He took an arrow from a quiver, ignited the tip and nocked it on to his bowstring. He gunned his engine, bracing himself against the acceleration, and dived on the balloon. The howl from the exhaust obliterated all musket reports, but he saw their toadstool billows of white. As the monstrous shape of the balloon swelled to become a curved brown wall blotting out much of the universe, he rolled the fighter to put the solidity of the engine between him and most of the enemy marksmen. Land and Overland obediently slid into new positions in the firmament.
Toller drew the bow and fired in a single practised movement.
and in the same movement heard the double blast of Berise’s cannon. His arrow streaked into the balloon, its line of flight vectored into an arc by his own speed. Something flicked his left leg and tufts of cottony insulation whirled away in the fighter’s slipstream. He crouched low on the rounded back of the machine and burned his way out towards the stars. At a safe distance he shut down the engine and pulled into a turn which gave him a view of the battle scene.
Berise was completing a similar manoeuvre above him and to his right. Fire was spreading on one side of the Lander balloon, but although he was certain Berise’s aim had been good, the gondola appeared to be undamaged. There was no way of telling what injury, if any, the iron balls passing through it had inflicted on those inside.
Berise was busy clearing the breeches of her cannon and inserting fresh shells. When she had finished she raised a hand and Toller went for the balloon again, trying to draw as much fire as possible in order to give her a second clear run. He successfully put an orange-streaming dart into the now misshapen giant and again sought out Berise in the empty sky beyond. Instead of pausing she reloaded during a sweeping turn and drove in beneath him at speed, coming up from beneath the Lander gondola.
The tethered soldiers were turning their muskets towards her as she fired both cannon. The gondola shuddered as the shot ploughed into the planking of the deck, but it remained structurally intact, and soldiers on board kept on firing through the black smoke which was gathering around the stricken craft.
Toller, who had been praying for a crystal explosion, coasted to a halt. There was a possibility that Rassamarden had been hit, but a man was a small target within the volume of a gondola, and in this instance he had to be able to claim a certain kill. Nothing else could be acceptable under the circumstances. He looked around for Berise and saw her swooping down on him in a nimbus of brilliant vapour. As she drew near he tapped his chest and pointed at the skyship, signifying that he intended to mount his own attack. She pulled down her scarf and shouted something he failed to hear above the growl of her engine. Her face was savage, almost unrecognisable. He barely had time to note that her windscreen was spidered with white lines, then she had given her engine full throttle and was dwindling into the distance —heading straight for the skyship amid an appalling blast of sound.
Toller gave an involuntary cry of protest as the fighter streaked towards the gondola and it became obvious that Berise had no intention of changing course. Barely two seconds before impact she leapt off the machine. It sledged through the wall of the gondola and struck the centrally mounted engine, driving the entire structure forward in a tumbling movement which wrapped large pieces of the still-burning balloon around it. An acceleration strut broke free and flailed off to one side while tethered soldiers were snatched into the turmoil by coiling ropes. A moment later there came a series of whooshing explosions —typical of the pikon-halvell reaction—followed by a great billowing of greenish flame. Toller knew at once that nobody aboard the gondola could possibly have escaped death.
Berise, having kicked herself into a trajectory only slightly different from that of her fighter, had disappeared into the opaque seethings of smoke, becoming lost to Toller’s view. Cold with apprehension, senses overloaded, he fed his engine and flew in a semi-circle around the slow-spinning chaos, reaching the dark blue serenity beyond. At first there was no sign of Berise, then he saw a twinkling white mote which was changing position against the background of stars and silver spirals. His glasses showed that it was Berise, perhaps a mile distant and still receding, still using up the energy imparted to her by the fighter’s speed.
He went after her, dreading the prospect of finding a mutilated body, adjusting his speed and direction as he drew near. The fighter had begun to wallow as it closed in on Berise, and he had to raise himself on the footrest in order to grip her arm and pull her towards him. He knew immediately that she was alive and well because she expertly took command of their relative motion, guiding herself in such a way that she ended up astride of him, face to face, arms around his neck.
He saw the manic ecstasy on her face, felt the quivering tension of her body despite the bulkiness of her skysuit, and in that moment there was nothing they could do but kiss. Berise’s lips were cold, even her tongue was cold, but Toller—the man who had forsworn sexual passion for ever—was unable to stop his groin lifting up against her again and again. She clamped her legs around him and rode him eagerly for the duration of the kiss, then used both hands to push his face away from hers.
“Was I good, Toller?” she breathed. “Was that the best thing you ever saw?”
“Yes, yes, but you’re lucky to be alive.”
“I know, I know!” She laughed and returned to the kiss and they drifted that way for a long time, lost among the stars and luminous swirls of their private universe.
For the most part it was quiet on board the skyship. Toller had carried out the inversion manoeuvre some two hundred miles below the weightless zone, and now the ship was gently falling towards Overland. During the next few days little would be required other than periodic injections of hot gas to give the huge balloon a positive internal pressure which would keep it from falling in on itself. The bitterness of the aerial element was mitigated to some extent by a crystal-powered heater and the fact that it was now standard practice for gondolas to be lined with vellum to prevent the ingress of chill air through chinks in the walls and deck.
It was, however, still very cold within the circumscribed space of the gondola, and when Berise removed her blouse her nipples gathered into brown peaks. Toller, who was already naked and ensconced in layers of eiderdown, extended an inviting hand to her, but she held back for the moment. She was kneeling beside him, gripping one of the transverse lines which were a vital safety feature in the virtual absence of gravity.
“Are you sure about this?” she said. “You haven’t been at all discreet.” She was referring to Toller having announced his intention of presenting her to the King, and —instead of returning to Overland by fallbag and parachute—commandeering a skyship for just the two of them.
“Are you delaying in this way to give me the opportunity to change my mind?” He smiled and glanced at the globes of her breasts, which were buoyantly beautiful in a way which would have been impossible in normal gravity. “Or is it to prevent me changing my mind?”
Berise placed a forearm across her breasts. “I’m thinking of the Lady Gesalla. It is almost certain that she will be informed, by somebody, and I have no wish for you to look on me afterwards with cold eyes.”
“The Lady Gesalla and I live in different worlds,” Toller said. “We both do what it is in us to do.”
“In that case…” Berise squirmed her cold little body into the quilts beside him, making him gasp with the touch of her cold fingers.
In the days and nights that followed, while the meteors flickered all around, Toller rediscovered vital aspects of his being, learned the extent to which his life had become arid and deficient in recent years. The experience was unbearably sweet and unbearably bitter at the same time, because an inner voice informed him that he was committing a form of self-murder—a spiritual suicide—while the meteors flickered all around.