He was five for five.
Gaea turned purple when she heard about it.
"He endangered my baby!" she roared, and began to stamp up and down the already churned grounds of Pandemonium. Everyone had to hustle to get out of her way. Many of them were successful.
"Who does he think he serves, anyway?" she thundered. "No chances, no chances are to be taken with that child! Didn't I make that clear?"
There were affirmative shouts. Bolexes jostled closer for the shot, climbing over each other like beetles in a jar.
She raised a hand into the air and there was silence but for the whining of the cameras. She clenched it into a fist the size of a station wagon, and lightning crashed down from the sky to make a purple nimbus around her. Face contorted with rage, she drew her arm back like a javelin thrower and hurled something that might have been a bolt of hatred in the direction of Mnemosyne.
High on the central cable, the Luftmorder's fuel tanks exploded. Sidewinders and red-eyes caught fire and found themselves streaking in their death lunges, to explode when their fuel burned out. Four buzz bombs also caught fire. The event was noisy and bright, and looked very much like the traditional Japanese pyrotechnic shell known as Bouquet of Chrysanthemums. When it was over, there were only nine Luftmorder combat groups in Gaea.
Robin, Chris, and Cirocco saw the show, and Cirocco edged around it warily, but nothing came down from the cable to chase them. Cirocco laid the wings back almost flush to the fuselage, and headed for the place that was full of black smoke. She kept calling for Conal, and getting no answer.
She slowed down at the twin columns of smoke, and began to circle. They all dreaded to find that one of the pyres marked the graves of Conal and Nova.
A flare crawled up into the sky and burst, and three minutes later Cirocco was setting down lightly. She had no sooner cut the motors than Chris and Robin were out, hurrying toward the two figures.
Conal had somehow managed to twist his ankle. Cirocco would not have thought it possible in the soft sand-then she remembered she had never gotten around to the parachute training she kept meaning to give him.
He had an arm draped over Nova's shoulders and she had an arm around his waist, and they managed to move in the one-quarter gee about as quickly as one person could walk. Nova had four inches on him, and he was wearing a silly grin, and Cirocco wondered just how badly that ankle was really hurt.
"Do we have any time, Cirocco?" he asked.
"It depends. What's up?" She thought about Adam, and knew they'd have to hang well back if they might be attacked by buzz bombs again. Then she thought about buzz bombs, and her eyes went nervously to the skies. They made a hell of a target out here.
"There might be something in the fuselage we ought to take a look at. It's right over there."
"I'll get it," Nova said, and dropped him. He squawked, overbalanced, and sat down in the sand. They watched Nova running toward the wreckage of the Dragonfly.
"They were shooting at us," Conal said. "Snitch was right."
He told them about the attack, how he had shot down one and made two crash and lucked out on the other two. Cirocco told him about the explosion, which Conal and Nova had seen from a great distance.
"I haven't the faintest idea what caused it," Cirocco said. "But it was in the spot where the buzz bomb base used to be. And it wasn't just jet fuel, either. There was a lot of explosives, and maybe some solid rocket fuel."
Nova returned, breathing hard, and held out the remains of the thing that had tried to bite her.
It looked a little like an exploding cigar, after the explosion. It was about four inches of flexible, hollow tube. One end was scorched and the other was ragged, splayed out. Nova pointed to the ragged end.
"There was a head there," she said. "It must have been hard, because it clanged when it hit the floor. It was jerking around like-"
"Like a fish in the bottom of a boat," Conal said.
"It didn't have any eyes. But it had a mouth, and it kept snapping at me. I stomped on it and its head exploded."
Cirocco took it from Nova. She handled it gingerly, and sniffed the burnt end.
"It's sort of a rocket bullet," she said finally. "I guess it was supposed to explode when it hit. It must have had one hell of a hard head to get through the Dragonfly hull. But, see, if it twists it can aim itself a little after it's ignited." She grimaced, then looked at Nova, "You say it blew up under your foot."
"Part of a flak suit was over it."
"Still, it wasn't enough of a charge to blow your foot off." She sighed, and tossed it away. "But it blew a hole in the floor. Friends, a buzz bomb could carry one hell of a lot of those little abominations. I don't like it one damn bit."
She couldn't think of anything to do but load them all back into the Mantis. She listened to Conal's description of the radar-jamming that had happened, and of the shape of the buzz bombs he had shot down. Most of the changes sounded to Cirocco like they were meant to confuse radar-that complex of characteristics known as "stealth."
Then they took off and headed east again. Soon they located the angel, and followed at a discrete two kilometers. Cirocco kept one eye on the radar and the other on the sky.
NINETEEN
During the long flight through Oceanus, Gaea sat still as stone in her monster chair, looking to the icy west, brooding. All the denizens of Pandemonium walked on eggs. They had never seen Gaea this way. Tons of fun, Gaea was, even if she did have a tendency to step on things. She was loads of laughs, the way she received all those preachers with big ceremonies, built the poor goons up till their heads were ready to bust, thinking Gaea had laid all this on for them, told them she had invited them to Pandemonium-them, personally, and nobody else, because nobody else quite had the slant on things, nobody else really understood the true faith quite as well as the schmuck-of-the-moment-and asked them would they pretty please let her in on the no-kidding Absolute Truth, and otherwise dispense their brilliant insights on theology? Then, when they were getting really wound up, she'd look at them like a pro gambler watching aces spill out of some poor dumb hick's sleeve, thunder blasphemy! and bite their fool heads off.
Then she'd spit the head into the Resurrect-O-Master and a dozen revs later some mewling abortion would come out the other end and she'd tell it You're Rasputin, or You're Luther, and solemnly intone the Gospel that one was supposed to believe in, and send it out into the world.
They lasted a while, the Priests did, not like the zombies, which had a half-life of about a kilorev. Still, even Priests reached a point where they were too mortified to do more than lie there and twitch, which was only funny for a short time, so Gaea had run through a lot of Luthers and a lot of Rasputins.
Everybody loved it.
But during the last part of the arrival of the King, Gaea was one goddamn scary fifty-foot special effect.
It was Oceanus that caused it, of course. Oceanus was the Enemy. Almost in the same league with Cirocco Jones herself. There's just no way she was going to feel good while the King was being flown over Oceanus's hyperborian precincts.
If the truth were told, not many of the Pandemonium felt good about being that close to Oceanus in the first place. Oceanus was a thing that ought to be comfortably far around the Great One's Curve, not looming frigidly like a gigantic breaking wave of icebergs. A lot of the most faithful sycophants were walking around with their shoulders hunched. You could have made a fortune on the gooseflesh concession.
But then the King was winging out of the twilight zone and over the Key of G-the most southwestern of Hyperion's eight regions, and only three hundred kilometers from the Key of D Minor, where Pandemonium had encamped. And maybe she did something with the sun panels out there in vacuum, constantly angling those rays down over fat and sassy Hyperion, or maybe it was just the enormous relief Gaea felt-and when a fifteen-meter goddess/starlet heaved a sigh of relief, brother, you felt it down to your toenails... but the day, the endless and unchanging day, was suddenly brighter.