Read Online The Fugitive Worlds by Bob Shaw - Free Book Online

must have originated, and was intrigued when he picked out what looked like a tiny cloud of golden fireflies. The cloud was roughly circular and was expanding rapidly, its individual components brigh tening with each passing second. He stared at it, bemused, unable to recall having seen anything similar amid the sky's sparkling treasures, and then—like the abrupt clarification of an image in an optical system—his sense of scale and perspective returned, and there came a terrible realization.
    He was looking at a swarm of meteors which appeared to be heading directly towards the fleet!
    His understanding of the spectacle transformed it, seeming to increase the tempo of events. The shower opened radially like a carnivorous blossom, silently encompassing his field of vision, and he knew then that it could be hundreds of miles across. Unable to move or even to cry out, he gripped the ship's rail and watched the blazing entities fan ever outwards, racing towards the peripheries of his vision, still in utter silence despite the awesome energies being expended.
    I'm safe, Toller told himself. I'm safe for the simple reason that I'm too small a prey for these fire-monsters. Even the ships are too small. . . .
    But something new was happening. A radical change was taking place. The obsidian horsemen from the far side of the cosmos, who had pursued their courses through total vacuum for millions of years, had at last encountered a denser me dium, and they were destroying themselves against barriers of air, the gaseous fortifications which protected the twin planets from cosmic intruders.
    Favorable though the encounter was for any creature living on the surface of Land or Overland, it boded ill for travelers taken by surprise at the narrowest point of the bridge of air between the two worlds. The meteors, racked by intolerable stresses, began to explode, and as they shat tered into thousands of diverging splinters they were bound to become less discriminatory in their choice of targets.
    Toller flinched as, with a wash of light and overlapping peals of thunder, the disintegrating meteors momentarily filled the whole sky. Suddenly they were behind him. He turned and saw the entire phenomenon in reverse, the great disk of radiance contracting as it raced into the remoteness of space. The main difference in its appearance was that there was less corpuscularity—the circle was a nearly uniform area of swirling flame. On leaving the last tenuous fringes of the twin worlds' atmosphere, the fiery bullets were deprived of fuel and quickly faded from sight. A numb silence engulfed the tower of ships.
    How did we survive? Toller thought. How in the name of... 7
    He became aware of shouting from somewhere not far above him. There came a blurry explosion, typical of the pikon-halvell reaction, and he knew that at least one of the ships had been less fortunate than his own.
    "Put us on our side," he shouted to Lieutenant Correvalte, who was frozen at the control station. Toller clung to the rail, impatiently straining to see upwards past the curvatures of the balloon, while Correvalte began the regulated intermittent firing of one of the lateral jets.
    A few seconds later Toller's eyes were greeted by the bizarre spectacle of a bluehorn drifting downwards in the sunlit air, against the background of daytime stars. The explosion must have hurled it clear of the gondola in which it was being transported. It was barking in terror and lashing out with hoofed feet as it imperceptibly fell towards Land.
    Toller turned his attention to the stricken ship, now coming into view. Its balloon had been reduced to a formless canopy of fabric panels. All four sides of the gondola had been blasted away from the base, and were still spinning slowly as part of an irregular ring which was made up of the figures of men, boxes of stores, coils of rope and general debris. Here and there among the floating confusion were flashes and fizzlings which emitted billows of