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But neither Shade nor Dekka could wedge into the cockpit and save the pilots flying the helicopter, which now veered wildly away.
Cruz had begun to morph, an amazing thing to watch with Shade’s accelerated senses. And as Cruz’s morph appeared, the bugs attacking her seemed to lose focus, as if they’d forgotten what they were doing. They turned in midair, and redoubled the assault on the cockpit.
“The pilots!” Dekka cried.
But Shade could see that it was too late. Far too late. The lieutenant pilot’s face was already erupting in pus-filled boils, slow-motion corruption of the flesh.
No time to consult Dekka. No time to parse the moral pluses and minuses. Time only to see the solution, the bright, clear, ruthlessly drawn line from where Shade was to a solution. The faint, probably futile, but only solution.
Shade pushed Dekka aside, reached into the cockpit, grabbed the pilot by the shoulder of his uniform, reached around to smack the buckle of his safety harness, yanked him out of his seat, and hurled him out of the door.
She was back to repeat the same sequence with the copilot. Finally she grabbed Malik bodily and pushed him toward the cockpit. All of this within three seconds.
She had time to watch in horror as the two men fell so very slowly, arms windmilling, mouths open to scream. The pilot hit the ground. The copilot smashed into a tree. Two rag dolls.
Three. I’ve killed three men today.
It took seconds for the others to realize what she’d done. It took Malik seconds to realize he was in the pilot’s seat. It took Dekka seconds to cry, “What have you done?”
“The only thing I could do,” Shade said at a speed Dekka would never be able to interpret.
Sam was on his feet now, putting an arm around a furious Dekka. He said, “Not now!”
The helicopter banked sharply, so hard that Shade was certain it would roll completely over and hit the ground in a fiery explosion. But then the roll slowed and reversed. Cruz and Armo crashed together into a bulkhead, knocking Sam and Dekka to their knees on the steel floor.
Shade knew one of them, just one, had the power to escape unharmed.
“Francis!” she cried.
But it was a tenth-of-a-second chirp in a howling tornado of wind as the ground rushed at them.
Malik quickly saw what Shade had done, quickly saw that she was hoping he would somehow figure out how to fly a helicopter, and stared in blank panic at an array of unfamiliar instruments.
Through the windshield Malik saw tall, straight pine trees rising suddenly like arrows, then tilting away. He felt the helicopter accede to gravity and slide sideways toward the ground. House roofs. Telephone poles. Grass. An aboveground backyard swimming pool. It was as if some giant had scooped the ground up and flung it at them, so that it felt less like they were falling and more like the ground was attacking them.
And yet, they were falling.
Malik understood Shade’s thinking: Malik was a techie, a gamer, a guy who’d spent thousands of hours driving virtual tanks and flying virtual jets. He was the best choice to play emergency pilot.
Just one thing: he’d never even flown a virtual helicopter.
To his side, right where the parking brake might be on a sports car, was an ornate sort of yoke, but it was no simple stick; it had various holds, things that needed to be pushed, things that needed to be rotated, things that needed to be pulled, and he had no idea, none, none, none what to do. But in flying planes, pulling back on the yoke had always sent the plane upward.
So Malik pulled up on the yoke. He heard the rising scream of the turbines, felt a sudden surge of speed, saw a whirlwind outside the bubble canopy . . .
The tip of a rotor caught a power line. There was a shower of sparks; the helicopter shuddered and jerked wildly, rose a few feet like a breaching whale, and spun madly. Malik was pushed back in his seat by the centrifugal force, suddenly several times his own weight. Behind him the bodies of his friends—those not buckled in—were hurled around, smashed into bulkheads, and suddenly Dekka fell, back first, feline hands clawing at the sky, out of the helicopter.
Shade moved, snatched Dekka’s desperate hand, and held on, but she wasn’t strong enough to pull Dekka in against the force of gravity and the delirious spinning, spinning . . .
The rotors hit again, and this ti
me they bit into something solid, and tree branches and pine needles lashed the windshield. Trees. A fence. The helicopter’s tail rose sharply, and the machine flipped over and smashed into the ground.
Even after impact the rotors churned on, tearing up grass and lawn toys and throwing steel chunks into the house whose backyard they had invaded.
Then . . . quiet, as the turbines whined and stopped. Malik was on his side. A tree branch had shattered the cockpit and now stuck there like a gnarled spear, having barely missed Malik’s head.
Then . . . Malik smelled smoke!
