Footfall

He looked for other flexwings. The colors of his Octuple were rose and black and green. He found six others and steered toward them. One missing. Where?

The land drifted: He steered above the road that the crater had broken, then along the road toward the city. Six flexwings moved into line behind him. Still one missing. And no way to avoid the ground now. The planet was all there was.

Details expanded. Three dots scrambled from a tiny vehicle to lie by the side of the road. He steered toward them. They grew larger, LARGER! Chintithpit-mang bellowed and pulled back in his harness to catch more air in his flexwing, increasing lift, striving desperately to avoid contact with the planet.

The planet slammed against his feet. They stung. His landing shoes were smashed flat. He stripped them off, dropped his flexwing and looked about him.

Big. Planets were big.

A line of insect-sized flyers converged toward the town ahead. Those weren’t parachutes. “Delta wings,” Harry Red murmured. “Hang gliders.” The shapes hanging under the delta wings were not human.

Harry ran to the bike and lifted the seat. The .45 Government Model felt comfortable in his hand, and the slide worked with a satisfying click, but the secure feeling the big pistol usually gave him was entirely lacking.

A group of hang gliders broke away from the formation and came toward them. They split into two groups, one on either side of them.

Melissa peered through the binoculars. “Elephants,” she said. “Baby elephants.”

Jeri grabbed the glasses. Then she began to laugh. She handed the glasses to Harry.

He said, “That funny, eh?’ and looked.

Baby elephants with two trunks drifted out of the sky beneath paper airplanes. Harry chortled. They were wearing tall, conspicuous elevator shoes. He laughed outright. Rifles with bayonets were slung over their backs. Harry stopped laughing.

Two lines of delta-wing gliders swept along a hundred yards to either side of them. They were sinking fast into the wheat fields. A much larger group had drifted over Logan .

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Harry shouted. He raised the bike.

It wouldn’t start. Laying it on its side in the dirt hadn’t been a good idea. The smell of gas was strong.

The electric starter whirred again. The engine caught. Harry turned the bike—

A delta-wing craft glided onto the road half a mile behind them. The Invader came down hard. It freed its weapon, then stepped out of the elevator shoes. Other gliders settled to each side. A much larger vehicle swept overhead: a flat oval with upward-pointing fins. It glided along the road, settling slowly, until it landed more than a mile away.

“We’re surrounded.” Jeri sounded tired, already defeated.

“Let’s go,” Harry ordered. “Out in the fields. Get out there and lay low. Go on, now.”

Jeri took Melissa’s hand and dragged her off into the wheat fields. They left an obvious trail behind them. The wheat stalks were thickly planted, and you couldn’t move through without knocking some of them down.

We can’t hide. Maybe they don’t want us. Harry took a fresh grip on the pistol and followed.

Eight-cubed Leader Harpanet kept only the vaguest memories of his fall.

Bubbles had streamed from digit ship Number Twenty-six into a dark blue sky and were instantly lost in immensity. Far, far below, a vast rippling white landscape waited for him. Voices chattered through a background of static; voices called his name. He didn’t answer.

He might have spoken anytime during the years of preparation. He’d heard lectures on planetary weather: the variations in temperature, “wind chill factor,” and the coriolis forces that cause air to whirl with force sufficient to tear dwellings apart: A vast worldwide storm. accidentally formed, beyond the control of fithp. The Predecessors’ messages tried to tell us. Random death in the life support system!

Harpanet had been in the Breaker group, trying to learn of the prey. They’d watched broadcasts that leaked through the target world’s atmosphere. I can’t make sense of these pictures. They don’t mean anything. The more he knew, the more alien they seemed. Breaker Takpusseh could live with his ignorance and wait to learn more. To Harpanet, these are not fithp at all. They build tools, and they kill, and we will never know more.

Others of the spaceborn had had private interviews with Fistarteh-thuktun, and later been taken from the lists of Winterhome-bound soldiers. What they told the priest must have resembled his own thoughts: I can’t stand it. The things who will try to kill me are the least of it. I fear the air and I fear the land, and I can’t tolerate the thought of an ocean! They were shunned thereafter. Their mothers never mentioned them again.

Harpanet could have joined the dissidents. He had kept his silence.

He kept it now. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t make a sound save for a thin keening like the keening of the air through which he fell. The thin skin of the bubble rippled under the atmosphere’s buffeting. The sky grew more inaccessible every second.