Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 8



After more than a year of near-continuous service in the fortresses Toller had accepted that he would never be able to sleep properly in weightless conditions. The inexplicable sensation of falling which plagued the station crews could be ignored in waking hours, but the dreaming mind had no defences against it. It was common among crew members to spend the entire rest period mumbling and twisting in their sleep-nets, seeing the planetary surface rise up to meet them with ever-increasing speed, and to awaken at the imagined point of impact with shrieks which entered and distorted the dreams of their comrades.

Toller had devised a personal routine which enabled him to deal with the problem. For the sixteen days of each duty period he made no real attempt to sleep, contenting himself with resting and drowsing when not required for active service. When it was time to return to Overland he would curl up inside the fleecy womb of the fallbag and sleep soundly throughout most of the long drop, rocked by its gentle buffeting and comforted by the low gurgling of the slipstream at the neck of the bag. At first he had been puzzled by his ability to sleep well in such unlikely circumstances, then had decided that the knowledge that he really was falling brought about a necessary accord between his intellect and the sensations of the body.

There was only one day left of his current duty spell and the tiredness had built up in him to the extent that within seconds of getting into his net he had lapsed into a bemused state, halfway between sleep and consciousness, in which there was little distinction between the remembered past and the vaguely apprehended present. It was peaceful inside Command Station One, which he had chosen as his living quarters in order to be close to the centre of operations at all times. The only sounds were the bored and scrappy conversation of the two men on watch, and the occasional swishing of the bellows which maintained a tolerable air pressure. Toller had turned his face to the wall of the station and was resting comfortably, something which would not have been possible at the beginning of the war. The walls were now insulated with flock and covered with skins which reduced heat loss and also helped prevent accidental puncturing of the shell.

One night, during one of his earliest duty spells, Toller had become aware of a faint but insistent whistling sound and had tracked it down to a large knot in a section of midship planking. The core of the knot had shrunk and was permitting air to escape. When Toller had tapped it with his knuckle the core had promptly disappeared into the outer void, and as he had occasioned the damage he took it on himself to repair the vent with cork and mastic. He had carried out the chore willingly, knowing that reports of it would be widely circulated, thus reinforcing the message that Lord Toller Maraquine did not set himself above the lowliest conscripts in the Sky Service.

He did such things with an undeniable degree of calculation, but excused himself on the grounds that only one kind of leadership was feasible—and correct—in the unnerving circumstances of the interplanetary war. King Chakkell could force soldiers to venture into the weightless zone on pain of death, but once they were there a commander could only get them to give of their best by showing that he was prepared to share every privation and face every danger.

And the dangers had been plentiful.

It had been fortunate indeed for the defenders that King Rassamarden, going about his unimaginable affairs in the unimaginable environment of the Old World, had not launched his invasion fleet in the shortest possible time. Tens of days had gone by after the positioning of the first two fortresses with no sign of enemy activity, and the grace period had been used—under liven Zavotle's direction-—to measure the radius of the neck of comparatively dense air at the juncture of the atmospheres. A skyship had been rotated into the plane of the weightless zone and had been driven laterally on jet power for an estimated sixty miles before the pilot had begun to lose consciousness through asphyxiation. He had been in the process of rotating the ship for the return when the balloon had ruptured because of excessive torque from the struts. The pilot had managed to retain his senses long enough to get himself into Overland's gravitational field by means of his personal pneumatic jet, and on the following day had parachuted to the ground within walking distance of Prad. His survival had been a great source of reassurance for rank-and-file members of the Sky Service, but the acquired data had troubled the top echelons of their leadership.

The gateway, as the bridge of breathable air came to be called, had a cross-sectional area of more than ten thousand square miles—and it was apparent that no achievable number of fortresses could bar it to intruders by gunnery alone.

Once again it had been Zavotle, the dogged eroder of problems, who had come up with a solution.

Inspired by the success of the personal flight units, he had proposed the simplest form of fighting craft possible—a jet tube which a man could sit astride as though he were on a bluehorn. Engines taken from ordinary airships would be about the right size, and when powered by pikon and halvell crystals would enable a warrior to range out many miles from his base. Zavotle's preliminary calculations, assuming an effective fighter radius of only twelve miles, showed that the entire area of the gateway could be covered by only twenty-five fortresses.

Drifting in the soft confines of his sleep-net, Toller recalled the look of wonder and gratification on King Chakkell's face as he was given the unexpected good news. There was no doubt that he could have forced through the construction of the hundred fortresses originally envisaged, but the strain on material and human resources would have been severe. Chakkell had been faced by an additional problem in that a large proportion of his subjects were too young to have had any first-hand experience of the terrors of the pterthacosis plague and were not inclined to accept punishing work loads, especially in the cause of a war which seemed so unreal. The concept of the jet fighter craft had therefore been embraced by Chakkell with a boundless enthusiasm which had led to the completion of the first batch in the remarkably short time of five days, thanks to nature having done most of the construction work in advance.

The jet engine was basically the lower part of the trunk of a young brakka tree, complete with the combustion chamber which had powered its pollination discharges. Pikon and halvell crystals were admitted to the chamber under pneumatic pressure, where they combined explosively to produce great quantities of miglign gas which was exhausted through the open end of the tube to drive the engine forward.

To convert the basic engine into an operational craft, it had been given a full-length wooden cowl which made for the easy mounting of equipment. A saddle-type seat had been installed for the pilot, aft of which were pivoting control surfaces. They looked like stubby wings, but in the weightless condition their sole function was to control the direction of flight. The fighter's armament consisted of two small breech-loading cannon, fixed to the sides of the cowl, which could only be aimed by aligning the entire craft with the target.

Toller, hovering between wakefulness and sleep, vividly remembered his first ride on one of the strange looking machines. The bulkiness of his skysuit had been augmented by his personal jet unit and parachute, and it had taken him some time to adapt to the seat and familiarise himself with the controls. Acutely aware of being watched by the skymen in and around Fortress One, he had pumped the pneumatic reservoir to maximum pressure, then had advanced the throttle lever. In spite of his having been modest with the power demand, he had been astonished by the surge of acceleration which had accompanied the roar of the exhaust. It had taken him perhaps three minutes, with an icy slipstream tearing at his face, to get the knack of keeping the fighter from doing a slow spiral as it howled through the sky. He had then shut down the engine, allowed air resistance to bring the craft to a halt and had turned in the saddle, laughing with acceleration rapture, to solicit the applause of his fellow pilots waiting by the fortress.

And the fortress had not been there!

That shock, that exquisite stab of pure panic, had been his introduction to the new physics of the jet fighter. It had taken him many seconds to locate and recognise the fortress as a tiny mote of hard light, almost lost in the silver-speckled blue of the universe, and to realise that he had been travelling at a speed previously undreamt of by man.

