Demon

The entire row of temples went up almost simultaneously. There would be a hypersonic streak of fire and the smart missiles would go right through the front door and boom, nothing but splinters and a mushroom of flame. The plane was strafing, too, but instead of going ka-chow ka-chow ka-chow and making little fountains of dirt in neat rows, these damn things twisted and turned and chased you, and went off like hand grenades when they hit.

Then Cirocco was turning, a racing turn, all she needed was a pylon, she must have been pulling twelve gees and was so low that if there'd been a field out there, she could not only have dusted the damn thing, she could have plowed it with her wingtip. So here she came again, faster than ever, strafing, firing more missiles, but starting farther back so everybody had time to see the sturm und drang coming at them. And she pulled up, almost vertical, rising higher and higher, and released three fat bombs, one, two, three, that kept rising as she pulled away, that went up until they were almost invisible, hung there, and started falling. There was no way she could have aimed them. It was supernatural, they said, it just couldn't be done, but they plopped right through the roofs of sound stages one, two, and three, just like that. One, two, three, and all of them were history.

The humans and humanoids were understandably terrified by all this action, but the photofauns were ecstatic. What footage! Riots developed at the camera mounts of copters, which would rise with five or six panaflexes clinging to their legs, twisting to find the shot. Most of them got glorious footage of missiles from the target's point of view, shots that had never been done before. It was a shame none of the raw stock survived to reach the projector.

By then Pandemonium was so choked in smoke it was hard to tell where she was going to come from next. They listened to the sound of her engines protesting, heard it grow louder. Then she was on them again. Liquid fire was spilling from the belly of the plane. It twisted in the air ... and, miraculously, fell a hundred meters from the carnage, in a semi-circle with Pandemonium at the center. Later, the survivors would agree it was impossible that had been a mistake. Jones had been too devilishly accurate for that. She had just been showing them she had it, and giving them something to think about for the next time. Most of them would spend a lot of time from then on, thinking about napalm.

Through it all Gaea stood. Solid as an oak. Great brows beetled as she watched the deadly gnat destroy everything around her. On the fourth pass she began to laugh. Somehow, it was more horrible than the sound of the bombs or the crackle of the flames.

Jones made a fifth pass-and for a moment Gaea stopped laughing as the Archives exploded. Twenty thousand film canisters became smoking debris. Ten thousand rare prints, many of them no longer replaceable. With one bomb Jones had wiped out two centuries of film history.

"Don't worry," Gaea shouted. "I have duplicates of most of them." The survivors, crouched under rubble and hearing Jones coming around for another pass, dimly realized that Gaea was reassuring them. She thought they felt the loss as acutely as she did, when in fact all of them would have traded every inch of film ever shot for the chance to get out of this nightmare. And again, Gaea laughed.

The plane was coming around one more time. Some of them sensed this would be the last run, and a few even managed to be curious enough to lift their heads and watch it.

Jones came in straight and level. She fired missiles in pairs, and every one streaked for Gaea-and turned aside at the last moment, missing her by inches. More and more of them came screaming by, to explode a hundred meters behind her. It began to look like a circus knife-throwing act as the projectiles went by her ankles, her arms, her ears, her knees. And still the plane kept coming on, and Gaea kept laughing.

A line of bullet holes appeared along Gaea's chest. She laughed louder. It sounded like Jones had ten heavy guns on that plane, and all of them opened up as she got closer. Gaea was rocked, bloodied, marked from her legs to her massive head.

And anybody could see she was unhurt.

The plane pulled up, climbed ... and kept climbing. At about three kilometers, when it was just a speck, it started circling again.

"I still won't hurt him, Cirocco!" Gaea shouted. Then she looked at herself, frowned, and turned to see a gaffer hanging on the back of her bullet-pocked chair.

"We'd better bring up the second unit," she told him. "And assemble my make-up crew. There's a lot of work to do."

The gaffer didn't move, and Gaea frowned, then tilted the chair and saw it was only half a gaffer.

So she strode off into the flames, shouting orders.

"Well," Cirocco finally said, much subdued. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

There had been none of the wild jubilation Conal and Nova had felt during their dogfight with the buzz bombs. Cirocco had more or less asked them all if she could do it, and they had all more or less agreed that she should. So she had gone about it with a cold intensity and thoroughness that left them all, including Cirocco, a bit shaken. Only during the last run, when she had fired on the monstrosity that called itself Gaea, had she felt the hatred boiling up inside her. The temptation to give it all she had, to pour firepower into the thing and hope against hope that she could blow it apart, had been tremendous. She wondered if the others understood why, in the end, she had settled for the show of force and the minor injuries.

Gaea would not be killed that way. She could sit on an atom bomb, be vaporized, and sprout again from the killing ground. Gaea was not immortal. She was over the hill, senile, growing madder every day. She couldn't last much longer ... only about another hundred mille

And it was Cirocco's job to kill her.

They all looked down at the blazing ruin that had been Pandemonium. Only one structure was left standing. There could be no doubt it was the "palace" the Snitch had spoken of, made of gold and platinum. Adam would be installed there, probably in a solid-gold crib, with goose-egg diamonds for marbles.

"Why didn't you just take her out?" Conal asked, quietly.

"You still don't understand her," Cirocco said. "If I'd destroyed the palace, or killed Gaea, the deathangel would just have flown on, too low for us to catch Adam. He'd have kept flying until he fell apart, and Adam would die."

"I don't get it," Conal confessed. "She said come down and fight. Well, you gave her a fight. What does she expect? Does she want you to land and arm-wrestle with her?"

"Conal, my old friend... I don't know. That may be exactly what she wants. I have the feeling that ... "

"What?" Conal prompted.

"She wants me to walk up to her with a sword in my hand."

"I don't buy it," Conal said. "I mean... Jesus, this sounds completely crazy. I guess it's because I can't find the right words. 'Fair play' isn't it, but she has ... something. Not all the time, and not in any sane way, but from what you've told me about her I'd think she'd even it out a little more than that. I just don't think that she wouldn't leave you any chance."

Cirocco sighed.

"I don't either. And Gaby says-" she cut herself off quickly when she saw Robin giving her an odd look. "Anyway, Gaea won't tell me what she wants, except to come and fight. I'm supposed to figure it out."

It got quiet again and they all looked out over the carnage. Human beings had died down there, and i