Valentine forced himself to pull on socks and tie his boots, grabbed the bag containing his gas mask, scarves, and gloves anyway, and buckled his pistol belt. Hank had cleaned and hung up his cut-down battle rifle. Valentine checked it over as he hurried through men running every which way or looking to their disheveled operations officer for direction, and headed for the stairs to the control tower, the field's tactical command post. He took seemingly endless switchbacks of stairs two at a time to the "top deck"-the Razors' shorthand for the tallest point of Love Field.
He felt explosions, then heard them a second later. Worse than mortars, worse than artillery, and going off so closely together he wondered if the Kurians had been keeping rocket artillery in reserve for a crisis. The old stairs rattled and dropped dirt as though shaking in fear.
"Would you look at those bastards!" he heard someone shout from the control tower.
"Send to headquarters: 'Rancid,'" Valentine heard Meadows shout. "Rancid. Rancid. Rancid."
Valentine came off the last stairs and passed through the open security door. Meadows and two others of the regiment had box seats on chaos.
Whoever had installed the glass-if it was glass and not a high-tech polymer-had done the job well; still-intact windows offered the tower a 360-degree field of vision. In the distance the crenellated Dallas skyline-one bifurcated tower the men called "the Eye" stared straight at the field thanks to its strange, empty-centered top-broke the hazy morning horizon.
As he went to the glass, noting the quiet voice of the communications officer relaying the "Rancid" alert to Brigade, another explosion erupted in black-orange menace atop the parking garage-the biggest structure on the field.
Valentine followed a private's eyes up and looked out on a sky filled with whirling planes.
Not rickety, rebuilt crop dusters or lumbering old commercial aircraft; the assorted planes shared only smooth silhouettes and a mottled gray-and-tan camouflage pattern reminiscent of a dusty rattlesnake. There were sleek single seaters, like stunt planes Valentine had seen in books, whipping around the edges of the field, turned sideways so the pilots could get a good look at ground activity. Banana-shaped twin-engine jobs dove in at the vehicles parked between the two wings of the terminal concourses, one shooting rocket after rocket at the vehicles while the other two flanked it, drawing ground fire. A pair of bigger, uglier, wide-winged military attack planes with bulging turbofans on their rear fuselages came in, dropping a series of bombs that exploded into a huge snake of fire writhing between the Razors' positions and the southwestern strip.
"Who the hell are these guys?" Meadows said to no one.
The screaming machines, roaring to and fro over the field, weren't the only attackers on the wing. Flying Grogs in the hundreds, many the Harpy-type Valentine had first met over Weening during his spell in the labor regiments, swooped below the aircraft and even the control tower, dispensing what looked-and exploded-like sticks of dynamite at anything that moved. A few bigger wings--the true gargoyles of the kind Valentine had seen lain out-circled above, possibly waiting for a juicy enough target to be worth whatever they held in saddlebags hung around their thick necks.
The Razors fought back, mostly from their positions in the parking garages and the heavy weapons point around a winged statue depicting "Flight" near the entrance to the terminal buildings. Small groups of men or single soldiers fired from behind doorways, windows, or the sandbagged positions guarding the motor pool between the concourses.
Perhaps a gargoyle decided to hit the control tower. Valentine heard a heavy thud among the aerials on the roof, the scrabble of claws.
"Out!" Valentine shouted.
The trio looked up at the roof, apparently transfixed by the harmless scrabbling noises. Meadows' hand went to his sidearm, and the private fumbled with his battle rifle. In seconds they'd be dead, fragmenting brain tissue still wondering at the strange raccoonlike noise-
"Out!" Valentine said again, bodily pushing the private to the stairs with one hand, and pulling the communications officer from her chair with the other. She came out of her chair with her headset on; the headset cord stretched and unplugged as though it were as reluctant to leave its post as its operator. Meadows moved with dramatic suddenness as the realization of what might be happening on the roof arrived, and grabbed for the handle on the thick metal door to the stairway.
"I'll get it," Meadows said. Valentine, keeping touch with both the private and the communications officer, hurried down the stairs.
One flight. Two flights. Meadows' clattering footsteps on the stairs a half floor above . . .
The boom Valentine had been expecting for ten anxious seconds was neither head-shattering nor particularly loud, and while it shook peeling paint from the stairs and knocked out the lights, the three weren't so much as knocked off-stride.
Meadows joined them, panting. "The door must have held," he said.
Or physics worked in our favor, Valentine thought. An explosion tends to travel along the path of least resistance, usually upward.
"Maybe." Valentine said.
The impact of three more explosions came up through the floor, bombs striking Love Field somewhere.
"Orders?" Valentine asked.
"I'm going back up," Meadows said. "They might think they finished the job with one bomb. The radio antenna's had it for sure, but the field lines might still be functional."
"You two game?" Valentine asked the private-an intelligent soldier named Wilcox who was the military equivalent of a utility infielder; he could play a variety of positions well. Ruvayed, the lieutenant with the headphone jack still swinging at the end of its cord just below her belt, nodded.
Valentine clicked his gun off safety and brought it to his shoulder. "Me first, in case they crawled in."
Meadows brought up the rear going back up the stairs. Valentine reached the security door. Dust had been blown from beneath the door in an elegant spiked pattern, and he smelled smoke and the harsher odor of burning plastic. He turned the handle but the door wouldn't budge.
A kick opened it. The air inside had the harsh, faintly sulfurous tang of exploded dynamite.
As he swept the room over the open sights on his gun, Valentine saw naked sunlight streaming in from a hole in the roof big enough to put a sedan's engine block through. Older air-traffic consoles and the Razors' newer communications gear were blackened and cracked; the transformation was so thorough it seemed it should have taken more time than an instant.