The nine fighters of Red Squadron were ranged line abreast, their upper surfaces gleaming in the sunlight. A short distance above them was what had been the first fortress, recently extended by the addition of three new sections to make it a command station. Other fortresses comprising the Inner Defence Group were positioned nearby, but they were insignificant objects, hard to see in the deep blue even though reflectors had been added to increase their visibility. Overland, flanked by the sun, was a fire-edged roof for the universe, and the vastness of Land made a circular floor, blue and green dusted with ochre, scrolled with white.

The other object of significance for the fighter pilots was the target ship. Although it was more than a mile away from them the hugeness of the balloon made it an important feature of the celestial environment, one with the apparent solidity of a third planet. It had been positioned well outside the theoretical plane of weightlessness, in the direction of Land, so that cannon balls fired at it would be drawn down into Land's gravitational field. Of the two fatalities which had occurred thus far in training, one had been that of a young pilot who had been making a highspeed practice run when he had been swept off his machine by a cannon ball which had hit him squarely in the chest. At first it was thought that he had been accidentally shot by another flier, then had come the realisation that the two-inch iron ball had been hanging almost motionless in the air, a deadly residue from an earlier practice firing. To prevent similar incidents, Toller had issued a general order that cannon could only be discharged when angled towards Land.

He was sitting astride his fighter, Red One, watching the target ship through binoculars and waiting for the pilot who had positioned it to return to safety. More than forty days had passed since the arrival of the first two fortresses in the weightless zone, and still there was no sign of a Lander invasion fleet. In some quarters there were rising hopes that King Chakkell's prognosis had been wrong, but Toller and Zavotle refused to be complacent. They had decided to use the strategic leeway to maximum advantage, and to that end were prepared to have a skyship whose balloon was nearing the end of its useful life sacrificed as a target.

The magnified image in Toller's binoculars showed the pilot leaving the skyship's gondola and bestriding a tethered fighter belonging to the as yet incomplete Blue Squadron. The pilot cast off, his craft surged away on a white plume of condensation, and seconds later came the powdery boom of his engine. He swept the fighter into an upward curve and disappeared in the radiant needle-spray of light emanating from the sun.

"Go in without delay," Toller shouted, gesturing to Gol Perobane, pilot of the furthermost left in the line of fighters. Perobane saluted and drove his machine forward, the roar of his exhaust swelling as it engulfed the remaining craft. His fighter swiftly shrank in apparent size, swooping down on the doomed skyship, and as he was flaring out of the curve both of his cannon streamed vapour. Toller, following the action with his binoculars, judged that Perobane had fired at exactly the right moment. He turned his attention to the balloon, expecting to see it quake and deform, and was disappointed when the serene curvatures appeared to be unaffected.

How can he have missed? he thought, giving the signal for the next fighter in line to blast off.

It was not until the fourth machine, flown by Berise Narrinder, had completed its ineffectual attack that he called a halt to the exercise. He blew crystals into his own engine and flew down to the target ship, cutting the power off early so that air resistance would bring him to a halt close to the huge balloon. At short range he was able to discern several holes in the varnished linen envelope, but they were surprisingly small—almost as if the material had partially healed its wounds—and were far short of the catastrophic damage the cannon should have inflicted. The balloon was beginning to show some slight wrinkling and slackness, but Toller attributed it to natural loss of heat as much as to the insignificant punctures. It was apparent to him that the skyship retained the capability of making a safe descent to ground level.

"Does this mean we have to start firing at the gondolas?" said Umol, drifting into position beside him on Red Two. His chest was visibly labouring to deal with the rarefied air.

Toller shook his head. "If we attack the gondolas we expose ourselves to return fire. We must attack from above, staying within the enemy's blind arc, and destroy his balloons with … with…" He paused, striving to visualise the weapon his fliers needed, and at that moment a large meteor struck across the sky far below them, briefly illuminating the scene from underneath.

"With something like that," Umol said, pulling down his scarf to unveil a smile.

"That is somewhat beyond our capabilities, but…" Toller paused again to let the meteor's tardy thunderclap roll by them. "But your thoughts fly in the right direction, old friend! Have somebody go back on board the ship and put heat into the balloon. Keep everything as it is until I return."

He placed his foot on the side of Umol's fighter, which had been nuzzling up to his own machine in stray air currents, and pushed hard. The two machines parted with a lazy wallowing action. Toller advanced his throttle lever, using an extreme sensitivity of touch developed since his first flight, and the fighter growled its way forward to pass within a few yards of the target balloon. As soon as he had gained enough speed to render the control surfaces effective he brought the nose up and around, and made a soaring return to the command station.

The weapon he brought back a short time later was a simple iron spike with a bundle of oil-soaked oakum bound to the blunt end. He ignited it by means of a phosphor wick and, whirling the spike to feed the flame, put the fighter into a shallow dive which took it close to the balloon's upper hemisphere. When he hurled the spike it flew down cleanly, with the stability of a dart, and sank its full length into the yielding material of the envelope. The varnished linen caught fire at once, producing a thick brownish smoke, and by the time Toller had come to a halt a sizeable area of the crown was alight. In less than a minute the balloon was beginning to fold in on itself, pulsing and losing symmetry, while the watching pilots shouted their approval. Without convection currents to bear it away, the smoke gathered around the stricken skyship in a strangely localised cloud.

Toller rejoined the group of fighters. The line was uneven, with no two machines parallel to each other or sharing the same up-down orientation, but that was something he had learned to accept. Unless the fighters were on the move there was little the pilots could do to control them, and several of the gifted youngsters—the ones who were already at home with the new form of flying—seemed to get a mischievous pleasure from conducting conversations with him in mutually inverted positions. Toller made no attempt to curb their high spirits—he had already decided that when war came the best fighting pilots would be those who were least shackled by traditional military customs and outlook.

"As we have just seen," he shouted, "fire is a good weapon to use against a balloon, but that was all too easy for me. I was able to go in very close, and at low speed, because there were no defenders on the ship and no enemy ships nearby trying to wing me. The low speed meant that I was able to stay in the ship's blind arc during the whole attack, but in battle things are likely to be very different. Most attacking dives will probably have to be conducted at high speed—which means you will not be able to pull out so quickly and will sink into the defenders' arc of fire. You are going to be very vulnerable at that stage—especially if the Landers have developed instant-fire cannon, like their muskets."

Perobane pulled down his scarf. "But it will only be for a few seconds if we're moving fast." He winked at the nearest pilots. "And I can assure you that I'll be moving very fast."

"Yes, but you might be heading straight towards another ship," Toller said, quelling some laughter.

Berise Narrinder signalled that she wanted to speak. "My lord, how about bows and arrows? Fire arrows, I mean. Wouldn't an archer be able to flare out of a dive much earlier and stay out of danger?"

