In the aft-most cargo bay, the retrieval team was probably bringing in the last of the flyers now. The Batwings[4] had been out all afternoon, soaring ahead, scouting, scanning…
All but one of them had returned safely. We'd lost contact with it and had no idea why. No rescue signal had been received. Captain Harbaugh and General Tirelli had discussed the matter and decided not to risk any more flights until daylight. We'd send out spybirds instead. If they found the pilot, we'd call for an immediate rescue mission. Otherwise, we'd wait until morning and send out three Batwings on an aerial search. If they found anything, we'd call in choppers. If not… we'd turn the search over to Rio de Janeiro and let them decide how to proceed.
It was a cold and heartless decision-but it was exactly this kind of decision that Lizard and I had been discussing yesterday morning. The mandate of this operation was more important than any individual life. The reconnaissance pilots knew what the mission orders were, they knew the risks. If they went down, we'd try to look for them. But we wouldn't—couldn't-delay the Bosch. The Brazilian government had given us just ten days to go in, take pictures, and get out. The airship would sail on whether a downed pilot was found or not.
The pilots were all volunteers.
Oh hell. Everyone aboard this thing was a volunteer. The same orders that applied to the pilots applied to all of us. And we all knew it. At the time we'd been briefed, I don't think anyone had really believed in the possibility that the order would actually be applied. Other than the scouting flights, nobody was leaving the airship. The entire mission would be carried out by remotes. The only direct contact we would have with the mandala nest would be our observation posts set up in the cargo bays.
But now, with one pilot missing and presumed down, and the blighted Amazon rumpled beneath us; the reality of it all was starting to come home. I watched as three more spybirds were uncrated and mounted in the launching racks. Silently, I wished them godspeed and luck. I'd never met the pilot, I didn't even know her name. I just wanted her home safe. I hoped she had someone to welcome her return. And I wondered how I would be feeling if it were Lizard out there in the fast-fading twilight.
I shuddered and headed aft, toward the number-two cargo bay where the primary observation team would be readying for the Coari flyover.
The bay had been especially refitted for this mission. A railing had been installed around the huge open access, so we could lean out over it and look straight down into the nightmare below. Captain Harbaugh was letting the airship descend as low as she could. She was going to bring us down to twenty meters, then if it appeared that nothing in the camp was going to reach up and grab us, we'd ease our way down to fifteen, and maybe even ten. We wanted to get as close as safely possible. This was going to be very intense.
As I entered, somebody gave an order, and the lights in the cargo bay were muted. Throughout the airship, the lights were going down. The plan was not to show any illuminated windows at all; just an enormous pink sky-whale. It was especially important that the observation and launch bays be dark. We didn't want to reveal a great open hatch in the belly of the vessel, blazing away like glory into the night and attracting the Chtorran equivalent of moths and God only knew what else.
I stopped at the railing and leaned over to peer down at the ground below. It slid by, looking exactly like one of the endless displays in the simulation tank. Here, closer to the actual mandala, the dark folded land was feathered with scarlet growths and near-luminous patches of blue iceplant that sprawled across the slopes of the hills like unmelted snowdrifts.
The airship was barely creeping along. We were slowing as we approached our target. By the time we reached the center of the mandala, it would be evening.
We passed slowly over tendrils of the settlement. The domes looked more and more like cancerous growths. Shapeless and unidentifiable things moved darkly in one of the corrals. I had no idea what they were. Three gastropedes came pouring out of the undergrowth, twisting and turning as they tried to comprehend the giant shape sliding across their sky. It was almost too dark to see now, but the gastropedes had better eyes than we did. They knew we were here.
I lifted my head and looked across the railing toward the other observers. They were all dark shapes in the gloom. Only a few people were gathered here; the rest were clustered around the video tables, watching the views that were starting to come back from the probes. As each data-channel was established, it was linked through to one of three ganglion-repeaters, and from there to the satellite-net. Later, after all the channels were up and running, we'd drop the ganglion-repeaters somewhere in the jungle, probably on some convenient hill, and Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Oakland, Detroit, Montreal, Orlando, Honolulu, and all the other stations would then be able to maintain real-time monitoring of this nest directly.
I noticed Dwan Grodin at the largest of the video tables; it was the brightest light-in the room, and it illuminated her face from below, giving her a ghastly Frankenstein's-monster look. I came around the corner of the railing and strolled as casually as I could over to the glowing display. A clump of technicians was listening to Dwan as she explained an obscure technical detail of night photography image enhancement-something about narrow-frequency coherent nano-pulses. The eye couldn't see them, but the specialized sensors in our cameras could collate the assorted pulses into full-color stereo displays.
The video table was showing a collage of today's scanning overlaid across the most recent satellite maps. It looked like a ragged and rumpled quilt had been spread unevenly across the table and illuminated from below. The height values in the stereo image had been doubled to accentuate the terrain, and the displayed landscape was creeping steadily past to mirror the progress of the airship. Even though the terrain below us was starting to flatten out as we approached the center of the mandala, the land still had a northward slope. The brighter zones of the display indicated areas where real-time updates from the probes were continually adding new information to the image.
Two of the technicians looked up as I approached; they returned their attention to the display without acknowledging my existence. Dwan glanced up, frowned, hesitated, then continued her painfully spoken explanation. I didn't know the doctor she was talking to. but I recognized the name on her tag: Shreiber, Marietta. Good-looking lady. Serious attitude problem. She looked over, didn't recognize me in the dark, then turned her attention back to Dwan. Maybe I'd talk to her later, maybe I wouldn't. Her actions of last week didn't seem quite so important anymore. I focused instead on Grodin.
Dwan's speech was slow and excruciating to listen to, but what she said was literate and to the point. "-including the ordnance overmap from the m-military n-network. The humans in the Coari infestation seem to have only a f-few weapons. All of the w-weapons have been d-disabled. Starting's-six m-months ago, Operation Nightmare b-began triggering random f-failures throughout the Amazon b-basin. As of three weeks ago, there were no working m-military devices in any of the three m-mandala nests on our primary site-selection list. The information g,-gathered in't-today's f-f-flyovers indicates that no replacements for any of the d-disabled weapons have been b-brought into the C'oari camp. So we d-don't have to worry about anyone b-below shooting at us."
"Unless they have handmade weaponry," I suggested. Shreiber looked up, annoyed. She thought she was the expert. Dwan was slower to react, but more intense. She looked across the table at me, angry at my interruption and uncertain whether or not she should even admit that I was there. Her face froze, and then reanimated in a fluster of confusion. Her features looked like they were all arguing with each other while her emotional processes churned. Her eyes fluttered, her mouth worked, her hands clenched on the table edge. Finally, her professionalism outvoted her annoyance. "I d-don't think so," she said with painful precision. "It isn't just that the c-capability for the't-technology is not c-commonly available; the d-desire for it also seems to be lacking. Apparently, the Amazon g-gastropedes d-do not f-feel particularly threatened by a human p-presence-and vice versa, thc humans in the b-basin seem to have reached an accommodation with the infestation." She glared at me. "P-part of our job is to find out how humans can exist unm-molested within a Chchtorran society."