Land and Overland - Omnibus (61 page)

A pressing sense of gloom and a coldness on his spine told Bartan that the sunlit normalcy all around him was a sham, that he was straying into realms beyond his understanding. On reaching the house he carried Sondeweere inside and carefully put her down on her bed. Her brow was cool and her coloration normal, giving the impression that she was merely asleep, but she failed to respond to being shaken or to his urgent repetitions of her name. He eased her out of the oilskin and was removing her sandals when he noticed a speck of dried blood on her right ankle. It came away quite readily on a damp cloth and the skin underneath was unblemished, dispelling the idea that she might have been bitten or stung by one of the creeping horrors. But
something
had happened to Sondeweere, and try as he might he could not rid himself of the notion that the creatures were in some way involved. Could they exude a venom so powerful that merely coming into contact with it was enough to render a person unconscious?

Standing by the bed, staring down at his wife's inert form, Bartan felt his fortitude begin to crumble.
Artoonl was right in what he said to me,
he thought. I
kept quiet about the warnings, and I led everybody to this place—and what has been the upshot? Two suicides, one disappearance which is probably a murder, still births, madness and near-madness, strange sightings and bad dreams, friends turning against friends, malice where once there was goodwill—and now this! Sondeweere has been struck down, and the earth spews out horrors!

With a considerable effort he wrenched his thinking out of the downward spiral and fought to regain his normal optimism. He, Bartan Drumme,
knew
that ghosts and demons did not exist—and, if there was no such thing as an evil spirit, how could there be an evil place? It was true that there had been a spate of misfortunes since the farmers' arrival in the Basket of Eggs, but runs of bad luck were always cancelled out sooner or later by runs of good. Artoonl was wrong in quitting after investing so much time and effort. What the farmers had to do was stand their ground and wait for things to improve. And Bartan's duty was clear—he had to stay by his wife and do everything in his power to restore her to her old self.

As he settled into his bedside vigil his thoughts were again drawn to the crawling creatures whose appearance had heralded Sondeweere's mysterious affliction. Many curious life forms, some of them highly unprepossessing, had been found on Overland, and it was likely that something so repellent would have been noticed elsewhere. On reflection he had been too quick at destroying the horrors. If he found another crawler he would overcome his revulsion so that he could trap and preserve it for inspection by someone with greater knowledge of such matters.

Bartan raised Sondeweere's limp hand to his lips and was holding it there, willing his own vitality to flow into her body, when he was alerted by a faint scratching sound from another part of the house. He tilted his head and listened intently. The sound was barely audible, but he placed its source at the entrance to the house. He stood up, puzzled, and took the few paces needed to take him out of the bedroom and through the kitchen to the front door. The line of brilliance seeping under the door was uninterrupted, and yet the delicate scratching continued. He opened the door and something which had been clinging to the lintel, something which twisted and squirmed, brushed his face as it fell to the floor.

Bartan gave an involuntary gasp, mouth contorted with shock and loathing, as he leapt back.

The crawler landed upside down with a thud, pale grey underside flashing, then righted itself and began moving into the house with every semblance of purpose. It single thick feeler was extended ahead of it, undulating, questing. Bartan's hoped-for objectivity failed to materialise. He stamped his foot down on the creature, and heard and felt its body burst and flatten—and between his temples there was the sound of Sondeweere's anguish.

He slammed the door shut and pressed his back to it, appalled, remembering times when he had seen human beings—a farmer's wife, little children at play—extend an arm and wave it in a strange, boneless motion which mimed that of a crawler's central feeler.

After more than a year of near-continuous service in the fortresses Toller had accepted that he would never be able to sleep properly in weightless conditions. The inexplicable sensation of falling which plagued the station crews could be ignored in waking hours, but the dreaming mind had no defences against it. It was common among crew members to spend the entire rest period mumbling and twisting in their sleep-nets, seeing the planetary surface rise up to meet them with ever-increasing speed, and to awaken at the imagined point of impact with shrieks which entered and distorted the dreams of their comrades.