"Yes, but…" Toller paused, realising that his objection had been a reflexive one based on the fact that he personally had never taken to the bow as a weapon. The proposal was sound, especially if the arrows were given fish-hook warheads which would trap them in the balloon material. And even a mediocre airborne archer—as he suspected he was likely to be—should find little difficulty in hitting a target as large as a skyship's balloon.

"But what, my lord?" Berise said, raising herself up on her footrests, encouraged by the other pilots' evident approval for her suggestion.

Toller smiled at her. "But would it be fair to the enemy? Armed with bows and fire arrows we would be able to shoot them out of the sky with the ease of a child bursting soap bubbles. It goes against all my sporting instincts to adopt such a…" His words were drowned out in a general shout of laughter from the line of pilots.

Toller bowed slightly towards Berise then turned away, not begrudging the fliers their moment of jubilation. He was the only member of the company with first-hand experience of warfare, and he knew that—no matter how well things might go for the Overlanders—there were some present whose time for nonchalance, merriment and optimism was drawing to an end, whether they lived or died.

At the midpoint between the two worlds the terms "night" and "littlenight" had lost their meaning. The diurnal cycle was divided into two equal spells of darkness of slightly less than four hours each, while the sun was being occulted by Land or Overland; and two daytime periods of just over eight hours. Toller had given up making any distinction between night and littlenight, foreday and aftday, being content to let time roll by him in an unremarkable sequence mileposted only by the fallbag returns to Overland. Especially when he was off duty, drowsing in his sleep net, there seemed no way to mark the passage of time but for the slow veering of the beams of sunlight from the portholes, and dreamy reprises became as real as life itself…

The sound of an argument slowly drew Toller back to full consciousness.

It was not uncommon to hear members of fortress crews in disagreement, but on this occasion there was a woman involved and Toller guessed it was Berise. For some reason he could not explain, he was interested in Berise Narrinder. There was no sexual element involved, of that much he was sure, because when Gesalla had made it clear that the intimate side of their marriage was over his capacity for physical passion had abruptly died. The process had been surprisingly quick and painless. He was a man who had no need for sex, who never thought of it or regretted its absence from his life, and yet he was aware of everything that Berise did. Without making any effort, he usually knew when her duty spells corresponded with his, where she was and what she was likely to be doing at any given moment.

He opened his eyes and saw that she was on watch—an obligatory duty for all personnel—tethered close to one of the large fixed binoculars which were permanently aimed at Land. Beside her was the tall angular figure of Imps Carthvodeer, the Inner Defence Group administrator, who normally stayed behind a wicker screen at the far end of the command station, in a cramped room he liked to refer to as his office.

"You can either draw pictures, or you can be on watch." Carthvodeer was saying peevishly. "You can't do two things at once."

"You may not be able to do two things at once, but I find it very easy," Berise said, her accentuated eyebrows drawn together.

"That's not what I mean." Carthvodeer's long face showed his frustration over the fact that although fighter pilots had the nominal rank of captain they were effectively senior to all non-combatants. "On watch duty you are supposed to concentrate all your attention on looking out for enemy ships."

"When the enemy ships come—if they come—they will be visible for many hours in advance."

"The point is that this is a military installation and has to be run on military lines. You are not being paid to draw pictures." Carthvodeer scowled at the rectangle of stiff paper in Berise's hand. "You don't even show artistic ability."

"How would you know?" Berise said, becoming angry. Farther along the cluttered tunnel of the station the crewman on bellows shift snorted in amusement.

"Why don't you two stop bickering and let a man get some rest?" Toller put in mildly.

Carthvodeer squirmed around in the air to face him. "I'm sorry if I disturbed you, sir. I have to prepare at least a dozen reports and requisitions in time to go down in the next fallbag, and I find it quite impossible to work and listen to the squeak-squeak-squeak of the captain's charcoal at the same time."

Toller was surprised to note that Carthvodeer, a fifty-year-old officer, was pale with emotion over the trivial incident. "You go back into your office and continue with your reports," he said, unfastening his net. "You won't be further distracted."

Carthvodeer, lips quivering, nodded and propelled himself away with poorly co-ordinated movements. Toller launched into a lazy flight which ended when he grasped a handhold close to Berise. Her green eyes triangulated on him in calm defiance.

"You and I are in a privileged position compared to a man like Carthvodeer," he said in a low voice.

"In what respect, my lord?" Of all the fliers in his command she was the only one who continued to address him formally.

"We wanted to come here. We leave the murky confines of these wooden boxes every day and fly through the air like eagles. This waiting and waiting is hard on all of us, but consider what it must be like for someone who had no wish to be here in the first place and who has no escape."

"I didn't realise the charcoal was so noisy," Berise said. "I'll find a pencil and work with that—if you have no objection."

"I don't mind at all. As you say, the Landers cannot take us by surprise." Toller craned his neck to see the drawing in Berise's hand. It showed the interior of the station in an atmospheric style, with strong emphasis on the parallel bars of sunlight slanting from the row of portholes. Human figures and machinery were suggested rather than detailed and in a manner Toller thought pleasing, although he was not qualified to judge the picture's merit.

"Why are you doing this?" he said.

She gave him a wry smile. "Old Imps said I was neglecting my duty, but I believe that everybody on Overland has a higher duty. Each of us has to search for and develop his or her artistic gift. I don't know if I can even be an artist, but I'm making the effort. If I fail I'll go on to poetry, music, dance… I'll keep searching until I find something I can do, then I'll do it to the best of my ability."

"Why is it a duty?"

"Because of the Migration! You can't do what we did and get away without paying a penalty. We left our racial soul behind on the Old World. Do you know that in all the ships that took part in the Migration there was not one painting? No books, no sculptures, no music. We left it all behind us."

"It was hardly a pleasure trip, you know," Toller said. "We were refugees carrying the bare essentials of life."

"We brought jewellery and useless money! Tons of weapons! A race needs an armature of culture to support every other aspect of its being, and we no longer have one. The King left it out of his great plan for a new Kolcorron. We left all that kind of thing behind, and that's why Overland feels so empty. It isn't because we are so few, spread out over a whole world—we suffer from spiritual emptiness."

Berise's ideas were strange to Toller, and yet her words seemed to find their mark somewhere far inside him, particularly the references to emptiness. As a young man in Ro-Atabri he had always enjoyed the setting of the sun and the gentle approach of darkness—but of late, even with Gesalla at his side, the once satisfying experience had become oddly flat and disappointing. No matter how beautiful the sunset, there was no longer any pleasure in reviewing the achievements of the day, no anticipation of the morrow. The associated emotion, had he ever acknowledged it, would have been a poignant sadness. Overland's western sky, as it deepened through gold and red to peacock green and blue, had seemed to ring with … emptiness.

