Farley stopped suddenly. His head cocked and his eyes narrowed as he took some inner measure.
“Joe?” said Wennda
Farley held up a hand.
Yone closed his eyes and stood listening. A faint drone grew in the distance.
Wennda glanced around. There was nothing to hide behind or under, nowhere they could run to except back into the massive well. “We have to find cover,” she said. “We’re too exposed here.”
Farley looked at her like a man jerked suddenly awake. “We aren’t exposed nearly enough,” he said.
Yone opened his eyes and saw Wennda’s perplexed look. “It isn’t the Typhon,” he told her.
Farley’s grin was startling. “Not unless it grew radial engines, it’s not,” he said, and pointed north.
As if summoned by the gesture, the Fata Morgana shot out of the distant northern fissure like something fleeing the gate of hell.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“They are turning,” Yone announced.
Farley lowered Wennda’s com panel, which he had been using as a signal mirror. “They sure as hell are,” he said.
A third of the way around the crater rim, the Morgana was banking hard right and peeling off from the rim wall. The unmistakable drone of four Wright Cyclone engines carried across the upcurved plain, the only sound there was to hear. Farley watched in mute wonder as his ship leveled off and headed straight for them. She flashed her landing lights and waggled her wings, and Farley felt his heart set sail. She was absolutely beautiful, and she was coming to take them home.
He turned to Wennda with his first carefree grin in what seemed like months. “Let’s go hitch a ride,” he said. They got on either side of Yone and practically carried him the rest of the way down to the crater floor.
A mile out the bomber banked to their right and descended. The landing gear lowered and Wennda and Yone let out a cheer. Farley laughed like a kid at a fireworks show. “Come on,” he shouted.
He and Wennda skip-carried Yone toward the descending Flying Fortress like contestants in some picnic game. “We’ll get sunburned on ten beaches back in the States,” Farley promised Wennda. “We’ll go dancing at the Avalon on Catalina. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller. We’ll drink a pint in this pub in Thurgood, Yone. English beer! It’s like motor oil. You’ll love it.” He was babbling, giddy, nearly stumbling as he watched his bomber angle down toward the ground. He could make out someone standing in the right waist window. Everett? It had to be. Everett! Farley tried to wave and nearly fell. He laughed.
The Morgana touched down. Dirt kicked up behind her tires.
“Come on, come on!” Farley shouted. Wennda laughed.
The Morgana slowed to a stop and then turned smartly and began to rumble back their way. They were breathing hard by the time the bomber swiveled a quarter-turn right and came to rest a hundred feet away. Shorty’s artwork nearly glowed beneath the pilot window in the early morning light. Floating rocks that looked like castles, the uncanny likeness of the woman who now stood beside Farley ethereal and impossible on the riveted hull. Worn out and beat up as he was, Farley could not stop grinning.
The pilot window slid aside and Jerry stuck his head out and doffed his cap. “Taxi, mister?” he yelled. His own grin big enough to unzip his head.
The crew came spilling out as if the bomber were on fire, Everett and Garrett and Sten from the waist, Martin and Shorty hopping out after them, Francis emerging from his own rear hatch. All the crew in thermal suits and headgear, Sten in cling-fitting body armor. Farley and Wennda and Yone were caught up in the press of bodies and grinning yelling faces and hard slaps on the back, and Yone was hoisted up by Everett and Garrett and carried toward the bomber like some visiting noble. Plavitz and Boney dropped from the forward hatch and waved at Farley and grinned at Yone upon the big men’s shoulders. Boney bent to the landing gear and chocked the tires. Their own mother hen who saw to all the details.
Farley laughed and looked to Wennda to say something, but Wennda seemed to be having a serious talk with Sten in the midst of all the shouts and laughter.
Francis’ goofy face filled Farley’s vision, joyously yelling something Farley couldn’t make out. His gauze eyepatch was gone and his eye looked perfectly normal, not a scar, not a scab, not even a bruise. Farley grabbed the lanky tail gunner’s shoulders and gave him a good squeeze and shake. Past him Farley saw Wen hop down to the crater floor. Wen! Son of a bitch. He looked like he’d had the living hell beat out of him, face swollen and bruising. But Wen! Alive! Wen saw Farley gaping at him and he smiled his slanted smirk and touched his cap bill.
Everybody was telling Farley what had happened all at once. “Tell me at the Boiler Room!” Farley shouted. “First round’s on me!”
Wennda was looking upset now as Sten spoke to her. Farley realized that Arshall was missing. Sten looked insistent and a little wild-eyed. He pointed north, toward the fissure that led to the Redoubt. Farley strained to hear.
Shorty saw his worried look. “He’s probably telling her about that aquarium,” he told Farley.
Farley looked at him.
“That joint’s kaput,” Shorty said. “Finished. They were barely hanging on as it was, and Wen got their repair bugs to turn against them. Can you believe it? It’s all over but the mop-up.”
Wennda turned toward Farley and looked at him in utter dismay. He felt the bottom drop out of his gut. “Not if her people don’t find out about it, it isn’t,” he realized. “And there’s only Sten to tell them.”
He glanced up at the cockpit window. Jerry saluted him somberly, then grinned like a fox with a weekend pass to Henville. Farley felt the engine’s guttural rumble through his feet.
He frowned. No. Not the engines.
He looked down. Glanced north and oriented himself from his memory of the underground complex.
The rumbling intensified. Farley turned toward the blunted cone of the well half a mile away. From its throat he heard a rising turbine whine, the voice of the devil calling from the Pit. He opened his mouth to yell a warning just as the Typhon streaked massive and hellbent from the well and up into the injured sky.
The men were turning toward the bomber even before Farley yelled for them to get on board. Farley glanced up at the streaking weapon banking as it climbed the sky and saw the great loop that the Typhon meant to make. They had a minute at the most before it hit its strafing run.
He waved for Broben’s attention, then made a cranking motion. Broben raised a gloved hand.
“Everybody on board!” Farley yelled. “Let’s go let’s go!”
He saw Wennda and he stopped.
She stood rooted to the crater floor and looked at him from far away. From two hundred years away. Her expression a forlorn resolve that wrenched his heart.
Farley could not move. Could not speak. The engines revving up behind him. Crewmen calling to his back. In the air the living weapon reckoning the calculus of their destruction.
Wennda, Farley said. Thought he said.
They hurried to each other.
“I have to go,” he told her.
“I have to stay,” she said.
Farley’s puppet heart unstrung. He looked back at the bomber. Everett and Garrett beckoned to him from the waist hatch. The languid motions of their arms like underwater fronds. Wen’s silhouette in the upper turret. The twin guns slowly swiveling and angling up.