Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Dar had Syd take the front stick and control the aircraft for a while, showing her how to take slow turns without stalling or losing too much altitude.

Syd loosened her mask and asked, “Can we do some acrobatics?”

Dar frowned but lowered his mask again, feeling the bite of cold in the air. “Do you mean aerobatics ?”

“Whatever,” said Syd. “Steve told me that you can do loops, rolls, all sorts of things in this special kind of glider.”

“I don’t think you’d like those,” said Dar.

“Yes, I would!” said Syd.

“Put your mask back on,” said Dar. “You’re getting hypoxic, I think.” But he added, “And hang on…but not to the stick. Keep your feet away from the pedals.”

They were still in the lift zone, crabbing fairly dramatically as Dar kept the Twin Astir’s nose to the breeze, and now he put the nose down to gain some airspeed. Without shouting another warning through his mask, he used the ailerons to put the sailplane through a snap roll, while simultaneously using the rudder and elevators to keep the Twin Astir’s nose aimed at a point just above the horizon. The sailplane recovered perfectly, aimed exactly where it had been headed.

“Wow!” shouted Syd. “Again!”

Dar shook his head. But then, aware that he was showing off ( for a girl, he thought), he banked right, dropped the nose below the horizon line to gain some airspeed, applied continuous up elevator while fine-tuning the aileron and rudder, and put the Twin Astir through a 360-degree barrel roll while flying a descending helix around their invisible horizontal axis. The sky and earth traded places, once, twice, three, four times.

Dar leveled off, checking his real altitude, glancing at control surfaces, and fiddling with the MacCready Speed Ring bezel around the variometer to estimate his best transit time to the next thermal.

“More!” shouted Syd.

Dar brought the nose up until the glider lost lift at its angle of attack and they stalled. The effect was roughly the same as stepping into an empty elevator shaft. The nose dropped and the Twin Astir plunged directly toward the earth, now some ten thousand feet below them. It was as if someone had cut the strings that held them aloft and the elegant sailplane had turned into so much dead metal and useless fabric, falling like an aluminum coffin dropped out of a cargo plane.

Syd screamed and Dar felt guilty for a minute until he recognized the scream as one of pure joy rather than terror. He loosened his mask and said, “You’ll have to save us from this.”

“How?”

“Push the stick forward.”

“Forward?” cried Syd through her mask. “Not back?”

“Most assuredly not back,” said Dar. “Forward. Gently at first.”

Syd pushed the stick forward, the wing surfaces began finding lift, and slowly, under Dar’s guidance, she pulled them out of the stall until the variometer told them that they were no longer losing altitude.

“This stupid stunt is called a wing-over,” said Dar. He took the controls, told Syd to hang on, and then pulled the nose to an impossible steep-pitch attitude. Their speed dropped precipitously. Just before they reached true stall speed, Dar applied full rudder to the yaw, slewed the Twin Astir around 180 degrees, pointed the nose almost straight down to pick up airspeed, and finally brought the plane to its normal, sedate glide attitude.

“Again!” said Syd.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Dar. He removed his mask and shut off the regulator. “All this horsing around has got us down to eight thousand feet. You can take your mask off and shut off the O-two.”

Syd did, but said, “Let’s loop.”

“You wouldn’t like a loop,” said Dar, knowing perfectly well that she would love it.

“Please.”

Before Dar could respond, a white Bell Ranger helicopter roared up to within fifty feet of them on their starboard side and leveled off at their same altitude.

“Idiot!” Dar began, and then silenced himself as he saw that the rear doors were missing and that a man in a dark suit was crouching in the opening. Then a muzzle flashed, and bullets struck the sailplane just behind the cockpit.

Dar had listened to countless cockpit voice recorders—the fifteen-minute loop tape in the orange so-called “black box”—and in the vast majority of fatal air crashes, the pilot’s or co-pilot’s final words were “Shit!” or some other choice epithet. Dar knew from the tone that the obscenities were not outcries against imminent death, but a professional’s final exclamation of outrage and frustration at his or her own stupidity—at getting into the problem or not being able to solve it. At killing everyone aboard.

“Shit,” Dar said as he put the nose down and rolled the glider hard left, losing altitude as he rolled. He leveled off several hundred feet below the chopper, but the helicopter flew ahead and buzzed around a full 180 degrees, roaring back within fifty feet of the Twin Astir, the man in the back firing as the aircraft passed. Dar had hit the air brakes and now the Twin Astir stalled—simply dropped—and the bullets passed just over the cockpit.

Syd had managed to extricate her 9mm Sig-Sauer from the straps and harnesses and was trying to get it in the tiny sliding portal that worked as a wind vent. “Goddammit!” she said as the helicopter zoomed past them and whirled around to attack from the rear. “That guy in the back has an AK-47!” she shouted.

Syd slid the right vent panel open. “I can’t aim from these stupid little vents without unstrapping!”

“Don’t unstrap!” said Dar. He was desperately trying to think, to find an advantage. What advantage does a high-performance sailplane have over a two-hundred-mile-per-hour helicopter? The glider could perform a loop and no helicopter could… Big damned deal, thought Dar. The Twin Astir could do a nice slow-motion loop while the Bell Ranger flew circles around it, shooting it to bits.

Anything else?

Well, thought Dar, we can fly one hell of a lot slower than they can.

They can hover, dipshit.

The Bell Ranger was coming past on their left side again. Dar could see that there were only two occupants—the pilot on the right side in front, and the man in the suit with, yes, an AK-47 assault rifle, in the back with both doors removed. The man appeared to have some sort of safety strap attached and he slid easily along the rear bench from one open door of the chopper to the other.

Dar waited until the last possible second, dived for speed, and looped the Twin Astir as they entered the turbulence of the foehn gap rotor of vertical air.

Too late, thought Dar as he heard at least another two hits somewhere behind him.

As they went up and over the loop, Syd holding her semiautomatic in both hands, Dar wondered how badly they were hit. None of the bullets had penetrated the cockpit yet. The sailplane had no engine to destroy, no fuel tank to ignite, no hydraulic links to cut, but its very simplicity meant that any hit on a control cable would disable them. A bullet in the ailerons could cause Dar to lose all control. Even the slugs that seemed to have passed harmlessly through the fuselage behind him were already spoiling the airflow over the glider’s smooth surface, hindering control.

Dar rolled during the loop, seeing the Bell Ranger hovering a hundred meters to the west, waiting for them to resume level flight. Instead of pulling out of the loop, Dar kept the nose down and dived for the earth.

Mistake, he thought, watching the altimeter unwind with startling speed. His instinct had been to get the sailplane down into those canyons and gulleys, using the ridges for lift, trying to put something—a hill, a mountain, trees—between them and the shooter. But as soon as he saw the altitude drop below a thousand feet, he knew that he had made an error—possibly a fatal one.