The word had been a curiously apt one to come from a comparative stranger. He had been attributing his feelings to some unrecognised inner malaise, but had he just been offered a better explanation? Could he be an aesthete at heart, troubled by a growing awareness that his people lacked a cultural identity? The answer came quickly as the pragmatic, practical side of his nature reasserted itself.

No, he thought. The worm which eats out the core of my life is not concerned with poetry and art—and neither am I.

He half-smiled as he realised how far he had strayed, in an unguarded moment, into realms of fanciful thought, then he saw that Berise was staring at him.

"I wasn't smiling at your ideas," he said.

"No," she replied thoughtfully, her gaze still hunting over his face. "I didn't think you were."

And, of all the scenes which were played and replayed in Toller's memory, the brightest and most clearly incised were those from the day which saw the war's true beginning…

Seventy-three days had passed since the positioning of the first two fortresses. It was not a long period of time by the standards of men and women going about their routine affairs on the surface of Overland, but evolution was swift in the unnatural environment of the central blue.

Toller had completed his daily flying and archery practice, and had felt disinclined to return too quickly to the oppressive confines of the station. His fighter was floating about five hundred yards outside the datum plane, a vantage point from which he could observe the ebb and flow of activity in the Inner Defence Group and the surrounding space. To his left he could see a supply ship crawling up from Prad, its balloon a small brown disk sharply outlined against the convex patterns of Overland; to his right was Command Station One, flaring with sunlight against the indigo of the sky. Close to it were lesser three-section habitats which were used as workshops and stores, and in a loose swarm were the fighters of Red Squadron. Dozens of human figures, moving purposefully, could be seen in perfect detail in spite of being so tiny, mannikins from the hand of a master jeweller.

As always, Toller was impressed by the sheer amount of progress which had been made in the time available, since the first naive scheme to blanket the entire weightless zone with fortresses which would have relied on guns to repel an invasion. The invention of the fighter craft had been the major step forward, their astonishing speed having rendered obsolete the idea of each fortress being an isolated and self-sufficient entity. They had ceased to be fortresses, and were now assigned specialised roles—dormitory, workshop, store, armoury—in support of the all-important jets.

No matter how clever was the theoretical planner working on the ground, Toller had realised, innovation and development were usually products of practical experience. Even Zavotle, his thinking conditioned by normal gravity, had not foreseen the problems which would be posed by weightless debris and waste matter. The death of young Argitane, the fighter pilot killed by a drifting cannonball, had been a dramatic example, but the pollution of the environment by human wastes had become a matter of increasing concern.

The psychological stress of life in the gateway was augmented by the indignity and sheer unpleasantness of attending to one's bodily functions in zero gravity, and no commander could countenance the prospect of each station being surrounded by a thickening cloud of filth. Carthvodeer had been obliged to set up a collection team—quickly and mercilessly dubbed the Shit Patrol—whose unenviable task it was to trawl all offensive material into large bags. The bags were then towed a few miles down towards Land by a fighter and released to continue their journey under the influence of gravity—a practice which occasioned much ribaldry among the fortress crews.

Another problem, one yet to be resolved, had come with the attempts to establish an outer defensive ring. The original intention had been to place stations on a ring thirty miles across, greatly extending the area of interdiction, but with separations of more than about four miles they had become almost impossible to locate and keep supplied. A second fatality among fighter pilots had occurred when a flier, perhaps with substandard eyesight, had simply become lost while returning from an outer station, and had burned up all her power crystals in vain attempts to locate her base. Deprived of the heat generated by her engine, she had perished of hypothermia, and had been found purely by chance. Since that time the policy had been to concentrate all stations in the central group and rely on the fighters to extend their area of influence as required.

As was the case with all the other fliers, Toller had found that his lung capacity had increased to deal with the rarefied atmosphere, but it was impossible to adapt to the relentless cold of the weightless zone. By the time he had been drifting and meditating for twenty minutes all residual heat had leaked away through the wooden cowling of his engine, and he was beginning to shiver despite the protection of his skysuit. He was pumping up the fighter's pneumatic reservoir, preparatory to returning to the command station, when his attention was drawn to a star which had suddenly increased in luminosity for a second and now was emitting regular pulses of brilliance. No sooner had he deduced that the star was actually a distant station, and that it was sending out a sunwriter message, when he heard the sound of a trumpet, its repeated blasts fast-fading in the thin air. His heart stopped, lay quiescent for a subjective eternity, then began a rhythmic jolting.

They're coming! he thought, sucking in air. The game begins at last!

He fed his engine and swooped down towards the command station. As the slipstream began to bite at his eyes he pulled his goggles into place and instinctively searched the area of sky between him and the curving vastness of Land, but was unable to find anything unusual. The slow-moving ships of the enemy armada could be as much as a hundred miles away, visible only in telescopes.

As Toller neared the station the trumpeter, positioned in the newly-added pressure lock, ended the warning call and retreated inside. Fighter pilots, distinguished by the squadron colours on their shoulders, were issuing from the nearby dormitory tube, and swaddled auxiliaries were sailing towards the dart-like machines in their care, propelled by the hissing jets of their personal units.

A mechanic swam to meet Toller with a tethering line, leaving him free to dive straight into the long cylinder of the station. Both doors of the pressure lock had been left open and he found himself suddenly translated from a boundless sunlit universe to a dim microcosm which was fogged with vapours and crowded with human figures and the appurtenances of their continued existence.

Carthvodeer and Commodore Biltid, the operations chief, were hovering by the look-out post, deep in discussion, Biltid, directly appointed by Chakkell, was a stiff-necked and formal individual who was equally embarrassed by his inability to get over the fall-sickness and the ambiguity of his relationship with Toller. The fact that Toller was his superior and yet insisted on riding a jet like an ordinary pilot frequently placed him in dilemmas he found it difficult to resolve.

"Look here, my lord," he said, espying Toller. "The enemy comes in force."

Toller drew himself to the binoculars and looked into the eyepieces. The image which washed into his eyes was of a fiercely brilliant background, blue and green whorled with white, in the centre of which was a meagre sprinkling of black dots, each ringed with prismatic fringes caused by imperfections in the optical system. By narrowing and straining his eyes, Toller found that he could distinguish even smaller specks mingled with the others, and suddenly the scene acquired depth, became vertiginous. He was looking downwards through a vertical cloud of skyships, a cloud which was many miles in depth. It was impossible to say how many ships it contained, but there could not be less than a hundred.

"You are correct," he said, raising his head to look at Biltid. "The enemy comes in force—which is what one would have expected."

