The two sentries were not talking, merely plodding their path, as they stepped onto damp matted grass. “Whatthefuck is this," said Wally, stopping, his words masking the rasp of Quantrill's stove lighter.
Al did not answer in words, but in a howl as the stove fuel ignited, a line of flame racing through the fence and along the path underfoot. Qu an trill was already spraying more fuel from his squeeze bottle onto Al's head and shoulders, his target illuminated by the blazing grass.
Wally jumped to one side. He might have saved himself had he not stood petrified in astonishment as Al flailed and slapped at his blazing hair. He never saw the stream of fluid that played up his back, barely had time to feel its volatile wetness before he too was a lambent torch in the night.
Quantrill did not wait to see how thorough was his handiwork but raced to his campsaw and, aided by the light of a growing grass fire, made a dozen feverish passes through the sawcut in ten seconds. The tree cracked like a rifle. Quantrill tossed his saw over the fence, hurled his pack over after it, then scrambled up the leaning tree trunk and rode it as it fell across the barbed wire.
By now the meadow was ablaze, doubtless a beacon to many eyes. Quantrill did not realize yet that the flames were high enough to hide his next moves, and opted for the saw instead of his cleaver. The tall Wally was whimpering, trying with dull single-mindedness to get out of the remnant of his coverall. QuantriU's flying kick caught him in the groin, sent him sprawling. With one foot in the tall man's chest, Quan-trill needed only a single pass with the saw.
Al was another matter. “I can't see, can't see ohjeez," he mewled as Quantrill found the carbine. The man was stumbling away from the heat waves, falling, running again, still on fire, and Quantrill made a lightning decision. Al — what was left of him — might be a better diversion alive than dead. Quantrill grabbed his pack, ran in a crouch to something that lay spread-eagled near the drainage ditch.
He dragged the thing into the ditch with him, took an interminable thirty seconds to gets its sticky coverall off, found that it fitted him better than it had someone else. Two minutes after the first flame had kindled Quantrill was sprinting in the ditch toward the maintenance shops wearing a coverall, pack slung over one arm, a carbine and a camp saw in the other hand.
A man raced by without seeing him, yelling. Quantrill saw elongated shadows bobbing near and dived headlong on dry gravel. As he scrambled to his feet, snatching at a carbine he had never fired, an older man saw him, tossed him a blanket. "Go on, you sumbitch," the man shouted, "fight that fire with the rest of us!" Then the man was running, arms full of blankets, while more men ran by. No women; somehow that figured.
Quantrill grabbed the carbine, paused only long enough to conceal the plastic-sheathed cleaver in the coverall pocket at his shin before surging up from the ditch. Not thirty meters away was the near edge of the delta moorage, its lights searingly brilliant. He gaped incredulous at the great vessel now splashed with reflected firelight, and then at the man who was hacking at a polymer-wrapped cable as Quantrill approached. The man saw him and the carbine in the same instant, raised his hands in supplication.
The man was dressed in a yellow flight suit; clearly not one of the men who should be guarding the delta. "Scrub the mission," he called softly, not taking his eyes from Quan-trill. In the meadow, other men were yelling orders, queries, obscenities.
"We're not armed," said a second man, rising from a crouch behind the second of the four mooring struts. In his eyes, Quantrill saw a calm smoking anger.
With a clarity bright as mooring lights, Quantrill knew that once their guard had become a fireman the delta's crew was trying, under cover of the confusion, to free their huge craft. "Can you shoot this thing?"
The man nearest him stammered, shrugged. “I used to."
Without a word, Quantrill skated the carbine toward him, fumbled the cleaver from his coverall, attacked the cable. It was glass rope; enormous tensile strength, yet so poor in shear strength that it could be cut by a patient man with a penknife. Quantrill was not patient. The cleaver bit deeply and fast.
The gangling man with the carbine took the cleaver and handed the carbine back as Quantrill stood up, the glass cable parted at his feet. "You got the right uniform," the man said, dashing to a rear strut. "So stand like a guard. Safety's off, buddy, all you do is aim and squeeze the trigger plate. Stand in the middle of that platform," he continued, puffing as he hacked through the polymer sheath of the glass cable. At the other rear corner, the second man was laughing insanely as he worked with shears.
Quantrill heard voices above him, dared not glance up. He heard brief whines and thunks of machinery, a call for 'full emergency buoyancy' which seemed to have no effect, and then saw the yellow-clad pair running up the struts using handhold cavities.
"No countdown; lift't" A voice echoed through the yawing hull above Quantrill. No one had warned him to sit down, and the pneumatic anti-inertial rams in the struts had thrust the great delta three meters into the air before Quantrill realized why he felt as if he had stepped into a fast-rising elevator.
The struts scissored, the platform began to rise into the delta's belly, and still there was no sound of propellers. It occurred to Quantrill that they might rise completely out of sight unnoticed, and then a vagrant breeze struck the leviathan hull, and without its gimbaled engines it responded like any balloon with control surfaces.
Quantrill's horizon tilted. He swallowed his heart, grabbed at a cargo pallet tiedown ring with both hands. The carbine began to slide, but he pinned it with his leg. The delta slowly pendulumed back and Quantrill saw that his lower legs had tripped limit switches that, in turn, prevented the platform from seating into the hull.
Now the mooring platform was fifty meters below but now, too, came a bright series of blinks from beyond the mooring lights and a drumming through the hull. Then more blinks from another source, and impacts Quantrill could feel through the hatch floor. Looping an arm through a pallet mount, he groped for the carbine, brought it to his shoulder, aimed in the general direction of the flashes.
His first burst sent a dozen rounds earthward in a hammering hiss that, if not on target, at least quelled the firing from below. His second burst was longer, sweeping the mooring pad; two of the lights flashed out, sparks blooming like fireworks. The Stirling engine nacelles of the delta began to thrum now, slowly at first, with a steady rhythmic beat, the propellers whispering strongly now, a breeze fanning Quantrill as he saw the flash of the rocket launcher from near one of the buildings.
Wherever the projectile went, it did not strike the delta. Quantrill emptied the long double-clip in answering fire and saw a man fly backward like a flung doll. Then, with great care, he pulled himself into a fetal position and risked a look around as the cargo hatch thudded against its seals. Two men, the same two who had attacked the glass cables, slapped manual hatch locks into place, and then the taller one approached Quantrill in a sailor's rolling walk. "Welcome aboard," he said grinning, offering his hand and then, taking his first hard look at Quantrill, shouted: "Good God, cap'n; it's a kid!"
Chapter Thirty-Four
Quantrill insisted that he had not been hit; that the blood was someone else's, though he did not expand on that. Not until he had removed the coverall and started to don a yellow flight suit did he feel the dull ache in his left calf. “He took a slug through the muscle; looks like a clean hole," said a crewman.