Monster Planet(97)

Standing up in its cargo bed, a gorilla or maybe just a really hairy man lifted a long tube to his shoulder. Sarah recognized the rectangular plates mounted on its business end. It was a Stinger missile, an antiaircraft weapon.

The Tsarevich must have learned about repelling airborne attacks after the time Ayaan tried the same trick on him in Egypt. A pile of Stingers lay at the gorilla's feet.

'Dive!' she shouted, and Osman spun the helicopter into a banking descent so sharp she lost her footing and fell out of the crew door, her fall cut painfully short as her safety line snapped taut. 'Osman!' she screamed, dangling in mid-air three feet below the Jayhawk's belly. 'Osman!'

'I'm busy,' he shouted back.

The gorilla discharged his weapon. A silver line of smoke shot out of its muzzle. Osman dipped the helicopter over to one side but the Stinger was a guided missile and it was already locked on to the Jayhawk. As Sarah watched it rolled over in mid-flight and gimbaled around to track the helicopter's exhaust.

Osman dropped the helicopter again and Sarah bounced madly on the end of her line. With hands like claws she grabbed again and again, trying to grab the cord. The green pointy tops of the fir trees below came rushing up at her but'but'yes'she had one hand on the cord. She managed to pull herself up a fraction of an inch before the rolling helicopter knocked her loose again.

She could hear the Stinger coming. It cut through the air with a high-pitched sreech. Sarah grabbed the line with both hands and hauled herself up, her body flailing in the wind.

A dozen linen-wrapped hands reached down and grabbed her shoulders, her arms, her neck, even her ears. The mummies hauled her up and inside the helicopter moments before the belly of the Jayhawk started hissing and rattling, smacking aside the higher treetops. Osman dropped them another two feet and wood and pine needles exploded against the undercarriage. Everything smelled like sap.

Fifty yards behind them the Stinger's stabilizing fins tangled up in a mangled larch. The missile exploded in a brilliant cloud of fire and dark smoke. Osman tapped his yoke and the helicopter lifted up, out of the trees again.

'Alright, girl,' he said in her earphones. 'What in hell comes next?'





Monster Planet





Chapter Ten


Sarah couldn't think. She could barely breathe.

'What's our destination, girl?' Osman demanded in her ear. His voice sounded tinny and stretched-out. It irritated her as if an insect had flown into her earl canal. She tried pulling off her headphones but without their protection the noise of the helicopter's rotor was deafening. It was like a buzzsaw sawing through her sinus cavities. She hurried to pull the headphones back on her head.

She didn't know what to do next. Ayaan had taught her a lot about small unit tactics. There had been lessons in stealth and camouflage and guerilla warfare. None of it came back to her then as she sat down on the deck plates of the Jayhawk and stared at Gary.

He had grown. There was no mistaking it. The stubby little crab legs that had once supported his skull were now as long as Sarah's forearms. With her subtle vision she could see that he was still growing, that it was an ongoing process. She watched it happen. He was drawing energy out of the earth's biological field, using it to heal himself. He was drawing on the energy supply that Ptolemy had showed her, the Source, to rebuild his form'except it wasn't his human form he was recreating. It was something new.

This close to the Source energy permeated the air she breathed, it filled up the sky. She could almost see the Source itself, right through the fuselage of the helicopter. It was like a projection on top of her vision, a torrent, a shower of pure light and form that constantly erupted and burst and flashed across her. Her very own light show.

'Sarah,' Osman said, at the same moment Ptolemy stepped forward and touched her arm.

Sarah,the mummy said.

She stared up at him with wild eyes. 'Help me,' she said, 'give me some advice. I'm, I'm drowning here. What do we do?'

our flying only machine advantage is this flying advantage machine,Ptolemy told her.

'We can't loiter forever,' Osman said. She had spoken into her microphone and he had heard her, assumed she was talking to him. 'We'll eventually have to set down.'

we aloft must stay must aloft,the mummy said.

They were both right. Sarah remembered perfectly well when Ayaan had ordered Osman to set down back in Egypt. When she had ventured out on foot and immediately been overwhelmed by accelerated ghouls and the green lich who commanded them. Sarah had, herself, protested against a landing. She had said it was stupid. That it was suicide.