Biltid nodded, covered his mouth with a handkerchief, and suddenly the sour smell which usually surrounded him intensified. "I … I'm sorry," he said, gulping noisily. "We must make ready."

How astute, Toller thought, then became sorry for a man who had been thrust willy-nilly into an unenviable situation as an instrument of the ruler.

"We retain our two great advantages," he said. "We are in sight of the enemy, but he is not aware of us; and we have the fighter craft—something the enemy cannot have even envisaged at this stage. It is now up to us to press home those advantages while we may."

Biltid nodded even more vigorously. "All fighter craft are in a state of mechanical readiness, and will be fuelled and armed. I propose engaging the enemy with the Red and Blue Squadrons, and holding Green in reserve. That is, if you have no…"

"Those might be good tactics in ground warfare," Toller said, "but remember that we will never again be able to take the Landers by surprise. There is a possibility that we could end this war on the very day it begins if we deal the enemy a sufficiently devastating first blow. In my opinion we should deploy the three squadrons and give all our pilots experience of combat."

"You're right as always, my lord." Biltid finished dabbing his mouth. "Though I'd be happier if we had some means of estimating the enemy's rate of ascent. If they reach the datum plane during the hours of darkness there is a chance of some slipping past us unseen."

"Nothing is to slip past us," Toller snapped, losing his patience. "Nothing!"

He moved away from Biltid and Carthvodeer, and went to another porthole where he could have an unobstructed view of Land. The sun was moving towards the Old World and would pass behind its rim in approximately two hours. Toller did some mental calculations and swore as he realised that the timing of the first encounter could be highly unfavourable for the defenders. The two daily periods of darkness had been named Landnight and Overlandnight, depending of which of the planets was occulting the sun, and although they were about equal in length they had important differences.

Landnight, which was coming next, would begin when the sun passed behind Land, but at that stage Overland would still be fully illuminated and the light reflected from it would be strong enough to permit reading. During the following hour that light would steadily weaken as Land's cylindrical shadow slid across Overland, then would come roughly two hours of deepnight, lasting until Overland was again kissed by the sun's rays. Throughout deepnight the heavens would be ablaze with stars, glowing whirlpools and the splayed radiance of comets, but the comparative level of general illumination would be very low—and even a ship's balloon would be hard to detect in the dim reaches of the weightless zone. The problem did not arise to the same extent during Overlandnight because Land was larger than its sister world and could not be completely swallowed by its shadow.

If the enemy ships were a hundred miles away, Toller reckoned, and were already at maximum speed, they could reach the datum plane during deepnight. He contemplated the prospect for a moment, then decided he was being unduly pessimistic. The Lander pilots would be nervous on experiencing the effects of weightlessness for the first time, and would also be apprehensive about the forthcoming inversion manoeuvre. It was entirely reasonable to assume that they would approach the weightless zone slowly and cautiously, and would plan to perform the supremely unnatural act of turning their ships upside down in good light conditions.

Having settled his mind, Toller left the chilling dank fug of the station and devoted the following hour to making a tour of the Inner Defence Group, calling at the other two command stations which were the bases for Blue Squadron and the newly completed Green. Reports from those on watch showed that the invaders were indeed advancing slowly, but the fighter pilots who had turned out prematurely were unable to resume their rest when darkness came. Some of them passed the time in noisy discussion or gambling by candlelight, while others hovered close to their machines, obsessively checking on the fuelling and arming procedures of the mechanics.

Finally a sliver of light appeared at the edge of Overland and rapidly expanded along it to form a slim crescent. As the sunlit area of the planet spread steadily into the gibbous phase, heralding the reappearance of the sun. Toller made repeated visits to the look-out post in Command Station One and peered through the binoculars. The vast disk of Land was bathed in a dim mysterious light, reflected from the sister world, which gave it the semblance of a sphere of translucent wax somehow lighted from within. Although brightening by the minute, the backdrop it provided refused to yield up a discernible image of enemy skyships, and—in spite of himself—Toller began to fantasise about the invaders having sustained a speed which had enabled them to pass through the datum plane under cover of darkness. The partial emergence of the sun flooded the interior of the station with light, and even then there was an instant during which the ships of the Lander armada remained hidden in the fringes of the planet's slow-swinging shadow.

Then, suddenly, they were there.

Unexpectedly beautiful, they appeared in Toller's field of view as a swarm of tiny, perfect crescents of brilliance, level upon level of them, exquisite in their crafted uniformity. For a moment he was awe-struck by the achievement the spectacle represented. Given the audacity and courage to cross the interplanetary gulf in frail constructs of cloth and wood, his kind should be able to unite and turn their eyes towards the outer universe instead of squandering their energies in…

"They can't be very far away," Biltid said, looking up from the other pair of binoculars. "Twenty or thirty miles. We haven't much time."

"Time enough," Toller said, recalled to the practical world of the soldier. On an impulse he propelled himself to his sleeping net, unhooked his sword from the wall beside it and strapped the weapon to his waist. He was conscious of how incongruous the sword was in the circumstances, but it had a psychological value to him in the preparation for battle. Going out through the airlock he saw that the other eight pilots of his squadron were already at their machines, and auxiliaries were swimming among them igniting the hooded fire-cups which had been installed forward of the saddles. The same scene was repeated in miniature, some distance away in the boundless blue, as the other two squadrons were made ready.

Some of the Blue and Green machines were already edging towards Command Station One to form a combined force, their paths marked by pulses of white condensation. As the swarm increased in size there were numerous gentle collisions between the fighters, occasioning a good deal of banter among the pilots and angry comments from the mechanics who were in danger of being crushed. As he drifted clear of the station Toller shaded his eyes from the sun with a gloved hand and looked in the direction of Land.

He found that the invaders could now be seen without optical aid, silvery specks at the very limits of vision, and he wished for a means of estimating their range. He had to engage the enemy well below the datum plane so that every ship destroyed would fall back towards Land, but if he went too far down to meet then his fighters' fuel reserves would be depleted. It looked as though the ability to judge distances accurately was going to be even more important in aerial combat than on the ground.

When the three squadrons were assembled Toller got astride Red One and wedged his toes into the fixed stirrups. He unclipped his bow, secured it to his left wrist with the safety loop and checked that the quivers mounted on each side of the cowling had a full complement of arrows. His heart was pounding again, and he was aware of the familiar old excitement, tinged with an inexplicable element of sexuality, which had always preceded a foray into the dangers of combat. While pumping up the pressure reservoir of his fuel feed, he glanced along the straggling, yawing line of fighters. The pilots were androgynous shapes in their skysuits, their faces hidden by scarves and goggles, but he picked out Berise Narrinder immediately and was compelled to issue a final word of caution.

