Land and Overland - Omnibus (64 page)

"They can't be very far away," Biltid said, looking up from the other pair of binoculars. "Twenty or thirty miles. We haven't much time."

"Time enough," Toller said, recalled to the practical world of the soldier. On an impulse he propelled himself to his sleeping net, unhooked his sword from the wall beside it and strapped the weapon to his waist. He was conscious of how incongruous the sword was in the circumstances, but it had a psychological value to him in the preparation for battle. Going out through the airlock he saw that the other eight pilots of his squadron were already at their machines, and auxiliaries were swimming among them igniting the hooded fire-cups which had been installed forward of the saddles. The same scene was repeated in miniature, some distance away in the boundless blue, as the other two squadrons were made ready.

Some of the Blue and Green machines were already edging towards Command Station One to form a combined force, their paths marked by pulses of white condensation. As the swarm increased in size there were numerous gentle collisions between the fighters, occasioning a good deal of banter among the pilots and angry comments from the mechanics who were in danger of being crushed. As he drifted clear of the station Toller shaded his eyes from the sun with a gloved hand and looked in the direction of Land.

He found that the invaders could now be seen without optical aid, silvery specks at the very limits of vision, and he wished for a means of estimating their range. He had to engage the enemy well below the datum plane so that every ship destroyed would fall back towards Land, but if he went too far down to meet then his fighters' fuel reserves would be depleted. It looked as though the ability to judge distances accurately was going to be even more important in aerial combat than on the ground.

When the three squadrons were assembled Toller got astride Red One and wedged his toes into the fixed stirrups. He unclipped his bow, secured it to his left wrist with the safety loop and checked that the quivers mounted on each side of the cowling had a full complement of arrows. His heart was pounding again, and he was aware of the familiar old excitement, tinged with an inexplicable element of sexuality, which had always preceded a foray into the dangers of combat. While pumping up the pressure reservoir of his fuel feed, he glanced along the straggling, yawing line of fighters. The pilots were androgynous shapes in their skysuits, their faces hidden by scarves and goggles, but he picked out Berise Narrinder immediately and was compelled to issue a final word of caution.

"We have rehearsed our battle plan many times," he called out, "and I know you are all anxious to test your mettle against the enemy. I know, also, that you will conduct yourselves with courage, but beware of becoming
too
courageous. In the fever of battle it is possible to grow reckless, to be lured into taking unnecessary risks. But bear in mind that each of you has the potential to destroy
many
of the enemy's ships, and therefore each of you has a value to our cause which is much greater than you may personally place on your life.

"Today we will smite the invader hard—harder than he can ever have dreamed of—but I will not countenance any losses on our side. Not a single pilot, not a single fighting machine! If you expend all your arrows do not be tempted to attack with your cannon. Retire at once from the battle and console yourself with the knowledge that you will be an even more skilful and more deadly opponent on a future occasion."

Nattahial, the pilot of Blue Three, nodded and vapour wisped through his scarf. "Whatever you wish, sir."

Toller shook his head. "Those are not my wishes—they are my direct
orders.
Any pilot I see behaving like an idiot will have me to answer to afterwards, and I can assure you that will be a more harrowing experience than facing a few scrawny Landers. Is that understood by all?"

Several of the pilots nodded vigorously, perhaps too vigorously, and others chuckled. With few exceptions they were young volunteers from the Air Service. They had been adventure-hungry to begin with, and the boredom of the long wait for this day had turned them into overwound human springs. Toller genuinely wanted them to heed his warnings, but he knew from combat experience that a balance had to be struck between prudence and passion. A warrior with too great a commitment to self-preservation could be even more of a liability than a glory-hunting fool, and the minutes ahead were likely to reveal how many of each were in his command.

"Is it your opinion," he asked, drawing his goggles down into place, "that I have devoted enough time to the making of speeches?"

"Yes!" The loudness of the general assent briefly filled the sky.

