had never happened to him before, but he had reflexes for it anyway.
When the rotors surged, he corrected for it. When the machine started into failure and instruments shorted out, he did not panic. The power cut out on him.
'I've got a hot start,' Branch declared calmly. Fed by an oxygen surge, the bushing above their heads held a fiery bluish globe, like St. Elmo's fire.
'Autorote,' he announced next when the machine – logically – failed altogether. Autorotation was a state of mechanical paralysis.
'Going down,' he announced. No emotion. No blame. Here was here.
'Are you hit, Major?' Count on Mac. The Avenger.
'Negative,' Branch reassured. 'No contact. Our turbine's blown.'
Autorotation, Branch could handle. It was one of his oldest instincts, to shove the collective down and find that long, steep, safe glide that imitated flight. Even with the
engine dead, the rotor blades would continue spinning with the centrifugal force, allowing for a short, steep forced landing. That was the theory. At a plunging speed of
1,700 feet per minute, it all translated into thirty seconds of alternative.
Branch had practiced autorotations a thousand times, but never in the middle of night, in the middle of a toxic forest. With the power cut, his headlights died. The darkness leaped out at him. He was startled by its quickness. There was no time for his eyes to adjust. No time to flip on the monocle's artificial night vision. Damn instruments. That was his downfall. Should have been relying on his own eyes. For the first time he felt fear.
'I'm blind,' Branch reported in a monotone.
He fought away the image of trees waiting to gut them. He reached for the faith of his wings. Hold the pitch flat, the rotors will spin.
The dead forest rushed at his imagination like switchblades in an alley. He knew better than to think the trees might cushion them. He wanted to apologize to Ramada, the father who was young enough to be his son. Where have I brought us?
Only now did he admit his loss of control. 'Mayday,' he reported.
They entered the treeline with a metallic shriek, limbs raking the aluminum, breaking the skids, reaching to skin their souls out of the machine.
For a few seconds more their descent was more glide than plummet. The blades sheared treetops, then the trees sheared his blades.
The forest caught them.
The Apache braked in a mangle. The noise quit.
Wrapped nose-down against a tree, the machine rocked gently like a cradle in rain. Branch lifted his fists from the controls. He let go. It was done.
Despite himself, he passed out.
He woke gagging. His mask was filled with vomit. In darkness and smoke, he clawed at the straps, freed the facepiece, dragged hard at the air.
Instantly he tasted and smelled the poison reach into his lungs and blood. It seared his throat. He felt diseased, anciently diseased, plagued into his very bones. Mask, he thought with alarm.
One arm would not work. It dangled before him. With his good hand he fumbled to find the mask again. He emptied the mess, pressed the rubber to his face.
The oxygen burned cold across the nitrogen wounds in his throat.
'Ram?' he croaked. No answer.
'Ram?'
He could feel the emptiness behind him.
Strapped facedown, bones broken, wings clipped, Branch did the only other thing he was able to do, the one thing he had come to do. He had entered this dark forest to witness great evil. And so he made himself see. He refused delirium. He looked. He watched. He waited.
The darkness eased.
It was not dawn arriving. Rather, it was his own vision binding with the blackness. Shapes surfaced. A horizon of gray tones.
He noticed now a strange, taut lightning flickering on the far side of his Plexiglas. At first he thought it was the storm igniting thin strands of gas. The hits of light penciled in various objects on the forest floor, less with actual illumination than through brief flashes of silhouette.
Branch struggled to make sense of the clues spread all around him, but apprehended only that he had fallen from the sky.
'Mac,' he called on his radio. He traced the communications cord to his helmet, and it was severed. He was alone.
His instrument panel still showed aspects of vitality. Various green and red lights twinkled, fed by batteries here and there. They signified only that the ship was still dying.
He saw that the crash had cast him among a tangle of fallen trees close to Zulu Four. He peered through Plexiglas sprayed with a fine spiderweb. A gracile crucifix loomed in the near distance. It was a vast, fragile icon, and he wondered – hoped – that some Serb warrior might have erected it as penance for this mass grave. But then Branch saw that it was one of his broken rotor blades caught at a right angle in a tree.
Bits of wreckage smoldered on the floor of soaked needles and leaves. The soak could be rain. Rather late, it came to him that the soak could also be his own spilled fuel.
What alarmed him was how sluggish his alarm was. From far away, it seemed, he registered that the fuel could ignite and that he should extricate himself and his partner – dead or alive – and get away from his ship. It was imperative, but did not feel so. He wanted to sleep. No.
He hyperventilated with the oxygen. He tried to steel himself to the pain about to come, jock stuff mostly, when the going gets tough...
He reared up, shouldering high against the side canopy, and bones grated upon bones. The dislocated knee popped in, then out again. He roared.
Branch sank down into his seat, shocked alive by the crescendo of nerve endings. Everything hurt. He laid his head back, found the mask.
The canopy flapped up, gently.
He drew hard at the oxygen, as if it might make him forget how much more pain was left to come. But the oxygen only made him more lucid. In the back of his mind, the names of broken bones flooded in helpfully. Horribly. Strange, this diagnosis. His wounds were eloquent. Each wanted to announce itself precisely, all at the same time. The pain was thunderous.
He raised a wild stare at the bygone sky. No stars up there. No sky. Clouds upon clouds. A ceiling without end. He felt claustrophobic. Get out.
He took a final lungful, let go of the mask, shed his useless helmet.
With his one good arm, Branch grappled himself free of the cockpit. He fell upon the earth. Gravity despised him. He felt crushed smaller and smaller into himself.
Within the pain, a distant ecstasy opened its strange flower. The dislocated knee popped back into place, and the relief was almost sexual. 'God,' he groaned. 'Thank God.'
He rested, panting rapidly, cheek upon the mud. He focused on the ecstasy. It was tiny among all the other savage sensations. He imagined a doorway. If only he could enter, all the pain would end.
After a few minutes, Branch felt stronger. The good news was that his limbs were numbing from the gas saturation in his bloodstream. The bad news was the gas. The nitrogen reeked. It tasted like aftermath.
'...Tango One...' he heard.
Branch looked up at the caved-in hull of his Apache. The electronic voice was coming from the backseat. 'Echo... read me...'
He stood away from the earth's flat seduction. It was beyond his comprehension that he could function at all. But he had to tend to Ramada. And they had to know the dangers.
He climbed to a standing position against the chill aluminum body. The ship lay tilted upon one