"We have rehearsed our battle plan many times," he called out, "and I know you are all anxious to test your mettle against the enemy. I know, also, that you will conduct yourselves with courage, but beware of becoming too courageous. In the fever of battle it is possible to grow reckless, to be lured into taking unnecessary risks. But bear in mind that each of you has the potential to destroy many of the enemy's ships, and therefore each of you has a value to our cause which is much greater than you may personally place on your life.

"Today we will smite the invader hard—harder than he can ever have dreamed of—but I will not countenance any losses on our side. Not a single pilot, not a single fighting machine! If you expend all your arrows do not be tempted to attack with your cannon. Retire at once from the battle and console yourself with the knowledge that you will be an even more skilful and more deadly opponent on a future occasion."

Nattahial, the pilot of Blue Three, nodded and vapour wisped through his scarf. "Whatever you wish, sir."

Toller shook his head. "Those are not my wishes—they are my direct orders. Any pilot I see behaving like an idiot will have me to answer to afterwards, and I can assure you that will be a more harrowing experience than facing a few scrawny Landers. Is that understood by all?"

Several of the pilots nodded vigorously, perhaps too vigorously, and others chuckled. With few exceptions they were young volunteers from the Air Service. They had been adventure-hungry to begin with, and the boredom of the long wait for this day had turned them into overwound human springs. Toller genuinely wanted them to heed his warnings, but he knew from combat experience that a balance had to be struck between prudence and passion. A warrior with too great a commitment to self-preservation could be even more of a liability than a glory-hunting fool, and the minutes ahead were likely to reveal how many of each were in his command.

"Is it your opinion," he asked, drawing his goggles down into place, "that I have devoted enough time to the making of speeches?"

"Yes!" The loudness of the general assent briefly filled the sky.

"In that case, let us go to war." Toller pulled his scarf up to cover his mouth and nostrils, and put the fighter into a curving dive which centred Land in his field of view. The sun was barely clear of the planet's rim, hurling billions of needles of light against him without creating any warmth. Amid a swelling roar of engine exhausts the other fighters took up their assigned positions, each squadron creating a V-shaped formation.

Slightly behind Toller on the left, leading the Blues, was Maiter Daas, and on his right at the apex of the Green Squadron was Pargo Umol. He wondered what the two middle-aged men—veterans of the old Skyship Experimental Squadron and the Migration—felt as they dropped towards the planet of their birth in circumstances they could never have envisaged. Analysing his own emotions, he was again disturbed to find that he felt youthful, fulfilled, totally alive. Part of him longed to be at home with Gesalla, making amends for all the ways in which he had failed her, and yet within him was the knowledge that, given the impossible opportunity, he would prolong this moment indefinitely. In a magical, irrational universe he would choose to live this way until he died—forever riding out through sprays of cold pure light to face exotic foes and unknown dangers. But in the real universe this phase was likely to be brief, perhaps encompassing only one battle, and when it was all over life would be a thousand times more humdrum than before, with little for him to do other than passively wait for an unremarkable death.

Perhaps, the thought came softly slithering, it would be better not to survive the war.

Shocked by where the bout of introspection had taken him, Toller forced his thoughts to bear on the task in hand. The plan was to engage the enemy ten to fifteen miles below the datum plane, but as always he was bedevilled by the impossibility of estimating distance or speed in the featureless oceans of air. When he looked over his shoulder he saw that the twenty-seven fighters had laid down a kind of aerial highway with their condensation trails. It narrowed to a distant point, vaporous white threads gathered into perspective's fist, and already the clustered stations and habitats were hard to see, even though he knew exactly where to look. The condensation would later disperse into invisibility, and when that happened the three squadrons would be in danger of becoming lost.

How far had they descended? Ten miles? Fifteen? Twenty?

Swearing at the sun for capriciously aiding the enemy, Toller screened off the blinding orb with his hand and searched for the ascending fleet. The combined speeds of the two forces had brought them much closer in a short time, and now the array of gleaming crescents could easily be resolved by the naked eye, each a perfect miniature of the fire-cusped planet behind it. They were concentrated in a small area of the sky, like glittering spawn.

This is far enough, Toller told himself. We wait here.

He spread both his arms in a prearranged signal and shut down his engine. The absorbent silence of infinity abruptly pervaded the scene as the other pilots closed their throttles in unison. The fighters coasted for some time, gradually becoming uncontrollable as air resistance robbed them of their speed, the V-formations loosening and distorting while they came to rest. Toller knew the appearance of being at a standstill was illusory—the machines had entered Land's gravitational field and were falling, but this close to the datum plane their speed was negligible.

"We will fight here," he called out. "It will profit us to be patient and allow the enemy to come to us, because the longer he takes the farther the sun will move out from behind his ships. Be sure to keep your igniter cups in good trim, and do not allow your hands and limbs to stiffen with the cold. If you think you are becoming too cold you are permitted to make short circular flights to put heat into your machines and warmth into your backsides, but remember that your crystals have to be conserved as much as possible for the battle."

Toller settled into the wait, wishing he had a reliable means of measuring the time. Mechanical clocks were much too large for tactical purposes, and even the traditional military timepiece was of no value in the weightless zone. It consisted of a slim glass tube containing a cane shoot which was marked with black pigment at regular intervals. When a pace-beetle was put into the tube it devoured the shoot from one end, moving at the unchanging rate common to its kind, thus indicating the passage of time with an accuracy which was good enough for commanders in the field. In zero gravity, however, the beetle was found to move erratically, often ceasing to eat altogether. At first it had been thought to be an effect of the extreme cold, but the same unsatisfactory results were obtained when the tube was kept warm, leading to the remarkable conclusion that the mindless bead-sized beetle was disturbed by its lack of weight. Toller had been intrigued by the findings, which in his mind established a link between human beings and the lowliest and most insignificant creatures on the planet. They were all part of the same biological phenomenon, but only humans had the intelligence which enabled them to override the dictates of nature, to impose their will on the organic machinery of their bodies.

Toller could hear the pilots of his squadron conversing as they waited, and he was pleased to note that there was none of the abrupt laughter which often indicated a failure of nerve. In particular he liked the demeanour of Tipp Gotlon, the young rigger he had promoted to pilot status against the counsel of Biltid. Gotlon, who had shown an instinctive grasp of the mechanics of flying, was exchanging occasional quiet words with Berise Narrinder and between times was scanning the sky ahead with shaded eyes. At eighteen he was the youngest of all the pilots, but he looked eminently calm and self-possessed.

As the minutes dragged by Toller gradually became aware of another sound—a low booming which he identified as emanating from the exhaust cones of the approaching fleet. The balloons of the Lander ships were becoming easier to see as the source of illumination moved progressively to the side, and they had greatly increased in apparent size. Umol and Daas were frequently turning their heads in his direction, obviously impatient for the order to attack, but Toller had decided to hold fire until he could pick out some detail of the crown panels and load tapes on the enemy balloons, by which time the foremost of them should be less than a mile below the waiting fighter craft.

