The Wooden Spaceships

Chapter 6

As they walked to the palace’s principal entrance Gesalla Maraquine talked continuously about domestic trivia—a tactic which Toller found more baffling and infuriating than if she had chosen to maintain a cold silence.

He had not been able to return home in the twelve days which had elapsed since the visitation by the skyship from Land, and consequently had been pleased when Gesalla had ridden up from the estate to spend the night with him. But her stay had provided none of the comforts for which he had hoped. She had arrived in a strange mood, enigmatic and slightly distant, and on learning that he had insisted on going aloft with the first fortress had become positively acidic. Later, in bed, she had responded to his advances with a dull compliance which was more hurtful than outright rejection and which had caused him to abandon all thoughts of lovemaking. He had lain apart from her all night, physically and mentally frustrated, and when he had lapsed into sleep there had been dreams of falling—not just of ordinary falling, but of the day-long drop from the weightless zone…

“Cassyll is waiting for you,” Toller cut in forcibly. “It’s good that you’ll have his company on the ride home.”

Gesalla nodded. “It’s very good—after all, you might have decided to take him into the sky with you.”

“What are you saying? The boy has no interest in flying.”

“He had no interest in guns, either—until you put him to work on those cursed muskets. Now I see almost as little of him as I do of you.”

“Is that what this is all about?” Toller stopped his wife in the busy, high-ceilinged corridor, waited until a group of officials had moved out of earshot, and said, “Why didn’t you come out with it last night?”

“Would you have changed your plans?”

“No.”

Gesalla looked exasperated. “Then what would have been the point in my speaking out?”

“What was the point in coming to the palace in the first place?” Toller said. “Was it to cause me pain?”

“Did you say pain?” Gesalla gave an incredulous laugh. “I heard about your plunge into insanity with that beast of a swordsman, Karkarand, or whatever his name is.”

Toller blinked at her, thrown by the apparent change of subject. “It was the only way…”

“Now you’re going up there when there is absolutely no need for it. Toller, how do you think I feel, knowing that my husband would rather court death than go on living with me?”

Toller strove for a suitable answer, gaining time through the fact that two clerks carrying ledgers were passing close by and giving him inquisitive looks. This was the sort of situation in which Gesalla could strike a near-superstitious fear into him. Her oval face was hard, pale and beautiful, and behind those grey eyes was a mind that could far outpace his own, making it impossible for him to best her in an argument, especially an important one.

“I know there is little evidence of it thus far, but this is a time of crisis,” he said slowly. “I am only doing what is required of me, and I hate it as much as…” He allowed the sentence to tail off as he saw that Gesalla was shaking her head emphatically.

“Don’t lie to me, Toller. Don’t lie to yourself. You are enjoying all this.”

“Nonsense!”

“Answer just one question for me—do you ever think of Leddravohr?”

Again disconcerted, Toller conjured up then drove from his mind a vision of the military prince, the man whose hatred had altered his entire life and with whom he had fought a duel to the death on the day their ships had touched down on Overland all those years ago.

“Leddravohr?” he said. “Why should I think of him?”

Gesalla produced the sweet, sweet smile which often preceded her deadliest thrusts. “Because you were a pair of sixes, you and he.” She turned and walked away quickly, her straight-backed figure slipping through barriers of people with an ease he could not emulate.

Nobody can say that to me, he thought in dismay, trailing in Gesalla’s wake. In spite of his efforts to overtake, she had passed through the arched entrance and was in the sunlight of the forecourt before he reached her side, and Cassyll was already bringing two bluehorns forward.

Cassyll Maraquine was as tall as his father, but the maternal component of his build was evident. His physique was of the lean and long-muscled type, giving him the capability—as Toller had learned through a number of failed challenges—of running for two or three hours at a stretch with virtually no diminution of speed. He bore a strong resemblance to his mother, with a fine-featured oval face and thoughtful grey eyes beneath a widow’s peak of black hair.

“Good foreday, mother, father,” he said and immediately gave all his attention to Toller. “I brought samples of the new batch of pressure spheres. Not one of them has failed or even distorted under test, so we can start producing reliable muskets right away. I have them in my saddle bag—do you want to see?”

Toller glanced at Gesalla’s set countenance. “Not now, son. Not today. I’m leaving it to you and Wroble to take care of the production planning—I have other work in hand.”

“Oh!” Cassyll raised his eyebrows and gazed at his father in open admiration. “So it’s really true! You’re going aloft with the first of the fortresses!”

“It has to be done,” Toller said, wishing that Cassyll had reacted differently. He had been away from home on the King’s business during much of his son’s upbringing and had always considered himself blessed in that, far from showing resentment, the boy had regarded him as a glamorous adventurer and a father of whom to be proud. There had been no sense of competition with Gesalla for their son’s mind, even after the boy had developed a strong interest in the new science of metallurgy, but now the triangular relationship was changing and presenting difficulties—just when Toller was least able to deal with them. The first two sky fortresses had been constructed in only a few days, far too short a time for a thorough study of the problem areas, and the forthcoming ascent was looming so large in his thoughts that all else seemed slightly unreal to him. In his heart he was already soaring up into the dangerous blue reaches of the sky, and he had become impatient with earthly matters.

“I’ll speak to Wroble before nightfall,” Cassyll said. “How long will you be away?”

“Perhaps seven days on this first ascent. Much depends on how smoothly the operation proceeds.”

“Good luck, father.” Cassyll shook Toller’s hand, then held one of the bluehorns steady for Gesalla to mount it. She swung herself up into the saddle with practised grace, her divided riding skirt giving her full freedom of movement, and looked down at Toller with an expression which seemed to indicate an odd mixture of anger and sadness. The silver streak in her hair shone like a military emblem.

“Aren’t you going to wish me good luck also?” he said.

“Why should I? You assured me the ascent would be perfectly safe.”

“Yes, but…”

“Goodbye, Toller.” Gesalla wheeled the bluehorn away and rode off towards the palace gates.

Cassyll gazed after her in perplexity for a moment. “Is anything wrong, father?”

“Nothing we are unable to put right, son. Take good care of your mother.” Toller watched Cassyll mount and ride after Gesalla, then turned and walked back into the palace, moving like a blind man opposed by currents of humanity. He had taken only a few paces when he heard a woman’s footsteps hurrying behind him. The idea that it might be Gesalla coming back to put things right between them was irrational, but nevertheless he felt the beginnings of a surge of gladness as he halted and turned to face the person who was overtaking him. The emotion subsided in disappointment as he saw a petite, black-haired woman in her mid-twenties who was wearing the saffron uniform of an air-captain. Blue patches stitched to the shoulders of the thickly embroidered jupon showed that she had been seconded to the hastily formed Sky Service. Her face was firm-jawed and full-lipped, with unfashionably full eyebrows which seemed poised to frown.

“Lord Toller,” she said, “may I have a word with you? I am Skycaptain Berise Narrinder, and I’ve been trying to see you for days.”

“I’m sorry, captain,” Toller said. “You have chosen the most inopportune time.”

“My lord, this will take but a moment—and it is a matter of some importance.”

The fact that the woman had not been deterred by his refusal caused him to look more closely at her, and far back in his mind there flickered the thought that she would have been highly attractive but for the anomaly of being in uniform. He was immediately angry with himself, and again wished that Queen Daseene did not have so much influence over her husband. It had been on Daseene’s insistence that women had been admitted to the Air Service, and she had prevailed on Chakkell to permit female volunteers to join skyship and fortress crews.

“All right, captain,” Toller said, “what is this matter of some importance?”

“I was told that it was your personal decision that no woman would take part in the first twelve ascents to the weightless zone. Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true. What of it?”

Berise’s eyebrows now formed a continuous line above intent green eyes."With the greatest respect, my lord, I wish to claim the right of protest granted to me under the Terms of Service.”

“There are no Terms in wartime.” Toller blinked down at her. “Leaving that aside, what have you to protest about?”

“I volunteered for flight duty and was rejected—simply because I’m a woman.”

“You’re in error, captain. If you were a woman with experience of piloting a ship to the weightless zone and carrying out the inversion manoeuvre you would have been accepted, or at least considered. If you were a woman with gunnery experience or with the strength to move fortress sections you would have been accepted, or at least considered. The reason that you were rejected is that you are unqualified for the work. And now may I suggest that we both resume our duties?”

Toller turned quickly and was beginning to walk away when the look of frustration he had seen in Berise’s eyes struck a responsive chord within him. How many times in his youth had he too frowned and chafed when thwarted by regulations? He had an instinctive distaste for the idea of sending a woman into the front line of battle, but if he had learned one thing from Gesalla it was that courage was not an exclusively male attribute.

“Before we part, captain,” he said, checking his stride, “why are you so anxious to climb to the midpoint?”

“There will never be another opportunity, my lord—and I have as much right as any man.”

“How long have you been flying airships?”

“Three years, my lord.” Berise was carefully observing the formalities of address, but her stern expression and heightened colour made it clear that she was angry at him, and he liked her for it. He had a natural sense of kinship with people who were unable to disguise their feelings.

“My ruling about the assembly flights is unchanged,” he said, deciding to show her that the years had not robbed him of his humanity, that he could still sympathise with youth’s ambitions. “But when the fortresses are in place there will be frequent supply flights, and the fortress crews themselves will be rotated on a regular basis. If you can curb your impatience, albeit briefly, you will have ample opportunity to prove your worth in the central blue.”

“You are very kind, my lord.” Berise’s bow seemed deeper than was necessary, and her smile could have suggested amusement as much as gratitude.

Did I sound pompous? he thought, watching her walk away. Is that young woman laughing at me?

He considered the questions for a moment, then clicked his tongue in annoyance as it came to him how trivial was the subject which had diverted him from his major responsibilities.

The parade ground at the rear of the palace had been chosen as the launch site, partly because it was fully enclosed, partly because it made it easy for King Chakkell to keep a close eye on every aspect of the sky fortress project.

The fortresses were wooden cylinders—twelve yards in length and circumference and four in diameter—each of which had been built in three sections. Two prototypes had been produced in the initial war effort and the sections comprising them were lying on their sides at the western edge of the ground, looking like giant drums. The huge balloons which were to carry them into the weightless zone had already been attached and were lying on the baked clay, their mouths held open by ground crew, and hand-cranked fans were being used to inflate them with unheated air. It was a technique which had been devised at the time of the Migration to lessen the risk of damage to the linen envelopes when hot gas was fired into them from the burners.

“I still say it’s madness for you to go aloft at this stage,” liven Zavotle said as he crossed the parade ground with Toller. “And even now it isn’t too late for you to appoint a deputy.”

Toller shook his head and placed a hand on Zavotle’s shoulder. “I appreciate your concern, liven, but you know it can’t be done that way. The crews are terrified as it is, and if they thought I was afraid to go up there with them they would be completely useless.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“You and I have been in the weightless zone before, and we know how to deal with it.”

“The circumstances were different,” Zavotle said gloomily. “Especially for our second visit.”

Toller gave him a reassuring shake. “Your system will work—I’ll stake my life on that.”

“Spare me the jests.” Zavotle parted from Toller and went to confer with a group of his technicians who were waiting to observe the take-off. He had proved himself so valuable to the sky fortress project that soon after their first meeting Chakkell had appointed him Chief Engineer, thus making Toller redundant to a large degree and freeing him for the first ascent. As a result, Zavotle felt responsible for thrusting his friend into dangers whose extent could hardly be guessed, and he had been increasingly morose over the past few days.

Toller glanced up at the sky, to where the great disk of Land was poised at the zenith, and once again it came to him that he might die up there, midway between the two worlds. On analysing his reaction to the thought, the disturbing thing was that he felt no real fear. There was a determination to avoid being killed and to guide the mission through to a successful conclusion, but there was little of the normal human sense of dread at the possibility of having his life snuffed out. Was that because he could not envisage Toller Maraquine, the man at the centre of creation, meeting the same fate as all ordinary mortals—or had Gesalla been right about him? Was he really a war-lover, as the long-dead Prince Leddravohr had been—and did that explain the malaise which had begun to affect him in recent years?

The thought was a disquieting and depressing one, and he pushed it aside to concentrate on his immediate duties. All day there had been intense activity around the six fortress sections as supplies were loaded and secured, and last-minute adjustments were made to engines and equipment. Now the area was comparatively empty, with only the launch teams and the flight crews standing by their odd-looking ships. Some of the latter exchanged words and glances as they saw Toller approaching and knew that the 2,500-mile ascent was about to begin. The pilots were all mature men, selected because of their flying experience during the Migration; but most of the others were youngsters who had been chosen for their physical fitness, and they tended to be highly apprehensive about what was to follow. Understanding their worries, Toller put on a show of being relaxed and cheerful as he reached the row of slow-stirring balloons.

“The wind conditions are perfect, so I will not detain you,” he told them, raising his voice against the clattering and whirring of the inflation fans. “I have only one thing to say. It is something you have heard many times before, but it is so important that it is worth repeating here. You must remain tethered to your ships at all times, and wear your parachutes at all times. Remember those basic rules and you will be as safe in the sky as you are on the ground.

“And now let us be about the work with which the King has entrusted us.”

His closing words were far from being as inspirational as he would have liked, but a traditional speech delivered in high Kolcorronian would have seemed incongruous in the context of the strangest war in human history. In past conflicts the common man had always been emotionally involved—largely through fear of what an invading horde would do to his loved ones—but in this case most of the general populace were quite unaware of any threat. In a way it was an unreal war, a contest between rulers, where a few gladiators were thrown into the ring like tumbling dice to bring about an arbitrary decision, largely influenced by their ability to endure pain and deprivation, on the viability of a political idea. How was he to explain, justify and glorify that to a handful of hapless individuals who had been lured into the King’s service, originally, by the prospect of steady pay and a soft life?

Toller went to his own ship, giving the signal for the five other pilots to do likewise. He had chosen to fly a fortress midsection because it looked less airworthy than the closed endsections and its crew needed an extra boost to their confidence. A temporary floor had been installed a short distance below one rim, and on that were the crew stations and lockers containing various supplies.

The centrally mounted burner was one which had served in the Migration and had been lying in Chakkell’s stores for more than twenty years. Its main component was the trunk of a very young brakka tree which had been used in its entirety. On one side of the bulbous base was a small hopper filled with pikon, plus a valve which admitted the crystals to the combustion chamber under pneumatic pressure. On the other side a similar mechanism controlled the flow of halvell, and both valves were operated by a common lever. The passageways in the latter valve were slightly enlarged, automatically supplying the greater proportion of halvell which had proved best for sustained thrust.

Because the section was lying on its side the floor was vertical and Toller had to lie on his back in his chair to operate the burner’s controls. His sword, which he had not thought to discard, made the attitude all the more awkward. He pumped up the pneumatic reservoir, then signalled to the inflation supervisor that he was ready to begin burning. The fan crew ceased cranking and pulled their cumbersome machine and its nozzle aside.

Toller advanced the control lever for about a second. There was a hissing roar as the power crystals combined, firing a burst of hot miglign gas into the balloon’s gaping mouth. Satisfied with the burner’s performance, he instigated a series of blasts— keeping them short to reduce the risk of heat damage to the balloon fabric—and the great envelope began to distend further and lift clear of the ground. The inflation crew raised it further by means of the four acceleration struts, which constituted the principal difference between the skyship and a craft designed for normal atmospheric flight. Now three-quarters full, the balloon sagged among the struts, the varnished linen skin pulsing and rippling like a giant lung.

As it gradually rose to the vertical position the crew holding the balloon’s crown lines came walking in and attached them to the section’s load points, while others gently rotated the section until its axis was perpendicular. All at once the section was ready to take to the air, held down only by the pull of the men holding its trailing ropes. The remainder of the flight crew scaled its sides on projecting rungs and took their places.

Toller nodded in satisfaction as he glanced along the line of craft and saw that the other crews had gone aboard in unison with his own. It was a departure from established Kolcorronian practice for a group of ships to take off simultaneously, but successful assembly of the fortresses in the weightless zone was going to depend on precision flying in close formation. Zavotle had decided that a mass take-off would help the pilots familiarise themselves with the technique, and also give an early indication of where problems could lie. There had been no time for trial ascents, and the crews would have to learn new skills under the tutelage of the severest and most unforgiving taskmaster of all.

Having assured himself that the other five pilots were ready to fly, Toller waved to them and fired a prolonged burst to initiate the climb. The roar of the burner was magnified in the vast echo chamber of the balloon which now blotted out most of the sky, and at the end of the blast the handlers released their lines on command from the launch supervisor. As the ship began to drift vertically upwards, with no breeze to impart a lateral component to its motion, Toller stood up and looked over the rim of the section into the slowly receding parade ground. He picked out the compact form of liven Zavotle, easily distinguishable because of his prematurely white hair, and waved to him. Zavotle did not respond, but Toller knew he had been seen and that Zavotle was wishing he could exchange places rather than have another man put his ideas to the test.

“Bring in the struts, sir?” The speaker was the rigger, Tipp Gotlon, a lanky gap-toothed youngster who was one of the few volunteers on the flight.

Toller nodded and Gotlon began working his way around the circular deck, drawing in the free-hanging acceleration struts by their tethers and securing them to the rim. Mechanic Millyat Essedell, a competent-looking, bow-legged man with several years of Air Service experience, was not required to do anything at this stage of the flight, but he was crouched at his equipment locker, busily sorting and checking the tools. The midsection ships had three-man crews—as compared with five in the end-sections—because they were burdened with the extra weight of the armaments the fortresses would use against invaders.

