5
Night Flight
Larson Sands stretched inside his environment suit and wished the ache in his arms would go away. It had been an hour since he had bailed out of SparrowHawk’s hydrogen lock to soar free beneath a jet-black flight wing. His flight had started high above the North Temperate Belt flyway, but the downdraft had cost him ten kilometers of altitude. At the same time, the glowing numbers in his visor navigation display registered a total distance covered of 120 kilometers. At the beginning of his flight, the Northern Alliance cities had been little more than individual specks of radiance glimpsed intermittently against the background lightning of the Dardanelles Cyclone. Now they were a necklace of tiny glass beads strung out against a background of black velvet.
Once each standard year the cities of the North Temperate Belt overtook the Dardanelles Cyclone as both were blown eastward by the globe girdling winds of the flyway. The centuries old storm was so named because it intruded deeply into the flyway, narrowing the safe passage lane to less than five hundred kilometers. To avoid being pulled into it, cloud cities bore much closer to the northern cloud wall than was usual. For the past several weeks, the cities of the Alliance had been arraying themselves preparatory to passing through the dangerous narrows.
After leaving Port Gregson, SparrowHawk had rendezvoused with three large air freighters in a deserted section of the flyway. The fusion-powered aircraft had been taken aboard the largest of the airships and given new markings. Its battered dark blue hull had been painted silver, while garish patches of paint had been slopped over where its identification symbols should have been. The overall effect was of a city naval unit that had been hurriedly disguised as a privateer.
At Bolin’s insistence, Sands waited until they were safely away from Port Gregson to tell his crew their target. He had expected them to want no part in the scheme. Instead, they cheered the opportunity to get back at the people who had killed Dane. Only Halley Trevanon remained silent. Her brooding had begun to worry Lars. Of all the members of his crew, he would have expected her to be the most excited.
While the airship crew worked to disguise SparrowHawk, the three freighters moved to the far eastern edge of the Dardanelles Narrows. There they would wait just beyond sensor range for Sands’s coded signal. If the signal did not come by the time the first Alliance cities registered on their sensors, the airships would disappear into the blue and white vastness.
Just before SparrowHawk departed the airship, Micah Bolin had called Sands to his cabin.
“Drink?” the bald man had asked amiably.
“Soft drink. I’m flying, you know.”
“Right.”
Sands still felt uneasy around Bolin, but had to admit that he had planned the raid well enough. They would fly to Cloudcroft on unpowered flight wings under the cover of darkness. The high volume of electromagnetic noise coming from the Dardanelles Cyclone would further mask their approach. Bolin had even provided lists of goods to be taken once they were in control, along with their storage locations throughout the city. Whoever the recruiter’s employers were, their spies were good.
Bolin handed Sands his drink, slid a small glass rectangle across the desk, and then leaned back in his chair to regard the privateer seriously.
“What’s this?”
“Your further instructions should you succeed. It is time locked and security coded. We are scheduled to be safely away by ten hundred hours. You will have one hour after that in which to use the password. Wait any longer and it forgets everything it knows. If you’re captured, please destroy it.”
“Very well,” Sands said, pocketing the record tile. “I presume this tells me the name of my employer.”
“It will direct you to the city where we will split up the loot.”
“How long for your ships to join us after I make the call?”
“Half an hour.”
“I’ll wait forty five minutes. If you aren’t there by then, I grab whatever loot I can and run for it.”
“We’ll be there. We haven’t gone to all this trouble and expense to fail now.”
They had reviewed the mission plan one last time. To minimize the risk of a slip, only SparrowHawk’s personnel would show themselves to their victims. Bolin’s people would stay aboard their ships and direct the loading of cargo via communicator. SparrowHawk would then cover the getaway of the slower airships.
The disguised privateer Air Shark departed the small fleet of airships and flew to a spot directly opposite the Dardanelles Cyclone. For two days, they had orbited inside the turbulent flyway wall, lurching in giant figure eights through the imbedded storms while they waited for their victims to arrive.
As Cloudcroft drew abreast of their hiding place, Larson Sands, Halley Trevanon, Ross Crandall, and Kelvor Reese climbed into the midships hydrogen lock and launched themselves one by one into the night. After a dangerous five minutes when they had steered through cloud, they broke out into the clear and began their long flights toward the largest and brightest pearl in the Northern Alliance.
