“Thirteen thousand,” said Broben.
Farley held the bomber level as he could to keep the glide ratio as high as possible. More speed would give him more control, but would also put them on the ground sooner. Luckily a steady updraft of warm air from the valley floor was helping to keep their glide path shallow.
The cockpit darkened as the bomber descended into shadow. The stark sky now a crooked path between black borders of mountain-high cliffs.
“Twelve,” said Broben.
A few miles ahead the dark edges of the massive cliffs framed a large open area, and Farley thought he could make out tiny pale-green lights in the far distance on the opposite side. Plavitz had good eyes.
They were going to break out into the open area at around eleven thousand feet. Another stroke of luck. The surface would be sunlit and Farley would be able to order the crew off oxygen and get the landing gear cranked down while he found a place to set her down. He hadn’t relished setting twenty tons of aircraft on the floor of a pitch-black canyon on zero engines, no lights, and an unexploded thousand-pound bomb stuck in the bay.
At eleven thousand feet they broke into the open and everything went to shit.
Vortex winds that curled around the fissure entrance assailed the heavy bomber. Farley fought for control. The aircraft banked a sharp right and Farley felt the right elevator barely hanging on. He sailed her in a wide right turn and straightened out and then had to take her left because more cliffs rose dead ahead. The open area in which they now glided was a vast bowl ringed by sheer, planed walls with jagged peaks. A circular mountain range. In the center of the bowl rose a conical mound with a flattened top.
“Navigator says negative on a landing site so far,” reported Shorty. “Bombardier says we’re in a bomb crater.”
Broben looked back at Shorty. “Bomb crater? This thing must be ten miles wide.”
Shorty shrugged. “It’s what he said.”
Broben looked at the altimeter. “Nine five,” he said. “Those turns were expensive.”
“Everybody off oxygen,” said Farley. “Get those wheels down.”
He glanced at Broben as Shorty relayed the order. “It’s going to be close,” he said.
Broben nodded. It would take several minutes for a team working furiously with the hand crank to lower the landing gear one at a time. “When isn’t it?” he said.
“We’re still flying and we’re still in one piece,” Farley pointed out.
“Well, look whose glass is half full.”
“Look who still has a glass.”
Broben snorted. “You win.”
Farley nodded at the front window. “Unless you have any better ideas, I’m heading for Plavitz’s lights on the other side of the bowl there.”
“All my better ideas involve being somewhere else right now.”
“Roger that.”
Shorty popped up again. “Martin says there’s a bandit shadowing us at eight o’clock level,” he said.
“You gotta be kidding me,” said Broben.
Through the control wheel Farley felt a faint shudder. The slowly lowering landing gear was adding drag.
“Get Martin on a waist gun and tell Boney to get in the top turret,” Farley ordered. “If it’s not one of ours, it’s history, got it?”
“Seven thousand,” Broben said.
“And tell Wen I need an engine, dammit.” Farley steered the bomber across the enormous bowl while Shorty relayed his orders. The surface looked rippled in places, waves hardened into rock formations splashed out from a common center. A crater? Ten miles wide? More like the caldera of some inconceivably large volcano. But this was no gouged mountain, it was a huge hole ripped out of a vast plain and radiating cracks bigger than the Grand Canyon.
He heard Boney climb into the top turret stand behind him.
Reflections played off the front windshield, and Farley realized he was looking at a shimmering column of air above the shadowed center of the crater. It looked the same as the disturbance in the air beneath the flak field above Zennhausen, and he didn’t want any part of it. He pointed it out to Jerry and turned to glide around it even though it would cost them even more altitude.
Above and behind him Boney called, “Bandit! Bandit eight o’clock level!” as Martin yelled, “What the hell is that?”
The jackhammering of .50s filled the cockpit.
“Shorty,” Farley began, and then something hit the bomber so hard it tore the controls from his hands. Fata Morgana slewed sideways and pitched right and began to plane down toward the ruined surface of that shifted world.
EIGHT
Wennda crouched behind a rockfall on the valley floor and studied the vast translucent wall of the massive Redoubt a kilometer away. Sunlight gleamed the wall’s top third. Canyon shadow slanted across its gridded surface below. The wall was made of large rectangular panels of some dense glasslike substance with a faint green tint. Panels here and there were cracked and chipped, some missing outright and covered with metal or plastic.
The Redoubt wall ran the width of the fissure, and rose up five hundred feet. The wedge of canyon behind it had been roofed over with the same material.
A cluster of tall buildings rose within that space. As if some enormous dam of pale green glass across the canyon had drowned a city and left it on display like some cruel god’s aquarium. Random lights glowed steady in the stark towers.
Wennda glanced at the other three members of the small reconnaissance party crouched beside her. Arshall and Sten were good soldiers and hard workers, fast, efficient, and skilled. Arshall farmed a plot with his older sister and their parents. Sten was a machinist who fabricated replacement parts for old equipment. Reliable men who trusted her to lead. They did their job and didn’t argue. Well, not much. In any case, they weren’t a worry.
The fourth member of their party was the worry.
Yone leaned against the rockfall and studied the translucent wall with Wennda’s priceless binoculars. He was small and thin and dark-haired, absorbed in his surveillance. Among them but not of them, as likely he would always be.
Wennda frowned at Yone’s back as he surveyed the place where he’d once lived. Will I really kill him if he runs? Will I have a choice? Maybe that’s why I brought Arshall and Sten. Because they won’t hesitate if it comes to that.
She glanced at Arshall and saw him frowning at Yone, and wondered if he was thinking something similar.
Yesterday their small recon team had quietly left the Dome and made the crater crossing. There was no foraging to be done. No game lived here, and none of them would have known how to hunt it if it had. Sparse weeds and vines had taken root in carbon-rich patches of crater floor, but there was nothing to eat or drink except what the team brought with them. It was unforgiving going. They slept in their clothes in the shelter of oddly undulant rock formations, smooth curved berms that once had briefly moved as ripples until they’d cooled to stone. At night the party lit no fire, and by day they traveled in the narrowing arc of shadow that crept eastward on the canyon floor until high noon, then thickened west to east as the unremitting sun shrank toward the blunt horizon. They followed the perimeter because no one dared go near the mound at the center of the crater. A vast well lay in its middle like a hole punched through the world. By day a column of air shimmered above it, as if a pillar of heat rose from the pit, or some great agitation in the deep churned what lay above. At night the vast bore glowed a faint pale green. Over it the insubstantial column glimmered in the nighttime air, distorting the hard sprawled stars that passed behind it.