knowing how our shield works, completely wrong. Now what the hell are they doing?”
One of the gliders had rolled into a near-vertical bank, tightening its circle and descending, sideslipping off height as it came. It was followed quickly by another three and then suddenly all of the aircraft were spiralling down towards them.
“Oh, no!” said the captain, answering its own question. “Because their crossbow bolts were stopped at ground level, they think the shield is a wall surrounding us instead of a protective hemisphere. They’re going to crash into an invisible wall at full… Haslam, Dodds, deploy your tractors, wide focus and low power in pressor node. Try not to wreck their gliders, just fend them off before they hit it.”
“Sir,” Haslam protested, “I need a few seconds to focus on every target…”
“And there are too many targets,” Dodds joined in.
“Do what you can—” the captain had time to say before the first glider crashed into the curving invisible surface of the shield.
It looked as if the aircraft had broken up and collapsed into a loose ball of wreckage in midair without any apparent cause. Both occupants were entangled in the structure as it tumbled along the frictionless surface of the shield towards the ground. The second pilot, guessing that some strange weapon was being used against them, banked sharply in an attempt to climb up and away. But one wing struck the shield, crumpled, and its main spar penetrated the fuselage. The aircraft spun heavily into the frictionless surface and the passenger was thrown free before its pilot and the crippled glider began to slip groundwards at an accelerating rate.
“Haslam, Dodds, grab them,” said the captain sharply. “Ease them down gently. Right, Doctor?”
“You’re reading our minds, friend Fletcher,” said Prilicla; then, “Friend Naydrad, instruct. ”
The fall of the first glider was checked about five meters from the ground and eased down so gently that it barely disturbed the sand, but the second one was caught two meters up so that its speed and impact were only slightly diminished.
“… Instruct the robots to return all patients to recovery at once,” Prilicla went on. For a moment he stared at the semicircle of waiting spiders that had begun to edge closer while he tried to maintain stable hovering flight in spite of the almost physical
impact of their emotional hostility. He made a quick, mental calculation and spoke.
“Friend Fletcher,” he said, “will you please increase the…”
“The diameter of the meteorite shield by, I would estimate, ten metres,” the captain broke in. “Am I still reading your mind, Doctor?”
“You are, friend Fletcher,” he replied, looking up.
The perfect, circular formation of the attacking gliders had broken up in disorder and the individual aircraft were scattering wildly and trying to regain height, all except two which had collided over an unshielded area of beach. They had each locked one of their wings together so that they were rotating around their common center of gravity and descending in an uncontrolled flat spin. Their rate of descent was fairly slow so that the spiders under them had time to scurry clear of the point of impact. They would hit too far away and there would be too many uninjured and angry spiders in the area between for him to risk extending the shield farther to try for a medical rescue. He hoped their friends would be able to take care of them and relieve his team of the responsibility.
“Prepare for incoming casualties,” he said briskly. “Four patients, hostile and noncooperative requiring physical restraint. Physiological classification GKSD with no prior medical data on file. Impact trauma is expected with probable external and internal thoracic damage, extensive limb fracturing, and associated surface lesions. I will assess and assign the treatment priorities. Naydrad, send the antigravity litters and rescue equipment. The rest of you, let’s go.”
He flew towards the wreckage of the first glider but Murchison, sprinting across the sand on its long, shapely Earth-human legs, reached it seconds before he did. The litter with the rescue gear came a close third.
“Both casualties are deeply unconscious and pose no present danger,” he said, “or future danger, provided you get rid of those weapons. Do you need Danalta to assist?”
Murchison shook its head. He could feel its concern for the casualties, its excitement at being presented with a new professional challenge and a flash of anger as it pulled the two crossbows and quivers from the wreckage and threw them with unnecessary force through the one-way protective shield at the surrounding spiders. It said angrily, “For you two bloody idiots the war is over. Sorry, sir, my mind was wandering. These two are badly entangled in wreckage with several limbs trapped, and one thorax has been transfixed by a wing spar. Rather than cut them free here and transfer them to litters, I feel sure that there would be less trauma involved if we lifted them, wreckage and all, with a tractor beam and placed them close to the treatment-bay entrance. That way we’ll reduce the risk of compounding their injuries before treatment.”
“Your feeling is correct, friend Murchison,” he said, flying towards the second wreck. “Do that.”
Only the pilot in the second wreck was unconscious while its passenger was radiating anger, fear, and hatred. Suddenly it burst out of the wreckage and aimed its crossbow at him while scurrying rapidly towards the station entrance. Prilicla flew high and took vigorous evasive action while Danalta interposed its virtually indestructible body to protect him, then extruded the limbs necessary to give chase and disarm the fast-moving spider. But even a shape-changer of Danalta’s ability needed a few moments to change shape, and the spider was more than halfway to the open entrance of the treatment room where Murchison and Naydrad were attending to the casualties in the pile of wreckage that had been the first glider. Ignoring the DBDG and CHLI patients still waiting to be moved indoors, it was heading straight for the medical-team members, its crossbow cocked and aimed.
Suddenly it was rammed into the ground, skidding to a halt in the sand and lying motionless, as a tractor beam in pressor mode held it as if under a heavy glass plate to the ground.
“Sorry about that,” said Haslam, “I had to be fast rather than gentle. Let me know when you want me to release it.”
Murchison ran towards it and stopped just outside the pressor field and bent forward for a closer look as Danalta arrived.
“You damn near squashed it flat, Lieutenant,” it said a moment later. “Release it now. There are no limb fractures that I can see, but there is evidence of overall pressure trauma, asphyxiation, and it may already be unconscious…”
“It is,” said Prilicla as he flew closer, “but not deeply.”
“Right,” Murchison went on. “Danalta, lose its weapon and help me transfer it to a litter, under restraint. Naydrad, help me untangle the other two from this wreckage.”
A few minutes later Danalta and himself were back at the other wreck. The thoracic injuries caused by the penetration of the wing spar appeared to be life-threatening but its emotional radiation was not characteristic of an imminent termination. With very little help from Prilicla’s fragile limbs and pitifully weak muscles, the shape- changer extricated the pilot and transferred it, also under precautionary restraint, to the waiting litter. By that time all of the other patients had been moved indoors.
“… Based on the actions of your lone hero,” the captain was saying on the treatment-room communicator as they entered, “their attack strategy is plain. Deciding that they couldn’t get through what they thought was a protective wall, and knowing from previous reconnaissance flights that there weren’t many of us, they decided to go over the wall and land an airborne force to kill us before destroying the controls for the wall, except that it wasn’t a wall. Considering their incomplete information, it was a neat plan…”
“Our hero is regaining consciousness,” Murchison broke in. “Naydrad, hold its torso still so I can scan it.”
Prilicla flew nearer and tried hard to project feelings of comfort and reassurance at the returning consciousness. But it was so terrified and confused by its surroundings, and emoting the dread characteristic of an entity expecting the worst of all possible fates, that he could not reach it.
He glanced back through one of the room’s big windows at the spider horde beyond the shield, then up at the circling gliders as he felt the waves of hatred beating in on him. If those feelings weren’t rooted in pure xenophobia then something the med team was doing or perhaps not doing was being badly misunderstood because the spiders’ hatred and loathing was mounting steadily in intensity. But how could he explain a misunderstanding in the middle of a battle when all he could do was feel but not speak? War, he thought sadly as
