”

  Emily’s broad mouth hung open. She shook her head, both in disbelief and in admission that she too knew nothing about the motivations of idiots. The Tortoise slowed and stopped, as did the traffic around it. A cacophony of Buggy voices rose as traffic began to pile up and drivers leaned on their horns.

  The Sparrow cocked its head, first one way, then the other, casting its eyes by turns upon the chaos it had created. Its beak thrust, and a Hopper went down its throat, in pieces, one by one. A Roachster quickly followed.

  Nick swore more genuinely as he reached for the panel hiding a control he had never dreamed he would have to use. Drops of sweat appeared on his forehead. “Where…? Ah.”

  The panel stuck, gave way to the bang of Nick’s fist, and opened. He pushed the switch behind it, and the Tortoise lowered its belly-plate, or plastron, to the pavement. Then it drew its head and legs as far into its shell as possible. Unfortunately, it was not a box turtle and it could not protect itself entirely. Its nose and feet remained exposed.

  The doors locked, and the windows slid smoothly all the way up, sealing the Tortoise’s passengers into as safe a redoubt as foresighted engineers could manage to provide. As a side effect, the severed tip of Andy’s jet feather fell to the pavement outside.

  “Wow!” said Andy. He ignored what on any other day would have been a major disaster. His nose was plastered to the window, just as it had been at home when Nick had collared him for this trip.

  The day’s heat wasted no time in making itself felt. The Tortoise had no air-conditioning, and its interior quickly became intolerable despite the best efforts of the ventilation system. But they dared not leave their shelter or open its windows. Nor did they want to. Nick thought that the ventilator admitted quite enough of the metallic scent of fresh blood.

  Fortunately, the carnage and the chaos outside the Tortoise were more than enough to keep their minds off their suffering inside it. Buggies struggled to reverse in the middle of the road. But the traffic jam was now too thick. A few, luckily near the shoulder, tried to use the embankment to make the turn or as a route to off-road freedom. But soon that lane too was blocked. Drivers and passengers fled their gridlocked vehicles. But nothing helped.

  As soon as anyone left their Buggy, the Sparrow’s eye turned their way. Split seconds later, the beak thrust, clamped down on wildly struggling limbs, and choked off screams. Few who were within the Sparrow’s reach escaped successfully.

  Even those who cowered within their buggies were not safe. When the Sparrow saw no prey fleeing, it accepted the vehicles with every appearance of relish. Its ancestors had been opportunists, dining on seeds, crumbs, and insects as they found them. Now it faced a wealth of insectile creatures, all of a size proportionate to itself. Its satisfaction was obvious.

  Only the few Tortoises on the road, each one pulled as much as possible into its shell; the old-style automobiles, even more hard-shelled; and the trucks, too huge, seemed immune to the terrifying attack.

  “Jesus!” Nick knew they were as safe as possible, given the circumstances, but that did not comfort him. When a limb—it might have been a Buggy’s—bounced off the Tortoise’s shell below the windshield, he clutched the tiller with a grip that death alone would slacken.

  “They probably still want the Israelis out of Tehran.”

  “The Palestinians?”

  “Whoever.” Emily shrugged and pointed at the logo on the airliner’s flank. “We should never have let Palestine Airways into the country. Once a terrorist, always a…”

  “Look!” cried Andy. “Here come the cops!”

  As the sound of sirens split the air, Nick peered upward through the windshield. Three Sparrowhawks were just coming out of their dives and sweeping into tight turns above the expressway.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  THE LAND SPREAD out below, wheeling, turning, pivoting now on some skyscraper near the city’s core, now on the crossing of two major roadways, now on the airport control tower. Small white clouds swung above. Broad, steel-gray wings swept through the peripheries of the pilot’s vision, immense feathers twitching from time to time in response to the flow of air or the muscles that controlled his path through the sky.

  The pilot’s name was Bernie, Bernie Fischer, and he was letting his Hawk soar at will while he bathed morosely in the whirling views. His hands rested lightly on the control yoke as he stared out over the sheet-metal cabinets, round-cornered, gray-enameled, of the vehicle’s console. Behind one of the panels, he knew, was the computer that translated his bendings of the yoke, his treadings of the pedals, and his twistings of knobs into landings, liftoffs, and smoothly sweeping turns to left and right.

  His seat was enclosed by a broad bubble or pod of clear plastic, marked only by an oval door frame, and, within that, a small porthole. The porthole seemed superfluous, unnecessary for vision when the door itself was transparent. It was there, he guessed, because the door’s manufacturer used the pattern for all its doors, clear or not.

  Bernie’s field of view was interrupted only beneath his feet, for only there did his vehicle turn opaque. There was the bird itself and, behind him, the engines and fuel tanks strapped near the base of its tail. There were the metal fittings that bore the Hawk’s serial number and to which attached the heavy straps that held the pod to the bird’s back. There was no need for metal structural members in the pod itself, or for rotor-mountings, as in the helicopters that still were used at times.