Toller had devised a personal routine which enabled him to deal with the problem. For the sixteen days of each duty period he made no real attempt to sleep, contenting himself with resting and drowsing when not required for active service. When it was time to return to Overland he would curl up inside the fleecy womb of the fallbag and sleep soundly throughout most of the long drop, rocked by its gentle buffeting and comforted by the low gurgling of the slipstream at the neck of the bag. At first he had been puzzled by his ability to sleep well in such unlikely circumstances, then had decided that the knowledge that he really was falling brought about a necessary accord between his intellect and the sensations of the body.

There was only one day left of his current duty spell and the tiredness had built up in him to the extent that within seconds of getting into his net he had lapsed into a bemused state, halfway between sleep and consciousness, in which there was little distinction between the remembered past and the vaguely apprehended present. It was peaceful inside Command Station One, which he had chosen as his living quarters in order to be close to the centre of operations at all times. The only sounds were the bored and scrappy conversation of the two men on watch, and the occasional swishing of the bellows which maintained a tolerable air pressure. Toller had turned his face to the wall of the station and was resting comfortably, something which would not have been possible at the beginning of the war. The walls were now insulated with flock and covered with skins which reduced heat loss and also helped prevent accidental puncturing of the shell.

One night, during one of his earliest duty spells, Toller had become aware of a faint but insistent whistling sound and had tracked it down to a large knot in a section of midship planking. The core of the knot had shrunk and was permitting air to escape. When Toller had tapped it with his knuckle the core had promptly disappeared into the outer void, and as he had occasioned the damage he took it on himself to repair the vent with cork and mastic. He had carried out the chore willingly, knowing that reports of it would be widely circulated, thus reinforcing the message that Lord Toller Maraquine did not set himself above the lowliest conscripts in the Sky Service.

He did such things with an undeniable degree of calculation, but excused himself on the grounds that only one kind of leadership was feasible—and correct—in the unnerving circumstances of the interplanetary war. King Chakkell could force soldiers to venture into the weightless zone on pain of death, but once they were there a commander could only get them to give of their best by showing that he was prepared to share every privation and face every danger.

And the dangers had been plentiful.

It had been fortunate indeed for the defenders that King Rassamarden, going about his unimaginable affairs in the unimaginable environment of the Old World, had not launched his invasion fleet in the shortest possible time. Tens of days had gone by after the positioning of the first two fortresses with no sign of enemy activity, and the grace period had been used—under liven Zavotle's direction-—to measure the radius of the neck of comparatively dense air at the juncture of the atmospheres. A skyship had been rotated into the plane of the weightless zone and had been driven laterally on jet power for an estimated sixty miles before the pilot had begun to lose consciousness through asphyxiation. He had been in the process of rotating the ship for the return when the balloon had ruptured because of excessive torque from the struts. The pilot had managed to retain his senses long enough to get himself into Overland's gravitational field by means of his personal pneumatic jet, and on the following day had parachuted to the ground within walking distance of Prad. His survival had been a great source of reassurance for rank-and-file members of the Sky Service, but the acquired data had troubled the top echelons of their leadership.

The gateway, as the bridge of breathable air came to be called, had a cross-sectional area of more than ten thousand square miles—and it was apparent that no achievable number of fortresses could bar it to intruders by gunnery alone.

Once again it had been Zavotle, the dogged eroder of problems, who had come up with a solution.

Inspired by the success of the personal flight units, he had proposed the simplest form of fighting craft possible—a jet tube which a man could sit astride as though he were on a bluehorn. Engines taken from ordinary airships would be about the right size, and when powered by pikon and halvell crystals would enable a warrior to range out many miles from his base. Zavotle's preliminary calculations, assuming an effective fighter radius of only twelve miles, showed that the entire area of the gateway could be covered by only twenty-five fortresses.