Satisfied that his companions were reliable, Toller directed all his attention into finding a burn ratio which would give a climb speed in the region of twenty-four miles an hour. He settled on a rhythm of four seconds on and twenty seconds off—well remembered from his first interplanetary crossing—and for the next ten minutes the pilots of the other ships practised keeping exactly level with him. They made a striking spectacle, being so huge and close, with every detail sharply etched in pure light, while the world gently sank into the blue haze of distance.

The ships had become Toller’s only reality.

Looking down on the sketchy geometries of the city of Prad, he could feel little affinity with the place or its inhabitants. He had again become a creature of the sky, and his preoccupations were no longer those of mere land-locked beings. Affairs of state and the posturing of princes now mattered little in comparison with the condition of a rivet or the correct tensioning of a rope or even the strange ruminative sounds which a balloon would sometimes emit for no apparent reason.

By the time the practice period had ended the squadron had attained a height of two miles and Toller gave the signal for a vertical dispersion to take place. The manoeuvre was carried out quickly and without mishap, changing the tight horizontal group into a loose stepped formation which could face the onset of night with little risk of collision.

Toller had driven himself to the point of exhaustion before the take-off, sometimes getting only two hours sleep in a night, and it was during the enforced idleness of the ascent that his body claimed its due compensation. Even while operating the burner he would sometimes lapse into a torpor, counting off the rhythm by instinct, and much of his rest periods were spent in dozing and dreaming. Often when he awoke he genuinely had no idea where he was, and would gaze up at the patient, looming curvatures of the balloon in fear and confusion until he had deduced what it was and where it was taking him. At other times, especially at night when the meteors flickered continuously all around, he would not succeed in awakening fully and in his tranced condition imagined that he was on an ascent of long ago, in the company of men and women who had long since died or been turned into strangers by the processes of time, all of them voyaging into the future with varying degrees of trepidation and hope.

The changing patterns of night and day enhanced his temporal disorientation. As the ascent continued Overland’s night grew shorter and its littlenight expanded, slipping towards the equilibrium which would be attained midway between the sister planets, and Toller found himself almost losing track of the sequence. The surest measure of time’s passing became the ship’s altimeter—a simple device consisting of nothing more than a vertical scale, from the top of which a small weight was suspended by a delicate coiled spring. At the beginning of the flight the weight had been opposite the lowest mark on the scale, but as the climb continued and the pull of Overland’s gravity diminished, the weight drifted upwards in a perfect analogue of the flight, a miniature ship sailing a miniature cosmos.

Another reliable indicator of progress was the increasing coldness. On Toller’s first ascent the crew had been surprised by the phenomenon and had been considerably distressed as a result, but now thickly quilted suits were available and the low temperatures were made tolerable. It was even possible, while seated close to the burner, to achieve a cosy, cocooned warmth —a condition which abetted Toller’s persistent drowsiness, and in which he could spend hours staring into the darkening blue of the sky, at fierce stars scattered on overlapping whirlpools of light, at the splayed luminance of comets, and at Farland hanging in the distance like a green lantern.

One of the most important problems facing the mission was that of recognising the exact centre of the weightless zone. Toller knew that in theory there was no actual zone of weightlessness, that it was a plane of zero thickness, and that a fortress positioned as little as ten yards to one side or the other would inevitably begin the long plunge to a planetary surface. It had been assumed, however, that reality would be more forgiving than absolute equations and would allow some leeway, no matter how slight.

Toller’s first job was to show that the assumption had been justified.

The six ships had switched over to jet propulsion days earlier, when the lift generated by hot air had become negligible, but now their engines were silent as they hung in a gravitational no-man’s-land. Toller found it eerie that the crews could communicate well with each other simply by shouting—although their voices seemed to be absorbed quickly in the surrounding immensities, they could in fact carry for hundreds of yards. For many minutes he had been busy with the device, invented by Zavotle, which was intended to show up any significant vertical motion of his ship. It consisted of a small pan containing a mixture of chemicals and tallow which gave off thick smoke when ignited, and a bellows-like attachment with a long nozzle.

The machine made it possible to shoot out from the side of the ship tiny balls of smoke which retained their form and density for a surprisingly long time in the still air. Zavotle’s idea was that the smoke, being no heavier than the surrounding atmosphere, would create stationary markers by which the ship’s motion could be gauged. Basic though the system was, it seemed to be effective. Toller had forbidden Essedell and Gotlon to move in case they tilted the circular deck, and he had been sighting the smoke puffs along the line of the handrail for long enough to convince him there was no relative displacement.

“I’d say we’re holding,” he shouted to Daas, pilot of the second midsection, who had been carrying out similar observations. “What say you?”

“I agree, sir.” Daas, barely visible as a swaddled figure at the rail of his ship, waved to supplement his message.

Foreday had just begun and the sun was positioned “below” the six craft, close to the eastern rim of Overland. The upflung brilliance was illuminating the underside of the fortress sections, casting their shadows on the lower halves of the balloons, adding an unnatural and theatrical aspect to the scene. Toller suddenly became aware of a sense of elation as he surveyed the unearthly spectacle. He felt well-rested and strong after the brief hibernation of the ascent, ready to do battle in a new kind of arena, and within him was a peculiar sensation of such intensity that he was obliged to pause and analyse it.

There seemed to be a core of lightness which had nothing to do with the zero gravity conditions, and from that core came varicoloured rays—the metaphor was too simple, but the only one available to him—characterised by feelings of joy, optimism, luck and potency, which infused every part of his mental and physical being. The overall effect was strange and at the same time oddly familiar, and it took him several seconds to identify it and realise that he felt young. No more than that, and no less—he felt young!

An emotional reaction followed almost immediately.

I suppose many would think it strange for happiness to come to a man at a time like this. He relaxed his grip on the handrail slightly, allowing his feet to drift upwards from the deck, and the dreaming disk of Overland, cupped in its slim crescent of brightness, came into view beneath the ship. This is why Gesalla compared me to Leddravohr. She senses the fulfilment I get when called upon to defend our people, but she is unable to share in it and therefore she becomes jealous. No doubt she is anxious about my safety, and that too prompts her to say things she later regrets in the privacy of the bedchamber…

“I’m ready to go, sir.” Gotlon’s voice came from close behind Toller, calling him back into the practical universe. Toller brought his feet down on to the deck and turned to see that the young rigger, without awaiting the order, had donned his full personal flight kit. His lanky form was all but unrecognisable in the thick quilting of a skysuit, which included fur-lined gauntlets and boots. The lower half of his face was hidden by a woollen muffler, through which his breath emerged in white vapourings, and his form was further bulked out by a parachute pack and by the air jet unit strapped to his midriff.

“Shall I go out now, sir?” Gotlon fingered the karabiner on the tether which was keeping him close to the ship’s rail. “I’m ready.”

“I can see you are, but curb your impatience,” Toller said. “There must be a full audience for your exploits.”

As well as being ambitious, Gotlon was one of those rare individuals who were totally without fear of heights, and Toller felt lucky to have found him in the short time available. The crews of the six fortress sections had been in the weightless zone long enough to start getting used to floating in the air like ptertha, but a huge psychological barrier had yet to be surmounted.

Final assembly of the fortresses could not begin until it had been demonstrated that a man could untie himself, jump free of his ship and successfully return to it by means of his air jet. Although he had intellectual confidence in the hastily devised system, Toller was unashamedly relieved that he was not required to put it to the initial test. Once in reality, and many times since in nightmare, he had seen a man begin the 2,500-mile fall from the fringes of the central blue, at first moving so slowly that he seemed to be at rest, and then, as the gravitational yearning of the planet grew more insistent, dwindling and dwindling into the plunge which would last more than a day and end in death.

Toller’s lungs were labouring in the rarefied air, and he felt a stinging coldness inside his chest as he shouted the necessary orders to the other five pilots. While all crewmen were lining up at the rails of their ships their eyes were fixed on Gotlon. He waved to them like a child attracting his friend’s attention before a daring playground stunt. Toller allowed him the breach of discipline in the interests of general morale.

He scanned the five men in the nearest fortress end-section and with some difficulty, because of the all-enveloping skysuits, picked out Gnapperl, the sergeant who had been so vindictive in the matter of Oaslit Spennel’s execution. Now ranked as an ordinary skyman, Gnapperl had not even tried to protest when Toller had selected him for the first mission, and had gone through his few days of training with a gloomy acceptance of his fate. It was not in Toller’s nature to engineer another’s death in cold blood, but Gnapperl had no way of knowing that and had become a very apprehensive and unhappy man—a state in which Toller was prepared to leave him indefinitely.

“All right,” he said to Gotlon when he judged the moment to be right. “You may now part company with us—but be sure to return.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gotlon replied, with what Toller would have sworn was genuine pleasure and gratitude. He undipped his line, raised himself by using his wrists until he was floating horizontally, then rolled over the rail and kicked himself clear of the side, using more force than Toller would have done. A bright blue void opened between him and the ship, and from one of the other vessels came the sound of a man quietly retching.

Gotlon slid away towards the stars, cradled in sunlight, gradually slowing as air resistance overcame his momentum, and by chance came to a halt in an upright position relative to those watching. Without pause, he twisted with an eel-like motion until he was facing away from the line of ships, and rapid movements of his right arm showed that he was pumping air into the propulsion unit. A few seconds later the hissing of the jet was faintly heard. At first it seemed to be having no effect, then it became apparent that he was indeed returning to his point of departure. His course was not perfectly true, and several times he had to glance back over his shoulder and adjust the direction of his air jet, but in a short time he was close enough to the ship to grasp the cane which Essedell was extending to him. Bracing his feet against the side, Essedell pulled on the cane and Gotlon came zooming in over the side like a man-shaped balloon.

“Well done, Gotlon!” Toller reached out casually with his right hand to arrest the weightless figure, and was surprised to find his arm painfully driven back beyond its normal traverse. The impact spun him round, still clutching Gotlon, and it was several seconds before the two men were able to stabilise themselves by gripping partitions. Toller was puzzled over what had happened, but the mystery was displaced from his thoughts by an outbreak of cheering and shouting from the crews of the other ships.

Toller had to acknowledge his own feelings of relief and reassurance. It was one thing to sit in a comfortable room in the palace and accept the pronouncements of clever men on the subject of celestial mechanics; but it was a different order of experience entirely to cast free of a ship and tread the thin air of the weightless zone, precariously balanced between two worlds, trusting one’s life to little more than a set of blacksmith’s bellows. But now he had seen it done! Having been performed once, the miracle was no longer a miracle. It had become part of the skyman’s armoury of routine skills—and, importantly, had helped ease Toller’s mind with regard to the ordeal which awaited him at the end of the mission.

He gave the order for all personnel to begin practising free flight. The period he could allow for the crews to adapt to the supremely unnatural activity was ridiculously short—but King Chakkell, with Zavotle’s concurrence, had decided that time was the most vital factor in the preparations for the battle against Land. The small emergency cabinet had chosen to gear the war effort to meet the most unfavourable case: ten days for the reconnaissance ship to return to Land; two days for Rassamar-den to react to the news it was carrying; and, on the assumption that part of his invasion fleet was already operational, a further five days for the vanguard of the enemy to reach the weightless zone. Seventeen days.

By the end of that time, ran Chakkell’s decree, there must be a minimum of six fortresses positioned at the midpoint and ready for combat.

Toller had been stunned by the announcement. The whole concept of fortresses had been presumptuous enough, but the notion of designing, building and deploying six of them in a mere seventeen days had struck him as being absurd in the extreme. He had, however, forgotten about Chakkell’s unique combination of abilities—the ambition which had raised him to the throne, the gift for organisation with which he had once assembled a thousand-strong fleet of skyships, the ruthless determination which hurled aside or burst through every obstacle. Chakkell was an able ruler in years of peace, but he only came into his own during darker hours, and his fortresses were being built on time. It now remained to be seen whether the flesh-and-blood elements of his plan could withstand the same punishing degree of stress as those fashioned from inert matter.

Toller was highly conscious of others watching when it became his turn to push himself out from the side of the ship. He did his utmost to maintain an upright attitude with regard to the balloon and its cylindrical load, and was beginning to think he had succeeded when he realised that the great blue-and-white whorled disk of Land—which had been hidden by the balloon since the start of the ascent—appeared to be on the move above him. It drifted downwards and disappeared under his feet, to be followed by a remarkably similar apparition of Overland partaking in the same stately motion. There was no sensation of tumbling—he seemed to be the only stable object in a rolling universe in which the sun, the sister planets and the line of skyships followed each other in wavering succession—and he was grateful when the movement eventually slowed and ceased. He was also glad to discover that the experience of hanging in the blue emptiness was not as bad as he had feared. Apart from the inexplicable sensation of falling, which troubled all who entered the weightless zone, he felt reasonably secure and capable of functioning.

“Anybody who feels like grinning at my acrobatics should get it over with now,” he shouted to the silently watching men. “The serious work begins in a few minutes, and there will be little cause for mirth, I can assure you.”

There was appreciative laughter from the crews and renewed activity among the bulkily suited figures as they made their sorties with varying degrees of aptitude. Toller quickly realised that his own initial efforts were not as good as those of young Gotlon, but he persevered with the air jet and picked up the knack of propelling himself with fair accuracy to any point he wished to reach. The skill would have been easier to acquire had the exhaust been on his back, thus enabling him to face forward when in motion, but lack of time had forced the Air Service workshop to produce the simplest possible type of unit.

As soon as Toller was satisfied with his own competence he called the five other pilots to him for a final review of the forthcoming assembly procedure.

The conference was the strangest in which he had ever taken part, with six middle-aged men—all veterans of the Migration —hanging in a circle against a panoply of astronomical features, among which meteors continually darted like burning arrows. Three of the pilots—Daas, Hishkell and Umol—had been known to Toller since his days in the old Skyship Experimental Squadron, and he had relied upon their recommendations to a large extent when recruiting the remaining pair, Phamarge and Brinche.

“First of all, gentlemen,” he said, “have we learned anything new? Anything which in your opinion affects the plan for building the fortresses?”

“Only that we should do it as fast as possible, Toller,” Umol replied, using permitted familiarity. “I swear this cursed place is colder than the last time I was passing by. Look at this!” He pulled down his muffler to reveal a nose that was distinctly blue.

“The place is the same as ever, old hand,” Daas told him. “Your trouble is you no longer have any fire in your balls.”

“Did I say gentlemen?” Toller cut in, quelling Umol’s obscene response. “Children, we have work to do, and nobody wants our task completed faster than I, so let us make sure we know what we are undertaking.”

He spoke mildly, knowing from the little he could see of their faces that his companions were pleased with the success of the air jets and that their confidence in the project had increased accordingly. For the next few minutes he rehearsed the sequential stages of the assembly plan in detail. The first step was to rotate the six ships through ninety degrees to bring the fortress sections into their operational attitudes, with their lateral portholes facing both planets. It would then be necessary to unclamp the false decks and fire short bursts on the jets to drive the balloons, still trailing the decks, a short distance away from the circular sections. Once the sections were floating free they could then be linked with ropes, drawn together and sealed to form two cylinders with closed ends.

At that point the work force was scheduled to split into two separate groups.

Those whose duty it was to man the fortresses would go inside them and prepare for their lengthy stay in the weightless zone. Meanwhile, the six pilots—each accompanied by a rigger— would begin returning the precious balloons and engines to Overland for use in further missions. The early stages of the descent were straightforward enough and caused no forebodings among the experienced pilots. It was a matter of rotating the stripped-down craft through a further ninety degrees, and— using the engines in the thrust mode—driving them a short distance into Overland’s gravitational field. The ships would be travelling upside down, something no commander liked doing, but that phase would last only a few hours, until they had regained enough weight to give them the balloonist’s much-cherished pendulum stability for the descent. A final rotation through half-a-circle would normalise the ships’ attitudes, putting Overland in its rightful place beneath the crews’ feet, where it would remain for the rest of the journey home.

So far the flight plan and its techniques were conventional —something which any surviving pilot from the Migration could have outlined in seconds—but the strictures of the crisis situation had yet to be applied. Toller could remember, with diamond clarity, all the relevant words from that first meeting with Chakkell and Zavotle, the words which told him that the sky and he had not yet tested each other to the limit…

“The descent is going to be the worst part,” Toller said. “Quite apart from the cold—which will be severe—the men are going to be sitting on an open platform, with thousands of miles of empty air beneath them. Just think of it! Trip on a rope and over the edge you go! It was bad enough in the old-style gondolas, but there you at least had the sidewalls to give you some sense of security. I don’t like it, liven—five days of that sort of thing would be a bit too much for any man. I think we…” He stopped speaking, surprised, as he saw that Zavotle was nodding his head in evident agreement.

“You’re absolutely right, quite apart from the fact that we simply cannot allow five days for the return,” Zavotle said. “We shall need you and the other pilots back on the ground again much sooner than that, to say nothing of the balloons and engine cores.”

“So…?”

Zavotle gave him a calm smile. “I suppose you have heard of parachutes?”

“Of course I’ve heard of parachutes,” Toller said impatiently. “The Air Service has been using them for at least ten years. What are you getting at?”

“The men must return by parachute.”

“Wonderful idea!” Toller clapped a hand to his forehead in case his sarcasm had not been noticed. “But—correct me if I’m wrong—does a man with a parachute not descend at roughly the same speed as a skyship?”

Zavotle’s smile became even more peaceful. “Only if the parachute has been opened.”

“Only if…” Toller walked around the small room, staring down at the floor, and returned to his chair. “Yes, I see what you mean. Obviously we can save some time if a man doesn’t deploy his parachute until he is well into the fall. At what height should he open it?”

“How about, say, one thousand feet?”

