Systemic Shock

effort to get a certain kill; but he had not realized it could bumble away so quickly. Ranjit had seen sparkles of bright polymer and wispy structure splash from the delta's hull and knew that he had drawn blood. Ranjit was an educated man; knew that dirigibles had considerable space between their great gossamer buoyancy bags. But Indian dirigibles were filled with hydrogen, and Ranjit had expected to fly over a fireball. He throttled back, realizing that the airship pilot would require him to maneuver at great waste of his remaining fuel if the damned thing could squat in the shallow canyon to the south.

Ranjit was no fool. This time he would make a head-on pass, slowing to the snail's pace of an STOL as he forced the gasbag to turn or die. In the canyon it could not maneuver. So thought Ranjit Khan.

'We're losing pressure in Cell Five,' Rogers said. 'Can't tell how big the leak, but big enough.'

Calm, quick: 'Deploy two series of patches.' Rogers flipped the protective cover from buttons, keyed an instruction.

The helium cell material was a ripstop fabric thinner than a wastrel's excuse, but it could be punctured rather easily. For in-flight repair, a delta boasted tiny subsystems on the floor of each cell; gadgets that actually blew bubbles. The skin of a bubble was a white polymer that turned from slick to sticky, then chitinous, as it encountered oxygen. Yet, for such a bubble to maintain neutral buoyancy in helium, it could have only one substance inflating it: hydrogen.

The bubbles migrated toward a leak so that they deployed to a puncture, popped, stuck and hardened in the hole, and usually plugged the leak, a white spot on the cell's black surface, easy to find and fix. But two dozen lemon-sized bubbles could not patch the rents in Cell Five. Chartrand found the Norway settling stern-first, and ordered more patches while he adjusted the elevens further. Then he called for more helium. 'If I can get some sky under this bitch, gentlemen, abandon ship. Consider it an order,' he said, still calm, watching his orientation display as the Norway slid over the lip of the canyon barely meters above the scrub. Even if he could maintain altitude, it would not be enough to let a chute open.

'We've got those twenty-two's, cap'n,' Bernie Grey said.

'If you get a shot, take it,' said Chartrand. Texas A & M had given them no heavy machine guns, but ROTC classes used weapons scaled down from twin-fifties for use against target drones. The twins fired twenty- two caliber slugs, four hundred rounds a minute. They would have been useful at

Oak Ridge, but against an Indian STOL?

Ranjit was having problems. He had felt one surge of fuel pumps, knew that his fuel plenums were nearly empty. He could make another pass and then horse the aircraft up and southward, ejecting a thousand meters or so before the craft began to drop. He might still walk to Mexico. He throttled back still more, practically gliding at a speed of three hundred klicks. The yellow delta had touched, tail-first, onto rocky alkali flats and even if it tried to turn, he could rake the gossamer brute with cannon. This time he could not miss.

Nor could Chartrand. He saw the line of alkali puffs stutter toward him from the approaching bird of prey. As the Norway's struts swung down to absorb the airship's inertia, Chartrand made ready to trip their pneumatics. She would be tail-heavy, her prop shrouds were aimed ju-u-ust right, and she had something more potent than a pair of twenty-two's slung against her belly.

Ranjit saw his cannon rounds march up the arroyo to his target. There was no question of missing now.

The Norway flopped slowly, then rebounded with her pneumatics, actually rose fifty meters like a broaching whale, nose proud. The aft end of the gondola spurted long tongues of fire.

Ranjit saw the enemy's maneuver and started to smile. Turning upward rather man sideways was a surprise, but his cannon were boring through the great ship, end-to-end. As he began the smile, he also commanded his hand to put the STOL into a steep bank, the better to reach an optimum cruise altitude. But neither the smile nor the bank ever really occurred. Tiny spots before Ranjit's eyes grew from gnats to fencepoles in a second, and of the twelve little missiles Chartrand had fired shotgun-fashion dead ahead, eleven shrieked past.

The twelfth passed into Ranjit's portside air intake, detonating against the duct wall adjacent to his remaining fuel.

David Chartrand saw the deadly fireflower blossom, become hunks of wing and impeller and ejection pod, and then it was a shower of metal and plastic, almost as big as the Norway as they engulfed one another thirty meters above Devil's River Canyon.

Sandys jurnal Aug. 24 Sat,

Holo says sinowinds envaded Florida, one sure envaded Texas. I heard the boooom in the hole, mom and me went to see. It was up the drywash, well realy it was clean acrost it. Mom woudnt let me go close to the delta stuff. Those poor men, poor soles, mom said. I found a napsack, a finger, some title bullets and a dress of ribbons tied to a heavy iron can. Well Igess its a dress. I rolled it all into a gully. Coudnt lift the can. It must be forein, the words arent ours. My dady doesnt talk much wont let me see his hands. He jokes its a secret. Hes still wore out from letting the animals go last week. I wish my dady didnt smell bad.

Chapter Forty-Two

A grain elevator, Quantrill found, could be almost as deep below ground level as it was high. So insulated were the tunnel occupants that they knew nothing of the Norway's fate until many hours later. No one at Aggie Station noticed the smoke to the south. The youth in the yellow flight suit was recognized from a week-old holocast; seemed willing enough to move cargoes around Aggie Station while he waited for the delta to return. Still confident that he would scramble aboard his airship after a day or so, and exhausted after relocating thousands of terrified hamsters, Quantrill fell instantly asleep in the staff quarters.

Dr. Catherine Palma damned her comm link with College Station that night as the three-note signal interrupted her work a hundred meters from Quantrill. It wasn't tough enough setting up a four-level paranthrax barrier with a few lay people before competent lab personnel arrived. No, she also had to second-guess the radiation counters, trial contusions, and play administrator. Palma stored her console display, queried the comm link, and swore again; the Red Cross had finally come through for the green-eyed kid.

Cathy Palma pushed herself away from the desk feeling all of her fifty-one years; trudged to the staff dorm. She found Quantrill naked, his covers kicked away in sleep, the dull gleam of synthoderm over a wound in one leg. She stood beside him for a long time, thinking that those muscular youthful limbs had taken their last indolent tan; wondering if she would ever see her own daughter again. Cathy Junior would have liked this boy, but of course he was much too young.

He stirred then, and Palma silently made her way back to her office. Though she had not entertained sexual thoughts about the boy, she felt a twinge of the voyeur's guilt. Time enough to talk with him the next day. Thank God, she thought, for objectivity.

When she returned to her office she was met by one of the Sonora field men with news of the Norway disaster. Palma spent the next two hours at her comm link trying to bridge the supply gap which the delta's loss represented. She did not think of the youth again until the next morning.

Sunday morning was like any other morning for Palma. A hectic scramble to rejuggle tasks; a radioed promise to use two valuable hours finding and treating one of the field men who, from the sound of it, had taken a massive radiation dose and could not be moved; and ah, yes, the Quantrill boy.

She checked her pocket, then took her coffee across the half-deserted little cafeteria. He was alone, studying her face as she neared him.

'It's about my parents,' he said. No barely-submerged hysteria there, but no hope either. And no wasted amenities.

She slid into a chair, willing him to play the man. “I 'm Dr. Catherine Palma, Mr. Quantrill. I've heard about you. Yes,' she went on levelly, 'I've just had word from — whoever finds out such things. You can't always believe what you hear.' Step One: give the poor devil a hint by manner and innuendo.

He looked away, as though to find some new exit from the room. 'That news about the Norway: we have to believe that, don't we?'