Systemic Shock (17 page)

When the bogie wailed by him near Gonzales, its afterburners rocketing pink in the early light, Hank thought at first it was an old Marine Tomcat. Then he saw it bobble, stray low, dip, and correct in a beeline for San Marcos. No friendly pilot on earth would make a mach-plus pass over Gonzales at treetop level. And then Hank recognized the silhouette. He shoved the throttle to the firewall and hoped he could keep the rice-pickin' bastard in sight. He had no radar, no access to military scrambler circuits, and no hope of catching an aircraft of twice his speed.

Unless the bogie slowed down.

Hank had manually, dangerously, charged his fifty because he had no automatic equipment. He knew that if it fired, it might fire all over hell and half of Texas because he had not boresighted or adjusted the gun; and every round would be a tracer, telling the sumbitch he was on the 'wanted' list. But Hank knew how to slide the stick over, easing the pedals, to let his aerial gun platform walk its fiery dotted line of tracers to a target. The problem was, the goddam bogie purely disappeared west of San Marcos as its afterburners winked out. Then he saw a sunglint on wings, the STOL rising up almost to Hank's own altitude at breathtaking speed, and again came the glint. The bogie began a great loitering arc that just might bring it around in a circle. Hank thanked Heaven he was not showing a contrail, kept himself high in the sun, and wished his eyes were younger.

Ranjit Khan's oval pattern took him two minutes, and by that time he knew he must pull the switch and its mount down, past the wiring bundle, to snap the miserable thing. He also knew that he would have to ground the switch body against the console or some other part of the STOL's airframe to complete the circuit. Unless the 'arm* signal was sent, he could not jettison his weapon either. So much for emergency refitting; Ranjit was not very keen on ditching at any speed whatever with the equivalent of a hundred thousand tons of explosive in the canister slung under his belly.

The offending item came into sight with one final tug; Ranjit nosed his aircraft down, set a visual heading for San Marcos, snapped the switch to 'arm' position and reached to ground it against the console plate. One way or another, he was about to do his bit for Asian democracy. And
still
Ranjit did not check his radar display.

The F-51 bored in from the southeast, her Allison singing like Valkyries, Hank Curran drymouthed as the enemy came within range. He would get only this one pass, and he had a slight advantage in altitude and a good angle on the bastard. Then the STOL's wings began to scimitar, its nose dropping as it gained speed, and Hank figured he'd been seen. He pressed the studs on his control stick, waiting that vital split-second to see where his tracers were stitching away before he maneuvered.

The worst possible thing happened, Hank thought—incorrectly. The recoil hammered his airframe, crabbing the entire aircraft very slightly so that Hank's tracer burst was not only far ahead of the Indian STOL but above it, too. If he hadn't been seen before, he sure-God had announced himself now.

Ranjit saw mach-three fireflies arc across ahead of him, knew instantly which quarter they had come from. He hit the afterburners, banked to the north,—and ran into Hank's last few rounds of API, lobbed in desperate seven-league trajectory after the fleeing jet.

Ranjit's aircraft had only one battery, the backup unit having been removed for this mission in the interest of fuel economy. It only takes one fifty caliber slug to decant one battery, zizzing through the bottom of the device to leave two clean holes. A second slug toured the engine accessory pack, damaging the alternator. By the time Ranjit was fifteen thousand meters up, he had lost sight of San Marcos and all interest in it; found that he had no electrical power for instruments or switches. He still had pneumatics and manual systems, so he could still fire his nose cannon.

The trouble was, there was nothing to shoot at and he could no longer be sure whether he had actually armed and dropped his nuclear bomb. He had seen no flash light the sky. His instruments certainly were not going to tell him. Ranjit raged and pounded against the arm of his ejection seat as he streaked over Kerrville on a westerly bearing. He armed his cannon, fired four rounds. Someone was going to regret this debacle. Ultimately, he thought, that someone might well be himself; but that was what paradise was for, to welcome warriors downed in holy battle. Ranjit Khan peered below in search of his own personal jehad.