“No!” Toller’s reaction was immediate and instinctive. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Toller stared hard at Zavotle’s face, reading the familiar features in an unfamiliar way. “You remember the first time we entered the central blue, liven. The accident. We both looked over the side and watched Flenn being taken away from us. He fell more than a day!”

“He didn’t have a parachute.”

“But he fell for more than a day\” Toller pleaded, appalled at what the intervening years had done to Zavotle. “It’s too much to expect.”

“What’s the matter with you, Maraquine?” King Chakkell put in, his broad brown face showing exasperation. “The end result is the same whether a man falls for a day or a single minute—if he has no parachute he dies, and if he has a parachute he lives.”

“Majesty, would you like to take that drop?”

Chakkell gazed back at Toller in simple bafflement. “Where’s the relevance in your question?”

Unexpectedly, it was Zavotle who chose to reply. “Majesty, Lord Toller has practical cause for concern. We have no idea of the effects such a fall might have on a man. He might freeze to death… or asphyxiate… Or there may be ill effects of a different ilk—a pilot who was physically sound but insane would be of scant value to you.” Zavotle paused, his pencil tracing a strange design on the paper before him. “I suggest that, as I was the one who proposed the scheme, I should be among those who put it to the test.”

You had me fooled, you little weasel, Toller thought, listening to his former crewmate with a resurgence of his affection and respect. And, just for that, I will ensure that you remain where you belong—right here on the ground.

In general, there was little difference in outlook between the men who had volunteered for the mission and those who had simply been told they were taking part. Both groups understood very well that defying the King’s will in a time of war would result in summary execution, and some of the volunteers had simply been making a virtue out of necessity, but confirmation of the fact that they could fly independently of the ships and come to no harm had boosted the general morale. If we have not died thus far, the reasoning had been, perhaps there is no reason for us to die at all. The outward sign of that optimism had been the shouting with which the men filled the sky as they developed their new skills and prepared for the next phase of the undertaking.

But now, Toller noticed, they had again fallen silent.

The last of the balloons had been separated from its fortress section, and—burdened with only its circular false deck and engine unit—had retreated a short distance from the centre of activity. Insubstantial though they were, the sheer hugeness of the gas-filled envelopes had made them dominant features of the aerial environment. In the mind they were vast friendly entities with the power to transport humans safely from world to world —and now, suddenly, they were withdrawing their patronage, abandoning their minuscule dependants in the hostile blue emptiness.

Even Toller, committed to the enterprise as he was, felt an icy slithering in his gut as he took note of how small the unsupported fortress sections looked against the misted infinities all around. Until that point it had seemed to him that the worst thing a man could be called upon to do was to take the long drop to the planetary surface, but he now felt almost privileged in comparison to those who would remain in the weightless zone. Privileged, yet in another way—and the realisation jolted him —oddly cheated.

What is happening to me? he thought, becoming alarmed. He had rarely given himself over to introspection, considering it a waste of time, but recently his emotional reactions to events had been so laden with ambivalence and contradiction that his mind had been obliged to turn inwards. And here was another example. In one instant he had pitied the fortress crews—and in the next he had come close to envying them! Few people knew better than he how illusory was the concept of military glory, therefore he could not have been seduced by his fleeting vision of a new breed of patriots, ultimate heroes, manning their fragile wooden outposts in the lonely reaches of the sky.

What is happening to me? he again demanded of himself. Why am I no longer satisfied by what satisfied me once? Why, unless I am deranged, do I press forward where any reasonable man would retreat?

Realisation that he was neglecting his duties prompted Toller to end the self-interrogation and propel himself closer to the first fortress under assembly. The mid-section and one end-section had been successfully aligned and brought together, and now the remaining component was about to be drawn into place. It had been deposited rather a long way from its companions, giving the men who were hauling on the link ropes time to develop a fast and effective rhythm. Clinging to the sides of the mid-section, four of them were working in unison with their free arms. The end-section, which had been sluggish at first, was now moving at a good speed and showed no signs of slowing down as it neared its assigned place. Toller knew it had no weight and therefore could cause no damage by colliding with the rest of the fortress, but on principle he disliked the use of excessive force in any engineering operation. He could foresee the section rebounding and having to be drawn in again.

“Stop hauling—it’s coming in too fast,” he shouted to the men on the link ropes. “Get ready to grip it and hold it in place.”

The men acknowledged his command with waves and made ready to receive the advancing cylinder. Phamarge, who had been overseeing the task, signalled for another two men who were holding on to the short lashing ropes of the mid-section rim to assist their comrades. One of them pulled himself against the leather-covered rim and locked himself in place by clamping his thighs around it.

Toller watched the end-section close in on the waiting man. The wooden structure was losing very little speed and was easily compacting the stout ropes in its path—all of which, Toller thought, was rather strange for an object which was as weightless as a feather. Alarm geysered through his system as he recalled a similar anomaly at the end of Gotlon’s first personal flight—the weightless man had delivered a surprisingly powerful impact, almost as though…

“Get off the rim!” Toller bellowed. “Get clear!”

The suited man turned towards him, but made no other movement. There was a frozen instant in which Toller recognised the rough-hewn features of Gnapperl, then the end-section drove against the remainder of the fortress. Gnapperl screamed as his thigh-bone snapped. The entire fortress bucked, dislodging men from its sides, and the end-section—still squandering kinetic energy—slewed a little and partially entered the main structure. Two opposing lengths of rim scissored across Gnapperl’s body for a moment, ending his screams, before the fortress sections drifted apart and came to rest.

Toller reflexively triggered his air jet and only succeeded in pushing himself farther away from the scene. He twisted around, pumping more air into the unit, and propelled himself backwards into the confusion of drifting figures. Colliding gently with the mid-section, he grasped a lashing point to steady himself and looked at the injured man. Gnapperl was drifting free of the fortress, arms and legs spread, and there was a long rent across the front of his skysuit. Blood had soaked into the exposed insulation, making the tear resemble a dreadful wound, and bright red globules were floating in a swarm around him, glistening in the sunlight. Toller was left with no doubt that Gnapperl was dead.

“Why didn’t the fool get out of the way when you told him?” Umol said, using a rope to draw himself closer to Toller.

“Who’s to say?” Toller thought of the dead man’s odd moment of paralysis before the impact, and wondered if Gnapperl would have been so slow to react had the warning come from anybody else. It could be that his mistrust of Toller had been responsible for his death, in which case Toller also bore responsibility.

“He was a down-looking brute, anyway,” Umol commented. “If any of us had to go, he’s the one I would have picked—and at least he taught us something useful.”

“What?”

“That something which can crush a man on the ground can crush him up here. It doesn’t seem to matter that nothing has any weight. Can you understand it, Toller?”

Toller wrenched his thoughts from morality to physics. “Perhaps being totally weightless affects our bodies. It’s something we ought to be careful about in the future.”

“Yes, and meanwhile there’s a carcase to be disposed of. I suppose we could just leave it be.”

“No,” Toller said immediately. “We’ll take him back to Overland when we go.”

Upside down, the six ships had travelled all through the hours of darkness. In addition to the speed imparted by their jets, there had been a slight gain as Overland tightened her gravitational web, but the acceleration had been negligible so early in the descent. And as soon as daylight had returned—with Overland’s binary dance swinging her clear of the sun—the engines had been shut down and air resistance had brought the vessels to a halt. The pilots had then used the tiny lateral jets to turn the ships over, an operation conducted in majestic slowness, with the universe and all the stars it contained wheeling at the behest of six ordinary men, and the sun obediently sinking to a new position beneath their feet.

The manoeuvre had been completed without mishap, and now it was time to do things which had never been done before.

Toller was strapped into the pilot’s seat, with Tipp Gotlon near to him on the other side of the engine unit. The false deck on which they were sitting was a circular wooden platform, only four good paces across, and beyond its unguarded rim was a yawning emptiness, a drop of more than two thousand miles to the planetary surface. At varying distances the five other sky-ships were suspended in the void against the complex blue-and-silver background of the heavens. Their two-man crews, because they were in the cylindrical shadows of the decks, were only visible where silhouetted against glowing spirals or the splayed radiance of comets. The huge balloons, brilliantly illuminated on their undersides, had the apparent solidity of planets, pear-shaped worlds with meridians marked by load tapes and lines of stitching.

Toller was concerned less with the unearthly ambience than with the demands of his own microcosm. The deck space was occupied by a clutter of equipment and stores, from the pipe runs of the lateral jets to the lockers used for the storage of power crystals, food, water, skysuits and fallbags. Waist-high partitions of woven cane enclosed the primitive toilet and galley. From the latter protruded the lower part of Gnapperl’s body, which had been lashed in place to forestall its unnerving tendency to rise up and meander in weightless conditions.

“Well, young Gotlon, this is where we part company,” Toller said. “How do you feel about that?”

“Ready when you are, sir.” Gotlon gave his centrally divided smile. “As you know, sir, it is my ambition to become a pilot, and I would be honoured if you would allow me to pull the rip line.”

“Honoured? Tell me, Gotlon—are you enjoying this?”

“Of course, sir.” Gotlon paused while an unusually large meteor burned across the sky below the ship, followed by a sonorous clap of thunder. “Well, perhaps it would be wrong to say I’m enjoying it, but I have no wish to do anything else.”

A fair answer. Toller thought, resolving to keep an eye on the youngster’s future progress. “All right, pull the line when you’re ready.”

Without hesitation Gotlon leaned forward, grasped the red line which ran down to the crew stations from the balloon’s interior, and tugged hard on it. The line went slack in his hand. There was no perceptible change in the ship’s equilibrium or dynamics, but high in the flimsy cathedral dome of the balloon something irrevocable had happened. A large panel had been torn out of the crown, surrendering the ship to the forces of Overland’s gravity. From that moment onwards the ship and its crew could do nothing but fall, and yet Toller felt a strange timidity over the next inevitable step.

“I see no point in sitting around here,” he said, taking no chances on having his feelings observed. His feet were already tucked inside his fallbag, which was a fleece-lined sack large enough to enclose his entire body. He unfastened his restraints, straightened up, and in the act of doing so noticed his sword, which was still tied by its scabbard belt to a nearby stanchion. For an instant he considered letting it remain. It was an inconvenient and incongruous article to be taken into the confines of the bag, but leaving it behind would have been like abandoning an old friend. He strapped the weapon to his side and looked up in time to see Gotlon—still smiling!—launch himself backwards from the edge of the deck.

Gotlon tumbled away into the sterile blue, sunlight glancing unevenly from the underside of his cocooned form until he came to rest some thirty yards from the ship. He made no attempt to modify his final attitude, and could have been thought lifeless but for the transient feathering of his breath.

Toller looked towards the sister ships and saw that other men, following Gotlon’s example, were venturing into the thin air. It had been decided in advance that there would be no synchronisation—individuals would jump when they were ready—and suddenly he had a fear of being last, and being seen to be last, which outweighed his reluctance to perform the supremely unnatural act. Toller drew the fallbag up to his chest, pushed hard with his feet and sailed face downwards over the rim of the deck.

Overland slid into view beneath him, and they were face to face like lovers, and she was calling to him from thousands of miles below. Little was visible in the gibbosity where night still reigned, but in the sunlit crescent the equatorial continent could be seen to span the world, pale green powdered with ochres beneath traceries of white cloud, and the great oceans curved away to the mysterious watery poles.

Toller surveyed the entire hemisphere for a short time, chastened and subdued, then drew up his knees to make himself smaller and closed the neck of the fallbag over his head.

I did not expect to sleep.

Who would have thought that a man could sleep during the dizzy plunge from the central blue to the surface of the world?

But it’s warm and dark in here, and the hours pass slowly. And as my speed gradually increases and the atmosphere grows thicker, I can feel the bag beginning to rock and sway, and there is a hypnotic quality to the soughing of the air as it rushes by. It is easy to sleep. Almost too easy, in fact. The thought has crossed my mind that some of us may not awaken in time to get out of the bags and deploy our parachutes, but surely that is a ridiculous notion. Only a man with a deep inner urge to end his life could fail to be ready when the time comes.

Sometimes I open the bag and look out to see how my companions are faring, but it is becoming impossible to find them, whether above or below me. We are falling at slightly different rates, and as the hours go by we are being strung out in a long vertical line. It is noteworthy that we are all falling faster than the ships—something which had not been predicted. The false decks, being symmetrically attached to the balloons, are trying to maintain a horizontal attitude even though the balloons have collapsed and are being dragged along in their wakes, thus creating greater air resistance.

As we left the ships behind I noticed the decks oscillating in the air stream, and the last time I picked them out they were like six slow-winking stars. I must relate all this to Zavotle and see if he wants to redesign the attachments so that the decks can fall edge-on. The ships would descend faster that way. The impact with the ground would be worse, but the engine cores are indestructible.

Sometimes I think about the men we left up there in the weightless zone, and have found genuine cause to envy them. They at least have something to do! An abundance of tasks to perform… the sealing of the fortresses with mastic… the hourly smoke readings to warn of drifting… the setting up of the pressurisation bellows… the preparation of the first meals… the checking of engines and armaments… the establishment of watch rotas…

The fallbag rocks gently, and the air whispers persuasively all around.

It is too easy to fall asleep in here…

Chapter 7

“Gold! You have the gall to offer me gold!” Ragg Artoonl, infuriated, slapped the leather bag away with a calloused hand. It fell to the ground and partially opened, allowing a few squares of stamped yellow metal to spill into the wet grass.

“You’re just as barmy as everybody says!” Lue Klo dropped to his knees and carefully retrieved his money. “Do you want to sell your section, or do you not?”

“I want to sell it all right—but I want real money. Good old-fashioned glass, that’s what I want.” Artoonl rubbed the thumb of one hand against the palm of the other, mimicking the counting of traditional Kolcorronian woven glass currency notes. “Glass!”

“It all bears the King’s likeness,” Klo protested.

“I want to spend the stuff—not hang it on a wall.” Artoonl glowered around the small group of farmers. “Who has real money?”

“I have.” Narbane Ellder sidled to the fore, fumbling in his pouch. “I’ve got two thousand royals here.”

“I’ll take it! The section is yours, and may you have better luck with it than I did.” Artoonl was extending his hand for the money when Bartan Drumme stepped in between the two men and pushed them apart with a force he would have been unable to exert when he first turned to farming.

“What’s the matter with you, Ragg Artoonl?” he said. “You can’t sell off your land for a fraction of what it’s worth.”

“He can do as he pleases,” the thwarted Ellder cut in, brandishing his wad of coloured squares.

“And I’m surprised at you” Bartan said to him, tapping him on the chest with an accusing finger. “Taking advantage of your neighbour when his mind is disturbed. What would Jop say about that? What would he say about this meeting?” Bartan glanced a challenge around the group of men who had come together in a tree-fringed hollow which offered some protection from the weather. A heavy belt of rain was drifting across the area, and the farmers in their sack-like hoods looked sullen and oddly furtive with their hunched shoulders and dripping features.

“There’s nothing wrong with my mind.” Artoonl stared resentfully at Bartan for a moment, then his face darkened even further as a new thought occurred to him. “This is all your fault, anyway. It was you who brought us to this place of misery.”

“I’m sorry about what happened to your sister,” Bartan said. “It was a terrible thing, but you have got to think straight about it and realise it’s no reason to give up all you have worked for.”

“Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?” Artoonl’s flushed face expressed the kind of mistrust and hostility Bartan had encountered on first entering the commune. “What do you know about the land anyway, Mister Bead-stringer, Mister Brooch-mender?”

“I know Lue wouldn’t be offering to buy your section unless he thought it worth his while. He’s taking advantage of you.”

“Watch your tongue,” Ellder said, stepping closer to Bartan with his stubbled jaw thrust forward. “I grow more than a little weary of you, Mister—” he sought a fresh insult, eyes narrowing under the mental strain, and finally was obliged to copy Artoonl—“Bead-stringer.”

Bartan looked around the group of cowled figures, assessing the general mood, and was both shocked and saddened to realise there was a genuine possibility of violence towards him if he remained. It was another indication, contrary to all his own arguments, that the farmers had indeed degenerated since occupying the Haunt. In the year that had passed since his marriage to Sondeweere he had seen their old spirit of camaraderie eroded and replaced by a mean competitiveness, with the largest and most successful families begrudging help to their neighbours. Jop Trinchil’s mandate had been totally withdrawn from him, and—coincidentally—the loss of his authority had been accompanied by a spiritual and physical diminution. Shrunken and ill-looking, no longer able to exert a cohesive force on his flock, he was rarely seen outside the boundaries of his own family’s section. Bartan had never expected to miss the old Trinchil, with his crassness and bullying ways, but the commune seemed to have lost direction without him.

“I am no longer a bead-stringer,” Bartan said stiffly to the rainswept assembly. “More’s the pity—because with my finest needle and thread I might have fashioned a slim necklace from all your brains. A very slim necklace.”

His words drew an angry response from perhaps twenty throats. The sound was formless and blurred, like a conflict of sea waves in a narrow inlet, and yet by a trick of selective perception Bartan was able, or thought he was able, to isolate a single sentence: The fool would be better employed making a chastity belt.

“Who said that?” he shouted, almost reaching for the sword he had never worn.

The shadowed archways of several hoods turned towards each other and back to Bartan. “Who said what?” a man asked in tones of gleeful reasonableness.

“Does young Glave Trinchil still lend a hand with your chores?” another said. “If his strength ever fails I’ll be willing to take his place—I’ve been known to plough an excellent furrow in my day.”

Bartan came close to running forward and throwing himself at the last speaker, but commonsense and prudence held him in check. The peasants had won again, as they always did, because a dozen cudgels would always overcome one verbal smallsword. The same coarse cliches were ever cherished by them as something entirely original and precious, and thus their ignorance became their armour.

