It was all thanks to the petrol fruit fuel the bus now ran on. Some hapless Tommy had distilled it in secret. The resulting alcoholic concoction proved to have undesirable side effects, and the commanders had declared it unfit for human consumption, although it did solve their dwindling petrol supply problem. It was another bone of contention between Everson and himself. Ever since they had discovered that the crew of the ironclad tank HMLS Ivanhoe had suffered from the psychoactive effects of its fumes, Everson had been more than a little suspicious of Tulliver, and had him up before Captain Lippett, the Medical Officer. Tulliver had explained at great length that the confinement of the crew within the tank for long periods had increased their exposure to the fuel vapours and heightened its psychotropic effects. He, meanwhile, was in the open air and travelling at almost one hundred miles an hour. Whatever vapours were expelled from the engine were whipped away by the aerial winds. The MO’s examination seemed to bear out this hypothesis, and reluctantly Everson had let the matter drop.
Tulliver decided to keep his new acuity to himself. He didn’t want to be grounded, and besides, what harm could it do?
Maddocks was pointing down. A couple of hundred feet below them, a pair of jabberwocks were engaged in territorial aerial combat, luckily too busy to notice the Sopwith.
Ahead, Tulliver could make out the depressed green circle of the jungle-filled Croatoan Crater. Almost a mile across and over two hundred yards deep, it was darker than the surrounding jungle, its bowl-like depression obvious and ominous. The strange strip of faded, discoloured foliage that cut across it was quite marked from this perspective. It didn’t seem quite natural to Tulliver’s eyes.
They came in low over the jungle surrounding the great depression. Without warning, the air came alive with cracks and bangs, like gunshots. Tulliver pulled back on the stick, gaining height.
Across the jungle canopy, huge vine-like things – whipperwills, Maddocks called them, anywhere from twenty to nearly a hundred feet long, sensitive to a combination of air movement and shadow – cracked above the trees, like whips. The fast-moving shadow of the Sopwith set them snapping ravenously behind them, like a living wake.
The treetop field of whipperwills gave way to the ruins of the Nazarrii edifice, which had belonged to a long-dead colony of chatts, the race of intelligent arthropods that dominated this planet. It now lay completely destroyed after the Fusiliers’ encounter with the Dulgur that inhabited it, and which had cost them the tank. The ironclad Ivanhoe now lay scuppered somewhere down in the crater. The crew had refused to abandon it and the two members that had gone over with it.
Tulliver banked the plane and circled over the brush leading to the lip of the crater. With his eyesight heightened by the petrol fruit fumes, they were easy to spot. He waggled his wings. Six small people waved back. A seventh Tulliver took to be the urman guide, Napoo. He seemed to be intent on some kind of work, squatting on the ground, ignoring the plane. Tulliver turned and nodded to Maddocks, who leant over the side and dropped the tin. As it fell, he saw the tank crew run towards it and then lost sight of them as he pulled out of the bank and set a course back to camp, following the line of the Strip that fortuitously pointed back to the trenches.
“Hold onto your lunch!” he bellowed out over his shoulder.
Tulliver performed a few rolls, simply for the joy of it, and then pulled the stick back, climbing up to meet a small flock of clouds. The bus soared over the bright white fairy-tale landscape. Up here, above the clouds, Tulliver could almost believe he was back on Earth again…
Barely five months ago, on the first of November, 1916, at six twenty ack emma, he and his observer, Hodgeson, had taken off with the flight from the aerodrome at Fine Villas, along with Captain Parkhurst and Biffer, with orders to take down a German observation kite balloon behind the lines near Harcourt Wood.
Thousands of feet below, flashes of artillery fire glittered like fallen sequins as they bombarded the already pitted and pocked German positions.
As they closed in on the observation balloon, the Hun observer in the basket beneath spotted them, and his ground crew began winching the tethered sausage balloon down.
Then Tulliver saw the two Hun Albatros D2s protecting it.
Parkhurst, red flight-commander’s streamers trailing from his outer wing spars, gestured that they should break and try to gain the higher ground.
Tulliver pulled back on the stick and indicated to Hodgeson to keep his eyes peeled. Hodgeson, as well as being the observer, also had a Lewis gun attached to the rear of his cockpit, mounted on a ring that allowed him freedom of fire, unlike Tulliver’s forward-facing gun.
Tulliver raced after an Albatros as it tried to escape them when suddenly, from round the huge mountain of cloud high above them, swooped a third.
A burst of machine gun fire from the new machine raked across Parkhurst’s Strutter. Tulliver saw smoke streak from its engine before an urgent thump on his back from Hodgeson alerted him to the fact that there was another Hun on their tail. While the 1½ Strutter outgunned the Albatros, the Hun machine was quicker and more manoeuvrable.
Tulliver banked hard to avoid a stream of tracer bullets and caught a glimpse of the Hun in his rear-view mirror. Hodgeson let out short bursts from the Lewis gun as the Albatros dived, trying to get below the Sopwith.
He felt the thud of bullets sewing themselves along the fuselage. Behind him, the rattle of Hodgeson’s machine gun ceased. He risked a glance over his shoulder to see Hodgeson slumped in the rear cockpit, his head lolling back.
“Hodge!” he yelled. “Hodge, old man?” There was no answer.
Above, Biffer was trying to shake off another Hun. Tulliver went after it. He came up below the Albatros and, without pity, strafed the machine. Gone were the days of playing the game, of chivalric aerial jousts. These days it was kill or be killed.
It went down, threading a smoky trail across the sky.
There was just the glory hound to worry about now. He liked to hang high and dive. Tulliver searched up and around for it, but everything seemed wrong, even the clouds. His compass began spinning wildly. The engine sputtered, misfiring. Try as he might, he could no longer find the horizon. He found himself suspended in a featureless grey miasma that billowed sluggishly around the bus. All sense of movement, direction and speed ceased.
A deep bass rumble filled the air about him.
Turbulent currents buffeted the machine, threatening to snap off its planes.
As he fought with the spade-handled stick to regain control over the Strutter, Tulliver felt a sticky warmth in his ears and tasted the metallic tang of blood trickling from his nose and down the back of his throat. His breathing became rapid and shallow. His eyes flickered shut and lights burst against his eyelids.
The noise died and the buffeting ceased abruptly. From above, a bright, diffuse light illuminated the encompassing haze. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was in cloud, that was all. He eased the stick forward and dropped. He could get his bearing and fly back along the front line until he came to a landmark he knew.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Spread out below was an unfamiliar landscape: a blaze of green plain and glistening rivers with mountains in the distance. Beneath him, set in a valley that existed on no maps or aerial photographs he had ever seen, he spotted the only remnant of the world he knew: an ugly circular scab of land, pock-marked with shell holes and raked by crenellated fire trenches. A pitiful, pulverised corner of earth on a world that was not the one from which he’d taken off…
All that was in the past now, and the alien world was momentarily hidden by the undulant white landscape around them. Vast billowing mountains rose about him and he flew his bus through their wraith-like canyons and gorges; the cloudy cartography of an insubstantial world. At play in the fields of the Lord, as his old flying instructor used to say. He chased their contours until the rigging wires sang and he let out a whoop of exhilaration that the wind snatched from his lips the moment he uttered it.