Demon

Click. So be it. He was almost in Cronus now. This plane behind him would take one, maybe two of the three remaining fliers of the squadron. He would not take three. Even if the Luftmorder himself was shot down, the buzz bombs had their Orders. They would attack until they ran out of fuel, and then kamikaze into the largest target of opportunity.

Just like an air show, Conal told himself, as the buzz bomb grew larger in his windshield, heading straight for him. The planes would fly right at each other and you thought there was just no way they weren't going to hit, and then at the last minute one of them would flip one way and one the other and they'd go by a couple inches apart.

Only at an air show, the planes weren't shooting at each other. Streaks of light came from the approaching buzz bombs, going by on all sides. Conal felt two of them slash through his wings, but he didn't look away.

From the time he saw it until he made his move couldn't have been more than two seconds, at the speeds they were traveling. It seemed like an hour. It grew and grew and he waited and waited, then he turned so hard he blacked out.

It was only momentary. When he lifted his head he was still in the air, and almost behind the remaining three, though they were still distant. Far behind him the attacker was screaming into a turn, but he could forget about that one. It would never catch him.

He tested the controls gingerly. The plane hadn't been hurt badly. The right wing ca

It began to seem almost too easy. He picked off one buzz bomb, which didn't even try to dodge. He zeroed in on the Luftmorder, but it twisted up and away. That left him with the other buzz bomb, which also took no evasive action. He almost hated to take the time, but he gave the computer its scent, the computer instructed a missile, and it screamed away to bury itself in the buzz bomb's tailpipe.

Conal looked up and saw the Luftmorder. He turned, shot another missile-then was turning even harder as he saw the sidewinder coming at him. He was still turning when it went off, taking a meter from the end of his left wingtip.

The little Dragonfly coughed, and he was pulled forward against his straps. He lost three hundred meters of altitude very quickly as the transparent wings strained and groaned, finding a new shape to compensate for the damage. At last-four, maybe five seconds later-he knew he was still airworthy, though not as fast as he had been.

He spied the Luftmorder. One of its four engines was missing, and black smoke trailed from that spot. But it didn't seem to bother the Luftmorder. It was descending, and Conal knew that was purposeful, as he could see the scattered fires of the army not too far ahead.

He moved in above and behind.

Carefully, he lined it up in his sights and told the computer to blow it to hell.

Nothing happened.

Cursing, he switched to manual control and tried to shoot it down with his remaining wing ca

Nothing happened.

The computer was still ru

Shouting his outrage, he moved in even closer.

The Luftmorder was not worried.

He couldn't shut off the flow to the missing engine, so the fire would not go out, and that hurt some, but pain would not divert him. A quick check of consumption assured him he was losing no more fuel than if the engine had still been in place. He would make it.

He would make it, so long as that little ...

Where the hell was it? He'd had it on his radar just a second ago. It had been descending. He would have seen it if it crashed. He sca

Finally, he began to worry.

Conal was ten meters beneath the Luftmorder.

He felt like he could almost reach out and touch its great bulk. Red-eyes and sidewinders hung in clusters, squirming eagerly in the high wind.

He saw the trailing edges of the great wings bend down and bite air, and had to move quickly getting his own flaps down or he would have shot out ahead of the monster.

Slowing down. Getting ready for the bomb run. It would want to make it accurate, drop as many bombs as possible during its one and only pass. It probably knew there were no ground guns that could hurt it.

Guns.

Conal had been thinking about ramming. If the Luftmorder hadn't slowed down, that would have been his only option.

He looked up at the belly. There were sphincter-like puckerings all along it. He had wondered where the bombs came from. Might have known, he thought. That would certainly appeal to Gaea's sense of humor.

He blew his canopy. The wind hit him like a fist. But he and the creature were still slowing, and it got a little better. He dug in his flak jacket and came up with his flare pistol. The wind snatched the first shot and pushed it off to the Luftmorder's left, just missing the fuselage. He had two more. Was the creature starting to turn? Never mind. He took aim again, giving it a lot of windage. He saw the flare embed itself in what was, surprisingly, soft flesh a few inches away from one of the sphincters. It was magnesium, and too bright to look at.

Conal dropped and turned-and so did the Luftmorder. He heard a screaming sound, looked up, got a glimpse of a loathsome, unblinking eye protected behind a hard plastic-like material. The eye glared its hate at him, and the Luftmorder fell helplessly away, its i

Conal thought of all those bombs and kerosene fumes and missiles, and turned his plane as hard as he dared.

Then it was like the Chinese New Year. Things were flying by all around him, trailing fire. The Dragonfly was buffeted by shock waves, rattled by shrapnel, for a moment engulfed in flames as a bomb went off close by.

He was in clear air again.

The Dragonfly shifted gears.

It shifted again, and again, trying out one shape after another, slowing, begi

But there wasn't.

Sorry, the brave little plane seemed to say, as it nosed over and dropped like a stone.

Conal pushed himself away from it, popped his chute, and saw the Luftmorder hit the ground a hundred meters short of the army.

And to think, he was the guy who had to be convinced that life never came out as well as it did in comic books.

He looked up, and saw his chute had a big hole in it. In his present state of mind, it didn't worry him in the slightest. This, too, I will survive, he told himself, with a big grin.

And he did survive it.

When he tried to get up he howled in pain. He had broken his ankle.

"Never did get that parachute practice," he told his rescuers.

ELEVEN

It might have gone differently.

Gaea did not have much of a military staff, but she had a few, and when the first reports of the defeat of the Cronus and Metis air forces came in, one of the staff found her and informed her. He recommended moving other units up from the far side of the wheel, getting them in positions more favorable for a massed attack. It was generally agreed that was the best way to defeat the tricky little Bellinzona planes.

Gaea was in a screening of War and Peace, the long, Mosfilm version. She agreed that was probably a good idea, and to ask her again when she got out and had a chance to think it over.

When she came, blinking, out into the light again, she was informed that all her air bases had been destroyed and her air force was in the final stages of being obliterated.