* * *
Cloudcroft was no longer a tiny, lighted bead in the night. It had grown slowly over the long, anxious, lonely minutes — first to a ball the size of a child’s toy, then to a self-contained world that hovered between vacuum and the crushing depths of the lower atmosphere. Sands felt a shudder go through his flight gear as he crossed over the city with a full kilometer of altitude to spare.
The slight shudder was the result of the millions of ergs of heat Cloudcroft’s gasbag radiated to the surrounding environment. It was his signal to bank sharply left. The ache in his arms suddenly disappeared as he spoiled his lift and began his long downward spiral.
The super strong membrane of the gasbag was transparent, but since it was filled with hydrogen a full 100°C hotter than the surrounding atmosphere, it glowed a wan yellow in his infrared visor display. Shifting streamers of orange and red marked the regions where vagrant breezes cooled the giant balloon. Deep inside, a point of blue-white radiance marked the main outlet where hot hydrogen wafted upward from the city power plant.
Cloudcroft, like most Saturnian cities, was laid out in a concentric pattern. Alternating bands of buildings and open spaces were spread across the support truss’s upper deck. Just below where the heat pipe discharged into the gasbag was a tall tower. This was the seat of the Northern Alliance government and Sands’s primary target.
In addition to providing a conduit for the main city heat pipe, Government Tower was also the central support for the habitat barrier. Six smaller towers were arrayed in a hexagonal pattern midway between the city center and its rim. These provided additional support for the tent-like membrane that separated the city’s oxygen-helium atmosphere from the bag’s heated hydrogen gas.
Suddenly the faintly luminescent fabric of the gasbag was only a few meters below him. With his heart pounding in his ears, he ignored the protests of his muscles and flared his wing. The wing stalled out just as his boots grounded on the yielding surface. He sprawled forward onto his face, and even while the fabric of his wing was collapsing around him, keyed the switch that would jettison the flight pack. He crawled out from under the folds of black fabric to get unsteadily to his feet. As he did so, he glanced anxiously skyward.
The worst part about the flight had been his inability to communicate with the others. Isolated and flying into danger, his mind had conjured up all manner of disasters. He saw Halley and the others blown off course by the microbursts of wind that punctuate the Saturnian atmosphere. In his mind’s eye, he saw them turn back while anxiously calling for him to do the same. Only, his suit radio had been turned off lest its quiescent radiations give him away. He had seen himself flying alone into the jaws of the enemy. It had taken all of his willpower to keep from breaking radio silence to ask if anyone were with him.
He had a long, agonizing moment as he searched the sky. The Notch was behind him, signaling the fact that First Dawn was not far off. The Arch was its usual silver band casting a pale glow over everything. Suddenly, a black delta wing eclipsed The Arch. Moments later, Halley Trevanon swept low over him as she came in for a landing. He felt the ripple as she touched down on the gasbag. Like he had done, Halley lost her balance and went sprawling. A moment later, she crawled free of her wing and came running to where he was standing on the gently glowing plain that was the top of a ten kilometer diameter balloon.
Seconds later, Ross Crandall and Kelvor Reese also swept out of the dark sky. Unlike Lars and Halley, they retained their wings. Sands watched their glowing figures on his infrared display as they moved awkwardly toward where he stood. Draped as they were, they reminded him of two bats he had once seen in the Sorrell Three zoo.
“It looks like we all made it,” Halley said as soon as she reached him. Her voice was barely recognizable in his earphones as his external sound pickup recorded her words. They still dared not use their radios for fear of discovery.
“Ready with your tape?”
“Ready,” Crandall replied, gesturing with his gauntleted hand toward the large reel suspended from his equipment belt.
“Good. You and Kelvor begin paying it out. Halley, get the detonator wired up.”
“Right, Lars,” she said as she unclipped a small electronic device from her belt.
Crandall and Reese stooped to attach the ends of two long adhesive strips to the gasbag at Sands’s feet. They then launched themselves into the air in opposite directions. As they soared low across the membrane, they trailed the tape out behind. Wherever it touched, it stuck. Meanwhile, Halley knelt at the intersection of the two strips and attached her small black box to the wires protruding from the adhesive strips.
By the time Crandall and Reese returned for a second landing, the detonator’s arming light glowed a malevolent red. The detonator contained a hemispheric-field-of-view camera in addition to its firing circuits. Anyone who approached it after they left would sound an alarm.
