Warbirds of Mars: Stories of the Fight! Read online

  When he learned that the Martians had taken an interest in his research, escape became crucial. Traveling on a commercial vessel wouldn’t be possible, either—those were too closely watched. So he gathered up his research materials and a few samples, and he donned his peasant’s clothing and joined the throng looking for passage out of Asia. He had some money to spread around—although he was cautious about doing so, because nothing could tear apart his disguise faster than being seen holding a lot of cash—and managed to ease his way onto the first ship leaving Hong Kong.

  Now a klaxon was blaring outside the private room Benjamin had bribed his way into—a storage closet, really, but with a door he could lock from the inside—and the hallway was thick with the sounds of running feet and voices screaming in Chinese. The ship was leaning markedly to the right, and it felt like it was rising in back. Benjamin didn’t know what had happened, but it wasn’t good.

  He had made a desk out of some shipping crates and a couple of boards, and he had papers strewn all over it. He’d brought aboard a specially designed carrying case that would safely hold three flasks of water samples and the thick folders containing his research notes. When everything was inside, he could close it, fasten the clasps, and turn the key in the lock, and the contents would be protected from water or fire. The whole thing looked like a suitcase, and he had distressed the outside of it so it wouldn’t appear new or expensive, even though it was both.

  Clearly something bad was going on. Benjamin hadn’t communicated his findings to anyone in authority, except in the most vague terms. He had wanted to be there, to convey the results of his research in person. You never knew when the Martians might be listening in or intercepting cables.

  If the damn ship was sinking, though, then all his work had been for nothing. All that time he’d spent in China, and out at sea—on chartered boats or with friendly fishermen who didn’t ask too many questions if he bought a few bottles of something after they returned to port—wasted. He could have stayed home, done research in a nice comfortable lab someplace.

  Complaining wouldn’t do any good. He had to protect the work. He pushed the sample flasks into their cutout spaces in the case’s lining, then gathered up his notes. They were all out of order, since he’d been working on them, but he didn’t think he had time to fix that. On his way back to the case, the ship gave a sudden lurch. Benjamin caught himself on the edge of his “desk,” but the papers squirted from his hands and fluttered to the floor.

  He dropped to his knees and retrieved them, now even more disordered than they had been. When he had them all firmly in his grip again, he carried them to the case and jammed them in. Then he shut it, making sure the seal was tight, and worked all the brass clasps. He hefted it and started for the door.

  Approaching it, he realized that during the minutes he had struggled with his research, the screaming and shouting from outside had stopped. Now he heard a dull roar, growing louder, like a subway train approaching through a tunnel. Dread filled him, but he was out of options—if the ship was sinking and he stayed in the storage closet, he would surely drown.

  He opened the door and stepped through.

  Water barreled toward him from down the hall—moving as fast as that imaginary subway, and with about the same force. He tried to dive back into the closet, but too late. The wall of water caught him and tore him away from the door. It ripped the case from his hands, and he and case and the water all hurtled through the hall. At its end was a solid wall, and the rush of water hit that and turned back. Tossed and tumbled by the competing surges, Benjamin felt the case smash against him. He tried to grab it, but the water snatched it away again. Then he hit the wall, and his mouth opened, and the water flooded in.

  Hoff stood on the deck, watching the lifeboats edge away from the Antilles. Women and children filled them, mostly, though he had also insisted that some of the ship’s crew get aboard. Each boat would need someone who knew the sea, knew something about navigation and survival. And he had not paid his men well, so giving them a chance to live seemed a small favor. Bruno Hoff was nobody’s idea of nobility, but when simple human decency didn’t cost him anything, he found that he quite liked it. Unfortunate, he thought, that he had not learned that earlier in life.

  The freighter was sinking fast. The bow was almost completely submerged. The vessel had broken almost in half at the hole amidships, and the stern was, for the moment, above the water line, sticking up and bobbing like a floater attached to a fishing lure. Hoff wasn’t sure how much time he had left, but he guessed his life would be measured in minutes, not hours.

  The tragedy—and he was beginning to see it that way—was that so many others would die, as well. Moonlight showed that the waters around the lifeboats were thick with swimmers, fighting to get aboard the boats and risking capsizing them in the bargain, or clutching life vests or anything else they’d found aboard that might float.

  But they had been at sea for three days, at the ship’s speed. They wouldn’t survive long enough to reach land. Even the people in the lifeboats only had a passing chance, and they had meager supplies and first aid kits. Hoff, about to die, looked at the legions of desperate people trying to put distance between themselves and the sinking ship, and he knew that most of them would also die, likely before the sun broke the eastern horizon.

  Hell would be crowded tonight.

  Seawater flooded into the ruined ship. Every ounce she took on made her heavier, sank her that much faster. The surface churned around her, and whoever didn’t get far enough away soon would be sucked into the whirlpool she would make going down. Those in the lifeboats were rowing hard, trying to escape, but the swimmers and floaters had less hope.

  The Antilles tilted more as it sank, and Hoff had to grab the wheel—his chest pressing against it—to keep from falling into the sea. He would be on board when it sank, he had decided. No matter what, he would not leave his ship. He watched out the doorway; watched the water rise, watched the panic of those trying so hard to get away, limned by moonlight.

