Филип Фармер - The Stone God Awakens

The sun reached its zenith, and Ulysses ordered the speed reduced to the point where there was just enough power to keep the dirigibles from losing head. It was comparatively silent than in the gondola, except for the soft voices of the petty officers talking into the radio boxes, the shuffle of a Neshgai's huge feet or squeak of air through his trunk, a Neshgai stomach rumbling, a cough from a man. There was a steady creaking sound: the movement of the tough husks holding the gondola to the main framework.

The sun went down toward the horizon, and Ulysses ordered their chief Dhulhulikh prisoner brought down. This was Kstuuvh, a scarred little man whose hands were tied behind him and whose wings were threaded together. Some of the fire that his skin had felt was reflected as heat in his eyes.

"We should be in sight of the city," Ulysses said. "Point it out to me."

Kstuuvh snarled, "With my hands tied?"

"Nod when I point to the right place," Ulysses said.

Most of the trunks reached to ten thousand feet, where they seemed to explode in a mushroom of green. About ten miles ahead of them was a trunk that reached almost to thirteen thousand feet. This should hold the city of the Dhulhulikh, somewhere down there on a number of branches and inside the trunk and the branches themselves. From here, nothing could be seen except The Tree itself. The bat-men would, of course, be hiding until the last moment.

Ulysses said, "That great trunk marks the city?"

"I do not know," Kstuuvh said.

Graushpaz placed the fingers of his giant hand around the skinny neck of the bat-man and squeezed. Kstuuvh's face turned blue, his eyes bulged and his tongue shot out.

The Neshgai released his hold. The Dhulhulikh coughed and gagged, and then said, "I do not know."

Ulysses admired him for making another stand, even though he knew what agony would be inflicted on him. He said, "If we don't get it out of you, we have more of your kind who are not so stubborn."

"Use fire on me again," Kstuuvh said.

Ulysses smiled. The bat-men knew by now how flammable the hydrogen was and how many precautions had been taken during the voyage to prevent sparks and fire.

"A needle will do as well," he said. But he paid no more attention to the little man except to have him taken to the upper deck. Too many bat-men, including Kstuuvh, had described this treemark while under torture.

He issued the orders that would place them in bombing formation, in an Indian file. They began to lower, and then the battle-stations order went through the radio boxes of the fleet. The flagship was down to ten thousand feet by the time it had reached the great trunk. It was still out of reach of the bat-men, who could not fly any higher than nine thousand feet and that only without any excess weight.

TheBlue Spirit went past the mushroom top of the trunk on the starboard side. Some mauve-and-red, hugewinged, small-bodied birds and some thickly furred otterlike creatures stared at the silver goliath as it slid by.

Several miles past the top of the trunk, the flagship made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn on the port side and came past the trunk at nine thousand feet above ground level. It moved at a ground speed of ten miles an hour against the wind, which had dropped to fifteen miles an hour. There was still no sign of the Dhulhulikh below, though there was plenty of evidence of other life. A V-shaped flight of thousands of black-winged, green-bodied, yellow-headed flying mammals rose up toward them, veered and then swooped down into the foliage miles away.

The city was well hidden. The observers on the ships could see nothing but the usual jungle and the waterways.

Yet the Dhulhulikh, under torture, had said that there must be thirty-five thousand living beings there. They had sworn that six thousand and five hundred warriors could swarm up from The Tree to defend the city.

The flagship continued to sink and then, carried toward the trunk by the wind piling against its massive broadside, it moved over a branch five hundred feet below.

Ulysses said, "Bombardiers, fire when ready!"

He glanced at his port. The trunk seemed to be rushing toward them so swiftly that he had to repress a desire to order the ship to turn away. He had made his calculations, and they should be past the trunk by a hundred yards before the wind took them northward.

The bomb hatches had been opened, and the bombardiers, all humans, waited until their sights were on the target.

Ulysses waited. Graushpaz, behind him, shifted. His stomach rumbled, and his proboscis, waving nervously, touched Ulysses' shoulder with its two wet tendrils. Ulysses shuddered.

"Bombs away," the bombardier reported. The ship immediately lifted as the weight fell out. Ulysses looked out of the side port. The dark teardrops were still falling. Some missed the branch and continued on to the one below it. About ten struck. Fire gouted up, and great chunks of wood came flying through the fire and the black smoke. There were sections of the smaller trees that grew on The Tree, and some things that could have been small bodies. But whether they were animals or winged men could not be determined.

The two ships behind them also dropped their load and at once danced upward with relief.

Enough of their bombs struck at the same place as the first load to dig huge holes into the branch. But the limb was a long way from being weakened enough to break off. Besides, even if it was severed, it would not fall. There were too many vertical branches growing beneath it. It was possible that it would have remained suspended if all its vertical growths had been taken away. The vine complexes linking it to other branches and to trunks might have held it up. However, the chunks blasted out had opened the way for the riverlet, which now spilled out and over the sides, down the trunk and on to a branch about three hundred feet below it.

Ulysses had known that the entire fire-bomb power of the fleet would be required to sever a branch. He was not after that. He only wished to shake out the hidden Dhulhulikh. Once he knew where they were hidden, he would attack those places.

The big dirigible made a wide circle around the trunk and entered into the pattern just after the final ship of the ten had released its bombs. This time, he gave the orders that dipped the nose of the craft and sent it under the blasted branch. The men in the cockpits on top of the vessel reported that the water from the riverlet was falling down on them. And then the ship had passed under and there was, a moment later, a number of explosions as bombs struck the branch beneath the ship. Some of these were composed of jellied alcohol and burned furiously, sending up a huge cloud of smoke.

There was still no sign of the Dhulhulikh.

Ulysses gave the order to save the bombs for a while. He took the flagship around again, this time flying it even lower, though at a greater distance from the trunk. The wind was much reduced here, and so the airship could manoeuvre with more safety. But even so the distance between the two branches through which theBlue Spirit slid was only two hundred feet. No bombs were released. Ulysses did not want the ship to lift up and possibly rub against the upper branch.

At this point, the air was alive with birds. The explosions and the great droning vessels had scared out all the animal life for miles around. A number of the birds hit the propellers, and blood was splattered over the sides of the ship in the immediate neighbourhood. Other birds rammed into the skin of the ship or into the glass of the control gondola ports.

Ulysses was too intent on the steering of the ship to inspect the intensely convoluted and wrinkled surface of The Tree for an opening to the city. But as the ship began to turn in a relatively wide space between trunks, he heard Awina gasp.