Assignment: Avalon

Chapter Fifteen: Melodan Takes the Controls

The struggle to get the plane into the air, the triumph as it lifted over the trees, the simple joy of flying...all those things had temporarily lifted Tor out of himself, so that, as he coached Melodan on the biplane's controls, he was almost happy. He even relaxed enough to stop the constant head-swivelling search of the sky he'd had drilled into him since his first day of Skyforce training.

It almost got them killed. Only by chance did he glance over his shoulder and see the black speck of another plane dropping out of the sky toward them.

He deactivated Melodan's stick, grabbed his own, and shoved it forward, diving for speed. You wanted altitude in a dogfight. If you couldn't get altitude, you went for speed, headed for the deck, and hoped your attacker was unwilling to follow. A burst of tracers chased them, tearing holes in the fuselage and wings—but then their attacker swept overhead and kept on going.

Tor levelled off only fifty or sixty metres above the treetops. "Why didn't he stay to fight?" Melodan asked in his headphones.

"Low on fuel," Tor said shortly. Ahead, he could see more black specks, circling the peak that hid the caves. "Let's hope they all are."

Apparently, they were. The Skyforcers fled east as Melodan and Tor approached. "They've been here a while," said Tor. "I hope we still have a place to land."

Melodan looked out and down. "The strip looks intact. But there's fighting near it. Just a skirmish, no large force."

Tor glanced over the side. Groundforcers crouched behind rocks up the slope from the landing strip. His hand tightened on the stick. For a moment he saw other Forcers crouched behind rocks, on a mountain slope beside the wreckage of a mysterious vessel, and watched Parl's plane explode in mid-air...

...and then he remembered men and women in a wheatfield falling beneath his guns.

"Maybe we can help," Melodan said. "A strafing run?"

A single pass would break up the skirmish, Tor thought. But the thought of watching more people die at his hand... "No. I...I can't."

"Then let me," Melodan snapped.

"No!"

"If we try to land while those Groundforcers are lurking by the strip, they'll shoot us out of the air. We've got to clear them out." A pause. "You've cast your lot with the Free Forcers, Tor. It's too late to back out now."

She was right, of course. Tor knew it. He'd betrayed his sister by letting himself be pulled into Skyforce, betrayed his best friend by letting go of his pledge of vengeance for his death, and betrayed his oath to Skyforce by attacking his own base. He'd broken every promise and every commitment he'd ever made and ended up back where he should have stayed, with Kyla, on the side of the teks. If he betrayed her again, he'd lose her forever. And he had nothing and no one else to live for.

Without another word, he banked the plane and dove toward the valley.

Puffs of dust and shattered rock raced across the slope where the Groundforcers crouched. Several fell. Others ran. A few held their ground and fired back, but as Tor swung around for a second pass, they, too, scrambled away.

Feeling no exhilaration, only fatigue and bitterness, Tor landed moments later, the plane rolling to a halt only three or four meters from the end of the tiny strip. Jubilant Free Forcers surrounded them. "Sent 'em running back where they came from!" said one. "They didn't expect us to have our own Skyforce!"

"When did they attack?" Melodan asked as she climbed from the cockpit.

"Around noon," said a woman whose arm was bound in a bloody rag. "They picked away at us for an hour or two, then the planes came over and dropped bombs. Didn't do much damage. Didn't stay long, either."