8
Maelstrom
“What the hell is she doing here?” Halley asked as Lars led Kimber to SparrowHawk’s cockpit.
“It’s a long story. Miss Crawford, you take the observer’s station. It’s going to be a rough ride so make sure you are strapped down.” Sands took his own advice. Only a tiny portion of his brain was engaged in the task, however. The rest of him was consumed by his study of the instrument panel. “What’s our status, Halley?”
“Who is she? And is it wise to use names?”
“Miss Crawford is the daughter of the Factor of Titan. We are rescuing her from the Alliance. As for names, she’ll see our faces sooner or later, so what does it matter?”
“How do you know she’s the Factor’s daughter?” Halley persisted. She had turned in her seat and was staring unabashedly at Kimber. It was not difficult to imagine the scowl beneath the opaque faceplate of her environment suit.
“If she turns out to be an Alliance spy, then we’ll toss her out the hydrogen lock. Now give me that status check, copilot!”
“The ship is ready to launch, Captain!”
Sands disabled his speech synthesizer. He had been running on adrenaline ever since bailing out into a hostile sky. For what he had to say now, he wanted his voice to come through with full overtones. “Look, you’ve delivered your message. You don’t like having a passenger along. I am sorry I didn’t have time to consult you about it. The fact remains that I thought it important to rescue this lady from the Alliance. We can argue about it later… that is, if we evade the trap they have undoubtedly set for us. Okay by you?”
“Yes, sir.” Halley’s tone had lost all trace of insubordination. “The power plant is ready for maximum thrust. All instrumentation is working and all weapons are armed.”
“Thank you.” Sands turned to his guest. “You’ll have to launch without a suit. As soon as we are clear of the city, I will give you the word. When I do, you go to the locker just aft of the cockpit door. You will find a suit in there. Put it on. You will have ninety seconds maximum, so do not dawdle. The whole Alliance Navy is out there somewhere. If we’re to escape with our lives, I’m going to have to really fly this beast.”
“Maybe they won’t attack with me onboard,” Kimber said.
“After what we did to them, they would attack if we were transporting Jesus Christ!” Halley responded. “Now please be quiet. We’ve a battle to fight.”
“Contact the port captain,” Sands ordered. “Tell him that we’re ready to launch.”
She did so. A moment later she reported, “They’ve passed control to us.”
Sands activated the ‘All Hands’ circuit.
“Look alive back there. If they are going to jump us, this is their last chance. I want a full circumambient sweep as soon as we get clear.”
“You’ll have it,” Crandall’s voice said over the intercom.
“Launch in ten seconds.”
He watched the red numerals count down on the chronometer display. When they reached 00:00, he keyed the control that triggered the catapult. There was a surge of acceleration and the landing bay was suddenly replaced by the blue-white vastness of Saturn’s atmosphere.
Sands rolled SparrowHawk upside down and pulled the nose into a vertical dive. As the ship dove past the bulge of the main city gasbag, he advanced the throttles. The reactors came alive with a surge that drove them toward the depths. He stayed close to the gasbag, hoping his proximity would thwart any fire control computer that might be tracking them. Within seconds, a large cylindrical object grew in the windscreen, and then fell behind as the exterior radiation detectors chattered once and went silent. The black-and-yellow cylinder had been the fusion generator suspended ten kilometers below Cloudcroft.
Lars worked furiously to clear his ears as he continued the descent. He held it until he was ten kilometers below the level of the fusion generator. He pulled back on his controller. Their speed was such that even that gentle movement was transformed into a three-gravity turn. As they leveled out, Cloudcroft was falling behind at a rate of 2200 kilometers per hour. The artificial compass showed them heading due south, directly toward the heart of the Dardanelles Cyclone.
“I’ve got multiple aircraft circling west of the Alliance, Ross Crandall reported. Now that they had dropped well below the cluster’s altitude, they could see objects that had been screened by the other cities of the Alliance. The Alliance Navy had spent the time assembling a large force in the blind spot. Only the fact that most of the Navy was engaged in the annexation of New Philadelphia kept the fleet from being larger.
“We just lost the signal from the detonator,” Brent Garvich reported.
“Someone check our stern!”
“Cloudcroft’s still there,” Halley replied. “They haven’t set the frumpin’ thing off. They must have neutralized it!”
“In only three minutes? I wonder how they managed that.”
Crandall’s warning echoed over the intercom. “We’ve got multiple missiles being launched behind us. They’re from Cloudcroft.” Even without his speech synthesizer, he was remarkably calm about it.
Sands glanced tensely at his tactical display, and then relaxed. They were already 100 kilometers south of the city and fleeing at high speed. They would be out of range before the missiles closed on them.
“Those aircraft to the west have stopped circling,” Crandall continued. “They’re coming after us. I make them six prowlers and two destroyers.”
