Chapter Four
The world tilted.
It bucked, rocking from side to side and backwards and forwards with dizzying speed.
And then the main engines kicked in, accelerating the Phoenix to her highest sub-fiery speed and throwing her crew back into their seats.
Tiny had no eyes to spare for Mark as the Commander scrambled back to his seat and fastened his seatbelt with a groan of discomfort. Every sense Tiny possessed, every fragment of his concentration, was focused on his task.
His hands flew over the suddenly responsive manual controls, balancing thruster and attitude jets, firing half a dozen different systems at any one time, struggling to anticipate their effects and balance his response without overshooting. Information flashed past on the screens so rapidly that his conscious brain barely had time to register it. He absorbed it on an instinctual level, flying his ship by the feel of her, and by the sound of her straining engines. He felt the peaks of the domed temples at Angkor pass no more than a hundred metres below. The Phoenix's few computer-independent sensor systems reported the buildings shaking as the supersonic whirlwind she dragged thundered over the earth below. Sunk deep into the superhuman concentration required for his task, Tiny accepted the information as if came from his own vision.
Slowly the ship's bucking and protesting flight path levelled into a smooth forward motion, and a side to side rocking that grew steadily weaker. Sweating profusely, Tiny's manipulations grew ever more subtle. Anticipation became more important than reaction. Almost there. Almost.
The nose of the ship settled into smooth flight, and although Tiny's hands remained in constant motion, the task was easier now. Air currents could be predicted by the slightest deflection of the Phoenix's nose. The constant buffeting of cloud was at least presaged by their fluffy whiteness on the screens in front of him. The Phoenix shredded those clouds behind her, riding her own vortices, high enough, fast enough and stable enough now that no more than two of three thrusters at a time were needed to control her reactions.
The noises of the world returned to his ears, his senses loses their narrow focus. He began to breathe again, his chest suddenly tight as he realised he had stopped. The darkness of the cabin was illuminated only by the monitors at his station, life support sacrificed along with every other system except for navigation. For the first time since taking control, he registered the presence of his friends, their breaths coming in short terrified gasps, their white faces partially reflected in the viewscreens ahead of him.
No on spoke to him, no one daring to disturb his concentration, but now they began to murmur between themselves.
"We're headed inland," Princess pointed out urgently, although her information was limited to the same view they could all see through the forward monitors. "Towards the mountains. Are the mechas following us?"
Jason shifted in his chair, and Tiny guessed that he was trying to peer out through the limiting viewscreens. "No way to be sure. They'll probably follow just to see what happens."
"Tiny can't hold this for long," Mark added grimly, stealing a glance at his pilot's sweating face. "If we can't land, we need to find somewhere safe to crash."
"Safe!" Jason barked a brief laugh. Safe for civilians, perhaps. Hardly safe for the team themselves. Tiny stole a glance at the quiet man, and the ship trembled in response to even such a brief lapse of attention. As Tiny had guessed from Jason's tone, his eyes held the same calm acceptance of death with which he approached their most dangerous missions.
"There has to be some way to get out of this!" Princess exclaimed, and in the reflections Tiny could see her with one arm around the still-shaky Keyop.
There was silence for a long moment. "Even if Tiny could take us low enough to drop the vehicles, there's no way they'd survive being released at this speed," Mark said finally in a quiet voice. "And he was right, jumping would be like flying into a brick wall. We're here, and we're in this together."
Tiny's stomach clenched. Mark was talking about the team's death. They had always known it would come, of course, but it was different to know the abstract, and to see the physical looming with long minutes in which to accept its inevitability. Almost without thinking he had angled the fidgeting, reluctant bird towards the mountains Princess has spotted. The barren and uninhabited peaks grew closer by the moment, the air rising in front of them bringing with it turbulence that shook the ship. The Phoenix slid sidewise down an air current, and shook again as Tiny powered up the attitude thrusters to level her. Once again, he sank into the concentration of his task, becoming almost one with the Phoenix.
