THEY FLEW WEST INTO THE NIGHT, heading north of Tulsa toward what had seemed to be a major staging area. Koyne reported air activity in the vicinity and registered numerous radar contacts. There were many fires along the route: some isolated and confined, suggesting burning vehicles or downed planes; others covering whole areas. In one place a sizable town looked to be ablaze from end to end. With the navigation aids disrupted, it was difficult to say exactly where it was.
The snippets coming in over the radio were garbled and panicky. A Union spearhead was already halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City, with another thrusting north along the Mississippi valley and threatening a massive left hook at Chicago, which would cut off the Federation armies that had advanced into Indiana and Illinoisassuming they hadn't been annihilated already. To the south they were reported to be near Shreveport, and the Dallas area was under attack. Gerofsky shook his head in bewilderment as Nyarl read off the details. "How is it possible? Under combat conditions? Nothing could move that fast."
"I tell you, you don't have mobility," Hudro said. "They don't move like you think. Hyadeans unroll carpet from sky." Twenty minutes later, Nyarl proved it with a shot he had received from somewhere along the Missouri valley, of Union armor emerging from huge, lumpy, gray vessels, looking like wedge-shaped landing craft, that had descended from the sky. "They're the size of battleships!" a commentator's terrified voice jabbered. "The defense is just coming apart! We've got a total rout on our hands here."
There were some heroics to record. West of St. Louis, a Federation Ranger force drew a detachment of Hyadean ground troops that had been landed on a flank into a classic ambush with pre-targeted mortars and prepared mines, and wiped them out. A pair of aging F-15s destroyed one of the flying pyramid-fortresses at Texarkanaand Nyarl got a clip of it. But the overall picture was grim. But still there seemed to be no word from Sacramento to call it off. Gerofsky's guess was that events had happened so quickly, and communications were in such chaos, that nobody there had grasped the enormity of what was going on.
"Darn it, look at that!" Powell exclaimed suddenly, at the same time banking the plane sharply to port.
"What is it?" Gerofsky called from behind Cade.
Koyne half turned his head, keeping his eyes on the outside. "Tracer coming up. Friendly fire."
"I guess there must be a lot of trigger-happy people down there tonight," Powell growled.
"Let's hope they're nervous enough not to shoot straight," Marie said. Even as she spoke, a series of flak bursts lit up ahead.
Powell throttled up and went into a tight, diving, starboard turn. "This is getting serious," he muttered. Moments later, there was an explosion outside close enough to light up the inside of the cabin, and the plane shuddered under a hail of impacting fragments. Wind whipped through the cabin from a rent in the skin somewhere. Powell straightened out but held the dive, shedding altitude for ground cover. Something was beeping up front. From where he was sitting, Cade could see alarm indicators flashing and lighting up all over the instrument panel. Powell and Koyne went into an emergency check routine. "Losing fuel on one engine," Powell called. "We're going down. Be ready for fire." Behind him, Davis broke out an extinguisher from a bulkhead rack. Marie found another at the rear of the cabin. Powell switched to emergency band and began sending out Mayday messages for a landing ground.
They found haven at a airstrip that was being used for night operations. A young Officer of the Watch who met them informed them they were twenty miles southeast of Wichita. The strip's combat aircraft were being evacuated before dawn; then it would be handling ambulance flights for as long as possible. Apart from that, he didn't know too much except that things seemed to be a mess everywhere. He sounded as if he was from New York.
The three soldiers that the C22-E had picked up left to find a unit to attach themselves to. While Powell and Davis began checking over the damage to the airplane, the others shared a beef stew supper with a maintenance crew in an Air Force trailer. Afterward, Gerofsky and Hudro borrowed a jeep and drove off in the direction of Wichita to seek news at the headquarters of an armored corps stationed in the area. A little over an hour later, a corporal from the signals unit serving the airstrip telephoned the trailer to report that he had Gerofsky on another channel with a data connection open, and could Nyarl get over with the material to be transmitted? Cade and Marie went with Nyarl to the sandbagged dugout that the CO's staff and signals unit were occupying, close to the airstrip's few buildings. Gerofsky had a landline connection to the Southern California Military Command in Los Angeles, and from there had succeeded in getting through to the Catacombs. So, finally, they were able to send through the recordings that had been accumulating. Yassem and Vrel were at the other end. Having spoken with Hudro and Gerofsky already, they had recovered by now from their anxiety at hearing nothing for two days.