“Keep me apprised of their progress. We’ll see what we can do to get to the cloud wall ahead of them.”
In front of SparrowHawk lay the several-hundred-kilometer-tall wall that marked the northernmost reaches of the Dardanelles Cyclone. It was streaked in blues, purples and blacks. The lightning that had been so visible across hundreds of kilometers last night was muted, but still active. The cloud wall had a fluffy texture that warned of massive turbulence inside the storm. Already they were being subjected to a series of bumps. It would get a lot worse before it got better.
From space, the Dardanelles was a tiny white spot intruding into the dark band of the North Temperate Belt. Only Saturn’s massive size could make such a thing look small. The storm arose from a localized hot spot deep within the atmosphere. Its energy was small compared to the zonal upwellings, but far more concentrated. The cyclone was powerful enough to maintain its shape against the Coriolis forces that tore apart other features of the Saturnian atmosphere.
“All right, Miss Crawford … Kimber. You have your ninety seconds. Get into that suit!”
“Yes, sir.”
He glanced over his shoulder once to see her scrambling aft to the emergency suit locker. She was back in her seat faster than he would have believed possible. She strapped down, and then expertly snapped her helmet in place with a quick thrust and twist.
“You do that like you were born to it.”
“I was. Every Titanian learns to put on an environment suit almost before he learns to walk.”
“I’m picking up something ahead.”
“Where?”
“Just exiting the cloud wall,” Halley answered.
“What is it?”
“It looks like four aircraft. I tentatively make them Alliance prowlers.”
“How the hell did they get there without us seeing them?”
She shrugged. “Like that squadron to the west, they used the other cities to mask their departure. They must have gone the long way around and come back inside the cloud wall.”
“This complicates things,” Sands muttered.
He glanced at his screen. Now there were two clusters of red symbols closing on the single green dot at the center. Crimson arrows gave velocity vectors, while blue alphanumerics told ship types and measured time to intercept. He mentally placed his adversaries in three-dimensional space. The craft behind him were still much higher than he was, almost at the altitude of the cities. They were descending in a long slanting dive, hoping to outrun him. The figures said that their efforts would be in vain.
The ships in front were another story. They lay directly across his path, having been vectored there by battle controllers aboard one of the cities. They too were above him, but well within striking distance. He considered his options and decided that his best hope of evasion lay in diving deep.
“Watch your ears again. We’re going down!
SparrowHawk stooped and dove for the dense atmosphere of the lower flyway. Sands yawned mightily as the pressure mounted. After more than a minute, he leveled off some 50 kilometers below the cities. The pressure was now 20 atmospheres and the outside temperature higher than it had been inside Cloudcroft’s gasbag. Only the ship’s environmental control system kept them from being cooked. The flow noise was deafening.
He glanced at his screen. The blocking force was in a near vertical dive down the face of the cloud wall as they attempted to cut him off. He waited for them to come level, then advanced his throttles to emergency maximum and sent SparrowHawk into a zoom climb.
“Smart move!” Halley said from beside him. “The prowler’s never been built that can out climb an air shark.”
“We all hope.”
Their speed bled off continuously as they climbed. When it fell to 1000 kph, Sands nosed his ship over to maintain that velocity. Two kilometers below them and still a hundred kilometers distant, the four prowlers had discovered their error. They began to climb as well.
They would never make it. Sands was gaining altitude at almost twice the rate they were. By the time SparrowHawk reached the cloud wall, the prowlers would be too far below to be a threat. Meanwhile, however, the climb had slowed SparrowHawk’s arrival at the cloud wall, allowing the ships behind to close the gap.
“It’s going to be a dead heat,” Sands said as he watched the blips on his display.
Sands watched his airspeed indicator as he climbed. Their speed was now less than 800 kph, yet still much too high to enter the cyclone. At that velocity, the first bit of turbulence would rip the wings off. To safely penetrate the Dardanelles, it was necessary to slow almost to a hover.
“Missiles in the air behind us,” Halley reported simultaneous with Ross Crandall.
“Man the lasers,” was Lars’s only response. He had all the trouble he could handle trying to find a relatively calm spot to breach the storm. He found it in a patch of smooth cloud that grew until it seemed ready to envelop them.
“Missiles are entering their terminal dive,” Crandall reported. “They fired too soon.”
Ten kilometers behind them, the missiles — designed for use a good deal higher in the atmosphere — ran out of kinetic energy and heeled over.
“It’s the last chance they’ll get,” Sands replied. He cut SparrowHawk’s reactors back to minimum as he fought the aircraft’s controls. He pulled the nose higher as the wall of dark black clouds came up to smack him in the face.
Suddenly, they were inside the storm and a giant hand was trying to shake his brain loose inside his skull.