The lack of spatial referents helped confuse the eye, but the skyships seemed to be ascending in groups of three and four, with quite a large vertical interval between the echelons. They formed an attenuated and elongated cloud many miles in depth, with those at the bottom of the stack appearing remote and shrunken compared to the leaders. The arrangement was a logical one for considerations of flight safety, especially when flying in darkness, but it was almost the worst possible for the penetration of defended territory. Toller smiled as he saw that the Landers had unwittingly given him an advantage which more than compensated for the unfortunate positioning of the sun.

Yielding to a sudden accession of battlefield humour, he drew his sword and used the incongruous weapon to make the downward stroke of the attack signal.

What followed was not a concerted swoop on the invaders, but a deliberate and systematic process of destruction. In conference with Biltid and his two squadron leaders, Toller had decided that—in the first battle of its kind in all of human history—it would be unwise to have twenty-seven high-speed machines milling and plunging through a comparatively small volume of airspace. Also, for psychological reasons he considered important, he did not want a random pattern of success, with some pilots emerging as heroes claiming multiple kills and others failing to achieve the first blood so vital to their morale.

Accordingly, the response to Toller's signal was that only the ninth pilot in each formation detached his machine and rode down to meet the unsuspecting enemy. The three fighters traced lines of vapour which converged on the uppermost of the Lander echelons, then swung across to the right, each one casting off a splinter of amber light. A few seconds later three of the leading balloons developed penumbras of smoke, became dark flowers with writhing centres of red and orange flame. Toller was surprised by the dramatic speed of their destruction compared with that of the balloon once used for target practice, then realised it was because the Lander ships were rising and creating a slipstream which not only fed the flames but directed them down the sides of the varnished linen envelopes.

Another gift, another good omen, he thought as the second trio of fighters roared away on plumes of condensation. One of them picked off the remaining skyship of the four that had formed the top echelon and curved off to the right, while its companions speared on down to find targets in the next level. Their success was betokened after a brief interval by the blossoming of two more dark flowers.

As the carnage continued, with wave after wave of fighters darting down into the affray, Toller began to speculate on the possibility of the entire Lander fleet being destroyed in a single catastrophic engagement. Due to the great size of a skyship's balloon in comparison to the gondola, an ascent had to be made blindly, with the occupants trusting that the sky directly above contained no hazard. When many ships were travelling together the roar of the burners drowned out all other sounds, therefore the members of any given layer could remain quite unaware of cataclysms above until it was too late to take evasive action. If the fighters were able to work their way down to the bottom of the stack, incinerating the skyships echelon by echelon, none of the enemy would survive to describe to their King how the destruction of his armada had been achieved. Such a total defeat could, indeed, end the interplanetary war on the very day it had begun.

Toller's mind was filled with that heady prospect as he watched the sky being transformed and sullied by conflict. The vapour trails were a complex skein of white tangled around an irregular, granular core of smoke and flame, and as successive fighter groups dived into action it became difficult to impose any sense of order on the scene. The carefully drawn up battle plan was being obscured by frenzied scribblings of condensation.

When it came the turn of the penultimate trio of fighters to set off Toller made a broad curving gesture with his free hand, signifying that they should swing outwards during the descent and intersect the column of skyships below the worst of the chaos. The pilots nodded and roared away on their diverging courses. They were just beginning to swing inwards again when from somewhere in the midst of the havoc came the sound of a powerful explosion.

Toller guessed that a Lander weapon, probably a pikon-halvell bomb, had detonated accidentally—a catastrophic event for the ship carrying it, but one which could benefit the invasion fleet as a whole. The report would have been heard far down the stack, alerting the lower echelons to the fact that all was not well. On hearing it any prudent pilot would use his lateral jets to turn his ship on its side so that he could observe the sky above.

Toller glanced with a new urgency at the other two squadron leaders, Daas and Umol, who were now his only two companions in the serenity of the upper air. "Are we ready?" he shouted.

Daas placed a hand on his lower back. "The longer we sit here the worse my rheumatism gets."

Toller blew crystals into his engine, felt his head being pulled back by acceleration, and watched the battle zone expand to fill his field of view. He had never before been so conscious of the jet fighter's speed. The vapour trails rushing towards him had the semblance of sculpted white marble, and he found it difficult not to flinch as the solid-seeming walls slammed in on him from one side and another, sometimes converging in a promise of certain death. Entire arctic kingdoms had streamed by him before he began to glimpse the wrecks of Lander ships. Their upward momentum had carried them into the flaming tatters of their balloons. He saw soldiers frantically ridding their gondolas of swathes of burning linen and wondered if they understood the futility of their actions. The ruined ships, although apparently locked in place, were already yielding to the gravitational siren call of their parent world, already embarking on the plunge to the rocky surface which waited thousands of miles below.

Toller had expected a considerable gap between the layers of burning ships, and was surprised to find them in a single loose conglomerate, sometimes almost in contact with each other. He realised that the first ships to be attacked had shut down their engines, and those below—still under way—had blundered in among them, vertically compacting the scene of destruction. Floating here and there among the smoke-shrouded leviathans were human figures, some struggling and some quiescent, pathetic debris from the gondola which had been exploded.

Toller barely had time to check that they were not wearing parachutes, then he was through the crowded volume of sky and bearing down on a group of four ships. At the edges of his vision he could see Daas and Umol riding in parallel with him. The Lander pilots must have reacted quickly to the sound of the explosion, because three of the ships were already tilted and he could see rows of faces lining their gondola walls. Far below them other ships, layer upon receding layer, were also turning on their sides.

Toller closed his throttle and allowed the fighter to coast while he snatched an arrow from one of his quivers. The oil-soaked wad at its tip caught fire as soon as he thrust it into the hooded igniter cup. He nocked the arrow and drew the bow, feeling heat from the warhead blowing back on his face, and fired at the balloon of the nearest ship, using the instinctive aiming technique of a mounted hunter. Even at speed and with swiftly changing angles the vast convexity of the balloon was an absurdly easy target. Toller's arrow needled into it and clung like a spiteful mosquito, spreading its venom of fire, and already he was plunging down past the gondola and its doomed occupants. There came a spattering of flat reports and splinters erupted from the wooden engine cowling scant inches from his left knee.

That was quick, he thought, shocked by the speed with which the Landers had brought their muskets into action. These people know how to fight!

He steered his machine into a right-hand turn and looked over his shoulder to see two of the other balloons beginning to crumple and wither amid wreaths of black smoke. Daas and Umol, riding on brilliant plumes of condensation, were swinging into wider curves which would bring them into the cluster newly formed by the three squadrons.