They still had the link to Cairns, but it would be six or seven hours before Cairns would be able to link with the Querl. The unpublicized news from Beijing, obtained via Di Milestro's line from Sacramento, was even more alarming than what had happened in the previous forty-eight hours in the Midwest. A Chinese nuclear antisatellite missile had knocked out a major Hyadean vessel in orbit, and the Hyadeans were retaliating against military targets on the Asian mainland. Nothing of the kind had been heard in Australia. The entire global situation was unstable. Collapse into universal catastrophe seemed only a matter of time.
"I don't understand it," Cade said to Yassem and Vrel. "Why isn't Jeye doing anything to restrain themafter what's happened here? He must know it's all over."
"But that's the problem," Yassem said. "I don't think they do know. It's as Major Gerofsky feared. They're still talking about a decisive struggle going on along the Mississippi valleyas if they still think they really can be in Washington in days. None of the advisers there understands how fast Hyadeans can move. They've lost touch with the real world."
"Get Chester to find someone up there that he can talk sense into," Cade pleaded. "We may have to be out of here by morning. I'm not even sure the plane will be able to fly."
They slept, exhausted, in an adjacent trailer serving as a billet. As Cade was dropping off, he heard the first of the helicopters coming in, bringing wounded to the ambulance planes. Nyarl was still over in the signals dugout, sorting through clips that Gerofsky and Hudro had sent via the data line and adding his own histories and commentaries for the benefit of the Chryseans. Sounds of gunfire and explosions came continuously from the direction of Wichita like dull, intermittent thunder.
Cade regained consciousness sluggishly to the feeling that something was strange. A reflex inside him didn't want to know what. It wanted to retreat back into sleep and not face any more of reality. But a more responsible part of himself still in control forced him back to wakefulness.
The distant booming was still going on, but he had already learned to tune that out. Nearer, everything was too quiet. There were no sounds of helicopter rotors or the roars of planes taking off. He sat up in the bunk and looked around the trailer. Marie was still fast asleep. So was Nyarlfor onceand Hudro, who must have returned with Gerofsky sometime in the middle of the night. Voices sounded nearby outside, followed by a truck motor starting up. Cade felt a mind-deadening weariness. It was as if the adrenaline charge that had kept him going through the previous few days had finally worn off, letting him sink to rock bottom. He had no recollection of the names of the officer who had received them or the signals corporal. They were just faces in a daily pageant that unrolled, and beyond the immediate object of staying alive, was ceasing to mean anything. And right now, he admitted to himself, he was scared. He didn't care that much about the Federation, what happened on Chryse, or great plans for how things would be a hundred years from now. What mattered was getting through until next week.
He swung his legs down to the floor and pulled on his boots. His face, when he rubbed it, felt stubbly and greasy. He went through to the washroom at the end of the trailer and ran water into the metal basin. The water was cold. The only towel was wet. He dried himself with tissue, came back to put on his shirt and jacket, and went outside.
The scene in daylight was the kind of litter that only the military in wartime can produce. Cartons, cases, drums, and debris were everywhere, with scatterings of dead cartridge cases, oddments of ammunition, tangles of wire, emptied food cans and rations packs, remnants of clothing. All that was left of the air traffic were several disabled planes and a helicopter, which a demolition crew was wiring with charges. A huge pall of smoke hung in the sky to the northwest. The remainder of the detachment that hadn't already left was congregating around a mix of cars, trucks, a couple of tankers, and other vehicles in the final stages of loading. Some civilians had appeared in a gaggle of heavily loaded cars and pickup trucks standing along the road at the end of the strip. Evidently, they were pulling out but had decided it would be safer to stay with the soldiers. Several men were rummaging among the piles of discarded supplies. Gerofsky and the C22-E's crew were conferring by the aircraft, parked fifty yards or so away. They saw Cade emerge. Gerofsky and Powell came over.
"We've got a problem with one of the pumps," Powell informed him. "Davis has rigged a temporary fix, but it needs a part we don't have. If it fails, I wouldn't trust the other engine alone to keep us up. We can risk it, but we might not be so lucky finding a place to get down next time. The alternative is to go with these guys in one of the trucks."