“I hope you will not be too distraught if I withdraw, gentlemen.” He paused, hoping the sexual innuendo might have eased some tensions, but it had gone unnoticed. “I have business at the markets.”

“I’ll travel with you, if that’s all right,” Orice Shome said, falling in at Bartan’s side as he walked away from the group. Shome was an itinerant labourer, one of the few who had recently been hired by members of the commune. He was a slightly wild-eyed young man, with most of one ear missing, but Bartan had heard no bad reports of him and was prepared to accept his company.

“Join me if you wish,” Bartan said, “but doesn’t Alrahen expect you to be at work?”

Shome held up a small kitbag. “I’m on the road again. Don’t want to stay around here.”

“I see.” Bartan pulled his oilcloth hood closer around his shoulders and climbed up to the driving seat of his wagon. The warm rain was still coming down hard, but above the western horizon was a band of pale yellow which was growing wider by the minute, and he knew the weather would soon improve. Shome sat on the bench beside him, Bartan twitched the reins and his bluehorn moved off, its rain-slicked haunches rising and descending in a steady rhythm. Inexplicably, Bartan found himself dwelling on the taunts about his wife, and to redirect his thoughts he decided to strike up a conversation with his passenger.

“You weren’t with Alrahen for long,” he said. “Was he not a good employer?”

“I’ve had worse. It’s the place I don’t like. I’m leaving because there’s something not right about the place.”

“Not another scare-monger!” Bartan gave Shome a critical glance. “You don’t look like a man who’d be given over to wild imaginings.”

“Imaginings can be a lot worse than anything that comes at you from outside. That’s probably why Artoonl’s sister killed herself. And I heard that boy of hers didn’t just disappear—I heard she slew him and buried the body.”

Bartan became angry. “You seem to have heard a lot—for somebody with only one ear.”

“There»’s no need to get touchy,” Shome said, fingering the remnant of his ear.

“I’m sorry,” Bartan said. “It’s just that all this talk of… Tell me, where are you bound for next?”

“I’m not sure. Had enough of breaking my back to make other men rich, and that’s the truth,” Shome replied, staring straight ahead. “Might try to make it as far as Prad. Work is plentiful there—clean, soft work, I mean—because of the war. Trouble is, Prad’s so far away. You’d need an…” Shome looked at Bartan with fresh interest. “Aren’t you the one who has his own airship?”

“It’s laid up,” Bartan said, seizing on the mention of the war. “What news have you? Do the invaders still persist?”

“They persist, all right—but always they are repelled.”

In Bartan’s experience itinerant workers did not identify themselves with national objectives, but there was an unmistakable note of pride in Shome’s voice.

“It’s a strange war, all the same,” Bartan said. “No armies, no battlefields…”

“Don’t know about there being no battlefield. I heard the skymen sit astride jet tubes as if they were mounted on bluehorns, and they fly out miles from their fortresses. And there aren’t any balloons—no balloons anywhere—nothing to keep you from falling to earth.” Shome gave a noisy shudder. “Glad I’m not up there—a man could get himself killed up there.”

Bartan nodded. “That’s why kings no longer lead their armies into battle.”

“Lord Toller doesn’t hold with that. You’ve heard of Lord Toller Maraquine, haven’t you?”

Bartan associated the name with the far-off events of the Migration, and was mildly surprised to hear that such an historic figure was still active. “We’re not completely cut off from civilisation, you know.”

“They say Lord Toller has spent more time up there, fighting the pestilent Landers, than any other man alive.” Speaking with patriotic fervour, Shome launched into a series of anecdotes —some of which had to be fanciful—about the heroic exploits of Lord Toller Maraquine in the interplanetary war. At times his voice thickened and shook with emotion, suggesting that he was acting out the tales in his imagination with himself as the central figure, and Bartan’s attention began to stray back to the jibes aimed at him by his former friends.

He knew better than to give any credence to the uninspired ritual insults, and yet he could wish that the name of Glave Trinchil had not been used. Glave was one of the few who still came to the farm and helped when there was heavy work to be done, but—the thought slid into Bartan’s consciousness like the tip of a poniard—he usually visited when Sondeweere was alone. Bartan thrust the notion away, but into his mind there crept the image of an event he had all but forgotten— Sondeweere and Glave by the side of the Trinchil wagon when they had believed themselves to be unobserved, the moment of intimacy which had taken neither by surprise.

Why am I suddenly doubting my wife? Bartan thought. What is doing this thing to me? I know that I cannot have been wrong about Sondeweere. And, while conceding that other men have been blinded by love, I know that I am too clever, too world-wise to be duped in that particular manner by a farm girl. Let the bumpkins jeer to their hearts’ content—I will never let them influence me in any way.

The rain was easing off and the well-defined edge of the cloud shield was now directly overhead, creating a feeling that the wagon was emerging into sunlight from the shade of a vast building. A short distance ahead the track on which they were travelling intersected a wider track, where Bartan would have to turn west for New Minnett. Water-filled ruts reflected the clear sky like polished metal rails.

Feeling oddly guilty, Bartan turned to Shome and said, “My apologies for this, but I have decided against attending the markets today. It’s a long way for you to go on foot, but…”

“Think nothing of it,” Shome said with a fatalistic shrug. “I have already walked halfway around this planet, and I dare say I can manage the rest.”

He shouldered his bag, jumped down from the wagon at the intersection and set off towards New Minnett at a good pace, pausing only to wave goodbye. Bartan returned the farewell and directed the bluehorn east towards his own section.

His feeling of guilt increased as he admitted to himself that he was laying a trap for Sondeweere. She would not be expecting him until close to nightfall, and the trip to town had been arranged days in advance, giving her ample time in which to make all her arrangements with Glave. Self-reproach mingled with self-disgust and a curious kind of excitement as he bent his mind to a new kind of problem. If he did espy Glave’s bluehorn from afar, tethered by the farmhouse, could he be underhanded enough to halt the noisy wagon and move in silently on foot? And if he were to find the couple in bed—what then? A year’s unrelenting toil had clothed Bartan’s frame in hard muscle, but he was still a lightweight compared to Glave and had little experience of fighting.

This is terrible, he thought in a crossplay of emotion. All I want out of life is to find my wife alone, working contentedly in our home. Why take the risk of losing what happiness I have? Why not turn back, catch up on Shome, and go on to the markets as planned? I could sit down with the old crowd and get merry on brown ale and forget all this…

The landscape ahead of Bartan was becoming obscured by refractive peach-and-silver mists as the fallen rain was lured back into the aerial element by the sun, and in the centre of his field of view there had appeared a wavering dark mote which seemed to change shape every few seconds. As he watched, the mote assumed a definite form, resolving itself into a rider approaching at considerable speed.

Bartan knew, long before proper identification was possible, that the rider was Glave Trinchil, and again there was a clash of emotions—simultaneous relief and disappointment over the fact that a confrontation was ruled out. This far from the farm Glave could claim that he was coming from any one of a number of places, and in all fairness there could be no justification for openly disbelieving him. With that analysis of the situation in mind, Bartan expected Glave to pass him with a casual greeting, and he was taken aback when the younger man began waving to him while still some way off, obviously preparing to stop and talk. Bartan’s heart quickened with alarm as he saw that Glave was in a state of agitation. Could there have been an accident at the farm?

“Bartan! Bartan!” Glave reined his bluehorn to a halt beside the wagon. “I’m glad to see you—Sondy said you had gone to town.”

“She said that, did she?” Bartan replied coldly, unable to shape a more appropriate response. “So you’ve been paying her another of your conveniently timed visits.”

The imputation seemed to pass Glave by. His broad, artless face looked troubled, but Bartan could detect no hint of shiftiness or defiance which might have sprung from guilt.

“Go to her without delay,” Glave said. “She has need of you.”

Bartan swore at himself for having continued nursing his petty suspicions when it was becoming obvious that something serious had happened to Sondeweere. “What’s wrong with her?”

“I truly do not know, Bartan. I called at the farm just to be neighbourly, just to see if there was any heavy work to be done…” Even though overwrought, Glave had to direct a satisfied glance at his well-muscled arms. “Sondy told me there was a tree to be uprooted. You know the one—where you want to plant the wirebeans and—”

“Yes, yes! What happened to my wife?”

“Well, I fetched a spade and an axe and set about the roots. It was hot work, in spite of the rain, and I was pleased when I saw Sondy coming down from the house with a pitcher of smallbeer. At least, I think it was smallbeer—I never got to drink any. She wasn’t more than a dozen paces away from me when she gave a sort of a gasp and let the pitcher fall and sat down in the grass. She was holding her ankle. I was fearful she had done herself a mischief, so I went to her. She looked up at me, Bartan, and she gave a terrible scream, but the worst thing about it was… was…” Glave’s voice faded and he stared at Bartan in perplexity, as though wondering who he might be.

“Glave!”

“It was a terrible scream. Bartan, but the worst thing about it was that her mouth was shut. I was looking straight into Sondy’s face, and I could hear her screaming, but her mouth was tight shut. It fair made my blood run cold.”

Bartan shifted his grip on the reins preparatory to moving off. “What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. All right, Sondeweere was moaning! Is that all there was to it? Had she turned her ankle? What did she say?”

Glave shook his head, slowly and pensively. “She does not say anything.”

“She doesn’t say anything! What way is that to…?” Bartan began to feel a new kind of alarm. “She can still speak, can’t she?”

“I don’t know, Bartan,” Glave said simply. “You should go to her. I stayed as long as I could, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could think of…”

His remaining words were lost in the clatter of hooves and equipage as Bartan sent the wagon forward. He goaded the bluehorn up to the best speed that could be achieved on the uneven track, enduring the discomfort of sliding and bouncing on the unpadded seat. The bright mist had now blanked out the horizon and reduced his range of vision so much that he seemed to be travelling at the centre of a bell-shaped dome in whose sides faint pastel colours swirled all the way up to the sun. A short time later the vapours began to boil off, the sky became a milky blue and Bartan saw his own farm in the distance, gleaming, created anew out of rain and mist. By the time he reached it the sky was returning to its normal intense shade of blue and the daytime stars were reappearing.

He brought the wagon to a standstill, jumped down and ran into the house. There was no reply when he called Sondeweere’s name, and a rapid search in which he threw himself from room to room established that she had to be out of doors. The first place he could think of looking was by the tree which Glave had mentioned, though it would be odd if she had lingered there so long—unless she had been overtaken by serious illness. Why had the oafish Glave not escorted her back to the house instead of fleeing as if he had seen an apparition?

Bartan left the building, sprinted past the sty which housed his modest stock of pigs, and went to the top of the grassy knoll which blocked the view to the east. He saw Sondeweere at once. She was sitting in the grass near the tree where Glave claimed to have been working, and she was still wearing her pale green oilskin cape. He shouted out to her, but she made no response of any kind. She remained completely motionless as he walked down the gentle slope, and his fears for her increased with every step he took. What manner of illness or disability would induce a person to sit for so long, head bowed, apparently oblivious to everything? Could she be fevered, or semi-conscious, or… dead?

When he was about six paces away from his wife he halted, overcome by a strange timidity, and whispered, “Sondeweere, dear one, are you well?”

She raised her head and a pang of relief went through him as he saw that she was smiling. She gazed at him for a few seconds—smile unchanging, no welcome in her eyes—then lowered her head again, obviously studying something on the ground in front of her.

“Don’t play games with me, Sondy.” Bartan stooped and went closer, and was reaching out to touch Sondeweere’s hair when his eyes abruptly focused on what she was watching. Only a hands-breadth away from her crossed ankles were two small multi-legged creatures, seemingly locked in combat. Their articulated, crescent-shaped bodies were longer than a finger and dark brown on top, pale grey on the underside. They were unlike any other crawling thing he had ever seen in that each sprouted a single thick feeler from just below the head. He was already recoiling in disgust when his eyes began to sort out and comprehend the profuse tangle of legs, eye-stalks and antennae. The creatures had bound themselves together by their central feelers and were engaged in copulation, not combat… and… There was only one head to be seen. The female had eaten off her partner’s head, and was gorging herself on the pale ichors oozing from his thorax, and all the while—quite undaunted, rhythm unaltered—his body went on with its ecstatic thrusting and jabbing into her greedy abdomen.

Bartan’s reaction was immediate and totally instinctive. He straightened up and smashed his boot down on the writhing obscenity he had witnessed. Sondeweere was on her feet in the same instant, screaming in a way that hurt his brain. Bartan gazed at her, afraid… How can she make a sound like that without opening her mouth?… then caught her as she toppled towards him in a faint.

“Sondeweere! Sondy!” He inexpertly massaged her throat and cheek, trying to restore consciousness, but her head lolled in the crook of his arm and her eyes glimmered white beneath the lids. He gathered up her limp body and began walking back to the house, his mind overloaded with worries and fears.

A short distance along the faint path he saw a movement on the ground, a brown glistening, and knew at once that it was another of the ugly crawlers. The sight added to his forebodings —he had never seen any of the creatures before, nor had he heard them described, but now they were beginning to abound. He altered his stride slightly so that his boot came down squarely on the crawler, crunching it into the soil.

Sondeweere stirred in his arms and, as though emanating from the far end of a mile-long corridor, there came a whispering version of her unnatural scream.

Twice more on the way to the house he encountered one of the nameless creatures, labouring towards him in a seething of many-jointed legs, and each time he pulped it underfoot and each time Sondeweere was affected as before. To Bartan it was unthinkable that there could be any kind of affinity or link between his wife and the crawlers, and yet—in spite of being unconscious—she had definitely flinched as each one of them was dying. And there was the question of the screams. How did she make the sounds without opening her mouth, and why were they so disturbing?

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.

Chapter 8

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 quanti-. ties 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.

He was sitting astride his fighter, Red One, watching the target ship through binoculars and waiting for the pilot who had positioned it to return to safety. More than forty days had passed since the arrival of the first two fortresses in the weightless zone, and still there was no sign of a Lander invasion fleet. In some quarters there were rising hopes that King Chakkell’s prognosis had been wrong, but Toller and Zavotle refused to be complacent. They had decided to use the strategic leeway to maximum advantage, and to that end were prepared to have a skyship whose balloon was nearing the end of its useful life sacrificed as a target.

The magnified image in Toller’s binoculars showed the pilot leaving the skyship’s gondola and bestriding a tethered fighter belonging to the as yet incomplete Blue Squadron. The pilot cast off, his craft surged away on a white plume of condensation, and seconds later came the powdery boom of his engine. He swept the fighter into an upward curve and disappeared in the radiant needle-spray of light emanating from the sun.

“Go in without delay,” Toller shouted, gesturing to Gol Perobane, pilot of the furthermost left in the line of fighters. Perobane saluted and drove his machine forward, the roar of his exhaust swelling as it engulfed the remaining craft. His fighter swiftly shrank in apparent size, swooping down on the doomed skyship, and as he was flaring out of the curve both of his cannon streamed vapour. Toller, following the action with his binoculars, judged that Perobane had fired at exactly the right moment. He turned his attention to the balloon, expecting to see it quake and deform, and was disappointed when the serene curvatures appeared to be unaffected.

How can he have missed? he thought, giving the signal for the next fighter in line to blast off.

It was not until the fourth machine, flown by Berise Narrinder, had completed its ineffectual attack that he called a halt to the exercise. He blew crystals into his own engine and flew down to the target ship, cutting the power off early so that air resistance would bring him to a halt close to the huge balloon. At short range he was able to discern several holes in the varnished linen envelope, but they were surprisingly small—almost as if the material had partially healed its wounds—and were far short of the catastrophic damage the cannon should have inflicted. The balloon was beginning to show some slight wrinkling and slackness, but Toller attributed it to natural loss of heat as much as to the insignificant punctures. It was apparent to him that the skyship retained the capability of making a safe descent to ground level.

“Does this mean we have to start firing at the gondolas?” said Umol, drifting into position beside him on Red Two. His chest was visibly labouring to deal with the rarefied air.

Toller shook his head. “If we attack the gondolas we expose ourselves to return fire. We must attack from above, staying within the enemy’s blind arc, and destroy his balloons with… with…” He paused, striving to visualise the weapon his fliers needed, and at that moment a large meteor struck across the sky far below them, briefly illuminating the scene from underneath.

“With something like that,” Umol said, pulling down his scarf to unveil a smile.

“That is somewhat beyond our capabilities, but…"Toller paused again to let the meteor’s tardy thunderclap roll by them. “But your thoughts fly in the right direction, old friend! Have somebody go back on board the ship and put heat into the balloon. Keep everything as it is until I return.”

He placed his foot on the side of Umol’s fighter, which had been nuzzling up to his own machine in stray air currents, and pushed hard. The two machines parted with a lazy wallowing action. Toller advanced his throttle lever, using an extreme sensitivity of touch developed since his first flight, and the fighter growled its way forward to pass within a few yards of the target balloon. As soon as he had gained enough speed to render the control surfaces effective he brought the nose up and around, and made a soaring return to the command station.

The weapon he brought back a short time later was a simple iron spike with a bundle of oil-soaked oakum bound to the blunt end. He ignited it by means of a phosphor wick and, whirling the spike to feed the flame, put the fighter into a shallow dive which took it close to the balloon’s upper hemisphere. When he hurled the spike it flew down cleanly, with the stability of a dart, and sank its full length into the yielding material of the envelope. The varnished linen caught fire at once, producing a thick brownish smoke, and by the time Toller had come to a halt a sizeable area of the crown was alight. In less than a minute the balloon was beginning to fold in on itself, pulsing and losing symmetry, while the watching pilots shouted their approval. Without convection currents to bear it away, the smoke gathered around the stricken skyship in a strangely localised cloud.