"In that case, let us go to war." Toller pulled his scarf up to cover his mouth and nostrils, and put the fighter into a curving dive which centred Land in his field of view. The sun was barely clear of the planet's rim, hurling billions of needles of light against him without creating any warmth. Amid a swelling roar of engine exhausts the other fighters took up their assigned positions, each squadron creating a V-shaped formation.

Slightly behind Toller on the left, leading the Blues, was Maiter Daas, and on his right at the apex of the Green Squadron was Pargo Umol. He wondered what the two middle-aged men—veterans of the old Skyship Experimental Squadron and the Migration—felt as they dropped towards the planet of their birth in circumstances they could never have envisaged. Analysing his own emotions, he was again disturbed to find that he felt youthful, fulfilled, totally alive. Part of him longed to be at home with Gesalla, making amends for all the ways in which he had failed her, and yet within him was the knowledge that, given the impossible opportunity, he would prolong this moment indefinitely. In a magical, irrational universe he would choose to live this way until he died—forever riding out through sprays of cold pure light to face exotic foes and unknown dangers. But in the real universe this phase was likely to be brief, perhaps encompassing only one battle, and when it was all over life would be a thousand times more humdrum than before, with little for him to do other than passively wait for an unremarkable death.

Perhaps,
the thought came softly slithering,
it would be better not to survive the war.

Shocked by where the bout of introspection had taken him, Toller forced his thoughts to bear on the task in hand. The plan was to engage the enemy ten to fifteen miles below the datum plane, but as always he was bedevilled by the impossibility of estimating distance or speed in the featureless oceans of air. When he looked over his shoulder he saw that the twenty-seven fighters had laid down a kind of aerial highway with their condensation trails. It narrowed to a distant point, vaporous white threads gathered into perspective's fist, and already the clustered stations and habitats were hard to see, even though he knew exactly where to look. The condensation would later disperse into invisibility, and when that happened the three squadrons would be in danger of becoming lost.

How far had they descended? Ten miles? Fifteen? Twenty?

Swearing at the sun for capriciously aiding the enemy, Toller screened off the blinding orb with his hand and searched for the ascending fleet. The combined speeds of the two forces had brought them much closer in a short time, and now the array of gleaming crescents could easily be resolved by the naked eye, each a perfect miniature of the fire-cusped planet behind it. They were concentrated in a small area of the sky, like glittering spawn.

This is far enough,
Toller told himself.
We wait here.

He spread both his arms in a prearranged signal and shut down his engine. The absorbent silence of infinity abruptly pervaded the scene as the other pilots closed their throttles in unison. The fighters coasted for some time, gradually becoming uncontrollable as air resistance robbed them of their speed, the V-formations loosening and distorting while they came to rest. Toller knew the appearance of being at a standstill was illusory—the machines had entered Land's gravitational field and were falling, but this close to the datum plane their speed was negligible.

"We will fight here," he called out. "It will profit us to be patient and allow the enemy to come to us, because the longer he takes the farther the sun will move out from behind his ships. Be sure to keep your igniter cups in good trim, and do not allow your hands and limbs to stiffen with the cold. If you think you are becoming too cold you are permitted to make short circular flights to put heat into your machines and warmth into your backsides, but remember that your crystals have to be conserved as much as possible for the battle."

Toller settled into the wait, wishing he had a reliable means of measuring the time. Mechanical clocks were much too large for tactical purposes, and even the traditional military timepiece was of no value in the weightless zone. It consisted of a slim glass tube containing a cane shoot which was marked with black pigment at regular intervals. When a pace-beetle was put into the tube it devoured the shoot from one end, moving at the unchanging rate common to its kind, thus indicating the passage of time with an accuracy which was good enough for commanders in the field. In zero gravity, however, the beetle was found to move erratically, often ceasing to eat altogether. At first it had been thought to be an effect of the extreme cold, but the same unsatisfactory results were obtained when the tube was kept warm, leading to the remarkable conclusion that the mindless bead-sized beetle was disturbed by its lack of weight. Toller had been intrigued by the findings, which in his mind established a link between human beings and the lowliest and most insignificant creatures on the planet. They were all part of the same biological phenomenon, but only humans had the intelligence which enabled them to override the dictates of nature, to impose their will on the organic machinery of their bodies.

