Филип Фармер - The Stone God Awakens

Ulysses grinned at this and then lost his grin. The last one in line of the five ships had burst into flames!

Suddenly, the ship was falling, its skeleton revealed through the burned away skin, and little bodies were dropping from the gondola and the hatches as the men jumped rather than burn to death.

White with the heat of burning hydrogen, the wreck crashed across a branch three hundred feet below the hole and there burned fiercely. The trees and vegetation growing on the branch caught on fire, and the fire spread along the branch. Through the smoke poured hundreds of females and children, forced out of a previously unseen hole. Many fell into the abyss, perhaps because they were overcome by the smoke.

Graushpaz had turned blue under his grey skin on seeing the holocaust. But it was he who first saw the hole above a branch. All the others had been below it, and this had frustrated Ulysses' intentions of landing troops. He needed a place where he could bring the dirigible down just before a hole and grapple the craft to the branch to discharge troops.

However, the air had to be cleared first.

He radioed orders, and the four survivors lifted and then began to swing around. The other five turned, and presently the two halves were moving toward each other. Ulysses spent a few minutes making sure that they were on courses which would not end in collision, and then he bent his efforts to the defence. His flight was still at a level with the upper echelons of the bat-men. These had restored enough order in their ranks to make formations which now attacked en masse. The hawks had either been killed or chased away, though at the cost of heavy casualties.

Now the second fourth of the birds was released. The hawks caused chaos and broke up the front ranks, but enough bat-men got through to the dirigibles. These were met by arrow fire, since the bombs could not be exploded too close to the ships. The bat-men were not inhibited by this, however, and they lit the fuses of their little bombs and lobbed them at the skin of the ships or the gun domes. Some actually struck the skin of the flagship and blew big holes in it. But none reached the big gas cells inside, and the leakage of hydrogen was so little that there was none in the effective range of the bombs.

The ships of each segment were close enough to each other to provide some crossfire of arrows and bolts. Warriors fell into the depths with arrows sticking from them, and many of these had not yet thrown their bombs. Ulysses saw a bomb explode while in the hands of a Dhulhulikh just hit by a crossbow bolt. The bomb blew him apart and sent two others spinning.

He gave the order to lift and increase speed. The winged men fell below and behind.

"Nesh!" Graushpaz said, and trumpeted. Ulysses turned to see a flaming ship in the other segment. Some bat-man had gotten in with a bomb, and it had set fire to leaking hydrogen or blown a gas cell open.

Slowly, majestically, the vessel fell, breaking in half even as it descended toward The Tree. White and red flames roared from it, and a great plume of black smoke followed it. Men were leaping from it, some of them afire. And many many blackened corpses of winged men fell past it. The ship had been the object of an especially heavy concentration of Dhulhulikh. It was this concentration that had enabled the bat-men to get their bombs to it. But there were so many around it, they died by the hundreds, caught in the blast of heat, skins cooked or their lungs seared.

Those some distance below it were diving away frantically to keep from being caught by the falling wreck. Most would make it, but the air space was so crowded that some could not get past their more fortunate fellows. The former disappeared into the flames and went on down with the vessel, though they may have been ashes before the fire-ravaged skeleton landed crosswise on a branch.

The vegetation growing on the branch burned fiercely. But The Tree itself, though its surface could be damaged by fire, would not burn.

Ulysses reassembled the fleet and put it into a formation that took it down toward the big hole just above a branch. The Dhulhulikh were in disorder, swirling around like gnats over a corpse. They did not seem to be so numerous now. They could have lost a fourth of their strength. That still left about forty-eight hundred, an appalling number against which to pit eight dirigibles.

Again, the ship came over the Dhulhulikh just above their flying range. They shot, not arrows, bombs or rockets, but clouds of smoke which enveloped the winged men. The ships threw a few more bombs from the stern hatches, hoping that the explosions in the midst of the blinding smoke would panic the Dhulhulikh.

The dirigibles turned again and came in lower, again laying down a thick level of smoke. The men in the cockpits on top and the domes on the side reported that a large number of bat-men had flown in out of the smoke and rammed against the ship. A few had struck so hard they had gone through the skin, but these were knocked unconscious or crippled, and the crew seized them, cut their throats, and threw them out through the hatches.

When the ships had left the second and lowest level behind them, they turned again. This time four stayed on the same level to lay another cloud, but the flagship and three others went down under the slowly drifting cloud. The sun was finally setting; in sixty seconds it would be below the horizon.

TheBlue Spirit plunged into an immense alley of trunks and branches about a thousand feet below the city and several miles south of it. It was so dark there that Ulysses had to turn on the searchlights of the ships. He did not think that the bat-men would see them until too late because they were occupied with the smoke clouds and the other ships. What with the night and the smoke, they would be blind. A few might glimpse the lights, but by the time they realised what they were, they would be too late to take action — he hoped.

He stood behind the helmsman and peered into the white tunnel created by the searchlights. On both sides and above and below were the thousand-feet-wide branches and the mile-wide trunks. The dirigible bored on ahead without the constant rise and fall it had when in motion in air containing areas of different temperatures. It was headed for a vertical shaft, one free of any extension of The Tree. It was so broad that the dirigible could manoeuvre in any direction toward its goal, the cavernous entrance just above the branch.

As the ship tilted upward and the branches that had been above fell to both sides, the lights illuminated a swarm of winged people flying into the hole. They seemed to be mostly females and children who had fled when the rockets burst in the holes. Or they could be those who lived in the vine complexes but had decided that it was too dangerous to stay there tonight. Under the cover of darkness, they were going into the hole and thence into the chambers in the trunk and the various branches.

As the lights struck them, some winged on into the hole but the majority wheeled away and into the night.

Ulysses paid no attention to them, though he had ordered that the guncrews and the archers keep a strict watch for warriors with bombs. His attention was concentrated on getting the dirigible to manoeuvre delicately and directly to a position just before the hole above the branch.

This was a daring move, or, perhaps, as some of the Neshgai had said, "stupid and suicidal."

Slowly, theBlue Spirit eased forward. And then, while the nose was still approaching the trunk just above the hole, a rocket streaked from the station on the nose. Its sharp plastic cone-nose drove into the trunk, and then the line attached to it stretched as the dirigible began to back away. Other rockets were fired from bottom hatches, and the lines attached to them were drawn tight. Ulysses had tested the ropes several times under conditions simulated to resemble these, but he still was not sure that the ropes would hold.