“We’ll do better next time, Admiral,” Drake Bonneau assured Paul with a cocky salute. Kenjo, entering behind him, regarded the tall war ace with amused condescension. “Today taught us that this Thread requires entirely different flight and strike techniques. We’ll refine that wedge maneuver so nothing gets through. Sled pilots must drill to maintain altitude patterns. Gunners must learn to control their blasts. It’s more than just holding the button down. We had some mighty close encounters. We lost some of the little dragonets, too. We can’t risk so many lives, much less the sleds.”
“We can repair the sleds, Drake,” Joel Lilienkamp remarked dryly before Paul spoke, “but power packs won’t last forever. We can’t afford to expend them uselessly on drills. Despite our resupply system, which I bet I can improve, nine pilots had to glide-land at Maori. That’s clumsy management. That wedge formation, by the way, Drake, is economical on the packs. But it still takes days to recharge exhausted ones. How long will this stuff keep falling, Paul?” Joel looked up from his calculating pad.
“We haven’t established that yet,” Paul said, his left thumb rubbing his knuckles. “Boris and Dieter are collating information from the pilot debriefing.”
“Hellfire, that’s not going to tell us what we need to know, Paul,” Drake said, his weary tone a complaint. “Where does this stuff come from?”
“Probe’s gone off,” Ezra Keroon said. “It’ll be a couple a more days before any reports come back.”
Drake continued almost as if he had not heard. “I want to find out if the stuff mightn’t be more vulnerable in the stratosphere. Even if we only have ten pressurized sleds, would a high-altitude strike be more effective? Does this junk hit the atmosphere in clumps and then disperse? Can we develop a defense less clumsy than flamethrowers? We need to know more about this enemy.”
“It doesn’t fight back,” Ongola remarked, rubbing his temples to ease the pounding sort of headache that battle had always given him.
“True,” Paul replied with a grim smile as he turned to Kenjo. “I wonder if we would gain any useful data from an orbital reconnaissance flight? How much fuel in the Mariposa’s tanks?”
“If I pilot it, enough for three, maybe four flights,” Kenjo replied, deliberately avoiding Drake’s eyes, “depending on how much maneuvering is required and how many orbits.”
“You’re the man for it, Kenjo,” Drake said with a flourish of his hand and a rueful expression. “You can land on a breath of fuel.” Kenjo, smiling slightly, gave a short, quick bow from the waist. “Do we know when, or where, the stuff hits us again?”
“We do,” Paul assured them in a flat tone. “If the data is correct, and it was today, stakeholders are lucky. It strikes in two places: 1930 hours across Araby to the Sea of Azov,”—his expression reflected his continued regret at the loss of Araby’s original stakeowners—“and 0330 from the sea across the tip of Delta. Both those areas are unoccupied.”
“We can’t let that stuff go unchecked anywhere, Paul,” Ezra said in alarm.
“I know, but if we’re going to have to mount crews every three days, we’ll all soon be exhausted.”
“Not everything needs to be protected,” Drake said, unfolding his flight map. “Lots of marsh, scrub land.”
“The Fall will still be attended,” Paul said in an inarguable tone of voice. “Look on it as a chance to refine maneuvers and train teams, Drake. It is undeniably best to get the stuff while it’s airborne. Thread didn’t eat through as much land today, but we can’t afford to lose wide corridors every time it hits us.”
“Draft some more of those dragonets,” Joel suggested facetiously. “They’re as good on the ground as in the air.”
Emily regarded him sadly as the others grinned. “Unfortunately they just aren’t big enough.”
Paul turned around in his chair to give the governor a searching look. “That’s the best idea today, Emily.”
Drake and Kenjo looked at each other, puzzled, but Ongola, Joel, and Ezra Keroon sat up, their expressions expectant. Jim Tillek grinned.
There were five main islands off the southern coast of Big Island and several small prominences, the remains of volcanoes poking above the brilliant green-blue sea. The one Avril and Stev were eagerly approaching was no more than the crater of a sunken volcano. Its sides sloped into the sea, providing a narrow shore, except to the south where the lip of the crater was lowest. Avril was bouncing with impatience as Stev nosed the prow of the little boat up onto the north shore.
“That Nielsen twit couldn’t possibly be right,” she muttered, hopping on to the pebbly beach before he had shut off the power. “How could we have missed a whole beach full of diamonds?”
“We had more promising sites. Remember, Avril?”
Stev watched her scoop up a handful of the black stones and sift them through her fingers. She kept only the largest, which she thrust at him.
“Here! Scan it!” As he inserted the palm-sized stone into the portable scanner, she looked about in angry agitation. “It makes no sense. They can’t all be black diamonds. Can they?”
“This one is!”
She took back the stone and held it up to the sun for a moment. “And this one?” She grabbed up a fist-sized rock and pushed it at him, but he was quick enough to see her slip the first stone into her pouch. “It’s lucky that Nielsen kid’s only our apprentice. All this is—ours—too!”
“We’ll,”—Steve had not missed Avril’s quick alteration— “have to be careful not to glut the market.” He put the big stone into the scanner with eager and not quite steady fingers. “It is indeed black diamond. Around four hundred carats and relatively unflawed. Congratulations, my dear, you’ve struck it rich.”
She grimaced at his mocking tone and snatched the diamond from him, clasping it against her almost protectively. “It can’t all be black diamond,” she muttered. “Can it?”
“Why not? There’s nothing to keep diamonds from being hatched from a volcano, if you have the right ingredients and sufficient pressure at some point in time. I grant you, this might be the only beach composed of black diamond, or any diamond, in the universe, but that’s what”—Stev’s grin was pure malice—“you have here.”
She glanced at him, her eyes wary, and managed an easy smile. “What we have, Stev.” She leaned into him, her skin warm against his. “This is the most exciting moment of my life.” She wound her free hand about his neck and kissed him passionately, her body pressing against him until he felt the diamond gouging his ribs.
“Not even diamonds must come between us, my love,” he murmured, taking it from her resisting fingers and dropping it behind him into the open sled.
Stev was not unduly surprised the next morning when he found that both Avril and the fastest sled were gone from their Big Island mining camp. He made a second check in the rock hollow where he knew Avril secreted the more spectacular gemstones that had been found. It was empty.
Stev grinned maliciously. She might have ignored the mayday from Landing, but he had not. He had followed what was happening on the southern continent, and kept an eye to the east whenever a cloud appeared. He had made contingency plans. He doubted that Avril had. He would have liked to see her expression when she found out that Landing was swarming with industrious people, the takeoff grid crammed with sleds and technicians. So he roared with amusement when one of their apprentices anxiously reported that she could not find Avril anywhere.