Toller, hovering between wakefulness and sleep, vividly remembered his first ride on one of the strange looking machines. The bulkiness of his skysuit had been augmented by his personal jet unit and parachute, and it had taken him some time to adapt to the seat and familiarise himself with the controls. Acutely aware of being watched by the skymen in and around Fortress One, he had pumped the pneumatic reservoir to maximum pressure, then had advanced the throttle lever. In spite of his having been modest with the power demand, he had been astonished by the surge of acceleration which had accompanied the roar of the exhaust. It had taken him perhaps three minutes, with an icy slipstream tearing at his face, to get the knack of keeping the fighter from doing a slow spiral as it howled through the sky. He had then shut down the engine, allowed air resistance to bring the craft to a halt and had turned in the saddle, laughing with acceleration rapture, to solicit the applause of his fellow pilots waiting by the fortress.
And the fortress had not been there!
That shock, that exquisite stab of pure panic, had been his introduction to the new physics of the jet fighter. It had taken him many seconds to locate and recognise the fortress as a tiny mote of hard light, almost lost in the silver-speckled blue of the universe, and to realise that he had been travelling at a speed previously undreamt of by man.
The nine fighters of Red Squadron were ranged line abreast, their upper surfaces gleaming in the sunlight. A short distance above them was what had been the first fortress, recently extended by the addition of three new sections to make it a command station. Other fortresses comprising the Inner Defence Group were positioned nearby, but they were insignificant objects, hard to see in the deep blue even though reflectors had been added to increase their visibility. Overland, flanked by the sun, was a fire-edged roof for the universe, and the vastness of Land made a circular floor, blue and green dusted with ochre, scrolled with white.
The other object of significance for the fighter pilots was the target ship. Although it was more than a mile away from them the hugeness of the balloon made it an important feature of the celestial environment, one with the apparent solidity of a third planet. It had been positioned well outside the theoretical plane of weightlessness, in the direction of Land, so that cannon balls fired at it would be drawn down into Land’s gravitational field. Of the two fatalities which had occurred thus far in training, one had been that of a young pilot who had been making a highspeed practice run when he had been swept off his machine by a cannon ball which had hit him squarely in the chest. At first it was thought that he had been accidentally shot by another flier, then had come the realisation that the two-inch iron ball had been hanging almost motionless in the air, a deadly residue from an earlier practice firing. To prevent similar incidents, Toller had issued a general order that cannon could only be discharged when angled towards Land.
He was sitting astride his fighter, Red One, watching the target ship through binoculars and waiting for the pilot who had positioned it to return to safety. More than forty days had passed since the arrival of the first two fortresses in the weightless zone, and still there was no sign of a Lander invasion fleet. In some quarters there were rising hopes that King Chakkell’s prognosis had been wrong, but Toller and Zavotle refused to be complacent. They had decided to use the strategic leeway to maximum advantage, and to that end were prepared to have a skyship whose balloon was nearing the end of its useful life sacrificed as a target.
The magnified image in Toller’s binoculars showed the pilot leaving the skyship’s gondola and bestriding a tethered fighter belonging to the as yet incomplete Blue Squadron. The pilot cast off, his craft surged away on a white plume of condensation, and seconds later came the powdery boom of his engine. He swept the fighter into an upward curve and disappeared in the radiant needle-spray of light emanating from the sun.
“Go in without delay,” Toller shouted, gesturing to Gol Perobane, pilot of the furthermost left in the line of fighters. Perobane saluted and drove his machine forward, the roar of his exhaust swelling as it engulfed the remaining craft. His fighter swiftly shrank in apparent size, swooping down on the doomed skyship, and as he was flaring out of the curve both of his cannon streamed vapour. Toller, following the action with his binoculars, judged that Perobane had fired at exactly the right moment. He turned his attention to the balloon, expecting to see it quake and deform, and was disappointed when the serene curvatures appeared to be unaffected.
How can he have missed? he thought, giving the signal for the next fighter in line to blast off.
It was not until the fourth machine, flown by Berise Narrinder, had completed its ineffectual attack that he called a halt to the exercise. He blew crystals into his own engine and flew down to the target ship, cutting the power off early so that air resistance would bring him to a halt close to the huge balloon. At short range he was able to discern several holes in the varnished linen envelope, but they were surprisingly small—almost as if the material had partially healed its wounds—and were far short of the catastrophic damage the cannon should have inflicted. The balloon was beginning to show some slight wrinkling and slackness, but Toller attributed it to natural loss of heat as much as to the insignificant punctures. It was apparent to him that the skyship retained the capability of making a safe descent to ground level.
“Does this mean we have to start firing at the gondolas?” said Umol, drifting into position beside him on Red Two. His chest was visibly labouring to deal with the rarefied air.
Toller shook his head. “If we attack the gondolas we expose ourselves to return fire. We must attack from above, staying within the enemy’s blind arc, and destroy his balloons with… with…” He paused, striving to visualise the weapon his fliers needed, and at that moment a large meteor struck across the sky far below them, briefly illuminating the scene from underneath.
“With something like that,” Umol said, pulling down his scarf to unveil a smile.
“That is somewhat beyond our capabilities, but…"Toller paused again to let the meteor’s tardy thunderclap roll by them. “But your thoughts fly in the right direction, old friend! Have somebody go back on board the ship and put heat into the balloon. Keep everything as it is until I return.”
He placed his foot on the side of Umol’s fighter, which had been nuzzling up to his own machine in stray air currents, and pushed hard. The two machines parted with a lazy wallowing action. Toller advanced his throttle lever, using an extreme sensitivity of touch developed since his first flight, and the fighter growled its way forward to pass within a few yards of the target balloon. As soon as he had gained enough speed to render the control surfaces effective he brought the nose up and around, and made a soaring return to the command station.
The weapon he brought back a short time later was a simple iron spike with a bundle of oil-soaked oakum bound to the blunt end. He ignited it by means of a phosphor wick and, whirling the spike to feed the flame, put the fighter into a shallow dive which took it close to the balloon’s upper hemisphere. When he hurled the spike it flew down cleanly, with the stability of a dart, and sank its full length into the yielding material of the envelope. The varnished linen caught fire at once, producing a thick brownish smoke, and by the time Toller had come to a halt a sizeable area of the crown was alight. In less than a minute the balloon was beginning to fold in on itself, pulsing and losing symmetry, while the watching pilots shouted their approval. Without convection currents to bear it away, the smoke gathered around the stricken skyship in a strangely localised cloud.