Drifting in the soft confines of his sleep-net, Toller recalled the look of wonder and gratification on King Chakkell's face as he was given the unexpected good news. There was no doubt that he could have forced through the construction of the hundred fortresses originally envisaged, but the strain on material and human resources would have been severe. Chakkell had been faced by an additional problem in that a large proportion of his subjects were too young to have had any first-hand experience of the terrors of the pterthacosis plague and were not inclined to accept punishing work loads, especially in the cause of a war which seemed so unreal. The concept of the jet fighter craft had therefore been embraced by Chakkell with a boundless enthusiasm which had led to the completion of the first batch in the remarkably short time of five days, thanks to nature having done most of the construction work in advance.

The jet engine was basically the lower part of the trunk of a young brakka tree, complete with the combustion chamber which had powered its pollination discharges. Pikon and halvell crystals were admitted to the chamber under pneumatic pressure, where they combined explosively to produce great quantities of miglign gas which was exhausted through the open end of the tube to drive the engine forward.

To convert the basic engine into an operational craft, it had been given a full-length wooden cowl which made for the easy mounting of equipment. A saddle-type seat had been installed for the pilot, aft of which were pivoting control surfaces. They looked like stubby wings, but in the weightless condition their sole function was to control the direction of flight. The fighter's armament consisted of two small breech-loading cannon, fixed to the sides of the cowl, which could only be aimed by aligning the entire craft with the target.

Toller, hovering between wakefulness and sleep, vividly remembered his first ride on one of the strange looking machines. The bulkiness of his skysuit had been augmented by his personal jet unit and parachute, and it had taken him some time to adapt to the seat and familiarise himself with the controls. Acutely aware of being watched by the skymen in and around Fortress One, he had pumped the pneumatic reservoir to maximum pressure, then had advanced the throttle lever. In spite of his having been modest with the power demand, he had been astonished by the surge of acceleration which had accompanied the roar of the exhaust. It had taken him perhaps three minutes, with an icy slipstream tearing at his face, to get the knack of keeping the fighter from doing a slow spiral as it howled through the sky. He had then shut down the engine, allowed air resistance to bring the craft to a halt and had turned in the saddle, laughing with acceleration rapture, to solicit the applause of his fellow pilots waiting by the fortress.

And the fortress had not been there!

That shock, that exquisite stab of pure panic, had been his introduction to the new physics of the jet fighter. It had taken him many seconds to locate and recognise the fortress as a tiny mote of hard light, almost lost in the silver-speckled blue of the universe, and to realise that he had been travelling at a speed previously undreamt of by man.

The nine fighters of Red Squadron were ranged line abreast, their upper surfaces gleaming in the sunlight. A short distance above them was what had been the first fortress, recently extended by the addition of three new sections to make it a command station. Other fortresses comprising the Inner Defence Group were positioned nearby, but they were insignificant objects, hard to see in the deep blue even though reflectors had been added to increase their visibility. Overland, flanked by the sun, was a fire-edged roof for the universe, and the vastness of Land made a circular floor, blue and green dusted with ochre, scrolled with white.

The other object of significance for the fighter pilots was the target ship. Although it was more than a mile away from them the hugeness of the balloon made it an important feature of the celestial environment, one with the apparent solidity of a third planet. It had been positioned well outside the theoretical plane of weightlessness, in the direction of Land, so that cannon balls fired at it would be drawn down into Land's gravitational field. Of the two fatalities which had occurred thus far in training, one had been that of a young pilot who had been making a highspeed practice run when he had been swept off his machine by a cannon ball which had hit him squarely in the chest. At first it was thought that he had been accidentally shot by another flier, then had come the realisation that the two-inch iron ball had been hanging almost motionless in the air, a deadly residue from an earlier practice firing. To prevent similar incidents, Toller had issued a general order that cannon could only be discharged when angled towards Land.