Farley ordered Martin to climb a nearby rockfall slanting from the cliff wall and look back to see if they were being followed. Wennda gave Martin her digital recording binoculars and showed him how to operate them. “Magnify, record, night vision, infrared,” she pointed out. Martin frowned at the flat device as if he were being given a crash course in how to fly a spaceship.
“We should head left when we get to the crater,” Wennda told Farley. “Assume there’s a team coming after us. Stay in the shadows, but remember they can see body heat. So your crewmen who aren’t wearing smartsuits have to keep something between and themselves and the people coming after us, if they can.”
“Can we make the Redoubt before daylight?” Farley asked Plavitz.
“It’s about ten miles across the crater,” the navigator replied. “So call it fifteen going halfway around the rim. Maybe six from the north fissure entrance to the Redoubt. A twenty-one-mile hump.” He shrugged. “We ought to get there with a couple hours to spare, if the guys coming after us don’t cut across the crater and get there ahead of us.”
“If they cut across,” said Wennda, “they’ll go by the well and the Typhon. So I don’t think they’ll get there at all.”
Martin came back and reported that he hadn’t seen anything. “These binoculars are something,” he said.
“I thought you people just put your ear to the ground,” said Garrett.
Martin nodded solemnly and cupped a hand to his ear. “Me think maybe twenty, twenty-five cavalry, kemosabe,” he said.
Farley waved him away. “Jerry,” he called. “Mission briefing.”
“You got it, boss.”
Farley led Broben away from the others and lowered his voice. “Listen, Jer,” he said, “you need to know what the labcoats told me about how to get back, in case you’re the one doing the flying.”
Broben frowned. “Okay.” he said. “I guess it’s good to know they think we can get back.”
“Well.” Farley put his hands on his hips and looked at the men taking advantage of their five-minute break. “They’re not a hundred percent about it.”
“I wouldn’t trust it if they were.”
“I hear you.” Farley frowned. “They said I shouldn’t think of the vortex as a tunnel between here and 1943. They think it’s more like a hub of a wheel. The wheel itself is time—all time, from Creation to Armageddon and everything in between.”
“I’m already getting a headache here,” said Broben.
“It’s like a roulette wheel,” Farley tried again. “Only the numbers are years, and the Morgana’s the ball.”
“And where she stops, nobody knows?”
“Where the ball lands depends on how and where and when it gets dropped in. So we can improve the odds quite a bit.”
“Now you’re speaking my lingo.”
“Here’s the dope,” said Farley. “You have to come in level at sixteen-five altitude, bearing one sixty-eight degrees, at two two five knots.”
“Sixteen five, bearing one sixty-eight, speed two twenty-five.”
Farley nodded. “I don’t know how much wiggle room you have, but the white-coat boys went out of their way to stress that you want to go in as close as possible to the exact spot where we came out.”
Broben looked worried. “We’ll be doing great to be less than a couple hundred yards off the mark,” he said. “What kind of difference are we talking about here? Miss by an inch and end up waving down at dinosaurs?”
Farley shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and come out after the Germans surrender.”
“Shit. Maybe I’ll get luckier and come out before I ever joined up so I’ll know better next time.”
“You’d still join up.”
“Yeah, I’m dumb like that.”
Farley grew serious again. “It’s a hell of a gamble, I know. But you’re a hell of a gambler, Jer. And if there’s any ship in the world I’d bet on, it’s the Morgana.”
Broben smirked. “That is lucky,” he said. “’Cause it’s the only ship in the world you can bet on.”
Farley was taking one last look at the enshadowed western edge of the canyon floor when Wennda came up beside him. “You can’t see them,” she said, “but they’re coming.”
He nodded. “I know.” He looked into her eyes. It felt like a long time but it wasn’t.
Finally she smiled. “Time,” she said.
Farley nodded. He turned and clapped his hands. “All right,” he called, “everybody out of the pool.”
They ran beyond the mile-wide portal of the fissure’s end and out onto the vast and rippled surface of the crater. They turned left and followed the western perimeter, keeping to the thickening crescent of shadow as the naked sun sank in its damaged sky.
They were hard pursued.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Technician First Class made a final adjustment to the hydraulic array framed above the ball turret slung in the belly of the captured warplane. He stepped back and nodded at the Class One Weaponry Officer who stood waiting with obvious impatience, even though the proper functioning of the turret was in the WepOff’s best interest.
At the nod, the WepOff immediately brushed past the Tech One and set his hands on the side edges of the little opened hatchway and lowered himself carefully into the tiny ball. The guns had to be pointed straight down before a man could enter the hatch from inside the plane, so the mod biobots had carved a divot from the stone floor below the aircraft to give the turret free rotation in all directions.
It was hard to believe the man could fit himself into the space. When they had first examined the turret, they had assumed it was an autonomous weapons node, or was controlled either by the ship’s command center or by an interfaced pilot. When it became clear the ball had been built to contain a human being, they had assumed the operator interfaced with the onboard command center. When they could find no interface connector and no command center, they realized with fascination and not a little horror that the armed ball was meant to house a human operator who manually and independently controlled the steering, targeting, and weaponry—at altitude, without pressurization or climate control. Like virtually everything else on the aircraft.
When the Weaponry Officer One was situated in the ball turret, the Tech One sealed the hatch and touched his right collarbone. “Ready to power up,” he said.
Across the cleared-off staging area another Tech One activated a power inverter that fed from the main solar array. The panel on his palm readout showed green. He touched his collarbone and said, “Power feed is on.”
“Azimuth power clutch engaged,” the Weaponry Officer replied immediately. “Main power on.”
The Tech One on the warplane examined the ball turret hydraulic rig one more time, then glanced around the fuselage and shook his head in a combination of wonder and pity he had never felt before. What these people had done with the little they knew was simply ingenious. Water compressed in metal tubes that pistoned to drive crude whole-body aiming mechanisms on two axes. Metal cams that physically prevented chemically powered projectiles from firing into the body of the aircraft itself. And combustible fossil fuels powered all of it—the motive engines that drove the aircraft to lift speeds, the dynamo generators that supplied electricity to power communications, instrumentation, and the hydraulics that rotated the turrets. Everything was mechanical, analog. It was like learning that ancient humans had traveled to the moon using hot-air balloons.