“Any suggestions?”
“None, my lord. Dropped from twenty-two thousand feet, that twenty-three hundred pound bomb will be graveling at supersonic speed. There is no chance of disarming it in flight or of significantly deflecting its course.”
“Then pray, my friend. Pray,” Copernick said, heading for the communications center four floors down.
“Just like a practice run, Colonel,” Captain Johnson had the B-3 in manual.
“That it is, Bill.”
“I thought I’d never get a chance to lay a nuke.”
“Just do it by the numbers.”
“And I never thought I’d be bombing Americans.”
“Look, son. You saw who gave the orders.”
“But still, our own countrymen?”
“That’s just it! They’re not our countrymen! These people have dropped out! They have abandoned America and everything it stands for! They are doing everything in their power to destroy our society! It’s a plot more insidious than anything the Communists or the Neo-Krishnas ever thought of! And it’s our job to stop them!”
“But still—”
“Bill, I’ll take the controls now!”
“Colonel?”
“It’s a commander’s job. Anyway, I don’t want you to do anything you’d feel guilty about.”
“But—”
“Enough! Kelly! Put a chute on that egg.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the flight engineer said.
“Colonel, you’re losing altitude,” Captain Johnson said.
“This has to be precisely on target, Bill. Any error and we kill real Americans outside of Death Valley. We’ll do it with a paradrop from five thousand feet,” the colonel said.
They were thirty miles and three minutes from Life Valley when they spotted a thin black cloud ahead.
Then they were in it.
A twenty-pound Canada goose bounced off the windshield. Followed by another. And another. Ahead of them, like contrails in reverse, eight long lines of eagles, owls, and condors were flying into their jet intakes. One by one the engines choked and froze and died. The fourteenth Canada goose took out the windshield, spraying the cabin with broken plastic and blood. The colonel pulled back on the controls, but they were sluggish. The plane was losing altitude fast.
“Kelly!” the colonel shouted. Communications above the roar was barely possible. “Set the bomb to detonate on impact!”
“Are you crazy?” Kelly yelled, disarming the bomb. “We’re too low to bail out!”
“I know! But we’ve got to! They’re in my head!”
“He is crazy,” Kelly muttered, jettisoning the fuse and bracing for a crash. He hit the lever to jettison the fuel, but he knew he was too late.
The huge plane came in near the center of the valley and erupted in a spray of broken wood and torn aluminum. The wings sheared off, engines ripped loose, and nearly full fuel tanks ruptured. Orange flames and black smoke poured through houses and into basements. Huddled people screamed and died.
One wing tank spun into Pinecroft’s side and burst and burned. The entire side of the hundred-foot-tall tree was a blanket of flame. It went through the windows and up and down the elevator shaft.
Mona and Patricia made it to the surface in Mack, a TRAC tanker loaded with water. They set him to spraying those walls that were not yet burning, and got out.
Copernick’s fauns, Colleen and Ohura, ran out of the tree house, each carrying a human baby. Most of Ohura’s black hair was burned off.
“My babies!” Mona screamed.
The fauns handed the unharmed Copernick children to Mona and Patricia, then turned back to the burning tree house.
When Colleen and Ohura ran inside, they found the elevator bouncing rapidly, convulsed with pain. They ran to the staircase, reaching it just as burning jet fuel was starting to dribble down. Without hesitation they ran up the stairs through the flames. Their hoofs provided some protection, but the fur on Ohura’s legs caught fire midway up. She continued upward to the fauns’ room before throwing herself to the floor and rolling on the carpet to put out the flames.
Cradled in soft niches on Pinecroft’s second floor, the four baby fauns each still lay on its back contently sucking the treenipple just above its mouth.
While Ohura flailed at her smoldering fur, Colleen took the babies from their niches. As Ohura finished she picked up one of her own children and one of Colleen’s. Each carrying two fauns, Colleen and Ohura bounded for the corridor.
The fire and smoke in the hallway had grown much worse, and the fauns had to crawl, babies clutched to their breasts, groping then-way to the service stairway, Colleen in the lead. A wall of flames shot up between them and Ohura gasped, involuntarily inhaling the fire, singeing her lungs. She couldn’t breathe or speak, and the world started to become dark gray. As she became unconscious, she tucked the two children under her, trying to protect them from the heat with her own body.
Colleen reached the service staircase before she realized that Ohura wasn’t behind her. She hesitated for a second, then turned back to grope blindly for her sister. As she crawled, a branch that had supported the third floor gave way, smashing the bones of her left knee and pinning her to the floor. The smoke cleared for an instant and she saw Ohura a few feet in front of her.
“Ohura! I’m over here!” But Ohura didn’t move.
The log pinning Colleen down was two feet in diameter and fifteen yards long. Colleen struggled helplessly, rolling over, trying to rip her own leg off. Anything to save herself and her children.
Suddenly an LDU darted through the smoke, his body silvery white to reflect the heat. His lateral tentacles grabbed for Ohura and the two babies were quickly secured to his underside.
The LDU turned its attention to the trapped faun. I’m Dirk, Colleen.” He tried to lift the log from her leg but failed. “Better give me the children. I can’t move this log.”
The flames were rapidly approaching them as Colleen gave up the baby fauns. The pain in her leg was unbearable. Death would be welcome.
“Sorry, Colleen.” Dirk tapped her behind the head, knocking her unconscious, ending the pain. Then he wrapped a tentacle tightly around her left thigh and with one whack of a dagger-claw severed the leg above the knee.
Dirk placed Colleen next to Ohura and the four baby fauns and raced down the burning stairway to safety.
Copernick stayed at his post in the communications center, giving an almost continuous stream of rational orders to the CCU, most of which had been anticipated and were being put into effect before they were received. Guibedo stayed at his nephew’s side, occasionally making suggestions.
“Get as many of the crew out as possible,” Copernick said. “Give them medical treatment in preference to our own people if necessary. We need the bastards.”
LDUs waded ankle deep through burning gasoline, slashing through aluminum and boron-fiber composite with their knife-claws, searching out every scrap of human flesh in the burning bomber.
Tree houses over an entire square mile were searched for the injured, the dying, and the dead.
The fire did not spread past the second subbasement of Copernick’s complex, because of Pinecroft’s green growing wood and the efficiency of the LDUs.
Hundreds of injured people and animals were brought to the third-level medical center. Among them, near the end of the list, were Ohura, with third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body, and Colleen, battered but still alive.
Liebchen was with them, holding four uninjured baby fauns, the size of squirrels.