  And then he saw something else break the surface, in the near distance, just past the farthest lifeboat. One, then several. He looked in different directions and saw them there, too. Shapes he could not recognize, surrounding his ship, as if to herd the survivors.

  He wasn’t sure what they were, but he knew at a glance that they had not come to help.

  Suddenly, the ship could not sink fast enough for his liking. Whatever was about to happen here, Bruno Hoff wanted no part of. He did not even want to bear witness.

  He made his way awkwardly to a cabinet on the bridge’s port side and unlocked it with a key from the set that always dangled off his belt. Inside the cabinet was a loaded pistol.

  Hoff took it from the cabinet and raised the barrel to his mouth. He tasted the cool, bitter steel, and he looked out at the doomed and the dying, and he pulled the trigger.

  Jack Paris sat at the controls of the DH 98 Mosquito and watched the Pacific pass below, vast fields of black dotted occasionally by silvery reflections of the moon. It was hard to tell, from this vantage, what was sea and what sky. But the sun would be up before long, and that would help. His navigator was Billy Samuels, a New York City kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of Times Square. Neither one was thrilled about flying a British-built aircraft on this mission, but the night fighter seated two, and hop-scotching across the Pacific made for a long trip that was easier with a partner. They had already stopped in Honolulu and the Philippines, and they were on the final leg, flying low and fast.

  “You ever gonna tell me what this is about, Paris?” Billy asked. He had brought the question up a dozen times, and each time, Jack had deflected it. The mission was sensitive, and Billy was a great navigator, but he wasn’t cleared to know what they were after. Even Jack only had an inkling. Something about a scientist working in China, who had learned important information about the Martians. The scientist was American, but he’d been doing research in the China Sea. He h
ad been en route back to the States, but he hadn’t arrived on schedule or contacted Martian Killers HQ.

  Then Jack had received a coded cable from a guy named Nicky Hawkins, with whom he had grown up, back in Illinois. Nicky was a submarine commander now, fighting against the Martians. Nicky said he knew what had become of the scientist, and wanted to meet with Jack. The whole thing was so secret that the cable had been hand-delivered by a mope in an ill-fitting suit, who’d shown Jack a badge from an agency of which he had only heard rumors.

  So the whole mission was made up of guesswork and hope—Jack hoping Nicky actually had solid information, and that whatever he knew could still be acted upon this long after the scientist’s disappearance. “We’re going to see an old pal,” Jack finally said.

  “All the way across the world on a social call?” Billy asked. “That don’t seem right.”

  “Not social,” Jack said. “Business all the way. Just happens to be business with an old pal.”

  “Gotcha, Mac,” Billy said. “You tell me what you want me to know, and we’ll get along fine.”

  “That’s how I always work.” Jack turned his attention back to the plane, enjoying the thrum of the Mossie’s twin Rolls Royce engines powering them through the air, and thinking about Nicky.

  Which led, always, to thinking about Renata. Funny that way.

  Jack and Nicky had known each other throughout their school years. In the small town of Eastland, everybody knew everybody else. But friendships came and went during their childhoods. Kids left school to work, and returned or not as circumstances permitted. Kids died. Their parents moved away. What seemed like a stable community was, in fact, constantly evolving.

  In high school, Nicky and Jack became friendly rivals. Both athletic, they vied for the top spots on various teams, until junior year when Nicky beat Jack out to become captain of the football team, and then Jack beat Nicky for the same honor on the baseball team. They started spending time together off the field, and by the end of that school year they were fast friends.

  That summer, everything changed.

  The Nazis had come to power in Germany, and they’d started spreading their evil across Europe. The world reacted in horror, and war began to look inevitable. No one could have guessed then that world war would turn into a war for the world. Jack followed the papers and newsreels with growing horror, and a fervent hope that the Nazis would be contained until he could get into the fight.

  Also that summer, Renata Mercer came to town.

  The first day he saw her, Jack had taken part in an afternoon ball game at the park. He was walking home, with his bat over his shoulder and his glove hanging off the end of it, when he noticed a girl standing on the corner of Broad and Mason. He only had to look once to know he had never seen her before—never seen anyone like her before, except possibly on a movie screen. Lustrous, jet-black hair fell halfway down her back, and her blouse and shorts showed smooth skin with a hint of amber to it. She had high cheekbones and dark eyes that flashed with mischief, even on that first meeting. Only sixteen, she had a woman’s curves and an ease with conversation that belied her age. He found out later that she had lived all over the world, that her father was a diplomat or something. He was of Swedish descent, her mother English, but there were other races in the mix, farther back, and they had combined to give her an exotic beauty rare in small-town Illinois.

  Jack supposed he had been staring, and when she met his gaze he was embarrassed. He started to look away, but she said, “Excuse me?”

  He stopped in his tracks. “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for the drugstore. I heard there was a soda fountain there.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Jack said. He pointed east on Broad. “Lash’s. Two blocks that way, on the corner.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Sure thing.”

  He wanted to say something else, but his mind had seized up. Instead, he took another couple of steps toward home.