Toller rejoined the group of fighters. The line was uneven, with no two machines parallel to each other or sharing the same up-down orientation, but that was something he had learned to accept. Unless the fighters were on the move there was little the pilots could do to control them, and several of the gifted youngsters—the ones who were already at home with the new form of flying—seemed to get a mischievous pleasure from conducting conversations with him in mutually inverted positions. Toller made no attempt to curb their high spirits—he had already decided that when war came the best fighting pilots would be those who were least shackled by traditional military customs and outlook.

“As we have just seen,” he shouted, “fire is a good weapon to use against a balloon, but that was all too easy for me. I was able to go in very close, and at low speed, because there were no defenders on the ship and no enemy ships nearby trying to wing me. The low speed meant that I was able to stay in the ship’s blind arc during the whole attack, but in battle things are likely to be very different. Most attacking dives will probably have to be conducted at high speed—which means you will not be able to pull out so quickly and will sink into the defenders’ arc of fire. You are going to be very vulnerable at that stage—especially if the Landers have developed instant-fire cannon, like their muskets.”

Perobane pulled down his scarf. “But it will only be for a few seconds if we’re moving fast.” He winked at the nearest pilots. “And I can assure you that I’ll be moving very fast.”

“Yes, but you might be heading straight towards another ship,” Toller said, quelling some laughter.

Berise Narrinder signalled that she wanted to speak. “My lord, how about bows and arrows? Fire arrows, I mean. Wouldn’t an archer be able to flare out of a dive much earlier and stay out of danger?”

“Yes, but…” Toller paused, realising that his objection had been a reflexive one based on the fact that he personally had never taken to the bow as a weapon. The proposal was sound, especially if the arrows were given fish-hook warheads which would trap them in the balloon material. And even a mediocre airborne archer—as he suspected he was likely to be—should find little difficulty in hitting a target as large as a skyship’s balloon.

“But what, my lord?” Berise said, raising herself up on her footrests, encouraged by the other pilots’ evident approval for her suggestion.

Toller smiled at her. “But would it be fair to the enemy? Armed with bows and fire arrows we would be able to shoot them out of the sky with the ease of a child bursting soap bubbles. It goes against all my sporting instincts to adopt such a…” His words were drowned out in a general shout of laughter from the line of pilots.

Toller bowed slightly towards Berise then turned away, not begrudging the fliers their moment of jubilation. He was the only member of the company with first-hand experience of warfare, and he knew that—no matter how well things might go for the Overlanders—there were some present whose time for nonchalance, merriment and optimism was drawing to an end, whether they lived or died.

At the midpoint between the two worlds the terms “night” and “littlenight” had lost their meaning. The diurnal cycle was divided into two equal spells of darkness of slightly less than four hours each, while the sun was being occulted by Land or Overland; and two daytime periods of just over eight hours. Toller had given up making any distinction between night and littlenight, foreday and aftday, being content to let time roll by him in an unremarkable sequence mileposted only by the fallbag returns to Overland. Especially when he was off duty, drowsing in his sleep net, there seemed no way to mark the passage of time but for the slow veering of the beams of sunlight from the portholes, and dreamy reprises became as real as life itself…

The sound of an argument slowly drew Toller back to full consciousness.

It was not uncommon to hear members of fortress crews in disagreement, but on this occasion there was a woman involved and Toller guessed it was Berise. For some reason he could not explain, he was interested in Berise Narrinder. There was no sexual element involved, of that much he was sure, because when Gesalla had made it clear that the intimate side of their marriage was over his capacity for physical passion had abruptly died. The process had been surprisingly quick and painless. He was a man who had no need for sex, who never thought of it or regretted its absence from his life, and yet he was aware of everything that Berise did. Without making any effort, he usually knew when her duty spells corresponded with his, where she was and what she was likely to be doing at any given moment.

He opened his eyes and saw that she was on watch—an obligatory duty for all personnel—tethered close to one of the large fixed binoculars which were permanently aimed at Land. Beside her was the tall angular figure of Imps Carthvodeer, the Inner Defence Group administrator, who normally stayed behind a wicker screen at the far end of the command station, in a cramped room he liked to refer to as his office.

“You can either draw pictures, or you can be on watch.” Carthvodeer was saying peevishly. “You can’t do two things at once.”

“You may not be able to do two things at once, but I find it very easy,” Berise said, her accentuated eyebrows drawn together.

“That’s not what I mean.” Carthvodeer’s long face showed his frustration over the fact that although fighter pilots had the nominal rank of captain they were effectively senior to all non-combatants. “On watch duty you are supposed to concentrate all your attention on looking out for enemy ships.”

“When the enemy ships come—if they come—they will be visible for many hours in advance.”

“The point is that this is a military installation and has to be run on military lines. You are not being paid to draw pictures.” Carthvodeer scowled at the rectangle of stiff paper in Berise’s hand. “You don’t even show artistic ability.”

“How would you know?” Berise said, becoming angry. Farther along the cluttered tunnel of the station the crewman on bellows shift snorted in amusement.

“Why don’t you two stop bickering and let a man get some rest?” Toller put in mildly.

Carthvodeer squirmed around in the air to face him. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you, sir. I have to prepare at least a dozen reports and requisitions in time to go down in the next fallbag, and I find it quite impossible to work and listen to the squeak-squeak-squeak of the captain’s charcoal at the same time.”

Toller was surprised to note that Carthvodeer, a fifty-year-old officer, was pale with emotion over the trivial incident. “You go back into your office and continue with your reports,” he said, unfastening his net. “You won’t be further distracted.”

Carthvodeer, lips quivering, nodded and propelled himself away with poorly co-ordinated movements. Toller launched into a lazy flight which ended when he grasped a handhold close to Berise. Her green eyes triangulated on him in calm defiance.

“You and I are in a privileged position compared to a man like Carthvodeer,” he said in a low voice.

“In what respect, my lord?” Of all the fliers in his command she was the only one who continued to address him formally.

“We wanted to come here. We leave the murky confines of these wooden boxes every day and fly through the air like eagles. This waiting and waiting is hard on all of us, but consider what it must be like for someone who had no wish to be here in the first place and who has no escape.”

“I didn’t realise the charcoal was so noisy,” Berise said. “I’ll find a pencil and work with that—if you have no objection.”

“I don’t mind at all. As you say, the Landers cannot take us by surprise.” Toller craned his neck to see the drawing in Berise’s hand. It showed the interior of the station in an atmospheric style, with strong emphasis on the parallel bars of sunlight slanting from the row of portholes. Human figures and machinery were suggested rather than detailed and in a manner Toller thought pleasing, although he was not qualified to judge the picture’s merit.

“Why are you doing this?” he said.

She gave him a wry smile. “Old Imps said I was neglecting my duty, but I believe that everybody on Overland has a higher duty. Each of us has to search for and develop his or her artistic gift. I don’t know if I can even be an artist, but I’m making the effort. If I fail I’ll go on to poetry, music, dance… I’ll keep searching until I find something I can do, then I’ll do it to the best of my ability.”

“Why is it a duty?”

“Because of the Migration! You can’t do what we did and get away without paying a penalty. We left our racial soul behind on the Old World. Do you know that in all the ships that took part in the Migration there was not one painting? No books, no sculptures, no music. We left it all behind us.”

“It was hardly a pleasure trip, you know,” Toller said. “We were refugees carrying the bare essentials of life.”

“We brought jewellery and useless money! Tons of weapons! A race needs an armature of culture to support every other aspect of its being, and we no longer have one. The King left it out of his great plan for a new Kolcorron. We left all that kind of thing behind, and that’s why Overland feels so empty. It isn’t because we are so few, spread out over a whole world—we suffer from spiritual emptiness.”

Berise’s ideas were strange to Toller, and yet her words seemed to find their mark somewhere far inside him, particularly the references to emptiness. As a young man in Ro-Atabri he had always enjoyed the setting of the sun and the gentle approach of darkness—but of late, even with Gesalla at his side, the once satisfying experience had become oddly flat and disappointing. No matter how beautiful the sunset, there was no longer any pleasure in reviewing the achievements of the day, no anticipation of the morrow. The associated emotion, had he ever acknowledged it, would have been a poignant sadness. Overland’s western sky, as it deepened through gold and red to peacock green and blue, had seemed to ring with… emptiness.

The word had been a curiously apt one to come from a comparative stranger. He had been attributing his feelings to some unrecognised inner malaise, but had he just been offered a better explanation? Could he be an aesthete at heart, troubled by a growing awareness that his people lacked a cultural identity? The answer came quickly as the pragmatic, practical side of his nature reasserted itself.

No, he thought. The worm which eats out the core of my life is not concerned with poetry and art—and neither am I.

He half-smiled as he realised how far he had strayed, in an unguarded moment, into realms of fanciful thought, then he saw that Berise was staring at him.

“I wasn’t smiling at your ideas,” he said.

“No,” she replied thoughtfully, her gaze still hunting over his face. “I didn’t think you were.”

And, of all the scenes which were played and replayed in Toller’s memory, the brightest and most clearly incised were those from the day which saw the war’s true beginning…

Seventy-three days had passed since the positioning of the first two fortresses. It was not a long period of time by the standards of men and women going about their routine affairs on the surface of Overland, but evolution was swift in the unnatural environment of the central blue.

Toller had completed his daily flying and archery practice, and had felt disinclined to return too quickly to the oppressive confines of the station. His fighter was floating about five hundred yards outside the datum plane, a vantage point from which he could observe the ebb and flow of activity in the Inner Defence Group and the surrounding space. To his left he could see a supply ship crawling up from Prad, its balloon a small brown disk sharply outlined against the convex patterns of Overland; to his right was Command Station One, flaring with sunlight against the indigo of the sky. Close to it were lesser three-section habitats which were used as workshops and stores, and in a loose swarm were the fighters of Red Squadron. Dozens of human figures, moving purposefully, could be seen in perfect detail in spite of being so tiny, mannikins from the hand of a master jeweller.

As always, Toller was impressed by the sheer amount of progress which had been made in the time available, since the first naive scheme to blanket the entire weightless zone with fortresses which would have relied on guns to repel an invasion.

The invention of the fighter craft had been the major step forward, their astonishing speed having rendered obsolete the idea of each fortress being an isolated and self-sufficient entity. They had ceased to be fortresses, and were now assigned specialised roles—dormitory, workshop, store, armoury—in support of the all-important jets.

No matter how clever was the theoretical planner working on the ground, Toller had realised, innovation and development were usually products of practical experience. Even Zavotle, his thinking conditioned by normal gravity, had not foreseen the problems which would be posed by weightless debris and waste matter. The death of young Argitane, the fighter pilot killed by a drifting cannonball, had been a dramatic example, but the pollution of the environment by human wastes had become a matter of increasing concern.

The psychological stress of life in the gateway was augmented by the indignity and sheer unpleasantness of attending to one’s bodily functions in zero gravity, and no commander could countenance the prospect of each station being surrounded by a thickening cloud of filth. Carthvodeer had been obliged to set up a collection team—quickly and mercilessly dubbed the Shit Patrol—whose unenviable task it was to trawl all offensive material into large bags. The bags were then towed a few miles down towards Land by a fighter and released to continue their journey under the influence of gravity—a practice which occasioned much ribaldry among the fortress crews.

Another problem, one yet to be resolved, had come with the attempts to establish an outer defensive ring. The original intention had been to place stations on a ring thirty miles across, greatly extending the area of interdiction, but with separations of more than about four miles they had become almost impossible to locate and keep supplied. A second fatality among fighter pilots had occurred when a flier, perhaps with substandard eyesight, had simply become lost while returning from an outer station, and had burned up all her power crystals in vain attempts to locate her base. Deprived of the heat generated by her engine, she had perished of hypothermia, and had been found purely by chance. Since that time the policy had been to concentrate all stations in the central group and rely on the fighters to extend their area of influence as required.

As was the case with all the other fliers, Toller had found that his lung capacity had increased to deal with the rarefied atmosphere, but it was impossible to adapt to the relentless cold of the weightless zone. By the time he had been drifting and meditating for twenty minutes all residual heat had leaked away through the wooden cowling of his engine, and he was beginning to shiver despite the protection of his skysuit. He was pumping up the fighter’s pneumatic reservoir, preparatory to returning to the command station, when his attention was drawn to a star which had suddenly increased in luminosity for a second and now was emitting regular pulses of brilliance. No sooner had he deduced that the star was actually a distant station, and that it was sending out a sunwriter message, when he heard the sound of a trumpet, its repeated blasts fast-fading in the thin air. His heart stopped, lay quiescent for a subjective eternity, then began a rhythmic jolting.

They’re coming! he thought, sucking in air. The game begins at last!

He fed his engine and swooped down towards the command station. As the slipstream began to bite at his eyes he pulled his goggles into place and instinctively searched the area of sky between him and the curving vastness of Land, but was unable to find anything unusual. The slow-moving ships of the enemy armada could be as much as a hundred miles away, visible only in telescopes.

As Toller neared the station the trumpeter, positioned in the newly-added pressure lock, ended the warning call and retreated inside. Fighter pilots, distinguished by the squadron colours on their shoulders, were issuing from the nearby dormitory tube, and swaddled auxiliaries were sailing towards the dart-like machines in their care, propelled by the hissing jets of their personal units.

A mechanic swam to meet Toller with a tethering line, leaving him free to dive straight into the long cylinder of the station. Both doors of the pressure lock had been left open and he found himself suddenly translated from a boundless sunlit universe to a dim microcosm which was fogged with vapours and crowded with human figures and the appurtenances of their continued existence.

Carthvodeer and Commodore Biltid, the operations chief, were hovering by the look-out post, deep in discussion, Biltid, directly appointed by Chakkell, was a stiff-necked and formal individual who was equally embarrassed by his inability to get over the fall-sickness and the ambiguity of his relationship with Toller. The fact that Toller was his superior and yet insisted on riding a jet like an ordinary pilot frequently placed him in dilemmas he found it difficult to resolve.

“Look here, my lord,” he said, espying Toller. “The enemy comes in force.”

Toller drew himself to the binoculars and looked into the eyepieces. The image which washed into his eyes was of a fiercely brilliant background, blue and green whorled with white, in the centre of which was a meagre sprinkling of black dots, each ringed with prismatic fringes caused by imperfections in the optical system. By narrowing and straining his eyes, Toller found that he could distinguish even smaller specks mingled with the others, and suddenly the scene acquired depth, became vertiginous. He was looking downwards through a vertical cloud of skyships, a cloud which was many miles in depth. It was impossible to say how many ships it contained, but there could not be less than a hundred.

“You are correct,” he said, raising his head to look at Biltid. “The enemy comes in force—which is what one would have expected.”

Biltid nodded, covered his mouth with a handkerchief, and suddenly the sour smell which usually surrounded him intensified. “I… I’m sorry,” he said, gulping noisily. “We must make ready.”

How astute, Toller thought, then became sorry for a man who had been thrust willy-nilly into an unenviable situation as an instrument of the ruler.

“We retain our two great advantages,” he said. “We are in sight of the enemy, but he is not aware of us; and we have the fighter craft—something the enemy cannot have even envisaged at this stage. It is now up to us to press home those advantages while we may.”

Biltid nodded even more vigorously. “All fighter craft are in a state of mechanical readiness, and will be fuelled and armed. I propose engaging the enemy with the Red and Blue Squadrons, and holding Green in reserve. That is, if you have no…”

“Those might be good tactics in ground warfare,” Toller said, “but remember that we will never again be able to take the Landers by surprise. There is a possibility that we could end this war on the very day it begins if we deal the enemy a sufficiently devastating first blow. In my opinion we should deploy the three squadrons and give all our pilots experience of combat.”

“You’re right as always, my lord.” Biltid finished dabbing his mouth. “Though I’d be happier if we had some means of estimating the enemy’s rate of ascent. If they reach the datum plane during the hours of darkness there is a chance of some slipping past us unseen.”

“Nothing is to slip past us,” Toller snapped, losing his patience. “Nothing!”

He moved away from Biltid and Carthvodeer, and went to another porthole where he could have an unobstructed view of Land. The sun was moving towards the Old World and would pass behind its rim in approximately two hours. Toller did some mental calculations and swore as he realised that the timing of the first encounter could be highly unfavourable for the defenders. The two daily periods of darkness had been named Landnight and Overlandnight, depending of which of the planets was occulting the sun, and although they were about equal in length they had important differences.

Landnight, which was coming next, would begin when the sun passed behind Land, but at that stage Overland would still be fully illuminated and the light reflected from it would be strong enough to permit reading. During the following hour that light would steadily weaken as Land’s cylindrical shadow slid across Overland, then would come roughly two hours of deepnight, lasting until Overland was again kissed by the sun’s rays. Throughout deepnight the heavens would be ablaze with stars, glowing whirlpools and the splayed radiance of comets, but the comparative level of general illumination would be very low —and even a ship’s balloon would be hard to detect in the dim reaches of the weightless zone. The problem did not arise to the same extent during Overlandnight because Land was larger than its sister world and could not be completely swallowed by its shadow.

If the enemy ships were a hundred miles away, Toller reckoned, and were already at maximum speed, they could reach the datum plane during deepnight. He contemplated the prospect for a moment, then decided he was being unduly pessimistic. The Lander pilots would be nervous on experiencing the effects of weightlessness for the first time, and would also be apprehensive about the forthcoming inversion manoeuvre. It was entirely reasonable to assume that they would approach the weightless zone slowly and cautiously, and would plan to perform the supremely unnatural act of turning their ships upside down in good light conditions.