  Bernie was seeking comfort in the clean peace of the sky, reluctant to return to Earth, even though his shift was nearly over, even though he could soon go home to his small apartment and pour a drink or two and try to forget what he had seen this day. He wished he had someone waiting for him, someone he could talk to, someone whose touch could ease him when things went so badly awry in the world with which he must deal each day.

  He had had chances, yes, he had. He had loved and been loved. He had come close to proposing. He had been proposed to. But he had held back, said no, temporized. He didn’t dare, he told them all, to impose his life on anyone. They had tried to talk him out of his refusal to run the risk of hurting, but he had insisted. It wouldn’t be fair, he had told them, for one day he might not come home.

  Bernie Fischer was a cop. At times, he wished he wasn’t, for only as a cop, or a physician or a paramedic, could he possibly encounter horrors such as the one that preoccupied his mind at the moment. Unless he or his should become a victim. He shuddered at the thought. Today’s horror was too much for sanity.

  His father had been a professional soldier. He had been a peacetime soldier until the Venezuelan Crisis, when he and ten thousand others had parachuted in to help a presidente and his cronies escape their thoroughly justified slaughter. He hadn’t come back,
and Bernie had seen the effects of the pain of his loss on his mother. She had lived only five years more.

  There had been Bernie’s own pain too. He had learned to handle it, yes. He had survived. But every time he encountered atrocities like today’s, he felt it anew.

  Someone had enticed a young black girl into a newly grown house in the suburb of Greenacres. There he had taped her mouth shut and put tourniquets on both her arms. He had removed the arms, just below the elbows, with an axe. He had raped her, fore and aft, with the amputated limbs. And finally, he had removed the tourniquets and left her to bleed to death. She had.

  Bernie had heard of such things. There were people who were turned on by amputees. There were even people who were turned on by being amputees—to the extent that they would try to persuade surgeons to remove a leg, a foot, “At least a finger, please!” But this?

  Her name had been Jasmine. Jasmine Willison. An old family name, her mother had said, again and again in those moments when she could talk half sensibly. Her grandmother’s name, as Bernie’s had been his grandfather’s. She had been pretty, a good student, going steady, thinking of college. And some monster…Bernie couldn’t help it. It was unprofessional, he knew. But the bastard was a monster. He was even worse a monster because he had left no clues. No fingerprints. Not even any semen.

  What other horrors were happening below him even now? He watched the concrete cityscape as it wheeled across his gaze. He stared at the greener suburbs, and the green, crisscross strips of the airport, with the big birds, big enough to dwarf his Hawk, landing and taking off in the distance.

  His mouth began to water, his throat to tighten. He sniffed, suddenly aware of the rankness of his sweat. He needed, he thought, a shower. Then he opened the small port in the door beside him, knowing for the first time what it was there for, glad that it was there, leaned, and vomited into space.

  He always did that. Whenever the world turned especially nasty, whenever he could stomach it no longer, he puked his guts out. But he had never done it before while in the air.

  The call came while he was rinsing his mouth from the thermos he always carried with him:

  “CODE NINER NINER. ALL OFFICERS TO REAGAN EXPRESSWAY, MILE THREE EIGHT. REPEAT: CODE NINER NINER. ALL OFFICERS TO REAGAN EXPRESSWAY, MILE THREE EIGHT, MILE THREE EIGHT.”

  Pausing only long enough to spit and close the port, he turned off the autopilot, seized the control yoke, and kicked the Hawk into a power dive toward Mile 38 on the old Reagan Expressway. Code 99 was a rare one. It meant a military or paramilitary attack. In this country, this age of the world, it had to be terrorists.

  His destination was not far away. As his Hawk cupped its wings to slow its dive, he saw two other Hawks arriving from nearer the city, diving like his own, converging on a scene of chaos. Traffic was backed up in both directions, six lanes of pavement covered with automobiles, Tortoises, Roachsters, Hoppers, and other Buggies. Only the zone immediately surrounding the Sparrow airliner was clear of vehicles, and the reason was obvious: The bare pavement was coated with blood and other body fluids and littered with the scraps of the Sparrow’s meal.

  Bernie was not surprised to see the logo on the Sparrow’s side. The Palestinians—along with the Iranian Shi’ites, Lebanese Christians and Moslems, Irish Nationalists, Afrikaaners, and a hundred other factions—had long since broadened their battles to encompass all the world.

  The three arriving Hawks began their siren calls together. The ululating rising-falling screams were as unlike a natural hawk’s screech as they could be, for the gengineers had labored hard to mimic the sound of traditional police cars. They had succeeded, and now, as the three Hawks swept, screaming, into a tight circle above the carnage, the Sparrow stopped its feeding and lowered itself on its legs. Then it cocked its head, half spread its wings, and, beak agape, lunged at its threateners.

  But the Hawks were still too high aloft. Bernie eyed his fellows. One—he recognized Connie Skoglund—held a microphone and was gesturing. When Bernie waved his acquiescence, the other’s voice boomed out of the police radio:

  “YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! TAKE OFF IMMEDIATELY AND FOLLOW US. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! COME QUIETLY, OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO STOOP!”