Almost one. A state of union with his damaged bird, almost certain that deep down he felt her panic. He tried to make his commands firm and decisive. Was it possible? With the controlling authority of the mainframe suppressed, was the personality that emerged in the Fiery Phoenix making herself known?
He gasped, the germ of an idea suddenly in mind. Again, the Phoenix tremored with his inattention, and the eyes of the team were suddenly points of pressure on Tiny's back. He kept his face forward, hands and eyes glued to the task, but he managed to whisper the word.
"Fireball!"
For once there was no discussion. Their options had narrowed beyond that now. A hand gesture from Mark sent Jason forward, and Princess towards her bike in the port nacelle. Mark himself helped Keyop to the starboard nacelle, making sure the boy was strapped in and at least partially alert.
Mark paused as he passed back through the main cabin. Tiny felt his commander studying his grey, perspiration-sheened face with a look of desperate resignation.
"Get going, Mark," Tiny grated. "I can't hold this for much longer!"
"Tiny..."
Mark's voice died away, and without another look behind him the Commander turned toward his own vehicle.
"All right, team." Mark's voice was cool and controlled as it emerged from Tiny's wrist activator. There was no trace of uncertainty. "When the Fiery Phoenix takes us, we're going to try for low and slow - understood? Operation Fireball is dangerous at low speed, let alone this one." He didn't add that reducing their velocity would give Tiny his only slim chance for escape. He didn't need to.
Tiny took a deep breath, flicked the button that removed the stops on the throttle, and pushed the engines into overdrive.
When the Phoenix takes us. When we lose ourselves in the oneness of a burning dream. When five become one. When machine and man merge and become something more. Something indefinable. Something wonderful.
The Fiery Phoenix was screaming as she emerged from the shapeless flames that had engulfed her namesake. Even in her primal paradigm, she could feel the wrongness. Her wings had been clipped, her sense of balance and ease in the air stripped from her.
She screamed again as she fell, her wings trailing flame in an eye-straining and wind-whipped trail.
But then they were there for her: the thoughts that guided her, strengthened her, and protected her even when she was sleeping.
Deep inside her, she felt a burning determination. The passion for life was there, as strong as ever, determined to preserve both the vital power within the Phoenix herself, and the lives of those she was sworn to protect. She felt the hatred of her eternal nemesis rise within her, and without even thinking steadied in her flight. She turned towards the two avatars of that power that followed uncertainly in her wake. She knew her movements were awkward, clumsy, and in deep frustration she spat fire at her pursuers. Something shifted deep within her, in that strange half-reality which joined her physical form to the soul of the firebird. The fire that she spat shed its golden sheath, solidified, became a reality that the Spectran mini-mechas could not avoid.
-Bird missiles-
The thought rang clearly through her, the first rational thought that the creature of pure instinct had felt since her rebirth in the flames. She recognised the voice, the harsh tones of her aggression, even if the words were lost on her.
-With no computer control to fight against, she managed to fire bird missiles!-
The thought was carried on a surge of elation, the strong emotion lifting it free of that segment of her in which it had originated.
The Phoenix hesitated in mid-air, discomforted by the sensation that parts of herself - woken by the angry elation - were drawing apart. The wind caught at her, and she spread her wings desperately, trying to adjust to her peculiar disorientation. Why couldn't she fly straight? What was wrong with her?
-Calm.- A new thought. The voice that coaxed her through the air, and told her when she was free to dance. The voice of the wind beneath her wings. -Low and slow and calm.-
She felt the other parts of her - both with her, and oddly separated from her now - join that call. Low and slow and calm, they insisted, and the Phoenix obeyed them, barely aware enough of herself to realise that there was another choice.
It wasn't easy, but the Phoenix had broad wings. She spread them to their fullest, gliding where she could, using that other power - the gift of her flight - where she couldn't.
