Sam disengaged the autopilot and dipped the Eagle’s nose down. Reluctantly he scanned the prairie below, looking for a landing site that would also offer him some shelter. He would be walking sooner than he’d hoped.
The Little Eagle dropped swiftly. Early in the descent, Sam spotted a small village, but the turns necessary to reach it would have put him into the teeth of the storm before he could bring the Little Eagle to earth. The grassland rushed past beneath the craft. No better opportunity appeared, and be began to regret having passed up the village. Time was running out.
His tail wind strengthened, forcing him to ease off to a shallower glide slope or else risk a dump. He thought about jacking back in; the added response-time from receiving the sensor data directly might give him an edge. The Eagle shuddered as the first of the storm’s winds reached her, and be knew the decision had been made. He could not afford to take his hands from the control yoke now. Seconds later, the drumming of rain announced the arrival of the storm.
Sam fought the bucking Eagle, trying to bring her down safely before the full force of the storm hit. His ground speed increased as the winds swelled, The prairie below vanished, replaced by a landscape as dark as his nightmare.
As the Eagle lurched downward, strange shapes loomed up and flashed past. Even as Sam fought to retain control, he could see that most were geological formations carved from rock by wind and rain and lit by the lightning. But the storm’s gathering darkness cloaked other, almost organic shapes. Hunched giants and monstrous creatures reached out of the storm to threaten him and his fragile craft. The Eagle twisted abruptly to the right, and Sam watched helplessly as the winds tore off the starboard wing tip, which tumbled away. Caught in a crosswind, the Eagle’s nose lifted just before slamming into a rocky spire. The port wing sheared away, leaving the craft a broken plaything for the gale. The battered fuselage was torn from the sky and slammed across the rough face of a mesa. The remains of the Little Eagle bounced three times before settling against a rocky bluff. Sam never felt those bounces; he lost consciousness when his head slammed back on the first strike.
Warm rain roused him to an aching body. So far, he had survived the landing. Raising a hand to explore his most immediate pain, his fingers came away sticky with what the lightning showed to be blood. Did he have a concussion? Dazed, he stared at his bloody fingers as the rain sluiced them clean.
Fitful flashes lit the barren landscape. The harsh white light washed out perspective, but Sam thought that the revealed formations looked too flat. A couple of twists of his head told him that he was only seeing out of his left eye. The other was swollen shut or gummed closed with blood. That was his hope, at least. He didn’t dare touch to see if the eye was still there.
Another sharp pain announced itself in his side, but that one he was willing to explore. He slit open his palm in the process of discovering that his torso had been gashed open by a ragged strut torn from Little Eagle’s airframe. He winced at his own touch and vomited. New agony erupted from the convulsion.
Then he was standing outside the wreck, looking at the devastation. He didn’t remember crawling free, but that was just as well. It would have been a tortuous process and he was feeling enough pain. He staggered back a step, his foot slipping in the thick, slick mud. He fell.
Pain exploded in him as he slid down toward a raging thunder that was more terrifying than the storm. He fetched up on an overhang that stopped him from plunging into the crashing torrent that rushed through what had minutes- hours? — before been a dry gulch. His reprieve was momentary, for already he felt the ground shifting beneath him; his precipitous landing had weakened the overhang.
Fear drove him from his perch and sent him scrambling upward. A detached part of his mind noted the blazing pain and the blood that flowed onto the slick mud. For every three meters he gained, Sam slipped back two, but he kept on climbing. He fainted for a bit, but the hungry water below spurred him forward as soon as he regained his fogged senses.
He had almost reached the wreck again when his foot found a solid rocky surface under the mud. He leaned into it, a safe place amid the morass. Then his hands slipped and his body twisted away from the ledge. His ravaged side screamed its pain and his foot wedged against something hard, sending a new agony searing through his leg. He slipped downward, surrendering to the pain, embracing the darkness.
34
“Change?”
The interrogative quavered with a faded hint of the brilliant trill the sasquatch’s voice must once have held. Sasquatches couldn’t speak like people, but they could imitate almost any Sound. Hart wondered how this one had come to associate the word with panhandling for money to buy more of the booze that stank on her breath. Most of her kind seemed unable to make the connection between the spoken word and communication. Why, Hart didn’t know. Another mystery of the Sixth World, she supposed. The large, furry bipeds could communicate with sign language, though, and this one’s fingers gestured in a fumbling way. Hart didn’t know the language, but it was obvious the sasquatch’s words were as blurred as any Humans would be when drowned in alcohol. How could any thinking being do that to itself?
“Change?” the sasquatch repeated exactly.
Just like a recording, Hart thought, or a dog barking to get a cookie. She shook her head and motioned the sasquatch away. As the furry panhandler hung her head, her hopeful, idiot smile died. She shuffled down the street to collapse outside the bar.
Hart shook her head. Disgusting.
She went back to scanning the sky for a sign of Tessien. The Dragon had finally checked in with the transmitter it wore and she had given it the final approach vector to cut off the running panzer. Tessien had been out of contact for too long. Had something happened to it?
Standing by the battered Chevrolet four-by-four she had rented in Grand Forks, Hart waited. There was no one in sight but that rummy old sasquatch. She didn’t like meeting out in the open, but no building in the town had enough space to house the Dragon. This street was at least in a nearly deserted part of town. That made it better than most for her purpose. Anyone who saw the pair would be more than happy to stay out of their way or else be on shadow business of his own.