BOOK ONE: Huntsmen of Pangaea

  Episode 01 The Hole in the Air

  Colonel Preston Lost did not think of himself as reckless. He believed in preparation, proper equipment, patience in stalking the prey.

  But, if truth be told, he was not a cautious man.

  When the stormclouds parted, and he glimpsed the glowing, unearthly craft he chased through the wild hurricane above the Bermuda Triangle, Preston Lost gritted his teeth in an odd smile, gripped the joystick, dropped the nose of the superhighspeed pursuit plane sharply down, opened the throttle of the jet engines, and ignited his afterburners.

  He squinted through the small, sloped, triangular windows of his rocketplane. The solid sheets of rain blocked his sight. The unidentified flying object was disk-shaped, bathed in a nimbus of strange light, and changed course and speed with sudden, strange jerks of motion that defied normal laws of inertia. It moved like no aircraft and no missile known to man.

  The flying disk dove into black cloud. At furious speed Preston dove in after, engines roaring. The winds roared louder. Preston had little fear of being spotted.

  The cockpit vibrated and the hull groaned. More than one of his gauge needles crept toward red.

  The magnificent machine was dubbed the Shooting Star VII. She had been built for one purpose. This purpose.

  The black hull was bat-shaped, streamlined to the ultimate degree. She had no tailfin, no large surfaces to reflect radar. She was, in fact, an aerospace plane. No ordinary jet, she was driven by a combination of turbo-ramjets and liquid-fuel rockets. She could achieve supersonic speeds and low earth orbit.

  Equally sophisticated was her military-grade detection gear. He lost sight of the flying disk amid turbulent cloud and the hellish flares of lightning. But his instruments continued to mark the location of the fleeing quarry.

  The altimeter blinked a warning. Sealevel was approaching. Somewhere below the curtain of cloud, the wind-lashed ocean waters were waiting. Preston's eyes narrowed. Did the flying disk intend to ditch?

  The cloudwrack parted. Preston, lightheaded from his dive, wondered if he were hallucinating. For it looked like the cloud had opened a huge, red eye. It was staring at him.

  Like a hooded lantern opening, a strange, bright, ruby beam, wide as a highway, spilled out from the center of the apparition and splashed across the knotted textures of surrounding cloud. Perched between the clouds was an erubescent maelstrom surrounded by streamers of bright vapor, with a tightly-wound spiral of electric discharges circling them in turn.

  Into the spotlight beam of red now shot the flying disk, as it jerked into yet another impossible, right-angled turn, and was yanked into acceleration even more impossible.

  It flew toward the vortex, directly toward the middle. The eye shaped apparition now grew wide, as if startled at the approach of the disk. Or as if opening in welcome.

  For suddenly Preston realized what he was seeing: The resemblance to an eye was accidental. The white vaporclouds formed the sclera; the flares of Saint Elmo's Fire formed the iris; the red light was issuing from the pupil. But it really was a maelstrom, a whirlpool.

  And this whirlpool, like that around a bathtub drain, let into a pipe, a tunnel. A tunnel, yes, without walls, and opening into a direction that seemed to have no place to be in three dimensional space. But still a tunnel.

  The thing was impossible. It was a hole in midair.

  The red pupil was like a porthole, a window. A window into where?

  The vapor he was seeing was flooding toward the opening. Earth's sea-level airpressure was forcing atmosphere out into some region of lower pressure. The electrostatic discharge was to be expected when two masses of air at different temperatures collided. But where did the hole in midair lead?

  This storm had risen very suddenly, and the flying disk, levitating serenely over the dark waters off Bermuda under the moonlight, had changed course, unaffected by the rising winds, and darted down toward the gathering stormclouds.

  Perhaps the storm had been caused by the sudden drop of pressure?

  The flying disk fled into the red beam, and grew suddenly smaller as if with distance. His detection gear went haywire. Active radar said the thing was gone; passive radar said it was present but dwindling in cross section.

  The pupil of the apparition began to close. The game was escaping.

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  There was no time for deliberation. He either had to ignite his rocket engine, and try to guide his craft into the narrowing ring of electrical fire and screaming winds, or he had to abandon the chase and pull up, hoping against hope that he could bring his nose up sharply enough so as neither to rip his wings off nor to pancake into the sea.

  Preston Lost, in truth, was not a cautious man. He had hunted game in India, Africa, and Greenland, on and under the sea. He had climbed mountains and flown experimental planes. But those dangers were known. This was the unknown.

  He flung his craft toward the vortex. He ignited his rocket. Three gravities of acceleration smothered him as with a giant, invisible hand.

  Beams of red light from some unknown sun, dimmer than the sun he knew, splashed into the cockpit, momentarily blinding him. At the same time, the column of compressed, rushing air being sucked into the closing eye of the maelstrom picked him up like a vacuum cleaner picking up lint from a rug.

  The Shooting Star went into a flat spin. A blurred world of cloud and lightning tumbled past the triangular windows of the cockpit. Preston's seat automatically flattened, putting him in a prone position, and his altitude suit inflated. But the acceleration was too great for his body.