-Hold her.-
An instruction from her guiding voice to the other presences that shared her essence. For a moment the firm hand that led her onwards withdrew a little, and she felt panic as once again something shifted within her. But then another part of her was rising to her forethoughts - the strong voice of command. From this essence too she felt the confidence to dance in the air, but it could not lend her the grace or strength to do so.
-Low and slow- The Phoenix had never disobeyed a command from this voice; she tried her hardest to fight against the relentless demands of uncaring gravity. Once again she screamed, beginning a helpless fall.
The wind flared under her, or perhaps it was simply that her wings began to shape the wind above and beneath them. The movement within her had stopped. The guiding hand was back. She was whole again, every part of her concentrating on keeping her from the cold ground below.
Her flight levelled, and now she saw the mountains above and around her. Terror flared within her. It was by chance alone that she had not met a flaming end against a sheer wall already.
The voice of command spoke again, and the anticipation that had simmered in the back of her mind suddenly flared full force. The Phoenix felt herself submerged in the instant demands of the minds bonded to hers.
-Fireball!-
Born in fire, torn apart in a moment of exquisite pain.
G-Force had practised this, trained themselves in the strength of will required for it, even been forced to it in combat - and it was still agony when the Phoenix screamed in their minds. They tore themselves free of the gestalt, and in the same moment, their vehicles wrenched themselves from their mountings. Four infant Phoenix wrapped the flames of their mother around them as they were born, a fragment of the mother-ship's indefinable essence carried in minds still half-bound to her gestalt.
They spread wings as unclipped and unhindered as the will of their pilots. They glided free of physical constraints and settled to the ground, supported on flames that faded as they touched the cold earth. To leave a car that skimmed the rim of a precipice, its wheels already turning at speed before it made contact with the uneven surface. To leave a motorcycle that landed with its front wheel raised, a spontaneous wheelie to celebrate the joy of continued life. To leave an orange bubble that floated perilously above the same chasm the car had avoided, and a jet which circled it, coaxing the unsteady craft to the safe ground on which its siblings waited.
And above them, the scream of the Fiery Phoenix faded into the distance. Only one hand remained to guide her. One voice to coax her onwards now and it wasn't enough. She fell, out of control, carried onwards by momentum alone. Through a curtain of flame she saw the cliff-face looming ahead of her, and knew only that it was her unavoidable doom. Resignation flared through her, and a distant desperation heard only as a far away whisper. And then there was a sensation of change within her, a sensation of emptiness, and then no sensation at all.
Mark was settling the G-1 into a vertical landing beside the G-4 when the mental shockwave struck. Keyop's flight had been unsteady, the boy's grasp over his fledgling Phoenix tenuous at best. Mark found a moment to be relieved that he'd edged his youngest team-mate away from the precipice, before fire filled his mind and his hands tensed on their controls. His beloved jet landed heavily, buckling its landing gear, but for once Mark spared it no thought.
An orange-red fireball lit the sky, its origin a good ten miles away. Even at her slowest, the Phoenix had eaten up ground by the second.
Mark stared at the flame-filled horizon with a kind of dull horror, and then he could resist no longer. He fell into the red hot furnace that had ignited in his own head.
Cliffs towered above him, glinting in the ghost-white moonlight. White ice sheaved the sheer stone, the crevice between its two faces no more than a metre wide.
Tiny lay at the bottom of the fissure, every nerve shrieking in agony. Beneath him, a thick drift of snow provided a cushion that had shaped itself around him. He held himself still upon it, not willing to move. How long had he been unconscious? How long had he lain here, unwilling to acknowledge the physical world and the pain it contained?
His decision to raise his seat into the Phoenix's top bubble had almost been the end of them all. His already anxious firebird had felt the mechanisms working within her, and Mark had barely held her aloft while Tiny was distracted. At the time, he hadn't believed for a moment that it would make any difference.
The seldom-used procedure had been designed to provide 360 degree visibility for vehicle pick-ups. The fact that it also placed the Phoenix's pilot on her outer skin was mere coincidence. A coincidence that gave Tiny his only chance.
