Demon (GAIA) (23 page)

When the thrust was right, she turned to Robin.

“Put your head back against the rest,” she said. “This thing has a bit of a kick.”

And they were off.

Cirocco had taught Conal to fly not long after his arrival in Gaea. He was very good at it, and it gave him pleasure.

Not that a Dragonfly was tough to learn. On a point-to-point they were capable of taking off, navigating, and landing all by themselves. They didn’t need runways, and could get by with no more ground support than the occasional re-fueling stop. Anyone who had ever flown a Piper Cub would have been right at home in a Dragonfly in a few minutes, though the lack of instrumentation might have bothered him. The Dragonfly had, in a sense, just one instrument: a computer screen. A single keypad to the pilot’s right called up any information the pilot might want, or the ship’s brain, reviewing data fifty thousand times each second, would make the pilot aware of any critical situation and recommend a course of action. It had ground radar and air radar and all the radio capability anyone could need. Cirocco had replaced the compasses with inertial trackers.

But the rudder pedals and the stick were the same type that had been in use on Earth for over a century and a half. Conal used the time waiting for Cirocco showing Nova the uses of these devices. She watched alertly, and did the right things when he handed control to her.

When the Four rose up to join him, Conal fell in with the larger plane and flew to the right and slightly behind it.

“Here’s the plan,” Cirocco said. “The radar is good for about thirty kilometers in all directions. An angel can do about seventy kilometers per hour, and can maintain that for maybe two hours. He’s been gone slightly under one hour. We will assume he’s headed for Pandemonium, which is currently in southern Hyperion. We’re going up to twenty, that’s two zero, kilometers, and we’ll fly fifty kilometers
apart, with the same heading. We will fly at one two zero kilometers per hour for another thirty minutes, and hope that puts us in his general area. We will then throttle back to sixty and attempt to locate him by radar. If that doesn’t work, we will move ahead at high speed until we’re sure we’re in front of him, and conduct a search pattern, diagonally across his project path, until we find him or one of us thinks of something better to do. Comments?”

Conal worked it out in his laborious but methodical way. Cirocco did not interrupt him. He realized that, aside from Chris, with whom she had already discussed this, he knew more about Gaea than anyone else.

“What if he goes higher?” Conal finally said. “Should the search pattern be vertical as well as horizontal?”

“I’m making the assumption that he’s going to be fairly low.”

Conal worked that out, too, and wasn’t sure it was a valid assumption to make. Angels might not
like
clinging to the curved rim roof, but they could do it if they had to. Cirocco was obviously counting on some sort of relay maneuver, since no single angel could move Adam from Dione to Hyperion, and she must think the most likely place for the later carriers to hide was the outer rim of Gaea.

But Gaea was an unusual place for flying. You could climb a full hundred and fifty kilometers before running into the roof. And if you flew through a spoke, you could go even higher than that. If the angel went up to sixty kilometers, they could fly right under him and never see him.

“Hyperion is about halfway around,” Conal pointed out. “He might just go up a spoke, through the hub, and down again.”

“You’re absolutely right, Conal,” Cirocco came back. “But for now, I’m going to assume the rim route. If we don’t find anything in two or three revs, we can reassess.”

“You’re the boss,” Conal said.

“Yeah, but don’t let that stop you from giving me ideas. And besides, I’m going to do my best to cheat, in just a few minutes.”

Conal could tell from Nova’s frown that she had no idea what the Captain was talking about. Conal could make a pretty good guess, but kept his mouth shut.

“Weather advisory,” the computer said. “You are entering a region where severe turbulence has—” Conal hit the override and the computer shut up.

“What was that about?” Nova asked. Conal glanced at her. She seemed to be feeling better. She
must
be, he thought, if she was willing to talk to him. He had not been looking forward to a long trip in the small space with somebody who hated him.

“The brain carries a model of Gaea in its head,” he told her, calling up a cut-away side view of the wheel-world. “This plane and all the others share the model, and they make a note of places where the storm probability is high, based on past experience. Mostly it’s a nuisance.”

“I’d think it would be helpful.”

