A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 69 Last Call

We almost made it.

The choppers carne roaring south from Yuana Moloco, circling us at a distance like predatory dragons. They paced us. They rose above us and lowered great bundles of pressurized cylinders to the cargo platform on the roof of the airship. Emergency crews worked around the clock, desperately striving to repair the gasbags, keep them filled and firm-keep them sprayed with sealant, keep them tight and lifting. Keep us safely above the terrifying floor of the worm-infested jungle. The whole ship reeked of the chemicals in the sealant. The stingflies were - everywhere. We were all wearing netting now and catching catnaps on the floor wherever we could. There was panic in our faces.

The crews couldn't move fast enough. One of the gasbags ripped-just came apart in shreds-and I thought I could feel the airship lurch beneath my feet, but maybe not. Sameshima and a work crew were moving a new mylar bag into place and already filling it. They hoped to replace all the bags, one at a time, before the rest of them shredded apart. The choppers were constantly roaring around us. A new chopper arrived on station every fifteen minutes, delivering tanks of helium and occasionally another new gasbag. The tanks and bags were offloaded onto the cargo platform aft of the skydeck and immediately brought below for immediate installation. Everybody was running.

Siegel and his team were pressed into service. The aides whose terminals had been dumped overboard assisted. Even the Brazilians were working alongside the rest, pulling bags into place, pushing tanks of helium.

We jettisoned the flyers, we sent them on ahead to Yuana Moloco, each one carrying one pilot and one infant child. We dropped spybirds continually. Siegel and Lopez disarmed the surplus ordnance, set it to self-destruct, and tipped it out the hatch. I hated seeing it go. If this ship went down, we might need that stuff.

Shaun and I and two other stewards patrolled the ship, looking for other things to dump, things we might have missed. We rolled up the rubber deck from the jogging track. We knocked down the windows from the observation levels. We unbolted doors and cabinets. We jettisoned the sewage tanks. We tossed out two of the water-recycling units. We gutted the airship's kitchen-all the stoves, all the sinks, the refrigerators and freezers, all the various machineries of cuisine. Down and down into the leafy green sea. Everything. All of it. We'd eat fresh fruit and salads and peanut butter sandwiches for two days if we had to. We couldn't let this ship go down

And still we sank.

The land rose up to meet us, closer and closer by the hour. We were approaching the foothills north of Japura. We weren't going to get over them. And we were running out of things to lose.

We sent people up to the skydecks, and the choppers lifted them away, six at a time. First the children from the camp, then the Brazilians, then the most valuable of the scientists. Lizard refused to go, so did I. Shreiber had to stay with Guyer. We ordered Dr. Meier aboard a chopper at gunpoint. She climbed out the other side and went right back to work.

We took apart the med-bay, pulled down the operating theaters, rolled out all the various pieces of diagnostic equipment, pushed them out into the open air and watched them tumble away. We pulled up the floor panels wherever we could, pulled down ceiling panels and ventilation ducts. We unbolted the air-conditioning units and let them crash downward to the jungle. File cabinets. Security safes. Paper shredders. Encryptors. Conference tables. Desks. Draperies. Paintings. Glass partitions. Televisions. The ship's entire library. All the books. All the disks and tapes. A wealth of history, literature, and science. All the knowledge of the world. The backup computers. People were abandoning their personal belongings too. I pulled the backup memory out of my notebook and scaled the machine out the window too. One less kilogram to worry about.

"This goddamn airship!" Shaun was swearing. "Everything is so lightweight, we're going to have to dismantle two thirds of it to stay aloft!"

The ship's wine cellar. We had to restrain Feist, we had to sedate him. He wanted to leap out after his Montrachet and Mouton Cadet. We were tempted to let him. He massed a good ninety kilos. But Captain Harbaugh would never have forgiven us. We sent him out on the next chopper instead.

The land kept rising. Achieving neutral buoyancy in the air wasn't going to be enough. The farther north we sailed, the higher the foothills rose. This airship was going to be a big pink drapery sprawled across the Brazilian hills.

There were worms beneath us still. Every now and then, we'd see them rushing through the greenery, chirruping and singing, calling up to us, crying and trying to join us. If we hit the ground, they'd be all over us.

My phone beeped. It was Lizard. Captain Harbaugh was ordering us off her ship. It was too late. We were to be on the next chopper out.

"Meet me in the main lounge, I've got the last of the mission logs, including all the stuff we didn't send out. Help me carry it up to the skydeck."

"I'm on my way-"

And that's when the whole thing came down.