Having settled his mind, Toller left the chilling dank fug of the station and devoted the following hour to making a tour of the Inner Defence Group, calling at the other two command stations which were the bases for Blue Squadron and the newly completed Green. Reports from those on watch showed that the invaders were indeed advancing slowly, but the fighter pilots who had turned out prematurely were unable to resume their rest when darkness came. Some of them passed the time in noisy discussion or gambling by candlelight, while others hovered close to their machines, obsessively checking on the fuelling and arming procedures of the mechanics.

Finally a sliver of light appeared at the edge of Overland and rapidly expanded along it to form a slim crescent. As the sunlit area of the planet spread steadily into the gibbous phase, heralding the reappearance of the sun. Toller made repeated visits to the look-out post in Command Station One and peered through the binoculars. The vast disk of Land was bathed in a dim mysterious light, reflected from the sister world, which gave it the semblance of a sphere of translucent wax somehow lighted from within. Although brightening by the minute, the backdrop it provided refused to yield up a discernible image of enemy skyships, and—in spite of himself—Toller began to fantasise about the invaders having sustained a speed which had enabled them to pass through the datum plane under cover of darkness. The partial emergence of the sun flooded the interior of the station with light, and even then there was an instant during which the ships of the Lander armada remained hidden in the fringes of the planet’s slow-swinging shadow. Then, suddenly, they were there.

Unexpectedly beautiful, they appeared in Toller’s field of view as a swarm of tiny, perfect crescents of brilliance, level upon level of them, exquisite in their crafted uniformity. For a moment he was awe-struck by the achievement the spectacle represented. Given the audacity and courage to cross the interplanetary gulf in frail constructs of cloth and wood, his kind should be able to unite and turn their eyes towards the outer universe instead of squandering their energies in…

“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 undipped 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.

Toller’s mind was filled with that heady prospect as he watched the sky being transformed and sullied by conflict. The vapour trails were a complex skein of white tangled around an irregular, granular core of smoke and flame, and as successive fighter groups dived into action it became difficult to impose any sense of order on the scene. The carefully drawn up battle plan was being obscured by frenzied scribblings of condensation.

When it came the turn of the penultimate trio of fighters to set off Toller made a broad curving gesture with his free hand, signifying that they should swing outwards during the descent and intersect the column of skyships below the worst of the chaos. The pilots nodded and roared away on their diverging courses. They were just beginning to swing inwards again when from somewhere in the midst of the havoc came the sound of a powerful explosion.

Toller guessed that a Lander weapon, probably a pikon-halvell bomb, had detonated accidentally—a catastrophic event for the ship carrying it, but one which could benefit the invasion fleet as a whole. The report would have been heard far down the stack, alerting the lower echelons to the fact that all was not well. On hearing it any prudent pilot would use his lateral jets to turn his ship on its side so that he could observe the sky above.

Toller glanced with a new urgency at the other two squadron leaders, Daas and Umol, who were now his only two companions in the serenity of the upper air. “Are we ready?” he shouted.

Daas placed a hand on his lower back. “The longer we sit here the worse my rheumatism gets.”

Toller blew crystals into his engine, felt his head being pulled back by acceleration, and watched the battle zone expand to fill his field of view. He had never before been so conscious of the jet fighter’s speed. The vapour trails rushing towards him had the semblance of sculpted white marble, and he found it difficult not to flinch as the solid-seeming walls slammed in on him from one side and another, sometimes converging in a promise of certain death. Entire arctic kingdoms had streamed by him before he began to glimpse the wrecks of Lander ships. Their upward momentum had carried them into the flaming tatters of their balloons. He saw soldiers frantically ridding their gondolas of swathes of burning linen and wondered if they understood the futility of their actions. The ruined ships, although apparently locked in place, were already yielding to the gravitational siren call of their parent world, already embarking on the plunge to the rocky surface which waited thousands of miles below.

Toller had expected a considerable gap between the layers of burning ships, and was surprised to find them in a single loose conglomerate, sometimes almost in contact with each other. He realised that the first ships to be attacked had shut down their engines, and those below—still under way—had blundered in among them, vertically compacting the scene of destruction. Floating here and there among the smoke-shrouded leviathans were human figures, some struggling and some quiescent, pathetic debris from the gondola which had been exploded.

Toller barely had time to check that they were not wearing parachutes, then he was through the crowded volume of sky and bearing down on a group of four ships. At the edges of his vision he could see Daas and Umol riding in parallel with him. The Lander pilots must have reacted quickly to the sound of the explosion, because three of the ships were already tilted and he could see rows of faces lining their gondola walls. Far below them other ships, layer upon receding layer, were also turning on their sides.

Toller closed his throttle and allowed the fighter to coast while he snatched an arrow from one of his quivers. The oil-soaked wad at its tip caught fire as soon as he thrust it into the hooded igniter cup. He nocked the arrow and drew the bow, feeling heat from the warhead blowing back on his face, and fired at the balloon of the nearest ship, using the instinctive aiming technique of a mounted hunter. Even at speed and with swiftly changing angles the vast convexity of the balloon was an absurdly easy target. Toller’s arrow needled into it and clung like a spiteful mosquito, spreading its venom of fire, and already he was plunging down past the gondola and its doomed occupants. There came a spattering of flat reports and splinters erupted from the wooden engine cowling scant inches from his left knee.

That was quick, he thought, shocked by the speed with which the Landers had brought their muskets into action. These people know how to fight!

He steered his machine into a right-hand turn and looked over his shoulder to see two of the other balloons beginning to crumple and wither amid wreaths of black smoke. Daas and Umol, riding on brilliant plumes of condensation, were swinging into wider curves which would bring them into the cluster newly formed by the three squadrons.

As far as Toller could ascertain, all his fliers had survived the first strike and all of them could claim victories, but the nature of the battle was changing and would no longer be so one-sided. The time for calculated and cold-blooded executions had ended, and from now on individual temperament would come into play, with incalculable results. In particular, there could be no more leisurely swoops through the skyships’ blind arcs. Not only were the ships far below turning on their sides, they were doing it in such a way that the vulnerable upper hemispheres of their balloons were facing the centre of each group. Toller had no doubt that rim-mounted cannon were already being loaded, and although the Landers had no metals their traditional charges of pebbles and broken stones would be highly effective against the unprotected fighter pilots.

“Strike where you can,” he shouted, “but be…”

His words were lost in the roars of multiple exhausts. The air around him became fogged with white as the most impetuous of the young pilots darted away in the direction of the apparently motionless skyships. Cannon began to boom almost immediately.

Too soon, Toller thought, then it came to him that the sheer speed of the fighters could actually be a disadvantage in this kind of aerial warfare. Long after a skyship’s cannon had been discharged it would be surrounded by relatively static clouds of rocky fragments, harmless to the slow-moving ships, but potentially deadly to attacking fighter pilots.

Pushing the thought aside, he gunned his machine into a downward curve which took him on a dizzying plunge in parallel with the vertical conflict. In the ensuing minutes the sky became a fantastic jungle, crowded with thickets, ferns and interlocked vines of white condensation, hung with the bulbous fruit of skyships, garlanded with black smoke. The slaughter went on and on in a frenzy incomprehensible to anyone who had never known the bitter passions of battle—and, as Toller had foreseen, the Landers began to draw blood.

He saw Perobane, on Red Nine, make a reckless dive on two ships and pull out of it with such force that his control surfaces were ripped off. The fighter did an abrupt somersault, throwing Perobane clear of it into a course which took him within twenty yards of a gondola. Soldiers on board fired at him with their muskets. The jerking of his body showed that many were finding their mark, but the soldiers—perhaps aware that their balloon was on fire and that they were bound to die—kept on shooting at Perobane in futile revenge until his skysuit was a mass of crimson tatters.

Shortly afterwards, the pilot of Green Four—Chela Dinnitler —made the mistake of slowly coasting past a soldier who was drifting free some distance from a gondola which was wrapped in the blazing material of its envelope. The soldier, who had appeared to be unconscious, stirred into life, calmly levelled his musket and shot Dinnitler in the back. Dinnitler slumped over his controls and the fighter’s exhaust spouted vapour. The machine, with the pilot freakishly locked in his seat, went into a twisting descent which carried it through the lower fringes of the battle. It dwindled into the backdrop of Land, passing through a sprinkling of circular white clouds which resembled balls of fluffy wool.

The soldier who had killed Dinnitler was fitting a new pressure sphere to his musket, and—incredibly in view of the death-fall facing him—was laughing as he worked. Toller advanced his throttle and drove straight at the man, intending to ram him.

then came the thought that even a fleeting proximity might prove enough to infect him with pterthacosis. He hit the plunger on one of his cannon, shattering power crystal containers in the breech, and held a steady course until detonation occurred. The gun had not been designed for precise marksmanship, but luck was with Toller and the two-inch ball hit the soldier squarely on the head, cartwheeling him away in spirals of blood.

Toller banked the fighter away from the corpse and was about to enter the main battle again when, belatedly, his memory of the odd-looking circular clouds began to trouble him. He flew well clear of the column of turmoil and studied the sky below its base. The clouds were still there and now there were more of them. It took Toller several seconds to realise that he was looking at the exhaust plumes of skyships—seen from “below” their gondolas. Pilots in the lower echelons had inverted their ships and were fleeing the scene of destruction upside down. It was something no commander liked to do, because when the thrust of an engine was augmented by gravity a ship could quickly exceed its design speed and tear itself apart, but for the Landers the risk was an acceptable one in the circumstances.

Toller’s first impulse was to reverse his original battle plan and go after the most distant of the enemy ships, but an inner voice sounded a warning. In the heat of combat he had lost track of time, and his fighters had been burning crystals at a prodigious rate all the while. He pumped up the pneumatic reservoir of his fuel feed and knew from the number of strokes required that the amount of solid material within the system had been greatly depleted. Looking up towards where the battle had begun he saw that the earliest condensation trails had faded. The squadron’s home base was totally invisible, concealed somewhere in the trackless immensities of the space between the worlds, and finding it could be a lengthy job which would require ample reserves of power.

He ignited one of his remaining arrows and slowly waved it above his head. During the next few minutes the other pilots, recognising the signal, detached themselves from the ferment of smoke and cloud to join him. Most of them were intoxicated with excitement and were loudly exchanging stories of daring and triumph. Legends had been born, Toller knew, and were already acquiring the embellishments which would be further elaborated upon in the taverns of Prad. Berise Narrinder was one of the last to arrive, and there was a cheer when it was seen that she had managed to put a line around Perobane’s crippled machine and had it in tow.

When it was apparent that disengagement had been completed, Toller counted the fighters and was disturbed to find there were only twenty-five, including the one Berise had salvaged. He ordered a squadron by squadron check, and there was a lull in the hubbub of talk as it was realised that Green Three, which had been flown by Wans Mokerat, was missing. At some point in the whirling turmoil of the battle Mokerat had met his fate, unobserved by any of his comrades, and had disappeared completely, perhaps engulfed by a burning skyship.

The sobering effect of the discovery was as brief as Toller had expected, with the noise level among the other fliers quickly swelling to what it had been. He knew the youngsters were not heartless by nature—it was simply that, although physically unscathed, they too had become victims of war. The same thing must have happened to me long ago, he thought, but without my understanding. And only recently has it been revealed to me what I am—a fleshly automaton whose essential hollowness renders him incapable of sustaining warmth or joy.

Directly ahead of him, but a considerable distance away, was the gondola of a ruined skyship. Its occupants had successfully cast adrift all remnants of their burning balloon, which now hovered above and around them in great flakes of grey ash. The gondola and the fighter squadrons remained in fixed relative positions, because all were falling at the same speed.

Again Toller wondered if the Lander soldiers fully understood that their rate of descent, although insensible at this stage, would show an inexorable increase which would guarantee their deaths. Some of the soldiers were still firing their muskets in spite of the fact that the fighters were out of range, and—in one of the flukes which so often occur in seeming defiance of probability—a bullet came slowly tumbling towards Toller and came to rest within arm’s length.

He plucked it out of the air and saw that it was a stubby cylinder of brakka wood. He put it away in a pocket, feeling a strange affinity with the alien marksman. From one dead man to another, he thought.

“We have done enough for this day,” he shouted, raising his gloved hand. “Now let us find our way home!”

Chapter 9

At the sound of the wagon approaching Bartan Drumme stood up and went to the mirror which hung on the kitchen wall. It felt odd for him not to be dressed in work clothes, and even the face which regarded him from the glass seemed unfamiliar. The boyish, humorous look—which had once earned him the farmers’ mistrust—was no longer present, and instead there were the hard, sun-darkened features of a man who was no stranger to solitude, sorrow and relentless toil. He smoothed down his black hair, adjusted the collar of his shirt and went to the farmhouse door.

The Phorateres’ wagon was drawing to a halt outside, amid much snorting from an elderly bluehorn which was sweating after the journey in the midday sun. Harro and Ennda waved and called a greeting to Bartan. They had actively befriended him since the grim incident at their farm, and it had been at Ennda’s insistence that he had agreed to take some hours off and go into New Minnett to relax. He assisted her down from the tall vehicle and, while Harro was leading the bluehorn to the water trough, slowly walked with her to the house.

“What a handsome young toff you look today,” she said, a smile erasing the look of tiredness on her face.

“I managed to preserve one good shirt and one pair of trews, but they seem to have shrunk somewhat.”

“You have expanded.” She halted to give him an appraising look. “It’s difficult to realise you are the same baby-face who used to try to dazzle us with his clever city talk.”

“I don’t talk much at all these days,” Bartan said ruefully. “There isn’t much point in it.”

Ennda gave his arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Has Sondy not improved in any way? How long has it been? Close on two hundred days?”

“Two hundred! I’ve lost track of the time, but it must be something like that. Sondy remains as she was, but I’m not giving up hope.”

“Good for you! Now, is she still in the bedroom?”

Bartan nodded, ushered Ennda into the house and led the way to the bedroom. He pushed open the door to reveal Sondeweere sitting on the edge of the bed in a full-length white nightdress. She was staring at the opposite wall and remained that way, apparently unaware of the presence of others. Her yellow hair was well brushed, but was unimaginatively arranged in a way which showed that Bartan had done it.

Ennda went into the room, knelt in front of Sondeweere and gathered her unresisting hands into hers. “Hello, Sondy,” she said in a gentle but cheerful voice. “How are you today?”

Sondeweere made no response. The beautiful face was untroubled, the eyes unseeing.

Ennda kissed her on the forehead, stood up and returned to Bartan. “All right, young man! You can go off to town and enjoy yourself for a few hours and leave everything to me. Just tell me what has to be done about Sondy’s food and the… mmm… consequences.”

“Consequences?” Bartan gazed at Ennda in puzzlement until a look of exasperation made her meaning clear. “Oh! You don’t have to do anything. She keeps herself clean, attends to all the basics by herself and eats anything that is prepared for her. It’s just that nobody else seems to exist for her. She never speaks. She sits there on the bed all day, staring at the wall, and I don’t exist. Perhaps I deserve it. Perhaps it’s my punishment for bringing her to this place.”

“Now you’re being silly.” Ennda put her arms around him and he clung to her, immensely comforted by her aura of warmth, femininity and resilience.

“What have we here?” Harro Phoratere boomed jovially, entering the shady kitchen from the sunlight outside. “Is one woman not enough for you, young Bartan?”

“Harro!” Ennda rounded on her husband. “What kind of a thing is that to say?”

“I’m sorry, lad—I wasn’t thinking about your Sondy being…” Harro hesitated, the circular bite-scar glowing whitely against the pink of his cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologise,” Bartan said. “I appreciate your coming here—it’s more than generous.”

“Nonsense! It’s a welcome break for me as well. I intend to spend a very lazy aftday and—I give you fair warning—to consume a quantity of your wine.” Harro glanced anxiously at the group of empty demijohns in a corner. “You do have some left, I trust.”

“You’ll find ample supplies in the cellar, Harro. It’s the only solace left to me and I take care never to run short.”

“I hope you don’t drink too much,” Ennda said, showing some concern.

Bartan smiled at her. “Only enough to guarantee a night’s sleep. It’s too quiet here—much too quiet.”

Ennda nodded. “I’m sorry you have to bear your burden alone, Bartan, but it’s all we can do to manage our own section now that so many of our family have given up and moved north. Did you know that the Wilvers and the Obrigails have gone as well?”

“After all their work! How many families are left now?”

“Five, apart from us.”

Bartan shook his head dispiritedly. “If only the pople would wait and…”

“If you wait around here much longer it’ll be dark before you reach the tavern,” Ennda cut in, pushing him towards the front entrance. “Go off and enjoy yourself for a few hours. Go on— out\”

With a last glance at his wife, withdrawn to her inaccessible world, Bartan went outside and summoned his bluehorn with a whistle. Within a few minutes he had it saddled and was riding west to New Minnett. He was unable to shake off the feeling that he was doing something shameful, planning to spend half a day free of his crushing burden of work and responsibility, but the fierceness of his hunger for a spell in the undemanding company of amiable topers told him the excursion would be remedial.

The ride through pastoral scenery was refreshing in itself, and on reaching the township he was surprised by his reaction to the sight of unknown people, clusters of buildings in a variety of sizes and styles, and the lofty rigging of sea-going ships at anchor in the river. When he had seen New Minnett for the first time it had seemed a tiny and remote outpost of civilisation—now, after his lengthy incarceration on the farm, it was a veritable metropolis.