He remembered the moment when the Fiery Phoenix had dissolved into Operation Fireball. For an instant he had watched the Phoenix's offspring spiral groundwards. Then he remembered fighting for control of his wounded bird, and losing. With the Phoenix's screaming pounding at his mind, it had taken all his strength of will to hit the bubble's opening control.
Flames had wrapped themselves around him, caressing his uniform's fabric and searching for some way inside. He had felt the skin on his face reddening, starting to burn as the superheated air curled up inside his full-face visor.
The deck of the Phoenix fell away under him, and the wall of air hit him like a full-body sledgehammer blow. Even in her death throws, the Phoenix had been slicing through the air like a shark through water. She shaped the air above and beneath her, its flows not far from supersonic. And now those flows threw Tiny backwards and upwards, clear of his dying ship but with every breath knocked from his body.
He struggled to retain consciousness, straining to draw in breath but unable to find any ease in the thin, fast moving air.
When the Fiery Phoenix's final scream tore through his still-linked mind, Tiny already teetered on the edge of blackness. He wasn't even aware of falling.
A miracle that he'd survived at all really. And one that he didn't expect to maintain. Already he'd dragged his arm to his face, only to discover that his wrist communicator was smashed beyond repair. There was no help coming.
He lay on his back and peered upwards at the crescent moon just visible through the smoke-tainted clouds far above. The light was fading now, twilight drawing across the mountains of South-East Asia. He didn't remember falling down this hundred-metre crevice, although the throbbing pain that engulfed three of his limbs suggested that he had bounced between its sides like a carelessly thrown toy. Small chance of anyone seeing him from above, small chance of anyone finding him at all, no matter how long they spent searching the Phoenix's erratic flight path.
Slowly, painfully, he used his one remaining good arm to push himself upright. Sitting was agony, and he gasped for air. Broken ribs? Possibly.
Shuffling backwards on his buttocks, dragging his left arm and legs, he eased himself to a position where he could lean against one wall of the crevice. A couple of moments later, he shifted again, awkwardly dipping his right hand into his left pocket and pulling out the uncomfortably hard lump there.
He turned it over in his hand, staring at it in disbelief, and a sudden blaze of returning memory. As his fingers ran over the surface, lights lit on the surface of the black cube. Katie's lovers' link.
Katie.
He closed his eyes in realisation. Anderson would have to tell her what had happened, and he knew she would grieve for him. He only hoped that the Chief would never be able to tell her the truth; he hadn't thought of her.
In all that had happened since he woke on the Phoenix, he hadn't thought of her once.
Oh, he loved her. But he had to face reality. Ultimately, G-Force meant more to him - and that was unfair to any woman.
Ironic that such clarity came only when it was too late to act upon it.
Tiny sighed, leaned back against the crevice wall, and waited.
"Mark!"
The voice rousing him was both familiar and unwelcome.
"Mark, answer me."
The G-1's canopy creaked a little wider open, letting in a cool draft of mountain air. It caressed Mark's cheeks, cooling the burning sensation there.
"Mark, I know you're awake. There's no use pretending."
The stern tone hotwired Mark's brain, forcing his eyes open as it had done since Mark was a small child. He squinted against the light, confused. Anderson? In the field? God, they must have scared him.
Anderson saw the confusion, and the returning rationality. The chief moved back a little, no longer leaning into the cockpit.
"The Phoenix was seen being chased over Angkor. Then she vanished from our radar."
Mark heard the unspoken fear in that last statement. He straightened slightly in his seat, and made out the three G-Force craft parked neatly around his own. He could hear other people moving about, around and between the vehicles. "The others?"
"We found the four of you here. The others will be fine. All of you simply seem to be exhausted from going fiery."
Mark closed his eyes. Four. No, that was wrong. And the mental shock had been more than simple exhaustion.
"Tiny?" he demanded.
He heard the irrational hope in his own voice. He felt Anderson hesitate, reluctant to crush it.
"We haven't found him."
Eyes still closed, Mark nodded.