"Near enough to an hour."
"All right. I will. Thanks." She turned slightly in her seat.
"How's the hand? You want those bandages wrapped again?"
"It's okay. I banged it while I was hanging onto the wing." She gave him a sleepy, friendly smile, then seemed to catch herself at it. Conal suppressed his own grin; she was definitely improving. She had to remember to be surly. Maybe she'd forget entirely one of these days. Could happiness be too far behind?
She closed her eyes and fell asleep in no more than ten seconds. Conal envied her. It usually took him at least a minute.
Feeling a little guilty, he studied her as she slept. Her face was relaxed, and she looked even younger than her eighteen years.
She still had a little girl's face, with a lot of cheek and a protruding lower lip. Conal could see her mother's features in her upturned nose and large jaw. With her eyes closed that unsettling resemblance to Chris was hard to find.
He resolutely turned away when he found his eyes straying to the full curves of the breast, the round hips, the long legs. Suffice it to say she had a child's face on a woman's body.
"Advisory," the computer said. "Hostile aircraft have been known to-"
Conal hit the override, and glanced at Nova. Her eyes fluttered, then she made an un-ladylike sound and nestled deeper into the cushions.
Once again, a nuisance. The damn computer had a long memory. The results of Cirocco's air war with the buzz bombs had been fed into it, so now it tried to warn Conal of a base that had been empty for eighteen years. The buzzers had liked to congregate at central cables. They could hang for years, nose down, waiting their chance. They had to hang like that, as they couldn't start their engines without first having some forward motion. Primitive ramjets, that's all they had been, nothing like the ultra-refined torch that hummed quietly in the back of the Dragonfly.
He was glad they were all dead.
Still, wouldn't it be funny if ...
He glanced at the central cable, and saw a tiny speck falling toward the sand. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and it was gone. He kept looking at the cable, then shook his head. It was easy to forget how gigantic it was. What did he expect to see? Buzz bombs clinging to the side?
On the other hand, just what the hell could that speck have been?
He fiddled with the radar, but nothing came back. He glanced up at the angel carrying Adam. Nothing wrong there.
On impulse, he fed power to the engine and climbed rapidly to six kilometers.
And the radar pinged.
"Alert," the computer said. "Four-correction, five unidentified aircraft approaching. Correction, three unident-correction, four-"
Conal overrode the voice, which was just a distraction. The graphic display would tell him a lot more.
But it didn't. He saw two blips clearly, down on the deck, moving rapidly in his direction. Then there were three, then another popped into being, "RADAR COUNTERMEASURES IN EFFECT," the computer printed on his screen.
That would seem to indicate Dragonflys, or Cirocco returning in the Mantis. He supposed she could be flying three planes on autopilot, but what for, and why hadn't she mentioned it to him? But buzz bombs couldn't jam radar.
"Hold on there, Conal," he muttered to himself. The plain fact was he had never seen a buzz bomb. He had never fought one. And believing that things always stayed the same in Gaea was a quick way to be dead.
"Wake up," he said, shaking Nova's shoulder. She was alert very quickly.
"Cirocco, I have some unidentified blips on my screen. At least four, probably five. They don't reply to transponders. They are closing on me at about ... five hundred kilometers per hour, and they are employing radar countermeasures. I have climbed to six kilometers in case... in case they take hostile action. I-" he paused, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Hell, Cirocco, what should I do?"
They both listened, and heard nothing but static. Nova was searching the sky above them, but he doubted she would see anything. Then, bless her, she turned quickly and began digging out the rest of their flak suits.
"Cirocco, do you read?" Again, silence. She was probably out of the plane, gathering weaponry, doing a check-out. Maybe she could hear him, and was on her way to the radio.
"Cirocco, I'm going to lead them away from Adam, and then I'm going to shoot them down. I'll leave this channel open." Nova was handing him a helmet and leggings. He put the helmet on, then waved the rest away. "Forget about that, we don't have time. Tighten your straps and hold on." The instant she had the strap pulled tight around her lap, Conal pulled back on the stick and pushed the throttle forward. The little plane leaped forward and curved up like a rocket.
Nova was looking forward, and side to side.
"The ones on the radar were under us," Conal said. "They were hugging the ground. So they'll be behind us now, and I don't think-"
"Right there," Nova said, pointing forward and to the left.
It was heading straight for them, plunging like a hawk, growing bigger.
Conal turned right and pulled back, and they flipped over. The buzz bomb screeched by them, howling. Conal had a glimpse of a shark's mouth, gulping air, and of wings that arched high and then swept down and back. They were buffeted in the heated air from the buzz bomb's tailpipe, then Conal got them turned around and dipped a wing for a better view.
"Why didn't you shoot?" Nova asked.
"I ... I forgot I had guns," he confessed. "You see them down there?"
"Yeah. The first one is pulling around, the other four-"
"I've got 'em." The four were climbing in tight formation. It took Conal back to a cold winter day. He had been ten, and the Snowbirds, Canada's precision flying team, had put on a show. They had flown wingtip to wingtip, turning as a unit. And they had climbed just like these were doing, and at the top of the climb the buzz bombs spread out, trailing black plumes of exhaust, quartering the sky.
Conal had picked them all up on radar now. The images were clear; the computer, fooled at first, was learning the new radar signatures. And it was a damn good thing he had radar, he realized. It was amazing how quickly the devils flew out of sight.
He felt rather helpless. The two of them watched the radar blips twist and turn without apparent pattern. Conal felt he should be preparing some maneuver, as the buzz bombs so obviously were. But he didn't know anything about aerial combat.
He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, and started to work it out.
What did he know about buzz bombs?
"They're big, clumsy, relatively slow, and they weren't equipped for air-to-air encounters." He could hear Cirocco's voice in his memory. She had not talked a lot about the creatures. "Their big tactic was ramming. I had to watch out for that, since they didn't seem to care whether they lived or died. One got me that way, once, and I was damn lucky to walk away from it."
That was all very well, and the one that had almost rammed them had certainly been big-possibly three times the length of the little Dragonfly. But clumsy, and slow? He looked again at the twisting trails in the sky. He thought he was faster than they were, and certainly more maneuverable, but these didn't look all that clumsy.
"There's one coming in behind us," Nova said.
"I see him." He tried a few things, feeling it out. All he could remember was dogfights in movies. There, they came out of the sun-but that wouldn't work well in Gaea. And they got on your tail and shot you down. Since buzz bombs didn't have guns, that wouldn't work.
He began to feel better. He slowed a little, let the pursuer move in closer, then went through a rapid series of turns and dives, all the time keeping his eyes open for the other four. The one behind him repeated his moves, but more slowly, overshooting. His confidence grew. Okay, the thing to do ...