Demon (GAIA) (56 page)

“Never again, never again, never again…”

***

Part of Conal’s mind knew that the Metis invaders had turned north, were headed for Bellinzona. That part of his mind wept for the outnumbered Third Squad.

The rest of him was concentrated on the dark air ahead that, minute by creeping minute, grew lighter. They could see the battle long before they arrived there.

Then they engaged the enemy, and there was no time to think of anything but flying.

He had to let his computer do a lot. There were too many blips on the screen, too much confusion, too much darkness. He twisted and turned, got lined up on something promising…and was overruled by the firecontrol computer, who had identified his target as friendly. Then he splashed a buzz bomb. The whole encounter between them was over in less than three seconds. He did not bother to watch the wreckage fall down into the night, but immediately slammed into a ten-gee turn toward the next target of opportunity.

The battle was actually anticlimactic. He knew it hadn’t been for those who had sat it out on the ground for the twenty minutes it had taken his squadrons to arrive. But by the time they got there the Fifth Wing had foolishly used up much of its air-to-air capacity. Their guns were running out of the little bullet-creatures. They still had some bombs left, and that was gratifying, as it made a much healthier explosion when Conal’s missiles hit them. Each airburst meant one less parcel of death for those in the trenches below.

At last there was only the Luftmorder. Conal and two of his pilots closed in on it from behind. He shot off most of its left wing. A Gnat seemed to be trying to fly right up its tailpipes, then delivered a missile, and they all throttled back and watched it fall. The air was full of smoke, and there were a frightening number of fires on the ground.

“This is Big Canuck, calling Rocky Road.”

There was a pause longer than Conal would have liked. Somebody had been separated from his radio, he realized.

“Rocky Road here, Canuck. I don’t see any more enemies.”

“That’s right. They’re all dead. The Fifth is no more. I haven’t heard from my Third Squadron yet, but I know they engaged the Eighth somewhere over Dione, and you people have at least a half-rev breathing space before any survivors could get here.”

“Roger, Canuck. We’ll be digging in.”

Conal was moving at dead slow, just over stall speed, while the computers formed up the First and Second Squadrons. Glancing around, he saw one hole in the Second, and one in his own, the First. He looked at his screen and saw one emergency beacon, stationary, on the ground, just short of Hestia. He dispatched one of his pilots to fly over and see if it was a survivor.

Two planes lost. One pilot lost, possibly two. Two other planes with minor damage.

Conal realized he was soaking wet. He put his plane on complete automatic, sat back, and shook for a few minutes. Then he wiped the sweat from his face.

“Big Canuck, Big Canuck, this is Squad Three.”

Conal recognized the voice. It was Gratiana Gomez, the youngest and least experienced pilot in Third Squadron.

“I read you, Gomez.”

“Canuck, Third Squadron engaged the enemy ten klicks south of Peppermint Bay. Ten aircraft were reported, and ten were destroyed. One got through to Bellinzona, and I have just destroyed it. It dropped three, maybe four bombs on the city.”

There was something in her voice that disturbed Conal.

“Gomez, where is your squadron leader?”

“Conal…I am the squadron leader. In fact…I’m the Third Squadron.” Her voice broke at the end, and he heard a dead mike.

“Gratiana, go back to Iapetus North and park it.”

There was a long pause. When she spoke again her voice was under control.

“I can’t, Canuck. The aircraft is pretty shot up. I think it might be salvageable. I’m gonna try to put it down on the football field up by the labor camps. I think I can—”

“Negative, Gomez.” Conal knew exactly what she was thinking. Pilots were easy to come by, but airplanes were at a premium. The equation offended him.

“Well…then I’ll ditch it up close to the wharves, where the water isn’t too deep. They can pull it out and—”

“Gomez, you head that thing out toward Moros, and when you’re right over the biggest, flattest piece of land you can find, you punch out of it.”

“Canuck, I think I can—”

“
Punch out
, Gomez! That’s an order.”

“Roger, Conal.”

Later, when things were sorted out, Conal learned that Gomez had made it safely to the ground. She died an hour later of blood loss from the shrapnel wounds she had not told him about.