The F-51 had been too long past redline on her tach, and Hank Curran gnawed the whiskers on his underlip as he tapped on the oil pressure gauge. A Mustang didn't deadstick worth a damn and he didn't want to do a gear-up in a plowed field. He decided to try the airstrip at Kyle. He might wind up in something worse than a field if anybody ever found out he'd been boring holes in the sky with tracer bullets like an old fool. But Hank had only been trying to protect his country, and just maybe that friggin' Hindu or Chinaman had cut and run for it because of him. He would never know whether his now-stuttering, vibrating old beauty had made any difference in anybody's life but his; he would like to think maybe it had.

Maybe it had.

Hank Curran ran out of runway and folded a wing within earshot of San Marcos, where five thousand inductees were in basic training. Ranjit Khan, with one eye on his chronograph, was estimating his remaining fuel and wondering whether he could get to Mexico. He was clearly not going to get another crack at San Marcos even if he could find it. He opted for Mexico; banked, then saw the buttercup-yellow gleam of a delta dirigible far ahead. It was motionless, moored near a group of long white buildings. It made the biggest, brightest target Ranjit Khan had ever seen.

"… like Vietnam all over again if the Cubans can hide in the Everglades," Bernie Grey puffed, steering the air-cushion pallet of supplies into the depot. Almost the first thing they had heard in greeting was news of the Florida invasion, only minutes old. A handful of maroon-coveralled Aggie personnel were on hand; most had flocked to the Caverns of Sonora, with most of the townsfolk.

Quantrill slid the pallet onto the floor. “I'd rather they hid than have 'em take over. Uh—this the last load?"

"Yup. Le's find some breakfast, ol' buddy." Their footfalls echoes through the depot building, Bernie glancing at his note 'corder. "Cap'n wants to get to Monahans by noon to pick up some—" Quantrill never learned what Monahans had to offer; the klaxon's hoot penetrated the building and, before they could spring to the exit, the
Norway
had already unlocked her struts. "Air raid," Bernie screamed, vaulting onto the cargo platform with an olympian leap. "Find a hideyhole, Ted!"

Already the airship was underway, the inertial bounce of the struts carrying her too high for Quantrill to reach. His first reaction was anger that the cargomaster hadn't helped him get aboard. Then he saw Bernie's elaborated arm sweep, a warning to get away, and realized that a lighter-than-air craft was a much more vulnerable place than a ditch or culvert. To Quantrill, an air raid meant a nuclear blast. He saw two men galloping toward a concrete grain silo and chased after them. He was the only one in yellow flight togs; was to learn that the entire regular crew of the
Norway
had made it aboard. His backpack was still aboard, too.

The great airship whispered southward where, Chartrand knew, the shallow canyon of Devil's River might suffice as a foxhole for a delta. A nuclear shock wave, catching the
Norway
moored, would utterly shred the great craft's filament-and-polymer body, but Chartrand imagined that either Sonora or the Aggie station was the target.

"I want every man in shock harness," Chartrand said on the intercom. "We're probably going to scrape some of our hide off."

The cargomaster: “Cap 'n, should you fire our little birds? Hate to have 'em going off under us if we hit—"

"Sweet shit, here he comes!" Blythe Rogers, his display a split-screen with overlapping views, had obeyed the radar and was scanning the northeast quadrant for the blip. Unbidden, he threw the visual display onto Chartrand's monitor. Computer-enhanced visuals lent an unreal aspect to the monitor, the colors too sharp, too bright. And the arrowing enemy STOL growing too large as yellow lights burst from its nose. "The motherlover's gunning for
us
," Rogers shouted in amazement.

They had been airborne for scarcely two minutes; the arroyo still distant. Chartrand hauled the huge vessel into a shallow climbing turn, felt the faint tremors as three explosive mini-cannon projectiles found their marks. A line of small explosions racketed across the packed earth of Edwards Plateau and then the Indian STOL had passed, wings extended, banking for another pass.

Ranjit Khan knew he had made a mistake, loitering in on the enormous shovel-shaped mass of airship in an effort to get a certain kill; but he had not realized it could bumble away so quickly. Ranjit had seen sparkles of bright polymer and wispy structure splash from the delta's hull and knew that he had drawn blood. Ranjit was an educated man; knew that dirigibles had considerable space between their great gossamer buoyancy bags. But Indian dirigibles were filled with hydrogen, and Ranjit had expected to fly over a fireball. He throttled back, realizing that the airship pilot would require him to maneuver at great waste of his remaining fuel if the damned thing could squat in the shallow canyon to the south.