  The edges of his vision turned black. His hand fell from the deadman switch which kept the rocket thrust roaring. In a strange, sullen silence, the pursuit plane seemed to be plunging down a spinning tunnel walled with boiling clouds and blinding stabs of lightning.

  Preston Lost, groaning, opened his eyes. Had he blacked out for a moment? Of the maelstrom, the storm, the clouds, there was no sign. The horizon was turning in a lazy loop in the canopy windows, earth and sky and earth again. The whistling in his ears told him he was in a stall, his wings at no angle to catch the air.

  Below him was a chain of active volcanoes. The ground was bright with burning patches of forest, and the air was black with smoke.

  The broken landscape rushed up to meet him.

  He groggily pushed the stick forward. Tailfinless, the chance of a stealth craft regaining control was slim. But there might be a way.

  He opened the split ailerons to the full, hoping their drag would pull his wingtip back, and, in combination with the forward wing yaw, would increase the overall drag, and produce a stabilizing yawing moment.

  A change in the pitch of the scream of the air told him it was beginning to work. Perhaps not soon enough. He saw tumbled crags, rocks, and patches of forest fire spin past his view. But there, glinting like a silver coin, was a mountain lake. He worked the controls, uttered a two-word and probably blasphemous prayer, grinned like a maniac, yanked on the stick.

  Out of the crimson sky plunged a creature. Its wingspan was equal to that of his plane. Its skin was naked leather. Its wings were triangular sails of membrane. The freakishly narrow head had a miter of bone above and a beak like a saber below. The monster was tiger striped with red, yellow, purple and black; its belly was blue; yellow rings of color surrounded its staring, lidless, lizardlike eyes; a scarlet wattle dangled rakishly from its cockscomb.

  Preston's wings thrummed. He was beginning to pull out of the spin. Had the plane been under control, he might have avoided the collision. The monster was diving headlong, its beak opened like scissors. Preston yanked the stick, poised as if balanced on one wing for a moment, hesitated.

  The collision sprayed the black blood of the creature across his small, triangular windows, blinding him. He heard the scream of metal and felt the stick jump in his hand as he lost purchase. He felt, rather than heard, fragments and scraps of wing material peeling off into the air. The ceramic composite of his hull could withstand the heat of supersonic friction, but was not designed for impacts. The wing lifting surfaces had shattered like a china plate.

  He heard the ramjet stall out. Particles of bone and flesh, moving at the speed of machinegun bullets, tore into the delicate fanblades of the intakes.

  Most jets allowed the pilot to eject from the cockpit. But this rocketplane was a compromise between jet and spacecraft, and had no such feature. He had to land with her or die with her.

  But this compromise cut both ways. A safety circuit cut off the ramjet fuel before the debris from the intake tore the engine apart; but he still had power. Solid fuel rockets do not need air intakes. They carry their own oxygen.

  The fuel gauge showed only 15,000 pounds of propellant were left. Eighty seconds of flight time. At high speed, even the reduced wing had enough intact surface to provide lift. He felt the stubby wings bite, heard the air scream, and felt the stick respond.

  The plane bucked like a bronco. One wing was more damaged than the other. He entered a tight curve, wrestling the plane into a spiral.

  The radar showed him he was above a torn, rocky, mountainous landscape. The infrared scopes gave insane readings, as if the ground below were on fire. But then the scope showed a round, flat surface. From the size and position, it might have been a mountain lake, but the temperature reading was too high.

  He ignored the readings. The scope must be damaged. The rocket had a fixed rate of exhaust. There was no throttle, no brake. The best he could do was find the moment in his wild spiral when his nose was pointing in the right direction, and cut the rocket.

  The craft was flung like a stone from a sling into straightline flight. Now he wrestled with the ailerons, praying for level descent. The proximity alarm screamed. The peaks were close.

  Grimacing, he drove his service revolver, aimed, and blew out the bloodstained window. The wind shrieked into his faceplate, blowing fragments of glass throughout the cockpit.

  He saw the lake, round as a silver dollar, slide past his tiny window. A rocky texture of mountain peaks of black rock, plumed with volcanic clouds, surrounding the upland valley holding the lake. Dozens of cones were active. Lava crawled in slow, wormlike streams and waterfalls, glowing.

  It was an insane world. The moon was four times its proper size. The sky was so purple as to be almost black. Dark green jungle stretched to the horizon. He saw long-necked monsters rear above the trees and bat-winged flying things against the winedark sky. Plateaus lifted their high, flat heads above the jungle canopy. A line of steep mountains reared jagged peaks. Was his altimeter malfunctioning? These mountains were higher than the Himalayas.

  The opened the flaps, cutting his airspeed. It was not enough. One last trick was left. His fantastic plane boasted a dozen cold nitrogen gas thrusters: he opened the valves of the four nose nozzles to their fullest. These were meant for zero-gee maneuvers, not for this.

  But it was enough, barely. The lake swatted him like an earth-sized hammer. His discovered the scope reading had been accurate. The water, mingled with steam, that sprayed in through the broken window was boiling hot.