It was nearly dawn and Ensign had just taken the lead when it happened. Far to the west a thread of blinding light lanced out of the sky. Brighter than lightning and straight as a diving shark, so bright it appeared purple at the edges. Ensign flinched away from the brilliance and screwed his eyes tight shut. Still the image burned in its retinas.
“It has begun,” Teacher said.
“No sound,” Melody said wonderingly. “There wasn’t any sound.”
“Too far,” The Geek told her. “It was so far and yet so bright.” For a moment the only sound was Old One’s mumbling.
“Come,” Teacher called them back from their reveries. “The next one may be nearer. Ensign, you have the lead.”
Wordlessly, Ensign turned north again. They approached the edge now and the air currents became more irregular and harder to avoid. He dodged two downdrafts only to be swallowed up by a third. He fought his way clear with powerful beats of his wings and a few moments later he broke out into strong, clear dawn light. While the others climbed up to him he looked around.
To the east was the normal rolling plain of clouds, purple where still in shadow, shading through rose and flaming crimson to pure clear whites and yellows at the tops fully in the sunlight. But there was something wrong with the sunrise. Off in the west a peculiar white sheet, flat and featureless, was spreading from horizon to horizon. Spreading quickly too, he realized. As he watched, it gobbled up cloud masses and rifts alike, churning them into flat white blankness. There was something about that…
“Um, Teacher?” he called.
Teacher turned to the east and his body went rigid. “Shock wave!” he roared on all frequencies. “Expand your—”
And then the Universe went white.
First came the pain. Pain everywhere. Searing, numbing pain in his timpani, his earmouths, his gas cells, pain everywhere on and in his body. He let the pain wash over him, unable to move or even cry out in his agony.
Next was his breathing. Great sucking gasps of hot, foul-tasting air passing through his body. Again and again, pain shooting through on each one.
Then at last, volition. Deliberately he took conscious control of his nervous system and blotted out the pain signals. He drifted upside down, he realized. Dead and flailing remoras floated nearby. Some of them his, some from the others.
The mist cleared slowly and he saw Teacher nearby. “What…?”
“It has begun.” Teacher’s voice sounded strained and strange. Either Ensign had lost his hearing on half the frequencies, or Teacher had lost half his voices. “The skyfall. Come. We must go on.” Teacher made a wobbly turn toward the North, but his strength and coordination had both failed him.
Ensign looked around. Some of his remoras reattached themselves to him. Others wandered dazed, making mewling seeking cries as they tried to find a host. He looked down at the flat white world below. They flew hundreds of wingspans above the cloudtops, thrown there by the shock wave. Most of the pod members wobbled back to consciousness or moved in tight little circles. Somewhere behind him he heard Yearling moaning in pain.
Down below Ensign saw a dark spot above the whiteness. In spite of the pain he forced himself to focus on it and the spot suddenly resolved into Crystal. She drifted down limply with one wing oddly angled.
“Crystal? Crystal!” But she did not respond. As she fell closer to the shark-filled clouds he called again but she did not stir. When the whiteness began to close around her he flattened himself for a rescue dive.
“Ensign!” Teacher called sharply, “Let her go!”
Ensign ignored him. He angled down and prepared to dive, but Teacher moved in front of him.
“She is already dead,” Teacher said quietly. “Leave her.”
He stared down, trying to track her in the clouds. Suddenly a shark jetted up from the whiteness, ignoring Crystal’s drifting body. At the top of its arc it twitched uncontrollably and fell, flailing back toward the clouds, bent and broken.
Gone, he thought numbly. Just gone. For an instant he wondered what had happened to Killer and Drummer and the others. Had they been far enough away?
Teacher called the pod into a shaky parody of traveling formation. Somewhere on the flanks someone began the song for the dead, distorted by loss of hearing or voices. No fancy figures this time, no subtle harmonies. Just the keening monotonous drone of the Mourning Song, fuzzed and blurred by their injuries. With the damaged song echoing among them, the damaged pod limped north again.
The mist rose far above them, dimming the light and setting sundogs and rainbows around the rising Sun. As the day wore on the Sun’s heat seemed to help sort the world out. The mist began to thin as the roiled atmosphere settled itself. Twice they saw sharks below them, drifting aimlessly. The ones at the deeper levels must have suffered worse because the pressure was higher, he thought dully. But he did not say it. No one spoke. They only sang with mindless intensity, trying to blot out the unabsorbable enormity of what had happened.
The foggy dimness suited Ensign. The pain eased though every part of his body still ached, and the numbness faded to anger. He hated the sharks, the things in the sky, the fates that randomly took his friends, the journey, and half a dozen real and imagined hardships.
The Sun lay on the horizon when Teacher broke the death song. “I think I feel the winds nudging to the east. We’re approaching the South Tropical Zone. Can anybody else feel it?” Ensign said nothing, lost in his own pain and self-pity.
“Things seem to be more normal here,” Teacher continued, as if oblivious to the pod’s mood. “The skyfall’s effects are damped by the boundaries. That’s important, remember it.” Then he turned to Ensign.
“Ensign, you take the lead. It feels like mostly updrafts here.”
The truth was there hadn’t been updrafts or downdrafts since the shock wave, but he grudgingly moved ahead, senses only half alert.
Teacher was half-right, Ensign grudgingly admitted as he flapped through the mist. Things did seem more normal here—or as normal as they got in the confused, swirling air of the boundary zone. The mist had definitely lightened. The air still smelled horrible and there was a slight wind angling down, but it was as if the patterns of swirls and eddies were forming again.
Now the mist seemed a bit thicker. “Climb?” Ensign asked Teacher.
“Not yet,” came the buzzing reply. Then a pause as Teacher and Simon consulted. “Conditions are too unsettled and we probably cannot get above it.”
The mists were definitely getting thicker and in spite of his black mood, Ensign became more alert. With so many of his hearing chambers damaged, his sonar wasn’t functioning well, but he listened intently for sharks. Perhaps the sharks had been hurt worse than the Bach Choir by the shock wave, but flying in clouds still felt wrong.
The angled downdraft became a little stronger now but still nothing like the downdrafts he’d dealt with for days. He ignored it and sounded the mists ahead. The echoes showed suddenly clear air within a wingspan or two. He pressed on, seeing the skies brighten before him as the mist thinned.
Then suddenly he broke through a wall of cloud and into clear light and horror.
Before him the ruddy ocher of the Great Red Spot fell off into unimaginable depths. The gigantic storm swirled from horizon to horizon, yellow shading to orange to dark, evil black at its enormous center vortex.
“Red Spot!” Ensign screamed on all frequencies. He beat his wings frantically trying to break away from the monstrosity. But the wind picked up and already he could feel the air sliding him down the funnel side of the Solar System’s largest hurricane.