Demon (GAIA) (58 page)

It was only momentary. When he lifted his head he was still in the air, and almost behind the remaining three, though they were still distant. Far behind him the attacker was screaming into a turn, but he could forget about that one. It would never catch him.

He tested the controls gingerly. The plane hadn’t been hurt badly. The right wing cannon wasn’t working, and some of the response was a bit sluggish, but he decided it would bear up. He closed in behind the three attackers.

It began to seem almost too easy. He picked off one buzz bomb, which didn’t even try to dodge. He zeroed in on the Luftmorder, but it twisted up and away. That left him with the other buzz bomb, which also took no evasive action. He almost hated to take the time, but he gave the computer its scent, the computer instructed a missile, and it screamed away to bury itself in the buzz bomb’s tailpipe.

Conal looked up and saw the Luftmorder. He turned, shot another missile—then was turning even harder as he saw the sidewinder coming at him. He was still turning when it went off, taking a meter from the end of his left wingtip.

The little Dragonfly coughed, and he was pulled forward against his straps. He lost three hundred meters of altitude very quickly as the transparent wings strained and groaned, finding a new shape to compensate for the damage. At last—four, maybe five seconds later—he knew he was still airworthy, though not as fast as he had been.

He spied the Luftmorder. One of its four engines was missing, and black smoke trailed from that spot. But it didn’t seem to bother the Luftmorder. It was descending, and Conal knew that was purposeful, as he could see the scattered fires of the army not too far ahead.

He moved in above and behind.

Carefully, he lined it up in his sights and told the computer to blow it to hell.

Nothing happened.

Cursing, he switched to manual control and tried to shoot it down with his remaining wing cannon.

Nothing happened.

The computer was still running, but no messages were getting through to his armaments.

Shouting his outrage, he moved in even closer.

***

The Luftmorder was not worried.

He couldn’t shut off the flow to the missing engine, so the fire would not go out, and that hurt some, but pain would not divert him. A quick check of consumption assured him he was losing no more fuel than if the engine had still been in place. He would make it.

He would make it, so long as that little…

Where the hell was it? He’d had it on his radar just a second ago. It had been descending. He would
have seen it if it crashed. He scanned the skies with radar and visual senses, and found nothing.

Finally, he began to worry.

***

Conal was ten meters beneath the Luftmorder.

He felt like he could almost reach out and touch its great bulk. Red-eyes and sidewinders hung in clusters, squirming eagerly in the high wind.

He saw the trailing edges of the great wings bend down and bite air, and had to move quickly getting his own flaps down or he would have shot out ahead of the monster.

Slowing down. Getting ready for the bomb run. It would want to make it accurate, drop as many bombs as possible during its one and only pass. It probably knew there were no ground guns that could hurt it.

Guns.

Conal had been thinking about ramming. If the Luftmorder hadn’t slowed down, that would have been his only option.

He looked up at the belly. There were sphincter-like puckerings all along it. He had wondered where the bombs came from. Might have known, he thought. That would certainly appeal to Gaea’s sense of humor.

He blew his canopy. The wind hit him like a fist. But he and the creature were still slowing, and it got a little better. He dug in his flak jacket and came up with his flare pistol. The wind snatched the first shot and pushed it off to the Luftmorder’s left, just missing the fuselage. He had two more. Was the creature starting to turn? Never mind. He took aim again, giving it a lot of windage. He saw the flare embed itself in what was, surprisingly, soft flesh a few inches away from one of the sphincters. It was magnesium, and too bright to look at.

Conal dropped and turned—and so did the Luftmorder. He heard a screaming sound, looked up, got
a glimpse of a loathsome, unblinking eye protected behind a hard plastic-like material. The eye glared its hate at him, and the Luftmorder fell helplessly away, its innards on fire.

Conal thought of all those bombs and kerosene fumes and missiles, and turned his plane as hard as he dared.

Then it was like the Chinese New Year. Things were flying by all around him, trailing fire. The Dragonfly was buffeted by shock waves, rattled by shrapnel, for a moment engulfed in flames as a bomb went off close by.

He was in clear air again.

The Dragonfly shifted gears.

It shifted again, and again, trying out one shape after another, slowing, beginning a slow roll to the left.
Somewhere
among its vast array of possible airframes there must be a configuration that would make further flight possible.

But there wasn’t.

Sorry,
the brave little plane seemed to say, as it nosed over and dropped like a stone.

Conal pushed himself away from it, popped his chute, and saw the Luftmorder hit the ground a hundred meters short of the army.

And to think, he was the guy who had to be convinced that life never came out as well as it did in comic books.

He looked up, and saw his chute had a big hole in it. In his present state of mind, it didn’t worry him in the slightest. This, too, I will survive, he told himself, with a big grin.

And he did survive it.

When he tried to get up he howled in pain. He had broken his ankle.

“Never
did
get that parachute practice,” he told his rescuers.

It might have gone differently.

Gaea did not have much of a military staff, but she had a few, and when the first reports of the defeat of the Cronus and Metis air forces came in, one of the staff found her and informed her. He recommended moving other units up from the far side of the wheel, getting them in positions more favorable for a massed attack. It was generally agreed that was the best way to defeat the tricky little Bellinzona planes.

Gaea was in a screening of
War and Peace
, the long, Mosfilm version. She agreed that was probably a good idea, and to ask her again when she got out and had a chance to think it over.

When she came, blinking, out into the light again, she was informed that all her air bases had been destroyed and her air force was in the final stages of being obliterated.

The news had produced a petulant frown on her huge face.

“See if you can scare up that copy of
Strategic Air Command
,” she told her advisors, and went back into the screening room.

The dead were counted, and gathered together. Just over six hundred humans, twenty-two Titanides. Their bodies were stacked with wood and set afire as all the Division stood at attention.

