Footfall

The planet slammed against his feet. They stung. His landing shoes were smashed flat. He stripped them off, dropped his flexwing and looked about him.

Big. Planets were big.

A line of insect-sized flyers converged toward the town ahead. Those weren’t parachutes. “Delta wings,” Harry Red murmured. “Hang gliders.” The shapes hanging under the delta wings were not human.

Harry ran to the bike and lifted the seat. The .45 Government Model felt comfortable in his hand, and the slide worked with a satisfying click, but the secure feeling the big pistol usually gave him was entirely lacking.

A group of hang gliders broke away from the formation and came toward them. They split into two groups, one on either side of them.

Melissa peered through the binoculars. “Elephants,” she said. “Baby elephants.”

Jeri grabbed the glasses. Then she began to laugh. She handed the glasses to Harry.

He said, “That fu

Baby elephants with two trunks drifted out of the sky beneath paper airplanes. Harry chortled. They were wearing tall, conspicuous elevator shoes. He laughed outright. Rifles with bayonets were slung over their backs. Harry stopped laughing.

Two lines of delta-wing gliders swept along a hundred yards to either side of them. They were sinking fast into the wheat fields. A much larger group had drifted over Logan .

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Harry shouted. He raised the bike.

It wouldn’t start. Laying it on its side in the dirt hadn’t been a good idea. The smell of gas was strong.

The electric starter whirred again. The engine caught. Harry turned the bike—

A delta-wing craft glided onto the road half a mile behind them. The Invader came down hard. It freed its weapon, then stepped out of the elevator shoes. Other gliders settled to each side. A much larger vehicle swept overhead: a flat oval with upward-pointing fins. It glided along the road, settling slowly, until it landed more than a mile away.

“We’re surrounded.” Jeri sounded tired, already defeated.

“Let’s go,” Harry ordered. “Out in the fields. Get out there and lay low. Go on, now.”

Jeri took Melissa’s hand and dragged her off into the wheat fields. They left an obvious trail behind them. The wheat stalks were thickly planted, and you couldn’t move through without knocking some of them down.

We can’t hide. Maybe they don’t want us. Harry took a fresh grip on the pistol and followed.

Eight-cubed Leader Harpanet kept only the vaguest memories of his fall.

Bubbles had streamed from digit ship Number Twenty-six into a dark blue sky and were instantly lost in immensity. Far, far below, a vast rippling white landscape waited for him. Voices chattered through a background of static; voices called his name. He didn’t answer.

He might have spoken anytime during the years of preparation. He’d heard lectures on planetary weather: the variations in temperature, “wind chill factor,” and the coriolis forces that cause air to whirl with force sufficient to tear dwellings apart: A vast worldwide storm. accidentally formed, beyond the control of fithp. The Predecessors’ messages tried to tell us. Random death in the life support system!

Harpanet had been in the Breaker group, trying to learn of the prey. They’d watched broadcasts that leaked through the target world’s atmosphere. I can’t make sense of these pictures. They don’t mean anything. The more he knew, the more alien they seemed. Breaker Takpusseh could live with his ignorance and wait to learn more. To Harpanet, these are not fithp at all. They build tools, and they kill, and we will never know more.

Others of the spaceborn had had private interviews with Fistarteh-thuktun, and later been taken from the lists of Winterhome-bound soldiers. What they told the priest must have resembled his own thoughts: I can’t stand it. The things who will try to kill me are the least of it. I fear the air and I fear the land, and I can’t tolerate the thought of an ocean! They were shu

Harpanet could have joined the dissidents. He had kept his silence.

He kept it now. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t make a sound save for a thin keening like the keening of the air through which he fell. The thin skin of the bubble rippled under the atmosphere’s buffeting. The sky grew more inaccessible every second.

He was late to open his bubble. The flexwing popped and the struts began to expand before it was clear. Harpanet shrieked. He was falling toward a rippling white landscape, vast in extent, and his collapsed bubble was still tangled around his flexwing. He clawed his way up the suspension harness and forced his digits under the fabric against the resistance of the inflated struts, and pulled. The planet’s white face came up to smash him.

It was nothing. He fell through it without resistance. He was still clawing at the bubble fabric, and suddenly it was floating loose above him. He had to nerve himself to let go of the flexwing; and only then did it begin to drag at the air until he was flying.

It was some time before he recovered enough to look for other flexwings.

He found a swarm of midges far away. Away from the sun. It is late in the day. The planet turns away from the star. My warriors are spinward.

The octuples under his command had steered toward their place on the rim of the great circle on the Herdmaster’s map. The circle would converge. Defenses would be erected. Digit ships would presently pick them up and return them to the darkness, the immensity, the security of space.

A rise of land blocked his view of the other wings. Undulations of yellow fur streamed beneath him, terribly fast, and Harpanet had seconds in which to learn to fly. Through his terror came a single memory, that lifting the fore edge of the flexwing would cause him to slow and rise. He slid back in the harness. The wing rose, and slowed … and hovered, and dropped, and picked up speed, and hurled him against the dirt. He rolled. The harness rolled with him; the flexwing wrapped around him; one of the struts hissed in his face as his bayonet punctured it. When he finally managed to disentangle himself, his radio was dead. One knee was twisted, so that he could walk on three legs only. Gravity pulled at him.

It was an experience he would never want to remember. But he was sixty-fours of makasrupkithp to antispinward from his assigned landing point.

Je

“Invasion? She sat up. “All right, Sergeant. I’m coming.”

“Now, Major—”

“I heard you. Thank you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She dressed quickly, putting on combat fatigues. He hadn’t said anything about sidearms. We’re at war, but surely they weren’t invading Colorado Springs !

When she reached the war room she wasn’t so sure.

Admiral Carrell, still in civilian clothes, was in one of the balcony offices overlooking the control room. Je

“Come in, Major.” Carrell pointed to the big screens below. They showed Kansas and southern Nebraska dotted with red flashes and hand-drawn gray squares. Je

“We don’t have symbols for a parachute invasion of Kansas ,” Admiral Carrell said. “So we had to draw them in. Not that it means much, since we don’t know all the places they’re landing.”

“Are all those red marks nuclear strikes?” Je

“Probably none of them,” Carrell said. “So far they haven’t used nukes. They haven’t had to.”