"Here's the plan. You program this crate to fly back to the cave by the Junction. Be sure it never gets closer than twenty kilometers to Whistlestop. After that, it's best for it to fly right down on the deck, two or three hundred meters." She looked at Nova. "Aren't you going to ask me why?"
"I didn't think I should."
"Relax, honey. We're not under military discipline here. The reason I want to fly low is I keep waiting for more buzz bombs to show up. They haven't yet, but one of these days they will. I don't want to lose this plane when it can't defend itself."
"That makes sense." She glanced nervously at the sky. Until that moment she had not thought of buzz bombs. She still remembered Conal's magnificent flying during the attack, and knew he had saved her life. She doubted her ability to handle a plane nearly so well.
So she started on the auto-pilot program while Cirocco waited calmly. Soon she was bogged down. She shook her head, and erased an impossible result.
"I don't know if I can handle all that," she admitted. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Here's what you're doing wrong." Her fingers flew over the keys, pausing only long enough to be sure Nova had seen and understood. "One of the most important things you can learn is when to admit you need to learn more."
Nova glanced at her, saw that Cirocco was smiling.
"Where would we both be right now," Cirocco said, "if you hadn't known you were up to a very hairy take-off situation?" For a fraction of a second her smile became a grin, then she was looking at the computer again. And Nova knew that, once again, the Wizard had been far ahead of her. She would have sworn that Cirocco had not been paying attention to the take-off, and had not noticed her nervousness.
"Okay," Cirocco went on, locking the program in. "You get out first. Go ahead and deploy as soon as you're clear of the plane, then follow me. If you see any buzz bombs, cut your lines and freefall as far as you dare. There's a spare wing in that pack. Any questions?"
Nova had a dozen, but only asked one.
"Do you think we'll see buzz bombs?"
"No. But I can't rule it out."
They opened the door and Nova stepped out into the air. She got herself oriented, and pulled the rip cord. There was the familiar fluttering snap of the fabric, the singing of the lines, and she was tugged sharply. She glanced up...
For a horrible second she thought the para-wing had ripped loose. She had expected a colorful, traditional canopy. Instead, there was a thing of spiderwebs and air, almost invisible.
Well, it made sense. They would be hard to see.
She located Cirocco, who had both hands in the shrouds, swinging around to her right and losing altitude. With a few tugs on her own lines Nova fell in behind her. Follow me, the Wizard had said. Anywhere, Nova thought.
For several minutes Nova spent her time scanning the clear skies for the tell-tale contrails of buzz bombs. Twice she sighted their own abandoned jet. The first time it scared her; by the second she was already bored. She followed Cirocco sedately, on as fine a day for soaring as she had ever seen.
Then Cirocco began to gyrate wildly, swinging back and forth at the end of her lines. Nova was not worried at first, but the longer it went on the more she began to wonder what was wrong. She did not get alarmed until Cirocco went into a steep downward plunge. She had to work hard to follow her, and no sooner was she in her dive than Cirocco pulled up, and up, and up ... and almost over. A loop was difficult to do with a para-wing. The Wizard had not quite managed it.
But she still couldn't figure out what the trouble was, until she heard the sound of laughter.
"I thought you were going to follow me," Cirocco shouted, and laughed again. "I thought you were All-Coven Girl Champeen, or something."
"Oh, yeah?"
Nova hauled on her lines with both hands and swept so close in front of Cirocco she could hear her startled gasp. Downward she plunged, faster and faster, swinging from side to side and building momentum until, with a hard jerk, she swooped up and around and poised for a moment, upside-down, the wing collapsing beneath her. She tumbled, expertly avoiding entanglement with the loose lines, was jerked to a stop amid the sharp cracking sound of the wing catching air, and came out in a glide, neat and sweet as ever it had been done in competition. She could see, in memory, the string of 10's flashing on the judges' scoreboards.
Cirocco eased in beside her, just far enough away to keep their wings out of trouble, and regarded her with a sour look which she couldn't maintain. She burst out laughing again.
"I yield to the better woman," Cirocco said. "You gave me a fright there, young lady."
"You scared me," Nova protested.
"Yeah, I guess I would have. So I probably shouldn't have done it."
"I didn't mind."
"Nova, I know I seem like a very cold, very sour old bitch. Lately I can't afford much time to have fun. And I know I'm six times your age, and I know you've heard the tragic story of my life ... but you know what? Adding it all up, the good and the bad, I've had a great time. The last thirty years have been hard, and they're about to get harder. But I wouldn't have liked any other life. The awful thing is ... well, like now. When I want to cut up, it just seems out of character. That saddens me."
The last thirty years, Nova thought.
It was a long glide. They amused themselves with some more tricks, though nothing as extreme as the loops. And all the time, Whistlestop continued to grow larger beneath them.
Almost a century ago, when Cirocco and her crew had first seen him, Whistlestop had been just over one kilometer from nose to tail. The Hindenburg, the largest airship ever built on Earth, had been slightly less than a quarter the size of Whistlestop.
Since then, he had grown considerably.
Now he was two kilometers long. With the proportionate increase in his other dimensions, he was eight times as large as he had been. He contained half a billion cubic feet of hydrogen.
"Nobody knows why he grew so much," Cirocco told Nova as they made ready for landing on the broad back. "Blimps don't usually grow so quickly. I know he's about sixty thousand years old. His contemporaries only seem to grow a few inches every year. I know that Old Scout, who is at least twenty thousand years older than Whistlestop, is only about a kilometer and a half long."
There was more, and Nova listened to it all, but mere words could never do justice to Whistlestop. He had to be seen to be believed. She had thought making a landing on the back of a blimp would be a hazardous thing. It was going to be about as difficult as a mosquito landing on an elephant.
She touched down lightly, ran a few steps as she expertly reefed her chute, and was about to pull it in for folding when Cirocco touched her shoulder.
"Cut it loose," she said. "We'll get down another way."
"I don't have a knife," Nova said.
Cirocco looked surprised, then shook her head.
"I'm getting senile, I guess," she said, looking Nova up and down. Nova couldn't figure out what the problem was. Cirocco severed Nova's lines with a white-bladed knife. When she got a close look at it, Nova realized it was made of sharpened bone, intricately carved in the Titanide manner.
"You wearing anything under those clothes?" Cirocco asked.
"Just cotton shorts," Nova said.
"It's metal I'm looking for. It's not only impolite but extremely dangerous to take anything metal onto a blimp. Anything that can spark."
There were metal grommets on Nova's bootlaces, but after a close look Cirocco pronounced them acceptable. Nova was relieved, they had been a gift from Virginal.
Then Cirocco knelt and started feeling the tough hide of the blimp. Nova followed her. She knew she should be asking questions, but, despite the glimpse of a fun-loving Wizard she had had on the way down, her predominant reaction to Cirocco was awe, and her response was obedience.