“That does it,” Crandall exulted upon seeing the ruby red light. “We’ve got them by the balls!”
Sands nodded. “If only we can tell them what we’ve done before they blow us away. Everyone ready for Phase Two?”
“Go,” Halley said. Her words were echoed by the other two.
Sands withdrew a knife from his equipment belt and knelt down. Grasping it overhand, he drove the point savagely into the yielding membrane. The film proved surprisingly tough. It was not until the third try that the point penetrated. After that, he carefully sawed a long slit. He halted when the opening was a meter long. A greenish cast in his visor marked it as hot hydrogen boiled upward through the rip.
He sheathed his knife and sat down gingerly on the bag with his boots inserted through the hole. He placed his arms over his head and slid forward. A moment later, he was falling freely toward the city below. Flattening out, he spread his arms and legs to assume a stable, nose down attitude. He watched the city expand with frightening rapidity. When he was three hundred meters above the habitat barrier, he touched a switch. There was a muffled explosion from his suit backpack and his flight was halted with an abrupt tug on his harness. Breathing a sigh of relief, he glanced upwards toward the strange device floating overhead.
Sands was familiar with rescue balloons. The device above him was similar in function, but different in shape. It was a giant parasol with numerous shrouds attached to the bottom of a wide canopy. Micah Bolin had called the device a “parachute” and had assured him that it was safe. Sands reached up to grasp the directional controls on the harness risers and steer himself well clear of the bright exhaust from the heat pipe. He watched the tall conduit carefully as he descended past its open end. He landed with a loud thump on Cloudcroft’s habitat barrier a hundred meters from the pipe.
The habitat barrier was much spongier than had been the gasbag. Unlike the bag, the barrier was not stretched taut by the weight of the entire city. Sands rolled with the impact, flattened out, and came to a sitting position in the midst of a deep depression. Switching his visor to normal vision, he glanced down. He was suspended in midair a hundred meters above a park-like expanse of grass and bushes. Nearby was the foreshortened obelisk of Government Tower. Lighted windows testified to the fact that people were at work inside. The upper several floors of the building were dark. A wide balcony jutted from the near side of the tower slightly above his level. It glowed silver with arch light, but was otherwise dark.
The other three raiders touched down in quick order. Sands was bounced around by the force of their landings. While he waited for the oscillations to die away, he continued to search below for signs that their arrival had been noticed. Despite the noise, all was quiet.
For the first time since entering the gasbag, Sands noticed the heat. His suit, which was designed to protect him from the cold of the upper atmosphere, was no help in the sauna-like gasbag. Already he was becoming overheated. He scrambled to his feet and attempted to climb the slope to where the habitat barrier overhung the balcony of Government Tower.
Walking atop the membrane proved impossible. As he attempted to stand, Lars found himself at the bottom of a slope sided hole with no way to climb out. Each time he tried, he would overbalance and fall down. Since Government Tower was the central support of the tent shaped barrier, each time he tumbled, he rolled further downhill from his goal.
Lars cursed at being thwarted by so simple a thing as trying to stand on the yielding surface of the membrane. He thought about the problem for a moment, and then began to crawl toward his goal. It was undignified, but it worked. He slowly made his way up the sloping membrane until he was directly over the corner of Government Tower.
The others had similar problems. They emulated him and were soon crawling on hands and knees toward the point where he lay atop the membrane. Sands had begun to sweat profusely as he pulled out his knife and worked at puncturing the habitat barrier. Once again, it took several tries before the point would penetrate the strong polymer. Then there was a ripping sound as he chinned himself on the hilt of his knife, drawing it down and toward him. A slit nearly two meters long opened up before him. He moved back from the slit to avoid tumbling into the opening he had carved. It was twenty meters down to the balcony that was his goal, and another hundred to the surface of the support truss deck. He signaled the others to be careful as they joined him.
Ross Crandall sidled up to the rip and dug into his suit pouch. He pulled out a long strip of adhesive tape. Sands did the same. They tore away the backing material and smoothed the sticky strips to the membrane. Each strip ended in a loop. Halley Trevanon unclipped a climbing line from her belt and passed it through the loops before threading it through the rip in the membrane. The line hung down from the habitat barrier to the balcony that was their goal.
Sands wriggled forward, grasped the line in one hand, and lowered himself through the rent in the membrane. As he left the overheated environment of the bag, he could not help thinking that he was exchanging the frying pan for the fire.