The wounded were treated. There were fifteen hundred human and thirty-five Titanide injuries, many of them serious. Wagons were loaded with the less serious casualties, and moved out toward the city, with three Cohorts to guard them.

So it was one Legion of dead and wounded, and half a Legion who would not go on to Hyperion. Similar numbers applied to the Titanides. It was, in effect, another decimation.

It could have been much worse. Everyone kept telling themselves that. Nobody mentioned it while the pyre was burning, or as blinded, burned, and dismembered survivors were loaded into the wagons.

In the remorseless logic of warfare, Cirocco knew it could not have been better if she had planned every second of it.

The Air Force was much more badly hurt than the army, both in planes and pilots—but the Gaean Air Force no longer existed. The survivors were heroes. The tale of their fight would be told in many a Bellinzona taproom.

The Army was damaged—but was probably stronger now than it had been before. It had been, in that horribly exact word, “blooded.” Soldiers had seen comrades die. They blamed Gaea for it, and they hated her. They had learned something about fear. They were veterans now.

Her Generals knew better than to bring up any of these points. They remembered the ex-General who had talked of “acceptable losses.” But they all knew it was the truth, and they knew Cirocco realized it.

It could hardly have been any better.

Cirocco was so happy she wanted to throw up.

The only thing that made it even marginally tolerable was that, so far, they had been fighting monsters. She could accept and approve of this hatred, this spirit of bloodthirsty vengeance that would have repulsed her so had it been directed at another group of humans. So far, they had been fighting true evil.

But in Hyperion, at the gates of Pandemonium, it might all change. If Cirocco’s plans for Gaea did not work out, these people would soon be fighting other human beings.

A very few of those people had chosen to be there, and were as evil as Gaea herself. But the great majority in Pandemonium had been tossed on its shores as randomly as the Bellinzonans had been washed up in Dione. It was the luck of the draw, and Gaea was using a stacked deck.

Cirocco found herself raising silent prayers to Saint Gaby. Please don’t let me fail. Please don’t let this army—this army I raised only when you promised me Adam could be saved without human beings ever warring against each other—please don’t let them learn to love killing other humans.

One other thing kept her going. If she died, and the army had to fight, it was better to die a bloody death than live in slavery.

***

The army pressed on.

As the road vanished into the jungle, the Titanide groups moved to the front.

There had been grumbling about the Titanides. It wasn’t logical, but those things never are. No matter that the pinned-down humans had nothing to fight back with—had not really fought a battle at all. No matter that, had it been possible, the humans would have run from the field of battle, too. The plain fact was, the Titanides had left and the humans had stayed behind to soak up the bullets.

The jungle changed all that.

Progress was slow through the jungle. As the troops moved through a long, dark tunnel of foliage, they would pass groups of exhausted, bleeding Titanides sitting at the side of the trail. Sitting with them would be the Legion that had been marching in the point position. When the end of the line passed them, the Legion and the Titanides would fall in at the back. This happened about every two revs.

When a Legion got to the front, they saw what was happening. The groups of fifty Titanides were hacking through the jungle with the speed and energy of a large, continuous buzz saw. It was awesome to watch. Little creatures that bit and clawed attacked them. Poisonous plants scored their colorful hides. It didn’t take long to see that humans could have moved the army at about a tenth its present speed, and only with heavy casualties.

It was bad enough in the middle of the column, with things jumping out of the underbrush all the time. The troops got very jittery. Some just died, for no reason anyone could see, victims of contact poisons.

When they camped, the jungle closed in. Creatures better suited to drugged nightmare than reality came blundering through the darkness and briefly into the light, fighting off four or five Titanides.

They had to camp twice in the jungle. Nobody slept much.

There was another constant tension. Word had come down that an attack in force might be made against them while they were in Cronus, who was an ally of Gaea. Nobody knew the nature of the possible enemies, but from what they had seen, it would be awful.

But for some reason, Cronus did not attack. The army came out the other end and breathed a sigh of relief—all but fifty-two Titanides and sixteen humans who would never breathe again.

***

They made a more elaborate camp by the river Ophion, on the verge of the great desert of Mnemosyne, not too far from where the river plunged underground and ran for two hundred kilometers before emerging.

Cirocco let them rest, recover from the jungle, and gather strength for the desert crossing. Football games were organized. Men and women soldiers retired to the conjugal tents and forgot about fear for a while.

Every available water container was topped off. There would be no oasis, no spring, no water of any kind until they reached the snows of Oceanus.

There was a universal mystic dread of the sandworm.

Many a tale had been told of it, though of the humans there only Cirocco had ever seen it.

It was ten kilometers long and had a mouth two hundred meters wide, some said. It thirsted for human blood, according to others. It liked to stay under the sand, where it could move faster than a Titanide could run, then come bursting to the surface to devour whole armies.

Well…sort of.

A lot of the tale-tellers were remembering the beast who had first appeared in a movie long ago—one of Gaea’s favorites. She had liked it so much she had
built
the beast, and let it loose in Mnemosyne, which, according to Titanide legend, had once been the Jewel of the Wheel.

The truth was a lot more, and a lot less.

They passed one great loop of the worm midway through their crossing. The worm was three
hundred
kilometers long and four kilometers in diameter. It preferred to stay below the surface, but where the bedrock was less than four kilometers down it had no choice, so loops of it were visible far into the distance. It was gradually crunching the rock into finer and finer sand, and somehow living on the minerals it ingested.

As to its speed…

Three hundred kilometers of sand creates a great deal of friction. The sandworm was made of huge ring-segments, each about a hundred meters long. What happened was, one of the visible segments would hitch itself forward six or seven meters, then the next one in line would pull itself back up against the first, then the next, and so on down. Two or three minutes later the segments would hitch along
another six or seven meters.