Ranjit was no fool. This time he would make a head-on pass, slowing to the snail's pace of an STOL as he forced the gasbag to turn or die. In the canyon it could not maneuver. So thought Ranjit Khan.

"We're losing pressure in Cell Five," Rogers said. "Can't tell how big the leak, but big enough."

Calm, quick: "Deploy two series of patches." Rogers flipped the protective cover from buttons, keyed an instruction.

The helium cell material was a ripstop fabric thinner than a wastrel's excuse, but it could be punctured rather easily. For in-flight repair, a delta boasted tiny subsystems on the floor of each cell; gadgets that actually blew bubbles. The skin of a bubble was a white polymer that turned from slick to sticky, then chitinous, as it encountered oxygen. Yet, for such a bubble to maintain neutral buoyancy in helium, it could have only one substance inflating it: hydrogen.

The bubbles migrated toward a leak so that they deployed to a puncture, popped, stuck and hardened in the hole, and usually plugged the leak, a white spot on the cell's black surface, easy to find and fix. But two dozen lemon-sized bubbles could not patch the rents in Cell Five. Chartrand found the
Norway
settling stern-first, and ordered more patches while he adjusted the elevens further. Then he called for more helium. "If I can get some sky under this bitch, gentlemen, abandon ship. Consider it an order," he said, still calm, watching his orientation display as the
Norway
slid over the lip of the canyon barely meters above the scrub. Even if he could maintain altitude, it would not be enough to let a chute open.

"We've got those twenty-two's, cap'n," Bernie Grey said.

"If you get a shot, take it," said Chartrand. Texas A & M had given them no heavy machine guns, but ROTC classes used weapons scaled down from twin-fifties for use against target drones. The twins fired twenty-two caliber slugs, four hundred rounds a minute. They would have been useful at

Oak Ridge, but against an Indian STOL?

Ranjit was having problems. He had felt one surge of fuel pumps, knew that his fuel plenums were nearly empty. He could make another pass and then horse the aircraft up and southward, ejecting a thousand meters or so before the craft began to drop. He might still walk to Mexico. He throttled back still more, practically gliding at a speed of three hundred klicks. The yellow delta had touched, tail-first, onto rocky alkali flats and even if it tried to turn, he could rake the gossamer brute with cannon. This time he could not miss.

Nor could Chartrand. He saw the line of alkali puffs stutter toward him from the approaching bird of prey. As the
Norway's
struts swung down to absorb the airship's inertia, Chartrand made ready to trip their pneumatics. She would be tail-heavy, her prop shrouds were aimed ju-u-ust right, and she had something more potent than a pair of twenty-two's slung against her belly.

Ranjit saw his cannon rounds march up the arroyo to his target. There was no question of missing now.

The
Norway
flopped slowly, then rebounded with her pneumatics, actually rose fifty meters like a broaching whale, nose proud. The aft end of the gondola spurted long tongues of fire.

Ranjit saw the enemy's maneuver and started to smile. Turning upward rather man sideways was a surprise, but his cannon were boring through the great ship, end-to-end. As he began the smile, he also commanded his hand to put the STOL into a steep bank, the better to reach an optimum cruise altitude. But neither the smile nor the bank ever really occurred. Tiny spots before Ranjit's eyes grew from gnats to fencepoles in a second, and of the twelve little missiles Chartrand had fired shotgun-fashion dead ahead, eleven shrieked past.

The twelfth passed into Ranjit's portside air intake, detonating against the duct wall adjacent to his remaining fuel.

David Chartrand saw the deadly fireflower blossom, become hunks of wing and impeller and ejection pod, and then it was a shower of metal and plastic, almost as big as the
Norway
as they engulfed one another thirty meters above Devil's River Canyon.

Sandys jurnal Aug. 24 Sat,

Holo says sinowinds envaded Florida, one sure envaded Texas. I heard the boooom in the hole, mom and me went to see. It was up the drywash, well realy it was clean acrost it. Mom woudnt let me go close to the delta stuff. Those poor men, poor soles, mom said. I found a napsack, a finger, some title bullets and a dress of ribbons tied to a heavy iron can. Well Igess its a dress. I rolled it all into a gully. Coudnt lift the can. It must be forein, the words arent ours. My dady doesnt talk much wont let me see his hands. He jokes its a secret. Hes still wore out from letting the animals go last week. I wish my dady didnt smell bad.