The sharp cracks of the rifles penetrated the buzzing in her ears. Chips of stone exploded from the top of the wall less than a foot away from Jan’s head. Further along the wall she saw a woman clutch at her face with her hands and fall backwards.
“Now!” yelled someone very close by. Jan remembered what she was supposed to do. She raised her head above the wall again and picked up the cross-bow. The Sky Warriors were approaching at a run. Many had attached knives to the ends of their rifles. They were yelling as they came. Jan placed the butt of the crossbow against her shoulder and picked out a target. She waited. The armour worn by the Sky Warriors wasn’t made of metal but it was strong enough to deflect a cross-bow bolt unless it was fired at very close range.
When her target was about twenty feet away she pulled the trigger. The cross-bow twanged and kicked her shoulder and her target was slammed backwards. I’ve just killed another human being for the first time in my life, she told herself but the realization drew no emotional response. Then she saw that her target wasn’t dead after all. He was writhing about on the ground, the feathered end of the bolt protruding from his left shoulder. His blood looked very bright against his black armour.
There were several Sky Warriors on the ground along with Jan’s victim, many of them not moving at all. Their companions were already retreating back down to the avenue. The women behind the wall gave a brief cheer. Someone yelled out something that was obviously a rude comment about the Warriors, though Jan couldn’t make out the words, and a few women actually laughed.
Jan thought that was very strange as she mechanically reloaded her cross-bow. More and more Sky Warriors were pouring into the avenue and she knew there was no hope of stopping their second charge. She looked round for the Sky Lord. It was now some two or three miles to the east of the town, hanging low in the sky like some vast fish. A break in the clouds illuminated the silvery, scale-like objects that covered the upper half of its hull and added to its fish-like appearance. The one great eye she could see at the bow seemed to have an anticipatory gleam within it. She wished she could fire the bolt from her cross-bow all the way to that terrible eye and blind it forever. But even if she had such a powerful weapon she knew the bolt would never reach the Sky Lord, just as none of the rockets had.
After the bombs had fallen and Jan had been in the square trying to find Melissa she had stumbled into Helen, who appeared to be walking aimlessly in circles. She had lost her right arm below the elbow and though someone had tied a tourniquet tightly around her upper arm the stump still dripped blood. She was clearly in shock but that did not prevent Jan from seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her roughly.
“What happened?” cried Jan, then choked as another cloud of thick black smoke came drifting across the square. On all sides the buildings were burning and the heat from the crackling fires came in waves whenever the smoke briefly cleared. When Jan got her breath back she again shook Helen. “What happened, damn you?”
But the only response from Helen was a blank look. Jan let her go and she staggered away into the smoke. Jan gave a sob of frustration. It wasn’t fair. She had to know what had gone wrong when victory had seemed so certain. …
The rockets had behaved perfectly, with the exception of a few that had spun off out of control shortly after take-off. But these few duds, which Helen had calculated for, didn’t matter, for the majority of the rockets were clearly going to hit their target.
And then, when the first of the rockets was less than a hundred feet or so from the hull of the Sky Lord, everything went wrong.
Beams of light—very bright beams of turquoise light—flashed out from numerous points on the Sky Lord’s hull and every one of them made contact with a rocket. That was the really uncanny thing, that every beam of light touched a rocket. What kind of people were they who could aim weapons—for it quickly became clear that the beams of light were weapons—with such unerring accuracy at moving targets? For even as Jan was asking herself this question the rockets exploded. Each and every one of them—instantaneously.
A glowing fire-ball marked the position of each rocket and then she saw burning debris start to fall from the sky. The Sky Lord, meanwhile, had started to ascend. The loading cradle, which was still burning fiercely, was no longer being winched upwards. As she watched she saw a Sky Warrior, enveloped in flames, jump over the side.
“What happened? What were those lights?” asked a stunned voice. It was Paula. The question served to snap Jan out of her paralysis. “Reload the tubes!” she ordered briskly. “Quick, before the Lord Pangloth is out of range.”
As her team hurriedly prepared another three rockets for firing nearby whooshing sounds told Jan that others had reacted more quickly than her. She glanced down towards the dais but there was so much smoke about from the rockets’ exhausts she couldn’t make it out. She wondered what was going through her mother’s mind at this instant.
Something crashed down on to the roof beside her and she jumped back with a cry of pain as her left leg was spattered with sparks. She saw that it was the burning tail section of a rocket. She used it to light her taper then told the others to take cover as she applied the flame to the fuses. …
As she’d feared it was all a waste of time. Again the turquoise beams of light flashed down from the Lord Pangloth and again the rockets, far fewer this time, disappeared into balls of fire too far from their target to do any harm.
The Sky Lord continued to rise. As it did so the burning loading cradle was cut loose—either that or the cables supporting it had burnt through—and it fell, trailing sparks, to earth. Jan watched it crash behind some houses on the other side of the square.
For a time after that, perhaps five minutes, nothing happened. The Sky Lord reached an altitude of about four thousand feet and stopped ascending. Partly obscured by the low cloud it just hung there motionless in the sky, a malign, silent presence.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Paula, a tremor in her voice. Jan had been asking herself the same question. She looked again towards the dais in the square in the hope that somehow her mother would pull a last minute miracle from her sleeve even though she knew that no such miracle existed. Martha emerged from her hiding place under the discarded camouflage screen and wrapped her arms around Jan’s legs. “Mistress, Mistress,” she wailed as she buried her face into Jan’s kilt.
Irritated, Jan tried to pull herself free from the chimp’s powerful grip. She was feeling too frightened herself to spare the time to reassure Martha.
“Look!” It was the man. He was pointing up towards the Sky Lord. Jan looked and saw several small dark objects tumbling downwards. As they got closer she could hear them making a whistling noise. …
When the first of them landed in the square directly in front of the tavern and sent a geyser of smoke and soil high into the air Jan knew that the objects were bombs. She had heard stories about these weapons of the Sky Lord when she was a child—they were the means by which the Sky Lords had subdued the ground dwellers after the Gene Wars—but she had never seen them being used before.