He rode straight to the open-fronted building used as a tavern and was gratified to find in it many of the local characters who had welcomed him and his airboat on that far-off first visit. Compared to the harrowing downward trend of life in the Basket, it was as though the townsfolk had been suspended in time, preserved, ready to spring to life at his behest. The reeve, Majin Karrodall, was present—wearing his smallsword—as was the plump Otler, still protesting his sobriety, and a dozen other remembered individuals whose obvious contentment with their lot was a reassurance that life in general was well worth the living.

Bartan happily drank the strong brown ale with them, finding room for pot after pot of it without wearying of the taste. He was appreciative of the way in which the men—including Otler, who was not known for his tact—made no reference to his people’s continuing evacuation of the Haunt. As though sympathising with the reasons for his visit they kept the talk on general subjects, much of the time discussing the latest news of the strange war that was being fought in the sky above the far side of the planet. The notion of a new breed of warriors who rode through the heavens on the backs of jet engines, without the support of balloons, seemed to have fired their imaginations. In particular, Bartan was struck by how often the name of Lord Toller Maraquine came up.

“Is it true that this Maraquine slew two kings at the time of the Migration?” he said.

“Of course it’s true!” Otler banged his alepot down on the long table. “Why do you think they call him the Kingslayer? I was there, my friend! Saw it with my own eyes!”

“Balderdash!” Karrodall shouted amid a general cry of derision.

“Well, perhaps I didn’t actually see what happened,” Otler conceded, “but I saw King Prad’s ship fall like a stone.” He turned his shoulder to the others and aimed his words at Bartan. “I was a young soldier at the time—Fourth Sorka Regiment —and I was in one of the very first ships to leave Ro-Atabri. I never thought I’d complete the journey, but that is another story.”

“One we’ve heard a thousand times,” another man said, nudging his neighbour.

Otler made an obscene gesture at him. “You see, Bartan, Prad’s ship got entangled with the one which Toller Maraquine was flying. Chakkell, who was then a prince, and Daseene and their three children were in Toller’s ship, and he saved their lives by pushing the two ships apart. It took the strength of ten men, but he did it single-handed, and Prad’s ship went down. I saw it plunge past me, and I’ll never forget the way Prad was standing there at the rail. Tall and straight he was, unafraid, and his one blind eye was shining like a star.

“His death meant that Prince Leddravohr became King, and three days later—after the landing—Leddravohr and Toller fought a duel which lasted six hours. It ended when Toller struck Leddravohr’s head off his shoulders with a single blow!”

“He must have been quite a man,” Bartan said drily, trying to separate fact from fiction.

“Strength of ten! And what do you mean by must have been quite a man? None of those striplings up there can keep pace with him to this day. Do you know that in the first battle against the Landers, after all his fire arrows had been expended, he started cutting their balloons into shreds with his white sword? The selfsame sword with which he overcame Karkarand— Karkarand, mark you!—with only one blow. I tell you, Bartan, we owe that man everything. If I were twenty years younger, and didn’t have this bad knee, I’d be up there with him at this very minute.”

Reeve Karrodall guffawed into his beer. “I thought you said they had no need of gasbags at the midpoint.”

“Very droll,” Otler muttered. “Very droll indeed.”

The following hours slipped by pleasantly and quickly for Bartan, and it was with some surprise that he noticed the sun’s rays slanting redly into the tavern at a shallow angle. “Gentlemen,” he said, getting to his feet, “I have stayed longer than it was my intention to do. I must leave you now.”

“Have but one more,” Karrodall said.

“I’m sorry, but I am obliged to leave. Friends are attending to the farm for me, and I have already done them a discourtesy.”

Karrodall stood and took Bartan’s hand. “I heard about your wife’s misfortune, and I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Would you not consider taking her away from that baneful place?”

“The place is just a place,” Bartan said lightly, determined not to be offended at this late stage of the gathering, “and I won’t surrender it. Good-bye, Majin.”

“Good luck, son!”

Bartan saluted the rest of the company and walked out to where his bluehorn was tethered. The alcoholic warmth in his stomach and the pleasant optimistic tingle in his brain, important allies in the day-to-day battle of life, were at their height. He felt privileged to be alive, a beautiful feeling which in the past had suffused his existence, but which of late could only be recaptured near the bottom of a demijohn of black wine. He hoisted himself into the saddle and nudged the bluehorn forward, delegating to the intelligent creature the task of getting him home.

As the sky gradually deepened in colour the daytime stars became more prominent, and the spirals and braids of misty light began to emerge from the background. There were more major comets than usual. Bartan counted eight of them, their tails fanning right across the dome of the heavens, creating alternate bands of silver and dark blue among which meteors darted like fireflies. In his mellow speculative mood he wondered if men would ever solve the mystery of the sky’s largest features. The stars were thought to be distant suns; the single green point of brilliance was known to be a third planet, Farland; and the nature of meteors was well understood because sometimes they crashed to the ground, leaving craters of various sizes. But what was the vast whirlpool of radiance which spanned the entire night sky for part of the year? Why did the heavenly population contain so many similar but smaller spirals, sometimes overlapping each other, ranging in shape from circles through ellipses to glowing spindles which concealed their structure until examined by telescope?

The train of thought caused Bartan to pay more attention than usual to the luminous arches of the sky, and thus it was that he noticed an entirely new phenomenon which might otherwise have escaped him. Due east, roughly in the direction of his farm, he saw a tiny and oddly-formed patch of light a short distance above the horizon. It was like a four-pointed star with in-curved sides, the kind of geometrical shape created at the middle of four touching circles, and each point appeared to be emitting a faint spray of prismatic colour. The object was too small to yield much detail without a glass, but its centre seemed to be teeming with multi-hued specks of brilliance. Intrigued, Bartan watched the eerily beautiful apparition sink swiftly downwards and pass out of sight behind the crest of the nearest drumlin.

Shaking his head in wonderment, Bartan urged his bluehorn forward to the high ground, greatly extending his range of vision, but the object was nowhere to be seen. What had it been? Meteors falling to earth sometimes blossomed into vivid colour, but they were accompanied by violent thunderclaps, whereas the phenomenon he had just witnessed had been characterised by silence and the smoothness of its movement. He tentatively reached the conclusion that the object had been much larger than he had supposed, dwarfed by distance, mysteriously sailing through space far beyond Overland’s atmosphere.

With his mind fuelled for further musings about the wonders of the universe, Bartan continued on his way. Almost an hour later he caught the first glimpse of the yellow lights of his own farmhouse and felt a fresh pang of guilt over having detained the Phorateres until after darkness. The fact that Sondeweere and he had only one bed made it difficult for him to invite them to stay until morning, unless Harro and he were to spend the night sleeping on the floor. It seemed a poor reward for their kindness to him, especially as neighbourly acts had become so rare in the Basket. Wondering how he was going to excuse himself, he increased the bluehorn’s speed to a trot, trusting it to maintain a sure footing on the star-silvered ground.

He was about a mile from the house when his surroundings were suddenly drenched in a varicoloured light so intense that his eyes reflexively clamped themselves shut.

The bluehorn reared up, barking in terror, and Bartan clung to it, quaking in expectation of the cataclysmic explosion which instinct told him had to accompany such a flash of brilliance. There was no explosion—only a ringing, reverberating silence during which he felt his clothing ripple and flap although there was no rush of air. He opened his eyes as the bluehorn dropped its forefeet to the ground. He found himself to be virtually blinded by after-images of trees and shrubs, orange and green silhouettes which seemed permanently printed on his retinas.

“Steady, old girl, steady,” he breathed, patting the animal’s neck. He blinked hard, knuckled his eyes and looked all about him in search of clues as to the origins of the bewildering, frightening and wildly unnatural event. The dark landscape had regained its eternal quietude. The sleeping world was trying to reassure him that things were as they had always been, but Bartan—prey to crawling apprehensions—knew better.

He urged the bluehorn forward as fast as he dared and in a few minutes was approaching the farmhouse. The very fact that Harro and Ennda were not outside and scanning the skies was a subtle indication that things were seriously amiss. Or was it? Perhaps he had been caught up in an essentially local disturbance of nature—after all, there were those who claimed that lightning sprang out of the ground, entirely contrary to the popular belief that it struck downwards from the heavens. He rode into the yard, dismounted and went to the farmhouse door. When he opened it the scene before him was a tableau of commonplace domesticity—Ennda doing her embroidery work on a sun hat, Harro in the act of tilting a demijohn to pour himself a cup of wine.

Bartan sighed with relief and then hesitated, his uneasiness returning, as he realised that the couple were indeed like part of a tableau. They were unmoving, rigid as statues. The only hint of animation in their features was a false one, due to the flickering of the lanterns in the draught from the open door.

“Harro? Ennda?” Bartan advanced uncertainly into the kitchen. “I… I’m sorry I’m so late.”

Ennda’s needle began to move on the instant, and wine gurgled into Harro’s cup. “Don’t fret yourself, Bartan,” Ennda said. “The sun has hardly set, and…” She looked through the doorway into the blackness beyond and began to frown. “That’s strange! How did it…?” Her words were lost in a dulled splintering of glass as the demijohn Harro had been holding crashed on the stone floor. Tentacles of dark wine raced outwards from the shattered vessel.

“Curses!” Harro grabbed at his right shoulder and massaged it. “My arm hurts! My arm is so tired that it… hurts!” He looked down at the floor and his eyes grew round in self-reproach. “I’m sorry, lad—I don’t know what…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bartan cut in. “What about the light? What do you think it was?”

“The light?”

“The blinding light. The light, for pity’s sake! What do you think caused it?”

Harro glanced at his wife. “We didn’t see any lights. Did you by any chance fall and knock your head?”

“I’m not drunk.” Bartan was staring at the couple in perplexity when his gaze was drawn to the bedroom door. It was partially open, allowing a strip of light to slant across the bed, and from what he could see of it the bed appeared to be empty. He strode across the kitchen and pushed the bedroom door fully open. Sondeweere was not in the small square room beyond.

“Where is Sondy?” he said quietly.

“What?” Harro and Ennda leapt to their feet and came to his side, their faces registering astonishment.

“Where is Sondy?” Bartan repeated. “Did you let her go outside alone?”

“Of course not! She’s in there!” Ennda thrust her way past him and halted, confounded by the room’s patent emptiness and lack of hiding places.

“You must have been asleep,” Bartan said. “She must have gone out past you when you were asleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep. This is imposs—” Ennda paused and pressed a hand to her forehead. “There’s no point in our standing around here arguing. We have to go out and find her.”

“Take the lights.” Bartan picked up a tubular lantern and hurried outside. Even after they had checked the lavatory hut and found it empty he was still only mildly concerned. Although Sondeweere had never strayed like this before, there were no predatory wild animals in the area, no cliffs or crevasses to threaten her safety. Her absence might even be a good omen, a sign that she was at last beginning to emerge from the shadow which had dimmed her mind and occulted her personality for so long.

It was not until they had been searching and calling her name for more than an hour that a different kind of premonition began to exercise its sway. Firstly, there had been the terrifying manifestation , the unbearable cascade of light; secondly, his wife had mysteriously vanished—and there had to be a connection between the two events. The Haunt—it had been naive and futile to rechristen it the Basket of Eggs—was going about its malign activities again, and Sondeweere had become its latest victim. He had been given ample opportunity to take her away from the place of evil, but in his stubbornness and intellectual arrogance he had continued to expose her to dangers that no man understood. And this was the inevitable outcome…

“This blundering about in the darkness will gain us little,” Harro Phoratere said, tiredness and reason combining in his voice. “We should repair to the house and conserve our strength till daybreak. What do you say?”

“I think you’re right,” Bartan said dully.

The farmhouse had grown cold by the time they reached it, and while Bartan was preparing a fire in the hearth Harro busied himself by fetching a full demijohn from the cellar and pouring three cups of black wine. But, far from comforting Bartan, the cosy firelit ambience served only to remind him that he had no right to be enjoying the luxury while his wife was wandering somewhere in the night. At best she was cold and lost; at worst…

“How could a thing like this happen?” he said. “If I had known a thing like this could happen I would never have left her side.”

“I suppose I could have fallen asleep,” Harro said. “The wine…”

“But Ennda was with you.”

Ennda, who had apparently been on the verge of sleep, turned on Bartan immediately, her face twisted with fury. “What are you trying to say, city boy? Are you hinting that I killed your young whore? Do you think I ate her face off? Is that what you are saying? But where is the blood? Do you see any blood on my person? Or on this?” She gripped the neck of her blue blouse with both hands and ripped it downwards, partially exposing her breasts.

Bartan was aghast. “Ennda! Please! I had no thought of…”

She silenced him by springing out of her chair and dashing her cup into the fireplace. “I keep the dream at bay! It can’t devour me any more, and that’s the truth!”

Harro stood up and embraced his wife, drawing her tortured face against his shoulder. She leaned into him, sobbing and trembling violently. The wine she had thrown hissed and sputtered in the fire.

“I…” Bartan stood up and set his drink aside. “I didn’t know the dream persisted.”

“This happens sometimes,” Harro said, his eyes contrite, miserable and haunted. “It would be best if I took her home.”

“Home?” Ennda, the manic energy having been drained from her, spoke like a child. “Yes, Harro, please take me home… away from this terrible land… back east to Ro-Amass. I can’t live this way any longer. Let’s go back to our real home, where we were happy.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Harro murmured, patting her on the back. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Ennda turned her head and looked at Bartan with a tremulous smile. “And what have I done to you, Bartan? You’re a good boy, and Sondy is a good girl. I didn’t mean anything I said.”

“I know that,” Bartan said uncomfortably. “There is no need for you to leave.”

Harro shook his head. “No, lad, we’ll go now, but I’ll come back in the morning with extra hands. If Sondy hasn’t shown up by that time we’ll soon find her. You’ll see.”

“Thanks, Harro.” Bartan went outside with the couple and helped them harness their bluehorn to the wagon. Throughout the task he was unable to prevent himself from scanning his dimly seen surroundings, hoping to pick out a drifting patch of white which would betoken Sondeweere’s safe return.

His vigilance went unrewarded.

Unknown to Bartan, he was entering the blackest phase of his life, one in which—over a period of several days—he would come to accept that his dumb, tranced wife had departed his world for ever.

Chapter 10

There was nothing unusual about the fact that the enemy was coming out of the sun, but what surprised Toller was the size of the attack wave. It contained at least sixty ships laid out in a protective grid pattern.

His hope that the punishment inflicted on the first invasion fleet would have been enough to end the war had been unjustified, but subsequent attacks had been on a smaller scale. Many of them had seemed like suicide missions whose purpose was to test Overland’s defences in new ways. The second force had tried to get through the weightless zone at night, but they had been betrayed by the sound of their exhausts, and had been forced to retreat with heavy casualties. Others had been equipped with varieties of ultra-powerful cannon, the recoil of which had destabilised and destroyed their own ships. And on two occasions the Landers had even deployed jet fighters of their own, launching them from the sides of gondolas. At first the enemy pilots had tried engaging the machines of the three squadrons in direct aerial combat, but they had been hopeless novices compared to Toller’s skilled fliers and had been slaughtered, almost to a man. In a second experiment, they had attempted to make high-speed sorties into the Inner Defence Group, evidently with the intention of ramming the stations, but again had been driven off and destroyed.

With the passage of time it had become apparent to Toller that the establishment of a permanent base in the weightless zone had given the defenders an overwhelming advantage. It was a matter for surprise that King Rassamarden had not reached the same conclusion and abandoned the unequal struggle. The only explanation Toller could think of was contained in Colonel Gartasian’s report of his meeting with the Lander scouting group. Gartasian had stated that they were overweeningly arrogant, proud and unamenable to reason. Perhaps the New Men of Land, their ruler included, were belated victims of pterthacosis in ways they did not even comprehend, destined to drown in their own irrational venom.

The only noticeable step they had taken towards self-preservation was that they had begun to wear parachutes, and thus could survive the destruction of their ships. It was impossible to say if they had invented the parachute independently, or if they had copied it after finding the body of Dinnitler, the pilot whose machine had made the runaway plunge towards Land. There was also a theory that they had arrived at the design of their own fighters by piecing together the wreckage of Dinnitler’s jet.

But Toller’s mind was occupied with more immediate conjectures—did the appearance of a large fleet at this stage of the war betoken nothing more than a massive venting of self-destructive passion on the part of the Landers?

Or was it a sign of confidence in a new type of weapon?

Toller mulled the question over as he rode down against the sunlight at the apex of Red Squadron’s formation. The sloping glass screen, a recent modification to the fighter’s design, was protecting him from the worst of the icy slipstream. A furlong away on either side he could see the Blues and Greens scoring their own white trails through the spangled heavens, and the old guilt-tinged excitement began to course through him.

Far below, outlined against the great painted curvature of Land, some of the enemy fleet were already turning on their sides. The Landers no longer sailed blindly into ambush. They had developed a method of observing the sky above, probably using look-outs at the end of long tethers, and at the first sign of the fighters’ condensation trails rolled their ships into varying attitudes for mutual defence. For that reason the three squadrons now went into action separately, and the style of combat had become individualistic and opportunist. Spectacular individual victories and equally spectacular deaths had ensued; legends had proliferated.

What is going to happen this time? Toller thought, his pulse quickening. Is there a soldier down there whose destiny it is to end my life?

As the array of skyships expanded across the view the fighters broke away from their formations and began to weave a basket of vapour trails around their quarry. Toller was aware of Berise Narrinder curving away to his left. There came a spattering of fire from long-range muskets, but it seemed sporadic in comparison to the usual fierce volleying, and Toller’s premonition about a radical new weapon returned to him in force. He shut down his engine and waited for the fighter to coast to a halt so that he could study the skyships better. Several of the other fighters were already darting through the grid in high-speed attack runs, and he could see the orange flecks of their arrows, though as yet no balloons were on fire.