***

Nova slowly realized that things had quieted down.

She lifted her head a little. There were fires in the night. She could hear people moaning not too far way. Some were screaming. She moved cautiously around on her elbows, straightened her helmet, and found herself face to face with one of her trench-mates. He gave her a foolish grin. She heard herself giggling. Great Mother, what a terrible thing to do. But she could not shut it off for a long time. The man laughed with her, glad to be alive. Then they turned to the third person in the trench to let him share in the joy.

But there was a little hole under the man’s left arm, and a big one in the center of his chest. Nova held the bloody corpse for a long time, and could not cry, though she wanted to.

Though they never spoke a word to each other, they had shoveled together like mad animals, and huddled together in the dark and the fire, shivering, sharing warmth. And she hadn’t known when the warmth leaked out of him in a flood of red.

***

Cirocco and Hornpipe had been knocked over by the blast wave of a near-miss. Though unhurt, they had
decided to stay down. Enough was enough.

Now she strode through the battlefield, limping slightly. Her ears were still ringing. The ends of her hair and her eyebrows on the right side were singed. There was a little blood on her right hand.

She took it all in. There were many dead and injured, but they were being attended to. Sergeants were shouting like it was just another drill on the obstacle course. Dirt was flying everywhere. Many of the trenches were already eight feet deep. Cirocco couldn’t find a single slacker. The Fifth Wing had made believers of them all.

The infirmary was a large tent set up as far away from the trenches as Cirocco had dared. She had debated a long time about whether to mark it with a big white cross. In the end, she decided not to. Gaea had cast herself in the role of the bad guy. She might very well have told her buzz bombs to seek out white crosses.

She entered the radio shack and grabbed a hand mike.

“Big Canuck, are you still up there?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Captain, have you seen Robin?”

“I have no information on that, Canuck.”

“…Okay. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Cirocco glanced around, saw no one was watching her.

“Conal, I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything.”

“Right. What do I do now?”

They discussed it, using code words Gaea and her troops would not understand if they happened to be listening in. Conal was the only other person who knew about Cirocco’s plan for the Gaean Air Force.

“I think,” Conal said, “if you’re gonna do it, you ought to do it as quickly as possible.”

“I agree. Give us…two more revs to get as solidly dug in here as we can. You and your people go back to Iapetus and re-arm and re-fuel. I’ll take it up with the Generals.”

***

Robin had spent most of the battle half-buried under a dead Titanide.

She and four others had dug a foxhole, the bombs had started to fall…and the Titanide had fallen right at the edge of it. Its body slipped slowly down, not quite covering Robin. She thought it had probably saved her life. When everything was over and she was able to struggle out, she saw the amount of debris the huge, dead hunk of meat had soaked up. One of her companions in the foxhole had a chunk of metal in her leg, but the others were unharmed.

She managed to locate Cirocco, who had time for a brief embrace before hurrying off toward the Generals’ tent.

Robin and Nova were oddities out here, and Robin was acutely aware of it. They were not in the army, as everyone else was. They had no assigned duties. Nova was not even in the city government anymore. In a sane war, one fought entirely by strategy and tactics of masses of soldiers and airplanes, Robin would never have been brought along. But her presence here was necessary.

The trouble was, she couldn’t tell anybody
why
. She didn’t even entirely understand it herself.

So now she wandered through the carnage, looking for her daughter. A few other people were wandering as aimlessly as she was, but they had that shell-shocked look. Robin was shaken, but in control of herself. She had come to terms with her fear twenty years ago, when she first allowed herself to feel it. She had been very afraid while the attack was happening, shocked and sorrowful at all the casualties, but now that it was over she felt only disgust at the atrocity of the attack…and worry for her daughter.

She found her digging a trench. She had to call three times before Nova looked up. Then the girl’s lower lip quivered, she climbed out of the hole, and went to Robin’s arms.

Robin felt only tears of happiness. And she felt a little silly, as she always did, putting her arms around a daughter almost a foot taller than she was. Nova wept uncontrollably.