“Not too much. Look.” He zoomed in on the segment of wheel rim that contained Dione, showing part of the spoke that loomed above it. Two blue dots winked on and off near the bottom of the picture, labeled 2 and 4. “That’s us,” he said, pointing to the 2. “We’re moving toward Iapetus, and we’re getting close to the twilight zone, which means warmer air coming up from the ground. When air rises in Gaea, it moves into masses of air that are traveling slower, because they’re nearer the hub. So it sort of curls over, like a breaking wave. You get a lot of quick downdrafts in the transitional zone.”

He glanced at her to see if she understood. It had taken him a while to get it straight, with his Earth-based thinking. The equivalent effect on Earth was the rotation of air masses caused by north-south currents, and depended on the fact that air at the equator was moving faster with the turning of the planet than air to the north or the south. When the effect was very intense, it was called a hurricane.

“Sure,” she said. “The coriolis effect. We have to take that into account when we go soaring at home.”

“It’s not as bad here. Gaea’s much bigger than the Coven. I don’t have to think about it when I’m flying the plane, but the computer takes it into account for navigation.” He pointed to the screen again.
“The thing is, the weather’s pretty regular in Gaea. Bad weather comes out of the spokes. Gaea sucks up a lot of air in one spoke, moves it through the hub into another one, and then lets it all fall out over a night region. It’s all done by a schedule. So that’s what the computer was telling me: I’m moving into a boundary line between day and night, which means I’m coming out from under a spoke, which means we can expect some bumps. The thing is,” and he pointed up at the gargantuan mouth of the Dione Spoke looming above them, “I can see that easy enough.”

She didn’t say anything, but looked around her, studying the spoke, the curved roof ahead of them that arched over Iapetus, comparing them to the model on the screen. He knew the convoluted geometry of Gaea took some getting used to. It was one thing to look at a map of it, and something else to stand on the hurtling rim and get an ant’s-eye view.

“I see what you mean about finding the angel,” she finally said. “What’s to prevent him from just going so high we’d never find him? It’s shorter that way, too.”

“All air distances in Gaea are shorter than ground distances,” he said. “And if you wanted to go from Dione to Rhea, all the way around the wheel, the shortest way is straight up the spoke, through the hub, and down the Rhea spoke. It gets easier as you go, because you get lighter. And once you’re in the hub, it’s downhill all the way.”

“Why does Cirocco think he won’t do that?”

“A couple of reasons. Different flights of angels live in different spokes. They don’t like each other and they’re jealous of their territory. No matter which flight this one comes from, he’ll have to go through unfriendly territory if he goes through two spokes. They might kill him, and he’d have a lot of trouble getting food. He’d do better foraging on the rim. It’d be easier for the others to hide on the rim, where no other flight has nesting rights.”

“Why are you assuming he’s going to Hyperion?”

Conal shrugged. “You’d have to ask the Captain about that. She has special knowledge which she doesn’t always tell me about. Then again, that angel grabbing Adam was one hell of a surprise to her, I
can tell you that.”

***

They were in the west end of Iapetus when Cirocco gave the order to throttle back. Conal’s plane was far to the north, invisible to the eye but making a strong steady blip when the computer displayed the ground map.

When the three-dimensional display was used, Robin found it hard not to be discouraged.

In that mode, Gaea’s rim was a gently curved tube. The angel’s possible locations made a hemisphere with Tuxedo Junction at the center. The search profile of the planes was a lengthening tube a hundred kilometers wide and fifty high. When compared with the region where the angel
might
be, it didn’t seem enough. There was so much space above them where it could be, and a vast amount behind them.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Cirocco said. “I’m going to hang around here for a while and hope it shows up. But if we don’t have it in an hour, I’ll increase our speed and we’ll start criss-crossing. We’ll cover just about all the airspace.”

“What if he’s headed back toward Metis?”

“It’s unlikely. But if we don’t get results in four or five hours, I’ll send Conal back in that direction.”

“And the spoke?” Chris asked.

“That would be such a logistical nightmare I’m ruling it out.”

Robin looked out at vast expanses of forest far below them.

“What if it just…settles down there in the bush?”