  “Do you like sundaes?” she asked.

  “Sure, I guess. Wait, the day or the ice cream one?”

  “The ice cream, silly.”

  “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

  “My mom,” she said. “She won’t let us have ice cream in the house. But it’s a hot day and I’ve been unpacking boxes in my room and I wanted some ice cream. I remembered hearing about the soda fountain at the drugstore. Can I get a sundae there?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. A thought was beginning to glimmer, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind. He could tell it was there but he couldn’t get his hands around it.

  Finally, she said, “Would you like one, too?”

  “What, a sundae?”

  She broke into laughter. Jack felt his face flushing, and he knew he’d made a fool of himself. “Yes, a sundae!” she said.

  Although the stray thought had finally pushed itself into visibility, now it was too late. She had been wanting him to offer to take her to the drugstore. Since he had failed so abjectly, she’d had to take the reins. Even through his humiliation, though, he knew he wanted to spend more time in this girl’s presence. “Sure, I guess.”

  He didn’t even taste the sundae, but he filled his eyes with the glory of Renata Mercer and loved every minute of it.

  He couldn’t keep her hidden from Nicky Hawkins for long, though.

  That summer, although their attention—like everyone else’s—was on Europe and the Nazi march and the prospects for war, both Jack and Nicky saw Renata as often as they could. Their friendly rivalry took on a new aspect, as Nicky took Renata to the movies and Jack took her to the county fair. Nicky topped that by saving every penny he could and taking her to dinner at a restaurant in Chicago, which turned out to be not as fancy as he’d hoped, and more expensive. Throughout the summer, she saw both of them, and their friendship cooled as they competed for her time and attention.

  But by the end of summer, she was exclusively dating Hal Yardley, who had graduated a year ahead of Jack and Nicky and had a sales job at Eastland’s biggest department store. She stayed friendly with both boys during their senior year, and Jack was delighted to discover that without the pressure of dating, she was still fun and smart and he liked being around her. The rift between Jack and Nicky healed, and the three of them were inseparable that year.

  The day after graduation, Nicky joined the Navy. Jack waited a few more months before enlisting in the Army Air Forces. He wrote Renata a few letters from boot camp, but after the first couple, she stopped responding. According to friends back in Eastland, she had moved away, but nobody knew where she’d gone. He’d lost touch with Nicky, too—until that cable came from the China Sea.

  So here he was, flying west with the sun rising behind him and China ahead, and Billy Samuels just off his right shoulder, grousing about the mission.

  He hoped that when he caught up to Nicky, he really did know something about the missing scientist. He’d hate to have made this trip for nothing.

  The Asian land mass had just come into view in the distance when a sleek shape parted from the clouds and raced toward them. Jack had just enough time to see it—and Billy had time to toss off a string of profanity—before the wedge-shaped craft, far more maneuverable than even the sprightly Mosquito, opened fire on them. Jack unleashed the .303 Brownings and watched as his rounds stitched into the ship’s fuselage. He took grim satisfaction from that, but it was too late to help.

  “Paris, we’ve lost most of a wing! We’re going down!”

  “You ready to jump, Billy?”

  “I’m not jumping!”

  “What? You’ve got to!” Jack twisted in his seat, expecting to see Billy’s grumpy face glaring back at him.

  Instead, he saw a bloody, pulped mess. Billy’s right eye was gone, and his cheek hung open like a flap somebody had unzipped. Blood ran from wounds at his scalp line, from his eye socket and cheek, and from his nose and mouth. More blood dotted his flight suit. “There’s no fixing this, Jack,” he said. “
I’m done.”

  “Billy, no!” The plane was spiraling toward the drink, smoke corkscrewing the air behind them. Jack let it go. Billy was right about that—most of the left wing had been sheared off by the Martian attack, and there wouldn’t be any pulling out of this dive.

  “Go on, Jack! Get out while you can!”

  “But—”

  “Go!”

  Jack watched the water rushing up to meet them. Another few seconds and it would be too late—the chute wouldn’t even open before he hit. He shot one more glance at Billy, who was hanging on as if daring the airplane to go down without him, then jettisoned the cockpit panel overhead.

  Instantly, wind whipped him and made it almost impossible to rise from his seat. He forced himself up into it, but the higher he went, the more the slipstream pummeled him. Once he rose above the remaining cockpit, it would most likely break his back. Even if it didn’t, it would slam him into the falling airplane’s tail structure and that would cut him in half.

  He hesitated, not sure which death would be more painful—bailing out or staying in until the airplane smashed into the water. Then he felt Billy’s hands on him, pushing him toward the opening. If Billy was speaking, the wind drowned him out. Jack wanted to check his position, see if there was a moment in the spiral when he could jump and the tail would be more likely to miss him, but he couldn’t see a thing. Finally, he just swallowed his terror and jumped.

  The wind snatched him from the plane and hurled him back into the sky. Fighting back fear, he yanked the ripcord. The chute billowed out behind him, catching the wind and carrying him higher. From that angle, drifting slowly toward the sea, he watched his Mossie—with Billy still inside—plummet into the water and disintegrate on impact.

  So far, this was not going at all well.