...of aerotitus

"It's a parachute," he says to Gibbs. "We hit a parachute on the way down."

His voice is strangely muffled: he can hear himself - but only silently, inside his head. Gibbs doesn't seem to hear him either: he doesn't answer - or if he does then his voice isn't loud enough for Serge to pick it up. Serge turns round. Gibbs is dead: stuff from his chest is spattered about the cockpit. Serge unclips his own harness, levers himself from his seat and drops to the silk-coated ground. Pushing his hands against a roof and walls of silk, he makes his way along the soft, white tube towards the opening by the strings and, emerging through this, prods the man tied to them. He's dead too, head split open from its impact against the earth. He must have jumped from the burning kite balloon, only for his parachute to be run into by their machine and carried along horizontally - or rather, on a diagonal descent - dragging him with it.

Serge looks around him. The landscape is nondescript, brown and broken, like all the front's terrain. Twenty or so yards away, a section of it jumps into the air as a shell lands on it. The explosion is silent: it's as though he were watching one of Widsun's films. Even the rushing air and the earth clods it brings smacking against his face carry no sound in their wake. He traps one of these clods against his skin, holds it out and inspects it. Viewed from this close, the earth takes on a similar resolution to the one it has in those photographs he shoots for Pietersen, pockmarked and lined with patterns. He lets it drop, from sympathy: it's been churned up enough. Watching it fall past his groin, he realises he's still got an erection. He looks about him, embarrassed, before remembering that there's no one else around. He could be anywhere. The fact that they hit a German kite balloon's occupant, or ex-occupant, on the way down suggests they were heading east, in which case... Should he torch the machine? As he wonders this, the pressure grows inside his ears - and with it comes, at last, a sound. It's a quiet one, resonating at a low frequency and emerging from inside the parachute: an electric buzzing spilling out of the inflated pod. He heads back through its opening towards the broken wings and bent propeller blades that, like a set of irregular tent-poles, hold the structure up. The buzzing's coming from the cockpit - from the back half of it, his half...

[C, McCarthy, T.]