“Robin, if it does that, there’s not much we can do.”

She wished she hadn’t asked.

“But,” Cirocco went on, “it isn’t going to do that.”

Robin thought about asking Cirocco how she could be so sure, and found she didn’t have the nerve to. She
wanted
the Wizard to be sure. Having somebody around who
seemed
to know what she was doing helped a little.

“Hand me my pack, Chris. It’s time for the nasty part.”

The pack had the unmistakable stamp of Titanide manufacture, and looked like an old friend. Robin watched as Cirocco set it on the transparent floor between her feet, opened it, and pulled out a small glass jar with a metal lid. Something white and slimy was curled up in the bottom. It lifted its head and blinked.

“What in the nine billion perversions of Christendom is that?” Robin asked.

Cirocco looked at her apologetically.

“It’s what I didn’t want to tell you about at the fountain. Things have gone a little far for us to keep secrets, though. It’s a piece of the mind of Gaea. It’s something Rocky took out of my head about five years ago. In a word, it’s my own personal Demon.”

Robin looked at it. The thing was uncoiling itself.

It was like a snake with two legs. When it stood up it balanced on those legs with its tail providing the third point of support. The legs were actually more like arms, with clawed hands. Its neck was an inch long, and its tail about three inches, with a stubby tip. There were two round, lizard-like eyes, and a surprisingly expressive mouth.

Robin leaned over and stared at it. The thing seemed to be shouting. She could almost distinguish words. Could it possibly speak English?

“Does it have a name?”

Cirocco cleared her throat, and Robin looked at her.

“Actually,” she said, with a twitch of her lips, “if you look closely, you’ll see it’s a male.”

Robin looked again. Great Mother save us, it was male.

“He claims not to have a name,” Cirocco said. “When I want to call him anything but ‘you lousy
slimebag’ I call him Snitch.” Cirocco vigorously rubbed her upper lip with one finger, cleared her throat, and in general exhibited all the signs of nervousness Robin would have thought foreign to her nature. You learn something new every day, Robin thought.

“See,” Cirocco went on, “…uh, from the position he was in when Rocky found him, uh…you might say he was sort of, well, fucking with my mind for about ninety years.”

There could have been no possible reason for Gaea to make this thing male, since it had been meant to live out its days in Cirocco’s head. Thus, its sex was one of Gaea’s twisted jokes, and a special and ugly humiliation for Cirocco should it ever be found.

Cirocco twisted the lid off the jar and set it down on the flat surface just above the computer screen—what she had called the dashboard. Snitch jumped up and perched on the rim of the jar, looked around blearily, and yawned. He used one claw to scratch like a dog, then settled down like a tiny vulture with his head almost concealed by his shoulders.

“I could sure use a drink,” he said. Robin remembered the voice.

“I’m talking to you, cuntface,” he said.

Cirocco reached out and flicked a finger. The demon thumped hard against the windscreen and fell to the dashboard, howling. Cirocco reached out and mashed his head under her thumb. Robin heard crunching noises.
Great Mother,
she thought.
She’s killed it.

“Sorry,” Cirocco said. “It’s the only way to reach him.”

“You’re apologizing to
me
?” Robin squeaked. “Skin it alive and feed it to the worms. I was just surprised you kept him five years and killed him now.”

“He’s all right. I don’t even know if he’s killable.” She removed her thumb, and Snitch rolled back onto his feet. His head was malformed and blood dripped from one eye. As Robin watched, the head returned to its former shape, like some weird plastic.

“Who do I have to blow to get a drink in this stinking place?” He hopped up and perched on the edge of the jar again.

Cirocco again reached into her pack and brought out a metal flask in a leather container. She took the top off and detached an eyedropper from the kit, inserted it in the neck, and drew out some clear fluid. Snitch was hopping from foot to foot in his eagerness, his head thrown back and his mouth open. Cirocco held the eyedropper over his mouth and let one fat drop fall into his mouth. He swallowed hugely, then opened his mouth again.

“That’s it for now,” Cirocco said. “If you’re good, you can have more.”

“What is that?” Robin asked. Snitch rolled his eyes toward her.