It was difficult to see, to judge. The thing was now lined up in a head-on attitude and looked like a white ball shining in the light and increasing rapidly in size as it floated towards the windscreen.
The organism was screaming.
Turn.
Shuddup and wait.
The distance has got to be so short that it can’t make the turn when you do. You don’t give it enough room to manoeuvre, okay?
Sipping his bloody tea.
Turn now.
Wait.
The white ball came floating, its high-explosive content still inert in these last few seconds.
You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between hit and miss.
Floating, dead centre in the windscreen, the fins revolving slowly in the light.
The left eye watering now, the vision blurring.
Somewhere along the invisible line that ran from the nose of the Finback to the nose of the missile there was the ideal point where the turn had to be initiated, before which the missile would have room to follow, after which the two objects would collide and explode. But there wasn’t time to measure its position visually; nor had I had the weeks and months of simulator training and combat experience that would have allowed me even a reasonable guess. At a combined speed of three thousand knots the object in the windscreen was approaching my coordinated eye-and-brain system at a relative speed of zero: the ball was simply expanding, not moving, against a background of blank space that offered no reference. The most I could do was to make sure that when I initiated the turn it was at the point where I thought it would be effective, not at the point where my nerve broke.
Don’t forget to turn into the missile’s trajectory.
It turned into mine. It’s the same thing.
You just go into a very high g-turn at the last moment.
That’s all I’ve got to do. It’s easy.
Turn. If you don’t turn now we’ll -
Shuddup.
Wait.
The ball was quite large now, floating as if motionless but expanding at a rate my eye could measure against two lines of reference: the sides of the windscreen. It was expanding very fast now, like a visual explosion. The fins were becoming a windmill.
Allow for the risk of target attraction, the mesmeric influence that will sometimes take the pilot all the way home to extinction. Allow for the margin of error. Allow for luck.
Turn now.
Yes. Now.
The control column shivered in my hands and the rudder bar resisted as I kicked at it and hauled the column back and felt the long wave of vibration coming into the airframe as the jets thrust it into the new trajectory with the stubby delta wings cutting the air and the ailerons taking the overload of pressure against their upper surfaces. The spheroid configuration of the missile sank immediately below the windscreen but it was still there and still trying to home in to the target; it would already have started turning for me, upwards and to the side as the Finback spiralled into the rolling climb and I waited, letting the mind go and the body instruct the machine. This was all I had to do. The organism would have striven to do a thousand other things, rather than be destroyed; but there was no need for them.
I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen.
It felt, though, that it was going to happen. The whole balance of this aerodynamic structure had been altered and by a factor so extreme that I could feel it reacting as if it were alive: it had become skeletal, animalistic, vibrant with nerves that quivered in the controls and the seat and the canopy above me. Even its voice had adopted new and undefinable tones as its shape was forced against the static air at its fullest angle, making a gigantic reed of its cowlings, curves and linear sections and sending them singing as finely as the song of the wind above the roar of the sea.
Information.
I would appreciate some information. Are the conditions such that within the next half second I shall be proved to have reacted too slowly, too late? If so, spare me the technical findings, the degree of heat engendered at the heart of the explosion from here inside this cockpit, the force exerted outwards from the centre, the subtler effect upon blood pressure, heart rate and cranial activity in the microsecond before the body flowers into a surrealistic sunburst, its blood bright in the sky. Spare me that.
But I would like to know where that bloody thing is and how close it is. I would like just this much information.
Sweat running and the left eye streaming and the mouth like a husk and the air pumping into the g-suit and squeezing my legs and the pelvic area as the force of the turn pushed me against the seat and held me there so that I couldn’t move. Trying to look into the mirrors but a lot of blood going down and away from the head because this is a very -
You just go into a very tight g-turn.
Yes. Exactly. Blackly, and the singing in the nerves. If it had missed the target, missed, it would have singing, nothing to see in the black, the roaring fading and coming back, would have gone ballistic and come down Christ knows where.
Look in the mirrors. Yes but it’d be too small by now. Has it missed me, then, has it missed me?
MISS.
Good old Thompson, what about a spot more tea?
Suit getting the pressure up and the blood going back and I eased the controls and brought her out of the roll and checked the altimeter, seven thousand feet
They’ve got more than one.
What?
They’ve got dozens of those things.
Head went cold and I sat up and brought her level and looked down through the bottom panels of the canopy and saw another one lifting off a launcher a mile away and seven thousand feet down, long and thin and white with the winter sunshine making a highlight on the warhead, coming up very fast with a second one lifting off behind it, no bloody go.
They were out for a kill and they knew how to do it and it didn’t matter where I went: these things were medium range and the gauges on the facia were reading out a six-minute deadline for me on the after-burners and I couldn’t shut them off because I needed the speed.
Voices in the headset, and a lot of static.
The cockpit was an oven, baking a body alive.
Some kind of campaign necessary: a glorious ten-second campaign to prove we went down at least with banners flying and the head held high, so forth.
This is it. They’re going to kill us, they -
Oh for Christ’s sake shuddup.
Half-roll and dive. There isn’t time to think and then act: the thinking has got to be done while the action’s running. And remember the mountains.
The only thing to do was dive because I had to turn into their trajectories and their trajectories were identical. And remember the altimeter because at Mach 2.5 everything looks farther away than it is: there’s no optical illusion, it’s just that every time you blink at this speed you’re a thousand feet closer to what you’re aiming at and I was now aiming at the ground, six thousand, five thousand, four.
Half-roll to come back on them. The low hills spun through 180 degrees in the windscreen and I saw the two missiles, one large, one small, both spherical and lined up and expanding. Remember the mountains and their direction from this new position: they would be due east when I came out of the dive and the snow cloud would be still moving across from the south and blotting out half the Khrebet Tarbagatay range but that wouldn’t affect me unless I had to change course.