Toller could hear the pilots of his squadron conversing as they waited, and he was pleased to note that there was none of the abrupt laughter which often indicated a failure of nerve. In particular he liked the demeanour of Tipp Gotlon, the young rigger he had promoted to pilot status against the counsel of Biltid. Gotlon, who had shown an instinctive grasp of the mechanics of flying, was exchanging occasional quiet words with Berise Narrinder and between times was scanning the sky ahead with shaded eyes. At eighteen he was the youngest of all the pilots, but he looked eminently calm and self-possessed.

As the minutes dragged by Toller gradually became aware of another sound—a low booming which he identified as emanating from the exhaust cones of the approaching fleet. The balloons of the Lander ships were becoming easier to see as the source of illumination moved progressively to the side, and they had greatly increased in apparent size. Umol and Daas were frequently turning their heads in his direction, obviously impatient for the order to attack, but Toller had decided to hold fire until he could pick out some detail of the crown panels and load tapes on the enemy balloons, by which time the foremost of them should be less than a mile below the waiting fighter craft.

The lack of spatial referents helped confuse the eye, but the skyships seemed to be ascending in groups of three and four, with quite a large vertical interval between the echelons. They formed an attenuated and elongated cloud many miles in depth, with those at the bottom of the stack appearing remote and shrunken compared to the leaders. The arrangement was a logical one for considerations of flight safety, especially when flying in darkness, but it was almost the worst possible for the penetration of defended territory. Toller smiled as he saw that the Landers had unwittingly given him an advantage which more than compensated for the unfortunate positioning of the sun.

Yielding to a sudden accession of battlefield humour, he drew his sword and used the incongruous weapon to make the downward stroke of the attack signal.

What followed was not a concerted swoop on the invaders, but a deliberate and systematic process of destruction. In conference with Biltid and his two squadron leaders, Toller had decided that—in the first battle of its kind in all of human history—it would be unwise to have twenty-seven high-speed machines milling and plunging through a comparatively small volume of airspace. Also, for psychological reasons he considered important, he did not want a random pattern of success, with some pilots emerging as heroes claiming multiple kills and others failing to achieve the first blood so vital to their morale.

Accordingly, the response to Toller's signal was that only the ninth pilot in each formation detached his machine and rode down to meet the unsuspecting enemy. The three fighters traced lines of vapour which converged on the uppermost of the Lander echelons, then swung across to the right, each one casting off a splinter of amber light. A few seconds later three of the leading balloons developed penumbras of smoke, became dark flowers with writhing centres of red and orange flame. Toller was surprised by the dramatic speed of their destruction compared with that of the balloon once used for target practice, then realised it was because the Lander ships were rising and creating a slipstream which not only fed the flames but directed them down the sides of the varnished linen envelopes.

Another gift, another good omen,
he thought as the second trio of fighters roared away on plumes of condensation. One of them picked off the remaining skyship of the four that had formed the top echelon and curved off to the right, while its companions speared on down to find targets in the next level. Their success was betokened after a brief interval by the blossoming of two more dark flowers.

As the carnage continued, with wave after wave of fighters darting down into the affray, Toller began to speculate on the possibility of the entire Lander fleet being destroyed in a single catastrophic engagement. Due to the great size of a skyship's balloon in comparison to the gondola, an ascent had to be made blindly, with the occupants trusting that the sky directly above contained no hazard. When many ships were travelling together the roar of the burners drowned out all other sounds, therefore the members of any given layer could remain quite unaware of cataclysms above until it was too late to take evasive action. If the fighters were able to work their way down to the bottom of the stack, incinerating the skyships echelon by echelon, none of the enemy would survive to describe to their King how the destruction of his armada had been achieved. Such a total defeat could, indeed, end the interplanetary war on the very day it had begun.