his pilots was making a perverse attempt to keep theHand oriented. Without such precise control, the flow past the ship’s irregular hull would send them into a long tumble, a million tonnes of hardware torn apart by forces it had never been designed to face.
The glow across the stern was a spreading sheet of light, clear only in a few places where the shock was not hot enough to vaporize the hull. Jau drifted back into his chair, the acceleration growing gently, inexorably. Four hundred milligees, eight hundred. But this acceleration was not caused by the ship’s torch. This was a planetary atmosphere, having its way with them.
And there was another sound. Not the rumble of the aux. It was a rich, growing tone. From its throat to its outer hull, theHand had become a vast organ pipe. The sound fell from chord to chord as the ship rammed deeper, slower. And as the glow of ionization trembled and faded, the
Jau stared out the aft view, at a scene that should have been impossible. The angular hull structures were smoothed and melted by their passage through the heat. But theHand was a million tonnes, and the pilots had kept it precisely oriented in the flow, and most of its great mass had survived.
Nearly a standard gee pressed him against his chair, but this was almost at right angles to the earlier acceleration. This was planetary gravity. TheHand was a kind of aircraft now, a disaster skidding across the sky. They were forty thousand meters up, coming down at a steady hundred meters per second. Jau looked at the pale horizon, the ridges and blocks of ice that swept beneath his view. Some of those were five hundred meters high, ice pressed upward by the slow freezing of the ocean depths. He tapped at his console, got a flicker of attention from one of the pilots, a scrap of further information. They would clear that ridgeline and the three beyond it. Beyond that, near the horizon, the shadows were softer… a deception of distance, or maybe snow piled deep on the jagged ice.
Echoing up through the
Thirty thousand meters. Dim sunlight reflected off the ice, but there was no sign of artificial lights or towns. They were coming down in the middle of the Spiders’ grandest ocean. TheHand was still making better than mach three. The sink rate was still one hundred meters per second. His intuition plus the few hints from the status board told him they would smear across the landscape at more than the speed of sound. Unless—the core power was still rising—if the main torch could be fired once more, and fired at precisely the right instant… a miracle touch might do it. TheHand was so big that its belly and throat might be used as a cushion, shredded across kilometers of crash path, leaving the bridge and the occupied quarters intact. Pham Trinli’s silly bragging had included such an adventure.
One thing was certain. Even if Jau were given full control at this instant, and all his pilots’ skills, there was no way he could accomplish such a landing.
They had cleared the last line of ridges. The aux thrusters burned briefly, a one-degree yaw, guiding them as if with special knowledge of conditions ahead.
Ritser Brughel’s time for killing had shrunk down to a few seconds. Rita would be safe. Jau watched the tumbled land rise toward him. And with it came the strangest feeling of terror, and triumph, and freedom. “You’re too late, Ritser. You’re just too late.”
SIXTY
Belga Underville had rarely seen joy or fear so strong, and never attached to the same events by the same people. Coldhaven’s techs should have been cheering as wave after wave of their long-range interceptors scored against the Kindred ballistics, and hundreds of other enemy missiles blew themselves up or otherwise aborted. The success rate was already nearing ninety-nine percent. Which left thirty live nuclear warheads arcing into Accord territory. It was the difference between annihilation and mere isolated disaster… and the technicians chewed on their eating hands as they struggled to stop those last, straggling threats.
Coldhaven walked down his row of techs. One of Lighthill’s people, an oophase corporal, was by his side. The General was hanging on Rhapsa Lighthill’s every word, making sure his techs got the benefit of all the new intelligence that was flooding across their displays. Belga hung back. There was nothing she could do but get in the way. Victory Lighthill was deep in some weird conversation with the aliens, every few sentences punctuated by long delays, time for side conversations with her brother and Coldhaven’s people. She paused, waiting, and gave Belga a shy smile.
Belga gave her a little wave back. The cobblie wasn’t quite the same as her mother—except, perhaps, where it mattered.
Then Lighthill’s phone came alive again—some relatively near collaborator? “Yes, good. We’ll get people out there. Five hours maybe…. Daddy, we’re back on track. Critter Number Five is playing fair. You were right about that one. Daddy?… Brent, we’ve lost him again! That shouldn’t happen now…. Daddy?”
Rachner’s helicopter had stopped its zigzag, evasive course, though not before Thract became thoroughly lost. Now the heli flew low and fast across the altiplano, as if fearless of hostile observation from above. A passenger on his own pilot’s perch, Thract watched the sky show with an almost hypnotized wonder, only partly aware of Sherkaner Underhill’s delirious mumbling, and the strange lights coming from his game helmet.
The sheets of amissile launches were long gone, but all across the horizon the evidence of their mission was lighting the sky.At least we foughtback.
The timbre of the rotor noise changed, bringing Thract back from his terrible, far vision. The heli was sliding down through the dark. Shading his eyes against the sky lights, Thract could see that they were headed for a landing on a random stretch of naked stone, hills and ice all around.
They touched down, roughly, and the turbines idled till the rotors were spinning slow enough to see. It was almost quiet in the cabin. The guide-bug stirred, pushed insistently at the door beside Underhill.
“Don’t let him out, sir. If we lose him here, he might stay lost.”
Underhill’s head bobbed uncertainly. He set down the game helmet; its lights flickered and died. He patted his guide-bug, and pulled shut the closures of his jacket. “It’s okay, Colonel. It’s all over now. You see, we won.”
The cobber sounded as delirious as ever. But Thract was beginning to realize: delirious or not, Underhill had saved the world. “What happened, sir?” He said softly. “Alien monsters controlled our nets… and you controlled the monsters?”
The old, familiar chuckle. “Something like that. The problem was, they aren’t all monsters. Some of them are both clever and good… and we almost squashed each other with our separate plans. That was terribly expensive to fix.” He was silent for a second, his head wavering. “It will be okay, but… just now I can’t see much.” The cobber had taken a full head of the aliens’ killer beam. The blisters on Underhill’s eyes were spreading, a pervasive, creamy haze. “Maybe you can take a moment and tell me what you see.” The cobber jerked a hand skyward.
Rachner pushed his best side close to the south-facing window. The shoulder of the mountain cut off part of the view, but there were still one hundred degrees of horizon. “Hundreds of nukes, sir, glowing lights in the sky. I think those are our interceptors, way far off.”
“Ha. Poor Nizhnimor and Hrunk… when we walked in the Dark, we saw something similar. Though it was much colder then.” The guide-bug had the trick of the door. It popped it open a crack, and a slow draft of coldest air licked into the cabin.
“Sir—” Rachner started to complain about the draft.
“It’s okay. You won’t be here long. What else do you see?”
“Lights spreading out from the hits. I guess that’s ionization in the magnetopatches. And—” Rach’s voice caught in his throat. There were other things, and these he recognized. “I see reentry traces, sir. Dozens of them. They’re passing overhead, and to our east.” Rach had seen similar things in Air Defense tests. When the warheads
