Sarah couldn't think. She could barely breathe.
'What's our destination, girl?' Osman demanded in her ear. His voice sounded tinny and stretched-out. It irritated her as if an insect had flown into her earl canal. She tried pulling off her headphones but without their protection the noise of the helicopter's rotor was deafening. It was like a buzzsaw sawing through her sinus cavities. She hurried to pull the headphones back on her head.
She didn't know what to do next. Ayaan had taught her a lot about small unit tactics. There had been lessons in stealth and camouflage and guerilla warfare. None of it came back to her then as she sat down on the deck plates of the Jayhawk and stared at Gary.
He had grown. There was no mistaking it. The stubby little crab legs that had once supported his skull were now as long as Sarah's forearms. With her subtle vision she could see that he was still growing, that it was an ongoing process. She watched it happen. He was drawing energy out of the earth's biological field, using it to heal himself. He was drawing on the energy supply that Ptolemy had showed her, the Source, to rebuild his form'except it wasn't his human form he was recreating. It was something new.
This close to the Source energy permeated the air she breathed, it filled up the sky. She could almost see the Source itself, right through the fuselage of the helicopter. It was like a projection on top of her vision, a torrent, a shower of pure light and form that constantly erupted and burst and flashed across her. Her very own light show.
'Sarah,' Osman said, at the same moment Ptolemy stepped forward and touched her arm.
Sarah,the mummy said.
She stared up at him with wild eyes. 'Help me,' she said, 'give me some advice. I'm, I'm drowning here. What do we do?'
our flying only machine advantage is this flying advantage machine,Ptolemy told her.
'We can't loiter forever,' Osman said. She had spoken into her microphone and he had heard her, assumed she was talking to him. 'We'll eventually have to set down.'
we aloft must stay must aloft,the mummy said.
They were both right. Sarah remembered perfectly well when Ayaan had ordered Osman to set down back in Egypt. When she had ventured out on foot and immediately been overwhelmed by accelerated ghouls and the green lich who commanded them. Sarah had, herself, protested against a landing. She had said it was stupid. That it was suicide.
She had no choice. 'Take us down, Osman,' she said, her eyes fixed on Ptolemy's face. 'Get us about a mile's clearance from that column and then find a flat spot we can set down in.'
Ptolemy did not chastise her. She'd made a decision, which was the main thing. They would go on foot from here. They really had little choice. The gorilla in the hot rod had a whole pile of Stingers ready to go. The one advantage Sarah had possessed, air superiority, had transformed into a liability.
It took a while for Osman to find an acceptable landing site. Even then it wasn't perfect'a rough hole in the trees where a limb of unbroken rock stuck up out of the side of the mountain. It had little cover and it provided no kind of access at all to the road. Had Sarah considered the possibility earlier they could have brought rappelling gear and hot-roped down into a better spot. But she hadn't thought of that. She hadn't thought of any possible problems. Her plan had looked so good she'd forgotten to make sure she had prepared for contigencies.
Ayaan would have slapped her, she thought, and rightly so.