As far as Toller could ascertain, all his fliers had survived the first strike and all of them could claim victories, but the nature of the battle was changing and would no longer be so one-sided. The time for calculated and cold-blooded executions had ended, and from now on individual temperament would come into play, with incalculable results. In particular, there could be no more leisurely swoops through the skyships' blind arcs. Not only were the ships far below turning on their sides, they were doing it in such a way that the vulnerable upper hemispheres of their balloons were facing the centre of each group. Toller had no doubt that rim-mounted cannon were already being loaded, and although the Landers had no metals their traditional charges of pebbles and broken stones would be highly effective against the unprotected fighter pilots.

"Strike where you can," he shouted, "but be…"

His words were lost in the roars of multiple exhausts. The air around him became fogged with white as the most impetuous of the young pilots darted away in the direction of the apparently motionless skyships. Cannon began to boom almost immediately.

Too soon, Toller thought, then it came to him that the sheer speed of the fighters could actually be a disadvantage in this kind of aerial warfare. Long after a skyship's cannon had been discharged it would be surrounded by relatively static clouds of rocky fragments, harmless to the slow-moving ships, but potentially deadly to attacking fighter pilots.

Pushing the thought aside, he gunned his machine into a downward curve which took him on a dizzying plunge in parallel with the vertical conflict. In the ensuing minutes the sky became a fantastic jungle, crowded with thickets, ferns and interlocked vines of white condensation, hung with the bulbous fruit of skyships, garlanded with black smoke. The slaughter went on and on in a frenzy incomprehensible to anyone who had never known the bitter passions of battle—and, as Toller had foreseen, the Landers began to draw blood.

He saw Perobane, on Red Nine, make a reckless dive on two ships and pull out of it with such force that his control surfaces were ripped off. The fighter did an abrupt somersault, throwing Perobane clear of it into a course which took him within twenty yards of a gondola. Soldiers on board fired at him with their muskets. The jerking of his body showed that many were finding their mark, but the soldiers—perhaps aware that their balloon was on fire and that they were bound to die—kept on shooting at Perobane in futile revenge until his skysuit was a mass of crimson tatters.

Shortly afterwards, the pilot of Green Four—Chela Dinnitler—made the mistake of slowly coasting past a soldier who was drifting free some distance from a gondola which was wrapped in the blazing material of its envelope. The soldier, who had appeared to be unconscious, stirred into life, calmly levelled his musket and shot Dinnitler in the back. Dinnitler slumped over his controls and the fighter's exhaust spouted vapour. The machine, with the pilot freakishly locked in his seat, went into a twisting descent which carried it through the lower fringes of the battle. It dwindled into the backdrop of Land, passing through a sprinkling of circular white clouds which resembled balls of fluffy wool.

The soldier who had killed Dinnitler was fitting a new pressure sphere to his musket, and—incredibly in view of the death-fall facing him—was laughing as he worked. Toller advanced his throttle and drove straight at the man, intending to ram him, then came the thought that even a fleeting proximity might prove enough to infect him with pterthacosis. He hit the plunger on one of his cannon, shattering power crystal containers in the breech, and held a steady course until detonation occurred. The gun had not been designed for precise marksmanship, but luck was with Toller and the two-inch ball hit the soldier squarely on the head, cartwheeling him away in spirals of blood.

Toller banked the fighter away from the corpse and was about to enter the main battle again when, belatedly, his memory of the odd-looking circular clouds began to trouble him. He flew well clear of the column of turmoil and studied the sky below its base. The clouds were still there and now there were more of them. It took Toller several seconds to realise that he was looking at the exhaust plumes of skyships—seen from "below" their gondolas. Pilots in the lower echelons had inverted their ships and were fleeing the scene of destruction upside down. It was something no commander liked to do, because when the thrust of an engine was augmented by gravity a ship could quickly exceed its design speed and tear itself apart, but for the Landers the risk was an acceptable one in the circumstances.

Toller's first impulse was to reverse his original battle plan and go after the most distant of the enemy ships, but an inner voice sounded a warning. In the heat of combat he had lost track of time, and his fighters had been burning crystals at a prodigious rate all the while. He pumped up the pneumatic reservoir of his fuel feed and knew from the number of strokes required that the amount of solid material within the system had been greatly depleted. Looking up towards where the battle had begun he saw that the earliest condensation trails had faded. The squadron's home base was totally invisible, concealed somewhere in the trackless immensities of the space between the worlds, and finding it could be a lengthy job which would require ample reserves of power.

He ignited one of his remaining arrows and slowly waved it above his head. During the next few minutes the other pilots, recognising the signal, detached themselves from the ferment of smoke and cloud to join him. Most of them were intoxicated with excitement and were loudly exchanging stories of daring and triumph. Legends had been born, Toller knew, and were already acquiring the embellishments which would be further elaborated upon in the taverns of Prad. Berise Narrinder was one of the last to arrive, and there was a cheer when it was seen that she had managed to put a line around Perobane's crippled machine and had it in tow.

When it was apparent that disengagement had been completed, Toller counted the fighters and was disturbed to find there were only twenty-five, including the one Berise had salvaged. He ordered a squadron by squadron check, and there was a lull in the hubbub of talk as it was realised that Green Three, which had been flown by Wans Mokerat, was missing. At some point in the whirling turmoil of the battle Mokerat had met his fate, unobserved by any of his comrades, and had disappeared completely, perhaps engulfed by a burning skyship.

The sobering effect of the discovery was as brief as Toller had expected, with the noise level among the other fliers quickly swelling to what it had been. He knew the youngsters were not heartless by nature—it was simply that, although physically unscathed, they too had become victims of war. The same thing must have happened to me long ago, he thought, but without my understanding. And only recently has it been revealed to me what I am—a fleshly automaton whose essential hollowness renders him incapable of sustaining warmth or joy.

Directly ahead of him, but a considerable distance away, was the gondola of a ruined skyship. Its occupants had successfully cast adrift all remnants of their burning balloon, which now hovered above and around them in great flakes of grey ash. The gondola and the fighter squadrons remained in fixed relative positions, because all were falling at the same speed.

Again Toller wondered if the Lander soldiers fully understood that their rate of descent, although insensible at this stage, would show an inexorable increase which would guarantee their deaths. Some of the soldiers were still firing their muskets in spite of the fact that the fighters were out of range, and—in one of the flukes which so often occur in seeming defiance of probability—a bullet came slowly tumbling towards Toller and came to rest within arm's length.

He plucked it out of the air and saw that it was a stubby cylinder of brakka wood. He put it away in a pocket, feeling a strange affinity with the alien marksman. From one dead man to another, he thought.

"We have done enough for this day," he shouted, raising his gloved hand. "Now let us find our way home!"