Cade didn't like the thought of leaving all that equipment while it might still have some use. He looked at Gerofsky. "What do you think, Major?"
"I say we risk it. Look at the jam we ran into yesterdayand that was up among hills. Everything's going to be squeezing through Wichita." A series of cracking sounds rippled from the north. They looked and saw the smoke of air bursts a mile or two off, that had come in several seconds previously. "And that's going to get worse," Gerofsky added.
"Where do we head for?" Cade asked.
"Anywhere. Union troops are already in Kansas City. Let's just get out of here."
"That's good enough for me," Cade said. He nodded to Powell. "Okay, let's have her loaded and ready. I'll get the others up."
Wichita had become a bottleneck of retreating infantry, armor, and support columns, and streams of refugees converging northward from Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and west from the region south of Kansas City toward routes west through Dodge City and Pueblo. The area had been under attack through the night, and by the time the C22-E skirted low over the city on the southern side, presented a virtually unbroken spectacle of burning and devastation.
Connecting the camera directly to one of the cabin displays, Nyarl brought telescopic views of knocked-out tanks, cratered malls and highways, streets ablaze, strewn with bodies and overturned vehicles. In one place, an overpass had fallen on a line of army trucks and yellow schoolbuses. A suburban airfield was covered with the wreckage of dozens of planes caught on the ground. Stranded vehicles were everywhere, their occupants sitting outside waiting for direction, besieging dressing stations and aid posts, or simply taking what they could and joining a tide of stragglers heading onward toward the west on foot, or at least just getting clear of the city.
Radio traffic was primarily local and concerned with emergencies: a hospital somewhere was on fire and being evacuated; a supply battalion was out of reserves of gasoline; a plane was in trouble and needed a directional fix. From an armchair up in the sky, it was easy to let it all feel unreal and detached. But just looking at Marie's face as they listened to the snatches of people in fear, people dying, calling for help, others just trying to do their jobs, forced Cade to be mindful that every one was a tragedy happening to somebody right now, each representative of a hundred others that they didn't know about, and very probably no one ever would know about. The pointlessness and the waste of it all came to him then in a way as never before. The inexhaustible potential of human creativity, and what it could produce, the limitless resource of young, educated minds to turn worlds into gardens, tame the power that drove stars, bring life and consciousness to the cosmos. And instead of what could have been, how much of it was squandered on death-dealing and destruction? The Hyadeans had created a whole legend out of what Earth could have beenwhat they described as the world of dreams. Was it to end as a nightmare?
As they came around onto a course heading for Denver, the skyline behind erupted in a series of black fountains from another salvo of missiles descending on the stricken city.
Nyarl made contact with an airborne command post flying somewhere above Colorado. The latest they had heard was that the attacks on China were now public news and intensifying. Houston was in Union hands, San Antonio was threatened, and Chicago encircled. Ellis in Washington was demanding unconditional surrender, but Jeye, following Beijing, had vowed to fight on and was escalating the use of battlefield nuclear devices. Nyarl sent off his latest package.
They covered a further four hundred miles, most of it over a flat, checkerboard Kansas landscape of straight roads and rectangular fields before the pump that Davis had jury-rigged failed. Soon afterward, the other engine began misbehaving under the added load, and Powell decided it would be better to land now, while they still had power at all. They were past the Colorado border, above dry prairie grasslands beginning to give way to desert. Powell found a road carrying military traffic widely spaced against air attack, mixed with clusters of civilian vehicles, all heading west, and put down on a stretch of sandy flat close by. The nose wheel collapsed, probably from a combination of plowing into the soft ground and the rough landing on the ridge the previous day, and they came to a spectacular skidding, grinding halt, shaken but otherwise unharmed.
Nyarl selected a minimum of equipment to be carried, while the others sorted out personal kit, tools, maps and documents, and supplies from the plane's galley. Davis broke out a cache of weapons that he had acquired and distributed them in addition to the ones that Marie and Gerofsky were already carrying, giving Cade an automatic rifle. Cade had never fired a gun. Marie promised him an improvised lesson.
Hudro refused. "No," he said. "I see too much. I no longer carry weapons."