* * *
“R… r… rough ride,” Halley said, the words burbling in her chest.
“It’s going to get rougher,” Sands responded. “Launch all decoys and chaff!”
He dove the ship as a series of popping noises denoted the launch of their various “spoofers,” devices designed to lead the enemy astray. Like SparrowHawk, the Alliance vessels would have to slow down to enter the storm. However, nothing would stop them from racing up to the cloud boundary and launching a full brace of missiles before turning away. If that was their choice, he wanted to give their missiles a target other than himself.
He switched his display from tactical to navigation. A schematic of the Dardanelles Cyclone came up with wind velocities denoted by small arrows of varying lengths. The obvious thing was to make directly for the cyclone’s eye, cross that thousand-kilometer-wide expanse of calm air, and escape out the other side. Sands had no intention of doing the obvious. There was most likely a squadron stationed inside the eye to ambush them the moment they appeared.
Rather than cut straight across the storm, Sands plotted a course around its eastern edge. That, too, was a risk. With peak wind velocities of 1800 kph near the eye, it was impossible to buck the storm winds by taking the western route. At the maximum velocity they dared use, they would find themselves blown backwards.
They spent fifteen tense minutes wallowing through the storm before Halley said, “I think we’ve lost them, Lars. Mind if I take off my helmet? It’s starting to chafe.”
He scanned the instruments that measured his ship’s health. Despite the shaking, all systems were well within safety margins. They were not about to lose a wing or anything else vital.
“Go ahead, but keep it handy.” He then keyed the ‘All Hands’ circuit and instructed the rest of the crew to do the same.
Halley removed her helmet to reveal drawn features and hair plastered down with perspiration.
Sands switched SparrowHawk to computer control, and then reached up to remove his own helmet. He needed two attempts to get it off. Finally, he got the neck seal undone and lifted the helmet over his head. The sudden blast of cool air was like being reborn. He glanced at Kimber Crawford as he stowed the helmet in the rack beside his seat. She too had removed her helmet and was looking at him with renewed interest.
“My savior has a face,” she said as he turned. “And quite a handsome one, at that!”
Sands grinned while Halley said something uncomplimentary under her breath.
The next half-hour saw their flight turn slowly from east to north as they fought their way around the storm. Sands put SparrowHawk into a climb, until an hour later; they broke free of one layer of storm clouds and began climbing for another far overhead. It was perpetual night between the storm’s cloud layers. A thick fog of ice crystals battered the windscreen, yet the obscuration and lightning of the past hour were gone.
“Is this wise?” Kimber asked as soon as she realized they were in clear air.
“It’s necessary,” Sands said through gritted teeth as he fought to control the ship. The higher they climbed the more sluggish the controls had become.
“What for?”
“We need to get up to the ammonia precipitation level. Our paint job is ammonia soluble. We need to wash off these incriminating markings before we can show ourselves anywhere.”
As they flew, they used all of their passive sensors to listen for Alliance ships. With darkness beyond the windscreen, all they received were a few garbled radar transmissions. Though it was difficult to tell for sure, most seemed to originate at a considerable distance. Sands was just beginning to relax when Halley reminded him of the time.
“Right,” he said, glancing up at the chronometer. “Time to get our next set of instructions.”
He turned control over to Halley, unstrapped, and climbed carefully out of his seat. Now that they were no longer bucking the storm’s winds, but rather allowing them to carry the ship along, the turbulence had quieted considerably. He squeezed past Kimber and made his way to his cabin just aft of the cockpit. He buzzed for Crandall to join him.
“What’s up, Lars?”
Sands flashed the memory tile Micah Bolin had given him. “Are you curious to find out the identity of our employers?”
“Damned right!”
“Come in and lock the door.”
The cabin barely allowed Crandall room to stand while Sands seated himself in front of his workscreen. A bunk and a recessed closet for his clothes completed the cabin’s furnishings. Despite its flattened lifting body fuselage and overall size — as large as a small airliner of a previous century — SparrowHawk was cramped.
Sands popped the memory tile into the proper slot and brought up a picture on his workscreen. He keyed in the first password Bolin had given him. An old-fashioned clock appeared and began to count down the seconds remaining before the information was erased. Sands keyed in the second password. At the moment he did so, the ship bucked and caused him to hit a wrong key. He willed himself to be calm as he cleared the input and tried again.
His second attempt was successful. The clock disappeared and Micah Bolin’s further instructions appeared. They were only three lines long. When he had finished reading, he turned to Crandall, whose position did not allow him to see the screen.
“It looks like we’re going to visit Glasgow-in-the-Clouds.”
“Are they our employers?”
Sands shrugged. “He doesn’t say. I guess we’ll find that out when we get there.”