Demon

Conal did as he was told, but not as quickly as Nova wanted. Even so, she had to hold on with both hands. Inertia, she told herself. You feel light, but your mass is the same.

He had the plane in a nose-dive, the throttle back all the way. Still the plane gained speed. They closed in again behind the deathangel who turned away with a contemptuous flicker of his ratty tail feathers. Conal zoomed by, pulled up, turned left and Nova found herself hanging by her fingernails, her feet having slid off the transparent wing surface.

Conal did a tricky little flip-flop that left her momentarily weightless, and she scrambled to get her boots down, felt weight returning, and looked up to see they were about to hit the angel.

This time, when Conal was through with his frantic maneuvers, she was holding on with only one hand. He leveled out and throttled back again, and she climbed up breathing hard.

"It's no good," Conal said. "I almost hit him."

"I know," she said, getting back in.

Conal was holding the loose end of the safety line and looking angry. He was about to say something, but Cirocco's voice came over the radio.

"He's still dropping, Conal. Why don't you level out and join us?" He turned, spotted Cirocco's plane following the angel, which now descended at a more leisurely rate. He followed them down.

The deathangel went down for a long time. When it finally leveled out, it was at an altitude of one kilometer.

"Well," Cirocco said, dubiously, "it had to be tried. If we hadn't tried it, we'd all have been kicking ourselves forever."

"Is it over, then?" Robin asked.

"It might as well be," Cirocco said. "My dears, that thing has reduced our chances of catching Adam by a factor of ten."

"Worse," Nova said.

"Okay, worse. And worse than that, if it does drop Adam, it's our fault he's down so low."

"We had to try it," Chris said.

Cirocco nodded thoughtfully.

"Folks, we just got sent a message. Gaea will not hurt Adam. But she's willing to let us kill him, if we get too cute. So let's back off, like about a kilometer, and hope that son of a bitch gets up a little higher."

They did, and after a short time the deathangel rose to two kilometers and leveled out there. Then another appeared from the bright yellow sands of Mnemosyne and took Adam. They watched as the second one disintegrated just as the first had, and the third flew tirelessly on.

"Cirocco, I'm going to have a fuel problem," Conal said.

She watched as the figures from his computer filled her screen. Then she sat back and thought it out, going over it all three times, until she felt sure she had the right course of action.

"I'm going to give you some fuel now," she told Conal. "Leave myself enough to reach the base in the north wall. I'll leave the Four there, and come back in something bigger and meaner."

"Got you."

So Conal dropped down to the level Cirocco was maintaining, went below her, then put his plane on autopilot as he crawled out to catch the fuel hose dangling from the larger plane. He plugged it in and watched the fuel fill his own tank.

"Stay behind and below, as we discussed," Cirocco told Conal. "I won't be away long."

"Don't worry about us, Captain," she heard him say. She dipped her wings and turned to the north.

What followed was no more amazing than a mosquito turning into a hawk.

Airplanes are a series of trade offs. The designer has to pick which characteristic is most important, and work around that, knowing the other parameters will suffer for it. A slow-flying high-altitude plane needs a lot of wing surface to provide lift in thin air. A very fast plane doesn't need much wing, but must withstand atmospheric heating. Either way, there are problems of structural strength. The very fastest planes usually have a short range because they burn fuel extravagantly.

The Dragonfly series was the best attempt human engineers had yet made at planes that could do all things well. They had been designed for Earth conditions. Gaea's environment was different, but most of the differences worked to the advantage of the Dragonflys.

The powerplants were small, light, and almost one hundred percent fuel-efficient.

The airframes were very strong, light, heat-resistant, and of variable flight-geometry.

On Earth, a Dragonfly stalled at ten kilometers per hour. At Gaea's rim, where the air pressure was two atmospheres, a Dragonfly could stay in the air at walking speed. They could reach seventy thousand feet on the Earth; in Gaea that ability was wasted, as even in the hub the pressure was one atmosphere. They were acrobatic, able to pull more turning gees than a human pilot could withstand without blackout. They were ultra-light, idiot-proof, high-capacity, low-maintenance, fuel-efficient, high-altitude, long-range ...

... and supersonic.

Cirocco had cracked the sound barrier a few times in Gaea, but there was not much point in it. At the rim the speed of sound was between thirteen and fourteen hundred kilometers per hour, depending on air temperature. The longest possible trip was about an hour and a quarter at that speed.

When Cirocco pushed the throttles forward in southern Mnemosyne she was about two hundred kilometers from her destination. The engines roared, the wings folded back and pulled in and the fuselage constricted at the waist, and in three minutes she was doing a thousand kilometers per hour. A few minutes after that she had to begin her deceleration.

Her destination was a cavern about a mile up the side of the sheer northern highlands cliff.

When she declared war on the buzz bombs, Cirocco had bought enough weaponry to arm a medium-sized banana republic. It had not been cheap, and the freight charges to Gaea had tripled the price, but it meant nothing to her. She had a great deal of money on Earth, earned mostly because she had lived so outlandishly long, and it was just paper-less than paper; you could use paper to start a fire. It had pleased her to at last find a use for the stuff. Killing all the buzz bombs had not taken long. She could have used just the Dragonflys to do it, but she had bought a lot more than that. Most of it was still there, waiting to be used.

She let the plane's brain bring her in until the last hundred meters, then took control herself and barriered into the cave, directing the jet exhaust to bring the plane in vertically. They got out quickly, and she directed Chris and Robin to take out all the personal gear. Then she selected another plane.

It was a big cave. There were thirty aircraft in it.

She chose a Mantis Fifty. It was of the same generation as the Dragonfly, but its mission was not primarily transportation. Its name came from the fact that it could carry fifty people and a little armament. Or, it could carry twenty-five, and a lot of armament. Then again, it could carry ten, and enough firepower to shoot down a squadron of older planes and level a small city.

Counting Chris as two people, Cirocco was going to be taking off with four. She pla

The three of them spent the next half-hour attaching missiles to the wings, loading ca

The thing clinging to the vertical surface of the central Mnemosyne cable was not a buzz bomb, just as an alligator is not an iguana.

He was built along the lines of a 707. His wings were swept back, and four ramjet engines depended from them.

Gaea, who had dreamed of him three myarevs ago and then seen her dream spring to life, as they so often did, had named him and his brothers and sisters Luftmorder. The name was visible, in English script, on his slim fuselage, which gurgled happily with a full load of kerosene. The name was in white, and the rest of him was the color of drying blood. There were not many like him. In all of Gaea, only ten. All of them hung from cables, like barnacles.