Toller reached for his binoculars, but his gauntlets and the bow tied to his left wrist made him clumsy, and it was with still unaided vision that he saw some of the enemy gondolas become surrounded with brownish specks, as though the crews were hurling dozens of missiles towards their attackers. But the specks were fluttering and beginning to move of their own volition.

Birds!

Still untangling the strap of his binoculars, Toller had a moment to let his mind race ahead to the question of what kind of bird the Landers would have chosen to send against human opponents. The answer came immediately—the Rettser eagle. Found in the Rettser mountains in the north of Kolcorron, the eagle had a wingspan exceeding two yards, a speed which defied accurate measurement, and the ability to gut a deer—or a man—almost in the blink of an eye. In the past they had not been trained for hunting or warfare, even against ptertha, because of their unpredictability—but the New Men had shown themselves to have little regard for their own lives when bent on the destruction of an enemy.

Toller’s first look through the glasses confirmed his fears, and a chill went through him as he waited to see what havoc the great birds, natural masters of the aerial element, would wreak among his pilots. The pattern of vapour trails abruptly changed as the pilots closest to the skyships perceived the new threat and took evasive action. Seconds dragged by, then it dawned on Toller that the battle situation was remaining strangely static. He had expected the eagles, with their incredibly fast reflexes, to begin their unstoppable attacks on the instant of sighting the human fliers—but they were remaining in the vicinity of the ships from which they had been launched.

The magnified image in the binoculars revealed a curious spectacle.

The eagles were vigorously beating their wings, but instead of being propelled forward by the action were spinning head over tail in tight circles, making little or no progress through the air. It was as though they were being held in place by some invisible agency. The more frantically they flapped their wings the faster they revolved without changing position.

Toller was so bemused by the phenomenon that more drawn-out seconds passed before he began to appreciate that in weightless conditions the eagles would never be able to fly. In the absence of gravity the equations of winged flight were no longer valid. The dominant force acting on the birds was the upward thrust from their wings, and without weight to counterbalance it they were thrown into continuous backward rolls. An intelligent creature might have responded by altering its wing movement to something akin to a swimmer’s stroke, but the eagles—prisoners of reflex—could only go on and on with their futile expenditure of energy.

“Bad luck, Landers,” Toller murmured, feeding his engine. “And now you have to pay for your mistake!”

In the ensuing minutes he saw balloon after balloon set alight, apparently without loss among his own fliers. Now that the Landers fought from stationary positions their balloons burned less readily, lacking a flow of air to feed the blaze, and sometimes the flames extinguished themselves long before the entire envelope was consumed, though without making any difference to a ship’s eventual fate.

On this occasion the battle was given a touch of the bizarre by the presence of the gyrating eagles. Their terrified shrieking formed a continuous background to the roar of fighter jets, the patter of muskets and occasional blasts from cannon. Most of them kept on spinning, mindlessly squandering their strength, but Toller noticed that some had become quiescent and were drifting with their heads tucked under their wings as though asleep. A few were inert with wings only partially furled, giving every indication of being dead, perhaps overcome by sheer panic.

Immensely gratified by the turn of events, Toller pulled clear of the white-swaddled tumult to search for a likely target and saw a pilot of his own squadron closing in on him. It was Berise Narrinder, and she was rapidly opening and closing her right hand, signalling that she wanted to talk. Puzzled, he closed his throttle and allowed the fighter to coast to a halt. Berise did likewise and the two craft drifted together, gently yawing as their control surfaces became more and more ineffective.

“What is it?” Toller said. “Do you want to bring one of the birds back for dinner?”

Berise shook her head impatiently and pulled her scarf down below her chin. “There’s a ship far down below the battle zone. I’d like you to have a look at it.”

He looked in the direction she was indicating, but was unable to find the ship. “It has to be an observer,” he said. “The pilot was told to remain well out of trouble and return to base with a report.”

“My glasses tell me it is not an ordinary ship,” Berise said. “Look carefully, my lord. Use your binoculars. Look where that line of cloud crosses the Gulf of Tronom.”

Toller did as instructed, and this time was able to pick out the tiny outline of a skyship. It was on its side relative to him, reinforcing his opinion that its function was to observe the outcome of the battle. He wondered if it had yet become apparent to those on board that all was far from well with their fellows.

“I see nothing unusual about it,” he said. “Why are you interested?”

“What about the markings on the gondola? Can’t you see the blue and grey stripes?”

After further study of the miniature shape Toller lowered his binoculars. “Your young eyes are obviously better than mine.” He paused, a coolness on the nape of his neck, as the full import of Berise’s words reached him. “Blue and grey were always the colours of the royal ships—but would Rassamarden have retained them?”

“Why not? They might mean something to him.”

Toller nodded thoughtfully. “In spite of his declarations of contempt he seems to covet everything the old kings had. But would any ruler be foolhardy enough to venture so close to a battle?”

“I’ve been told that Leddravohr often led his troops—and he wasn’t a New Man,” Berise said through featherings of vapour. “And what about the eagles? If they had done what was required of them things would probably have gone very badly for us. Rassamarden may have expected to witness a famous victory.”

“Your mind is as sharp as your eyes, captain.” Toller gave her an approving smile.

“Compliments are all very well, my lord—but I have a more apt reward in mind.”

“Assuming it is a royal ship, you want the honour of destroying it.”

Berise met his gaze squarely, eyebrows drawn together. “I believe I have that right—I am the one who saw it.”

“Your feelings are understandable—and I sympathise with them—but you must consider my position. If Rassamarden is on board that ship all else should be subordinated to the task of slaying him, thus bringing this war to an end. In all conscience, it is my duty to attack the ship with every fighter at my disposal.”

“But you don’t know that Rassamarden is there,” Berise said, shifting her argument with a casual speed which reminded Toller of his wife’s similar ability. “Surely it would be wrong of you to divert your forces from the main battle to pursue a single ship, especially one which in any case cannot hope to escape us.”

Toller gave an exaggerated sigh. “May I at least accompany you and witness the exploit?”

“Thank you, my lord,” Berise said warmly, and for once without the hint of challenge she always insinuated into the title. She immediately reached for the throttle of her red-striped machine.

“Not so fast!” Toller protested, pausing as the exhaust of a jet slewing wide of the battle made communication momentarily impossible. “First I want you to seek out Umol and Daas and bring them to me, and I will tell them what we are about. They must keep an eye on our progress. If we fail to return, they must attack that ship in force—on no account can the ship be permitted to withdraw with any of its crew or passengers still alive.”

Berise tilted her head and frowned, her face a beautiful mask in the upflung light of the sun. “We are two fighters against one skyship—how can you doubt our success?”

“Because of the parachutes,” Toller said. “When a skyship carries common soldiers it is enough for us to destroy the balloon. It matters little to us if they survive the drop and come back for more of the same medicine another day. But in this case the ship is of no importance—it would be less than pointless to burn the balloon, but allow Rassamarden to return safely to his pestilent kingdom. In this crucial case the balloon is not our target, nor even the gondola.

“We have to kill Rassamarden himself, and I don’t need to tell you that will be a far more hazardous business than merely spiking a balloon at long range. Do you still claim the honour?”

Berise’s expression was unaltered. “I am still the one who saw the ship.”

A few minutes later Toller was riding down towards the distant ship, with Berise holding a parallel course, and it was then that he began to have doubts about allowing her to accompany him. The fighter pilots shared a special bond, a spirit of comradeship which surpassed anything he had previously known in ordinary military service, and she had skilfully made use of it to influence his decision. It was perhaps all right for him, half in love with death, to undertake such a dangerous mission—but what about his responsibility towards all those he commanded?

The dilemma was intensified by the fact that if he were to send Berise back to comparative safety she would jump to the conclusion that his motives were selfish, that he wanted the glory of killing Rassamarden all to himself. Most of the other fighter pilots would side with her, their impulse-governed natures allowing no options, and he dreaded the prospect of losing their esteem. Could that be the obvious nub of a childishly simple problem? Was he prepared to waste a young woman’s life rather than forfeit the flattering regard of a handful of young bucks?

The only reasonable and honourable answer had to be: No!

Toller looked at Berise, preparing himself for an ordeal, then he was overwhelmed by a rush of unexpected emotion. It was a blend of affection and respect, triggered by the sight of her diminutive figure astride the streamlined bulk of the jet fighter and outlined against silver whirlpools in a dark blue infinity. It came to him that she was both courageous and intelligent, that she had certainly been ahead of him in every one of his ponderous deliberations, and that she was fully qualified to choose her own destiny. As though sensing his interest she gave him an enquiring glance, her features all but hidden by her scarf and goggles. Toller gave her a salute, which she returned, then he concentrated his thoughts on the forthcoming skirmish.

He and Berise were on a straight line between the main battle and the lone skyship. His hope had been that their condensation trails would remain unnoticed against the tangled confusion of smoke and sun-glowing vapour above, but the evidence was that keen-eyed lookouts had already spotted them. Musketeers were diving out from the gondola, tumbling to the ends of their lines, forming a sparse circle from which they could direct fire at a fighter going for the balloon’s vulnerable upper surface. Their chances of disabling a pilot were not great, but the problem in this particular instance was that Berise was required to go in on a level with the musketeers in order to attack the gondola itself, and in previous encounters the Landers had proved themselves to be excellent marksmen.

A few furlongs away from the ship Toller gave the talk signal and shut down his engine, and when Berise drifted to a halt beside him he said, “Before taking any unnecessary risks, have a closer look at the gondola. Find me some evidence that Rassamarden really is on board.”

Berise raised her binoculars to her eyes, was quiet for a moment and then—unexpectedly—began to laugh. “I glimpsed a crown! A glass crown! Is that what King Prad and all the others wore? Did they really walk about with ridiculous ornaments like that on their heads?”

“On certain occasions,” Toller said, wondering why he had begun to feel offended. “If what you saw was the Bytran diadem it is composed principally of diamonds, and is worth—” He broke off, suffused by a savage gladness. “The fool! The puffed-up, vainglorious fool! His fondness for that little glass hat has cost him his life for certain! How many cannon shells have you?”

“The full six.”

“Good! I’ll take the balloon, but from the side rather than above, so that I’ll be visible from the gondola. All eyes will be upon me when I loose my arrow—and that’s the moment for your attack. Perhaps fate will let you burst their crystal stores on the first pass. Are you ready?”

Berise nodded. Toller made sure his pneumatic reservoir was at maximum pressure, then blew crystals into his engine and the responsive machine surged towards the skyship. He flew a little slower than he would normally have done and swept outwards into a curve which would take him past the balloon on a descending diagonal. Berise was on a steeper downward course, using her engine in short bursts which left an intermittent trail of white.

As the blue-and-grey gondola expanded in his vision Toller saw a milling of figures among the wicker partitions. He counted eight soldiers at the ends of radial lines, all with a hunched foreshortening of their upper bodies which told him they were aiming their muskets in his direction.

That’s what I want, he thought, removing his right glove. That’s just what I want.

He took an arrow from a quiver, ignited the tip and nocked it on to his bowstring. He gunned his engine, bracing himself against the acceleration, and dived on the balloon. The howl from the exhaust obliterated all musket reports, but he saw their toadstool billows of white. As the monstrous shape of the balloon swelled to become a curved brown wall blotting out much of the universe, he rolled the fighter to put the solidity of the engine between him and most of the enemy marksmen. Land and Overland obediently slid into new positions in the firmament.

Toller drew the bow and fired in a single practised movement.

and in the same movement heard the double blast of Berise’s cannon. His arrow streaked into the balloon, its line of flight vectored into an arc by his own speed. Something flicked his left leg and tufts of cottony insulation whirled away in the fighter’s slipstream. He crouched low on the rounded back of the machine and burned his way out towards the stars. At a safe distance he shut down the engine and pulled into a turn which gave him a view of the battle scene.

Berise was completing a similar manoeuvre above him and to his right. Fire was spreading on one side of the Lander balloon, but although he was certain Berise’s aim had been good, the gondola appeared to be undamaged. There was no way of telling what injury, if any, the iron balls passing through it had inflicted on those inside.

Berise was busy clearing the breeches of her cannon and inserting fresh shells. When she had finished she raised a hand and Toller went for the balloon again, trying to draw as much fire as possible in order to give her a second clear run. He successfully put an orange-streaming dart into the now misshapen giant and again sought out Berise in the empty sky beyond. Instead of pausing she reloaded during a sweeping turn and drove in beneath him at speed, coming up from beneath the Lander gondola.

The tethered soldiers were turning their muskets towards her as she fired both cannon. The gondola shuddered as the shot ploughed into the planking of the deck, but it remained structurally intact, and soldiers on board kept on firing through the black smoke which was gathering around the stricken craft.

Toller, who had been praying for a crystal explosion, coasted to a halt. There was a possibility that Rassamarden had been hit, but a man was a small target within the volume of a gondola, and in this instance he had to be able to claim a certain kill. Nothing else could be acceptable under the circumstances. He looked around for Berise and saw her swooping down on him in a nimbus of brilliant vapour. As she drew near he tapped his chest and pointed at the skyship, signifying that he intended to mount his own attack. She pulled down her scarf and shouted something he failed to hear above the growl of her engine. Her face was savage, almost unrecognisable. He barely had time to note that her windscreen was spidered with white lines, then she had given her engine full throttle and was dwindling into the distance —heading straight for the skyship amid an appalling blast of sound.

Toller gave an involuntary cry of protest as the fighter streaked towards the gondola and it became obvious that Berise had no intention of changing course. Barely two seconds before impact she leapt off the machine. It sledged through the wall of the gondola and struck the centrally mounted engine, driving the entire structure forward in a tumbling movement which wrapped large pieces of the still-burning balloon around it. An acceleration strut broke free and flailed off to one side while tethered soldiers were snatched into the turmoil by coiling ropes. A moment later there came a series of whooshing explosions —typical of the pikon-halvell reaction—followed by a great billowing of greenish flame. Toller knew at once that nobody aboard the gondola could possibly have escaped death.

Berise, having kicked herself into a trajectory only slightly different from that of her fighter, had disappeared into the opaque seethings of smoke, becoming lost to Toller’s view. Cold with apprehension, senses overloaded, he fed his engine and flew in a semi-circle around the slow-spinning chaos, reaching the dark blue serenity beyond. At first there was no sign of Berise, then he saw a twinkling white mote which was changing position against the background of stars and silver spirals. His glasses showed that it was Berise, perhaps a mile distant and still receding, still using up the energy imparted to her by the fighter’s speed.

He went after her, dreading the prospect of finding a mutilated body, adjusting his speed and direction as he drew near. The fighter had begun to wallow as it closed in on Berise, and he had to raise himself on the footrest in order to grip her arm and pull her towards him. He knew immediately that she was alive and well because she expertly took command of their relative motion, guiding herself in such a way that she ended up astride of him, face to face, arms around his neck.

He saw the manic ecstasy on her face, felt the quivering tension of her body despite the bulkiness of her skysuit, and in that moment there was nothing they could do but kiss. Berise’s lips were cold, even her tongue was cold, but Toller—the man who had forsworn sexual passion for ever—was unable to stop his groin lifting up against her again and again. She clamped her legs around him and rode him eagerly for the duration of the kiss, then used both hands to push his face away from hers.

“Was I good, Toller?” she breathed. “Was that the best thing you ever saw?”

“Yes, yes, but you’re lucky to be alive.”

“I know, I know!” She laughed and returned to the kiss and they drifted that way for a long time, lost among the stars and luminous swirls of their private universe.

For the most part it was quiet on board the skyship. Toller had carried out the inversion manoeuvre some two hundred miles below the weightless zone, and now the ship was gently falling towards Overland. During the next few days little would be required other than periodic injections of hot gas to give the huge balloon a positive internal pressure which would keep it from falling in on itself. The bitterness of the aerial element was mitigated to some extent by a crystal-powered heater and the fact that it was now standard practice for gondolas to be lined with vellum to prevent the ingress of chill air through chinks in the walls and deck.

It was, however, still very cold within the circumscribed space of the gondola, and when Berise removed her blouse her nipples gathered into brown peaks. Toller, who was already naked and ensconced in layers of eiderdown, extended an inviting hand to her, but she held back for the moment. She was kneeling beside him, gripping one of the transverse lines which were a vital safety feature in the virtual absence of gravity.

“Are you sure about this?” she said. “You haven’t been at all discreet.” She was referring to Toller having announced his intention of presenting her to the King, and —instead of returning to Overland by fallbag and parachute—commandeering a skyship for just the two of them.

“Are you delaying in this way to give me the opportunity to change my mind?” He smiled and glanced at the globes of her breasts, which were buoyantly beautiful in a way which would have been impossible in normal gravity. “Or is it to prevent me changing my mind?”

Berise placed a forearm across her breasts. “I’m thinking of the Lady Gesalla. It is almost certain that she will be informed, by somebody, and I have no wish for you to look on me afterwards with cold eyes.”

“The Lady Gesalla and I live in different worlds,” Toller said. “We both do what it is in us to do.”

“In that case…” Berise squirmed her cold little body into the quilts beside him, making him gasp with the touch of her cold fingers.

In the days and nights that followed, while the meteors flickered all around, Toller rediscovered vital aspects of his being, learned the extent to which his life had become arid and deficient in recent years. The experience was unbearably sweet and unbearably bitter at the same time, because an inner voice informed him that he was committing a form of self-murder—a spiritual suicide—while the meteors flickered all around.