He waited tensely, but the alien remained silent. Nothing to do now but wait, he told himself, wiping ineffectually at the perspiration on his face. If it doesn't work we'll have to surrender. If it does … they'll probably start shooting.
"You heard the order, soldier," Major Banner said, nodding to the bewildered sergeant at his command-post barricade. "Start slicing. And be sure and spread the fertilizer evenly over the ground."
"Yes, sir." The man still didn't look happy, but the order he barked to his squad was forceful enough. Holstering their pistols, they produced trench knives and got to work on the thick plastic.
It took Carmen nearly a minute of straining before the intervening kilometers of air calmed enough for her to glimpse the underside of the distant landing craft; but once she had seen it she had no doubts left. "Landing skids," she told Al Nichols, who had moved up beside her. "No rubber wheels. Almost certainly bare steel or something equally vulnerable." Lowering the glasses, she offered them to him.
"So that's what the fertilizer business is all about." Nichols hung the binoculars around his neck. "Meredith thinks extra metal on the ground will trigger the leech effect. Should work."
"If metal concentration is what causes it to start up," Carmen reminded him. She glanced around the mountainside, eyes flicking over the expedition members huddling together as they gazed westward.
Hafner was missing.
She thought about it for a moment as she double-checked the group; but there really was only one place he could reasonably be. Leaving Nichols, she headed downslope toward their flyer.
Hafner was in the pilot's seat when she arrived, forehead furrowed with concentration as he studied the controls. "Going somewhere?" she asked, sitting down beside him.
He glanced up, then returned to his study. "Be a friend. Carmen, and show me how to start this thing up," he said. "Then get out of here."
For a moment she stared at his profile. Then, deliberately, she reached over and flipped the switch that transferred control to her half of the board. "Where are we going?" she asked, snapping her flying harness around her.
"You can't come," he growled, trying to reach past her to the switch. "I'm serious, Carmen; this is too risky. Give me back the controls and disappear."
"Tell me what you're planning first."
"Oh, for—" He ran his right hand through his hair. "Look, it's obvious what Colonel Meredith is trying, but I don't think the fertilizer alone will do the trick.
We've got to get more metal into the ground as fast as possible."
Her stomach knotted. "You're going to crash the flyer?"
"Are you crazy?" He was aghast. "I'm not that desperate. I'm going to try and get the aliens to crash one of theirs."
"Oh. Well, that's different. For that you'll need a decent pilot." Flipping the ignition, she fired the underside repulsers, their low roar not quite covering Hafner's yelp. "No argument!" she shouted as the flyer lifted. "Colonel Meredith can give me orders, Peter, but you can't. Besides, you know perfectly well I'm right. Now, where to?"
There was a short pause, but when he spoke the argument was gone from his voice. "North and maybe a little east. I want to draw one of those flyers the aliens unloaded and make him chase us."
Carmen nodded and cut in the main engines. Olympus dropped away behind them and she took a moment to check the radar screen. "You have some way in mind to keep them chasing and not shooting?"
"I hope so. But I'm not sure." He hesitated. "That's one reason I wanted to go alone."
Carmen nodded grimly, swallowing all the obvious comments. "Well, get your plan in gear … because here they come."
Hafner turned to look out his window. Carmen was on the wrong side to see, but the radar screen told her everything she needed to know. Two of the alien's four flyers were coming in fast, one at reasonably high altitude, the other almost skimming the ground. Turning back, Hafner slipped on his radio headset. "Is this thing on?" he asked.
She hit the right switch and one-handedly got her own headset on.
"—immediately," a flat translator voice greeted her. "Repeat: the unauthorized Ctencri flyer is to land immediately."
"If you have any interest in the cable we've discovered, you'd better not bother us," Hafner said, his voice betraying none of the uncertainties of a minute ago.
"We have in our possession delicate equipment vital to the operation of the machinery. So just pull back and let us go our way." Without waiting for a reply, he reached over and shut off the transmitter. "All right," he said to Carmen,
"double back and head southwest toward the spot where Flyer Two crashed."
"Mind letting me in on the secret?" she asked as she put the craft into a right turn.
"No secret, just a hunch. As you pointed out earlier we've flown over that area several times before … but Flyer Two was heading due south when it failed, and I'm pretty sure we've never passed by going anywhere near that direction."
Carmen thought it over for a long minute. It wasn't impossible, she realized; something like a long underground solenoid or antenna could conceivably provide that kind of directional dependence. But it could just have easily have been a oneshot event. "I hope you're right," she said aloud, wishing she'd known all this when there was still a chance of talking him out of it. "So what do you want me to do, run an S-curve over the region and assume our pursuers will follow a straight north-south path?"
"Exactly. I'm hoping they'll be smart enough to realize that if they just stay with us we'll eventually run out of fuel and have to land. That may keep their trigger fingers steady long enough—yipe!"
Carmen twitched violently, the flyer's automatic systems smoothing out the effect on their motion. Bare meters away, flanking them on both sides, the alien flyers had suddenly appeared. Close up, she realized for the first time just how big they really were.
"Carmen!" Hafner's cry was half agonized expletive, half bewildered question.
"I don't know," she shook her head, feeling her own nerve sliding away. "Twenty seconds ago they were fifteen kilometers away—I never even saw them move."
She broke off, forcing her mind back to the task at hand. For all their superior equipment, she told herself firmly, we know something they don't. But how to use that knowledge, now that their opponents would be watching their every move?
She thought of a way. Maybe.
"Take a deep breath, Peter," she ordered, "and brace yourself. Here goes nothing."
Ahead, Olympus was sweeping toward them like an inverted tornado. Pulling back on the stick, Carmen shoved the throttle to full power, sending the flyer arcing toward the clouds. The alien craft matched the maneuver without the slightest trouble that she could detect; matched it again when she turned the flyer to point due south. Olympus's cone flashed past, far beneath and to her right.
Somewhere along here Flyer Two had lost all power—
Gritting her teeth, she shut down the repulsers.
The sudden silence seemed to roar in her ears. She spared a quick glance to the side, found Hafner tight-lipped but with the look of understanding in his eyes.
Giving her full attention to flaps and elevons, she tried to remember every scrap she'd ever learned about gliding. The review, unfortunately, didn't take long.
"Any idea what our range is like this?" Hafner asked, his voice studiously casual.
"None." She tried to match his tone, but her performance wasn't nearly as good as his. "We were still climbing when I cut power and we're just leveling out now. It all depends on the glide characteristics of this thing, and I have no idea what those are. I think we'll be past the crash site before we have to restart the engines, but I don't know how much farther than that we'll get."