  Bernie wished the rapist he had sought earlier were beneath him now. Hawks had replaced helicopters for most police purposes because their built-in weaponry, by its nature—beaks and talons as sharp as scythe blades, and larger—had more deterrent effect on evildoers than machine guns or rockets. The Hawks were also quite effective at catching those who fled the scenes of their crimes.

  The Sparrow—or its crew—ignored the threat. It sidled a few steps down the road, and its beak dipped once more into the gridlocked traffic. Years ago, Bernie reflected, that Sparrow and its crew and passengers would have been safe. Once terrorists had routinely taken hostages as guarantees of their own safety. But those days were gone. The world could not afford them. Governments had accepted that the only way to handle terrorists was to destroy them promptly—hostages, if necessary, and all—in hope of convincing other terrorists, and would-be terrorists, that they had nothing to gain by their actions. Sadly, some terrorists continued to believe that publicity was enough of a reward. It had been proposed that government bar the press from covering terrorist attacks, but such proposals had never been implemented. If they had, they would not have worked. No government could ever muzzle the press for long.

  The Hawks folded their wings and dived. The Sparrow sidestepped and its engines roared, their exhaust sweeping a number of Buggies across the pavement behind it, tumbling into one another and the ditch. To Bernie, one tiny detail stood out: A Roachster’s antennae crumpling in the gust of hot exhaust; he could almost smell the scorching chitin.

  The Sparrow spread its wings and lurched into the air. The Hawks lunged, trying to force it toward the airport.

  It refused. Even though its stubby beak was no match for the predatory hooks and talons of the Hawks, it was larger. It slashed at its tormentors and, steadily gaining altitude, tried to push past their lunges.

  The Hawks attacked. Their beaks slashed. Their talons seized and tore, and impacts jolted Bernie in his harness. The straps that held the Sparrow’s engines and passenger pod in place gave way, and the Sparrow, too large to fly unaided, even without its burden of passengers, fell to the highway. Its engines fell too, smashing into the packed traffic. The passenger pod, when it too hit the pavement, broke open, spilling bodies among the wreckage already there.

  The road was blocked as badly as ever, but now the end and a resumption of journeys was in sight. Long-legged, police-model Roachsters and wrecker Crabs, waving massive claws above their cabs, were picking their ways down the embankments of the highway. Ambulances—gengineered from pigeons not only for the value of the symbolism, but also for their vertical takeoff-and-landing abilities and for their broad, compact bodies that could support multi-gurney cargo pods—were descending on the road.

  The Hawks perched on the Sparrow’s carcass. The Hawks’ red-brown tails jerked as they eyed their kill, and their hooked beaks opened and closed. Their talons dug possessively into the cooling flesh. Gouts of blood were visible as new spots on their plumage, especially against the dark-splashed cream of their undersides, the white of their throats and cheeks. They cocked their heads, each one marked, as if it wore an ancient warrior’s helm, with dark guard-pieces jutting downward past the eyes and ears. A reddish crest, resembling a tonsure, suggested that those warriors might have been monks as well.

  Bernie had never before seen a Hawk on the prey for which its ancestors had been named. Now he reflected that a Sparrowhawk, or Kestrel, had to be the perfect bird for police work. There were larger natural hawks, but that mattered little to gengineers who could resize a sparrow into a Sparrow. There was one Hawk, the Duck-Hawk, that had a singlebarred helm and no tonsure, but it had been claimed by the Air Force. Other, less aptly marked raptors had gone to the other armed services—the Osprey to the Navy,
the Broad-Winged Hawk, with its chevroned tail, to the Army, Harlan’s Hawk to the Marines.

  He knew that, if he left his Hawk to its own devices, it would feed. The instincts were there, after all; they were, in fact, a large part of what made a Hawk so effective for police work. But they had to be suppressed at times, especially when the public had already seen more than enough raw meat. He lifted a small, bright green hatch in the control panel to reveal a recessed toggle. The switch was wired to the Hawk’s sleep center. When he flicked it, the bird would tuck its head beneath one wing and go dormant. It would wake only when he touched the switch again.

  A puff of breeze ruffed the feathers at the crest of his Hawk’s head. He flicked the switch. So did his fellow Hawkers, for even as his Hawk lifted one wing and bent its neck, so did theirs. In a moment, he joined his fellows on the ground. Connie was a thin brunette, as wiry and tough as the Hawk she flew; Bernie had dated her more than once, and he knew both the appeal of her soul and the strength of her body. The third Hawker was less familiar, though Bernie knew him—Larry Randecker, softer in appearance, almost chubby. Yet he was tough enough; Bernie thought his had been the Hawk that had sliced the Sparrow’s engine straps. There had been no hesitation; to all appearances, Randecker had embraced the possibility that he would not be able to dodge the blades of incandescent gas erupting from the tumbling, still blasting jets.

  The cleanup crews were already removing the wreckage from the roadway, loading the remains of vehicles into trailers and those of their drivers into body bags and gurneys. The wreckers avoided the Sparrow and its pod, for they would have to be moved to the airport for examination. Proper emergency procedure allowed them only to open the liner’s stomach to retrieve its victims. The genimal’s body would have to wait for a Crane.