Fighting Thread required entirely different techniques from hunting wherry or scoring a hit on a large flying machine driven by a reasonably intelligent enemy. Thread was mindless. It just fell—in a slanting southwesterly direction, occasionally buffeted into tangles by gusting winds. It was the inexorability of that insensate Fall that infuriated, defeated, depressed, and frustrated. No matter how much was seared to ash in the sky, more followed relentlessly. Nervous pilots swooped, veered, and dove. Unskilled gunners fired at anything that moved into range, which more often than not was another sled chasing down a tangle of Thread. Nine domesticated dragonets fell victim to such inexpertise, and there was suddenly a marked decrease in the number of wild ones who had joined the fray.

In the first half hour of the Fall, seven sleds were involved in midair collisions, three badly damaged and two with cracked siliplex canopies which made them unairworthy. Even Kenjo’s sled bore scorch marks. Four broken arms, six broken or sprained hands, three cracked collarbones, and a broken leg put fourteen gunners out of action; many others struggled on with lacerations and bruises. No one had thought about rigging any safety harnesses for the flame-gunners.

A hasty conference between the squadron leaders was called on a secured channel at the beginning of the second hour while the Fall was still over water. The squadron leaders—Kenjo, Sabra Stein-Ongola, Theo Force, and Drake Bonneau—and Paul Benden, as leader of the ground-support crews—decided to assign each squadron their own altitude level at hundred-meter intervals. The squadron would fly in a stacked wedge formation back and forth across the fifty-klick width of the Thread corridor. The important factor was for each wedge of seven sleds to stick to its designated altitude.

Once the sleds began to maintain their distances, midair collisions and scorchings were immediately reduced. Kenjo led the most capable fliers at ground level to catch as much missed Thread as possible and to inform the surface crews where tangles got through. Paul Benden coordinated the movements of the fast ground-skimmers, which carried teams with small portable flamers. Channels were kept open to air, ground, and Landing. Joel Lilienkamp organized replacement of empty HNO3 cylinders and power packs. A medical team remained on standby.

By mid-Fall, Paul knew that his ground-support teams were too thinly spread to be truly effective, even though there were, fortunately, substantial stretches where Thread landed on stony or poor soil and shriveled and died quickly. Toward the end, when weary pilots were running low on energy and the sled power packs were nearly depleted, more Thread got through. It seemed to be part of the growing bad luck that it fell over thick vegetation and the home farm of the Mexico Stake.