“Oh, Mother,” she said, “I want to go
home
.”

Cirocco spread her clock-face map on the rickety table. A Captain held a lantern over it as she drew in two more
X
s.

“The Cronus and Metis wings of the Gaean Air Force are wiped out. That means this whole half of the wheel, with us right in the middle, no longer contains any enemy air power. The nearest threat to us is all the way over here, in Hyperion. Bellinzona is still threatened by the Thea Wing. Now, if you were Gaea, what would you do?”

General Two studied the layout, and spoke.

“She must know by now that one of our groups outmatches one of hers.”

“But I don’t think she knows our total strength,” Cirocco said.

“Good. That might make her wait. An attack on Bellinzona from Thea is a possibility. But you say her main objective is the army.”

“It is.”

“Then…we’ll get a good deal of warning if the Hyperion Wing takes flight. You said our spies in Hyperion are excellent.”

“They are.”

“If I were her,” General Eight said, “I would start massing my planes. Shift the Hyperion group into the empty base in Mnemosyne, for instance, if that base is still usable.”

“It isn’t.”

“All right. And the Hyperion couldn’t make it to the Cronus base without being attacked by our Air Force. So I’d tell them to sit tight. I’d move the Thea wing to the base in Metis. Iapetus is out of the
question, for the same reason as Cronus. How many buzz bombs can use one base?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Hm. Well, if more than one wing can land at one base, I’d start moving those more remote ones in closer. Phoebe, Crius, Tethys, into Metis and Hyperion. We don’t know the range, either, do we?”

“No. I suspect we’re at the outer limits of the Hyperion group’s range. But we’ll get closer. I thought she might launch them at us now, while we’re still recovering, and move Rhea up to take their place. But I
think
what she’ll do right now…is nothing. So far, I’ve been right.” She pointed at the map again. “We have to defend the army, the city…and the base in Mnemosyne. The base in Iapetus is expendable—in fact, I’ve given orders to blow it up if they try to take it.”

“Why would they try that?”

“Because they’re going to be hungry. I propose a surprise attack. If it works, it might give us total air superiority.”

She watched the effect of that magical phrase. In large army engagements for two centuries, those words had been the key to victory.

Naturally, they wanted to know how she planned to do it. She told them.

“Begin Operation Hotfoot. Begin Operation Hotfoot.”

Perched on central cables from Hyperion to Mnemosyne, those Dione Supras who were gathered around the little radios began to chitter excitedly.

The dream-demon had said the radios would speak, and my, didn’t they ever? The Supras had sat entranced as the pristine gibberish issued from the clever machines. Mentioning exotic bafflers like Canuck, poesy like Rocky Road, speaking of metal Squadrons, Luftmorders, and a fellow named Roger, the radios had become a great source of fun to the Supras. They played rhyming games.

“Big Canuck, are you in position?”

“Intromission.”

“Inquisition.”

“Pig and puck.”

“Rig a duck.”

It was great fun.

The dream-demon and her insubstantial companion had explained what a hotfoot was. It appealed to the Supras. Not the mission—to which they were already committed—but the code name, and the practical joke. Supras had a rather rough sense of humor.

They had been setting up for it for kilorevs. It was unpleasant. They did not like the stink of kerosene. But they did it, for the Demon.

And now the code word had been spoken by the radio. The plan had to be executed instantly, so it would be simultaneous all over Gaea. Any other way would be perilous to the Supras, Gaby had been
quite emphatic about that.

“Oh, such dynamite there will have been,” one of them said.

“Bouquets of Chrysanthemums,” one gasped, a bit previously.

“Showers of flowers.”

“Break out the soothing salves,” one worried.

“Casualties are to be expected,” another encouraged, referring to the dastardly attack on the nest in Tethys.

“The sword cuts both ways.”

“That’s a pyrotechnicality.”

“Is there film in the camera?”

They dropped away from the cable and plunged toward the nest of vipers clinging below them.

***

The Luftmorder was only peripherally aware of the angels until they got within fifty meters. They had been around so much, his perceptions had simply edited them out, like smart radar erasing the signatures of birds.