That time would come when his corps was utterly destroyed.
I hope those brave boys are not killed before they can at least do some good, Boyd thought as he watched the last of the gliders lift off from the northern side of the airstrip.
With each liftoff, Boyd had shaken his head with wonder, in part at the courage of the young pilots, and in part at the patent insanity of their chosen mechanism of attaining flight.
The gliders, though they had auxiliary propulsion engines, had not used their engines. Young Diaz had explained that it was his understanding that every Posleen with a direct line of sight, possibly to include those still in space, would have instantly engaged any such attempt. Instead, the gliders had been dismounted from their trailers, nose down, while long, and very large, balloons had been laid out behind them. The ground crews had then strapped the pilots into their seats, rotated them by hand to face downward, and manhandled them into the cockpits in that position. After the pilots were placed, the balloons had been secured to both the gliders and the ground. Tanks of helium had then been connected to the balloons, filling them until they stood huge and fat above the gliders, swaying in the wind. The whole process took nearly an hour.
At that point the balloons had been released from their ground tethers to shoot into the air like rockets. A few brief seconds lapsed for the pilots before the ropes connecting the gliders with the balloons grew taut. At that point, the gliders dutifully followed the balloons up, up and away. Both balloons and gliders were too high by far for Boyd to see when the pilots released their cables, freed themselves from the balloons’ tug, fell a few score feet, and began to soar.
As the wise old sergeant once said, thought Boyd, if it’s crazy or stupid but it works, it isn’t crazy or stupid.
The worst part, from Diaz’s point of view, was not the initial launch or the rapid acceleration upward. He didn’t really mind the restraining straps cutting into the flesh of his stomach, shoulders and chest. He could even live with facing straight down, surely the worst possible view, as the earth seemed to race away from him.
But what he could not stand was watching that earth spin and wobble as the uncontrolled and uncontrollable glider twisted and swayed in the breeze.
He had taken Triptone, a more modern and powerful version of Dramamine, of course. That had become SOP during program development as one glider after another returned to earth with the contents of the pilots’ stomachs roughly distributed over the inside of the cockpit.
And the Triptone helped, no doubt about it. If it hadn’t, Diaz would have lost his breakfast, too, before even half the necessary altitude had been gained. Yet while the Triptone helped, it did not stop the feeling that he ought to be nauseated, that he should be painting the instrument panel and canopy with his bile.
Closing his eyes helped, a little, but there was still that feeling of uncontrolled spin nudging at the pit of his stomach. Growing… growing… growing.
Triptone didn’t always work. Diaz lunged for the vomit bag.
Colonel Preiss wanted to puke. He hated nap-of-the-earth flying, the helicopter doing its best to simulate a railless roller coaster, skimming the jungle roof or descending into it as opportunity offered.
They’d lost a couple of choppers, too, on this hair-raising trip from the battalion’s home base at Fort Davis to a previously cut “postage stamp” landing zone in the jungle on the northern side of Panama’s central cordillera. Behind the long trail of Blackhawks a few jungle patches smoked and smoldered where a chopper had gone in.
It had been a gamble, using aircraft in the presence of the Posleen. While there was little doubt that the aliens could have shot down every one of the birds, there had been enough doubt as to whether they would to make the risk seem worthwhile. The helicopters represented no direct threat to spacecraft, and so — it was hoped — spacecraft would ignore them. Indeed, from the point of view of an orbiting spacecraft, the helicopters, operating anywhere from a few feet to a few inches over the jungle, were almost indistinguishable from a ground vehicle. The aliens rarely engaged ground vehicles from space.
Moreover, the cordillera itself was expected to, and did, act as a shield from the observation and fire of already landed Posleen.
Still, there were spacecraft overhead, some of them apparently manned by Posleen who exhibited an unfortunate degree of what could only be called boyish high spirits. These had tossed a few kinetic energy projectiles at the helicopters. None had scored a direct hit but, given the shock wave from a couple of pounds of material coming in and impacting at a high fraction of C, a few Blackhawks had been knocked around. Given the close proximity of chopper to jungle, being knocked around, if only for a second, was likely to prove fatal.
Preiss’s stomach lurched as a single bright streak flashed down to impact on the jungle ahead. A visible shock wave composed of jungle detritus and compressed air radiated outward from the point of impact. The helicopter lurched again as the pilot pulled back on his stick frantically to gain a little altitude before the shock wave hit. When it came the chopper momentarily bucked and strained like a wild animal.
Despite this, however, the pilot succeeded in riding out the wave. It passed and the pilot descended once again to tree-top level. Unaccountably, the pilot was laughing as he did. The pilot turned his head around, facing Preiss, and shouting, just loud enough to be heard over the beating of the rotor and the roar of the jet engine.
“YAHOO! Mama, what a ride!”
Preiss shared none of the pilot’s glee. Maybe he thinks this shit is fun. I’ll be a lot goddamned happier when we’re on the ground and can fight back. He was frankly looking forward to seeing how these alien bastards liked dealing with the best jungle troops in the world, the 10th United States Infantry, in the environment for which they had trained for decades.
The chopper copilot nudged Preiss and pointed downward at a rectangular cut in the jungle roof. From this distance, it looked impossibly small. Still, Preiss had trained with these pilots for a long time. He had every confidence they could land in it.
As the chopper descended, blades chopped leaves and light branches that had grown up around the edges since the LZ was cut. Nearing the ground, even through his nausea and his fear, Preiss felt a smile growing on his young-old face.
Interlude
The fighting had passed on without Guanamarioch and his band. The frightening sounds were distant now; the crash of the threshkreen artillery, the unending merciless thumping of their heavy repeaters, the overhead rattle of their indirect firing weapons. He became aware of this only slowly.
His normals and cosslain gathered stupidly around him while the pain of his several injuries abated somewhat. The hand, in particular, still shrieked in protest. However rapidly the People had been modified to heal, it would take cycles for the blistered, charred and oozing flesh to grow a new layer of hide. In the interim the keening Kessentai continued to rock back and forth slowly, the injured hand tucked protectively in his right armpit.
The normals and cosslain clustered nearest to him began petting their god to offer as much sympathy as they were capable of showing. Some of them set up a keening cry to match Guanamarioch’s. The sympathy cries of the normals and cosslain was loud enough that Guanamarioch didn’t notice the low hum of an approaching tenar.
“What are you whining about, Kenstain?” asked the tenar-riding God King. Guanamarioch recognized him as the enforcer who had dealt summary execution on the mess deck aboard ship. Still unable to speak, even to object to the mortal insult of being called one of those who had fled from the path of fire and fury, the junior Kessentai held up his seared hand, palm open, in explanation and excusal.