Hasson became anxious, aware that Nunn was leading up to something important. “The Fireman is real—I’ve seen him.”
“Whether he is or not, I’m grounding you.”
“You can’t do that,” Hasson blurted instinctively.
Nunn looked interested. “Why not?”
“Because …” Hasson was striving for the right words, any words, when the communicator sphere on Nunn’s desk lit up redly, signalling a top priority message.
“Go ahead,” Nunn said to the sphere.
“Sir, we’re picking up an automatic distress call,” it replied with a male voice. “Somebody drifting out of control at three thousand metres. We think it must be Inglis.”
“Dead?”
“We’ve interrogated his compack, sir. No response.”
“I see. Wait till the rush hour is over and send somebody up for him. I’ll want a full report.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going up for him now,” Hasson said, moving towards the door.
“You can’t go through the traffic streams at this hour.” Nunn got to his feet and came around the desk. “And you’re grounded. I mean that, Hasson.”
Hasson paused knowing that he had already stretched to the limit the special indulgence granted to members of the Air Patrol. “If that’s Lloyd Inglis up there, I’m going up to get him right now. And if he’s dead, I’m grounding myself. Permanently. Okay?”
Nunn shook his head uncertainly. “Do you want to kill yourself?”
“Perhaps.” Hasson closed the door and ran towards the tackle room.
He lifted off from the roof of the police headquarters into a sky which was ablaze with converging rivers of fire. Work-weary commuters pouring up from the south represented most of the traffic, but there were lesser tributaries flowing from many points of the compass into the vast aerial whirlpool of the Birmingham control zone. The shoulder-lights and angle-lights of thousands upon thousands of fliers shifted and shimmered, changes of parallax causing spurious waves to progress and retrogress along the glowing streams. Vertical columns of brilliance kept the opposing elements apart, creating an appearance of strict order. Hasson knew, however, that the appearance was to some extent deceptive. People who were in a hurry tended to switch off their lights to avoid detection and fly straight to where they were going, regardless of the air corridors. The chances of colliding with another illegal traveller were vanishingly small, they told themselves, but it was not only occasional salesmen late for appointments who flew wild. There were the drunks and the druggies, the antisocial, the careless, the suicidal, the thrill-seekers, the criminal—a whole spectrum of types who were unready for the responsibilities of personal flight, in whose hands a counter-gravity harness could become an instrument of death.
Hasson set his police flare units at maximum intensity. He climbed cautiously, dye gun at the ready, until the lights of the city were spread out below him in endless growing geometrics. When the information display projected on to the inner surface of his visor told him he was at a height of two hundred metres he began paying particular attention to his radar. This was the altitude at which rogue fliers were most numerous. He continued rising rapidly, controlling the unease which was a normal reaction to being suspended in a darkness from which, at any moment, other beings could come hurtling towards him at lethal velocity. The aerial river of travellers was now visible as separate laminae, uppermost levels moving fastest, which slipped over each other like luminous gauze.
A further eight hundred metres and Hasson began to relax slightly. He was turning his attention to the problem of homing in on Inglis when his proximity alarm sounded and the helmet radar flashed a bearing. Hasson twisted to face the indicated direction. The figure of a man flying without lights, angled for maximum speed, materialized in the light of Hasson’s flare units. Veteran of a thousand such encounters, Hasson had time to calculate a miss distance of about ten metres. Within the fraction of a second available to him, he aimed his gun and fired off a cloud of indelible dye. The other man passed through it—glimpse of pale, elated face and dark unseeing eyes—and was gone in a noisy flurry of turbulence. Hasson called HQ and gave details of the incident, adding his opinion that the rogue flier was also guilty of drug abuse. With upwards of a million people airborne in the sector at that very moment it was unlikely that the offender would ever be caught, but his flying clothes and equipment had been permanently branded and would have to be replaced at considerable expense.
At three thousand metres Hasson switched to height maintenance power, took a direction-finder reading on Inglis’s beacon and began a slow horizontal cruise, eyes probing the darkness ahead. His flares illuminated a thickening mist, placing him at the centre of a sphere of foggy radiance and making it difficult to see anything beyond. This was close to the limit for personal flying without special heaters and Hasson became aware of the cold which was pressing in on him, searching for a weakness in his defences. The traffic streams far below looked warm and safe.
A few minutes later Hasson’s radar picked up an object straight ahead. He drew closer until, by flarelight, he could make out the figure of Lloyd Inglis performing its grotesque shuffle through the currents of dark air. Hasson knew at once that his friend was dead but he circled the body, keeping just outside field interference distance, until he could see the gaping hole in Inglis’s chest plate. The wound looked as though it had been inflicted by a lance …
A week earlier Hasson and Inglis had been on routine patrol over Bedford when they detected a pack of about eight flying without lights. Inglis had loosed off a miniflare which burst just beyond the group, throwing them briefly into silhouette, and both men had glimpsed the slim outline of a lance. The transportation of any solid object by a person using a CG harness was illegal, because of the danger to other air travellers and people on the ground, and the carrying of weapons was rare even among rogue fliers. It seemed likely that they had chanced on the Fireman. Spreading their nets and snares, Hasson and Inglis had flown in pursuit. During the subsequent low-level chase two people had died—one of them a young woman, also flying without lights, who had strayed into a head-on collision with one of the gang. The other had been a pack leader who had almost cut himself in two on a radio mast. At the end of it, all the two policemen had had to show for their efforts had been four unimportant members of the Welwyn Angels. The Fireman, the lance-carrier, had got away to brood about the incident, safe in his anonymity.
Now, as he studied the frozen body of his former partner, Hasson understood that the Fireman had been inspired to revenge. His targets would have been identified for him in the news coverage given to the arrest of Joe Sullivan. Swearing in his bitterness and grief. Hasson tilted his body, creating a.horizontal component in the lift force exerted by his CG harness. He swooped in on the rigid corpse, locked his arms around it and, immediately, both bodies began to drop as their counter-gravity fields cancelled each other out. No stranger to free fall, Hasson efficiently attached a line to an eye on Inglis’s belt and pushed the dead man away from him. As the two separated to beyond field interference distance the upward rush of air around them gradually ceased. Hasson checked his data display and saw that he had fallen little more than a hundred metres. He paid the line out from a dispenser at his waist until Inglis’s body was at a convenient towing distance, then he flew west, aiming for a point at which it would be safe to descend through the commuter levels. Far beneath him the traffic of the Birmingham control zone swirled like a golden galaxy, but Hasson—at the centre of his own spherical universe of white misty light—was isolated from it, cocooned in his own thoughts.