The hyperglider shook as the wind strengthened around it. Overhead, the gray clouds had merged into an unbroken rumpled ceiling above the stark canyon. “Whatever you want to do, I’m with you,” he told Wilson. It was a cop-out and he knew it, transfer responsibility to someone else. But then that’s what he’d been doing ever since Abadan.
He checked the weather radar with its false-color mating jellyfish patterns. The whole cockpit was juddering now, wobbling the images on the little screen. It showed him a salmon-pink tide of wind channeled by the overbearing walls of Stakeout Canyon and reaching close to a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere in the invisible distance ahead of the hyperglider’s nose, the stormfront had reached the base of Mount Herculaneum.
“Confirmed go status,” Wilson responded with toneless dispassion.
Oscar smiled tenderly at the absolute professionalism; in his own fashion Wilson was showing him the way. Okay, if that’s what it takes to do this, I’m game. “Roger that. I’m beginning ascent phase.”
He brought his hands down on the console’s i-spots, gripping the concave handholds. Plyplastic flowed over his wrists, mooring them into place for the flight. His e-butler reported a perfect interface with the hyperglider’s onboard array.
Oscar put Anna aside and allowed the memories to come to the fore. Not his memories, but the skill belonged to him now, merging him with the hyperglider. A red and violet virtual hand gripped the joystick that had materialized in front of him. His other hand skipped across the glowing icons.
The plyplastic wing buds began to flow, extending out from the fuselage into a simple delta configuration. Oscar was rattled from side to side in the cockpit as they caught the wind. He disengaged the forward tether lock, and the hyperglider leaped about wildly. His own sparse piloting knowledge buoyed by the recent skill implants helped him counter the movement with relative ease, keeping the craft as level as possible.
He allowed the front and rear tether strands to unwind, and adjusted the wings to provide some lift. The hyperglider began to rise away from the floor of the canyon, tugging hard at the cables as the wind tore at the fuselage. Once he was fifty meters high he adjusted the tail fin into a long vertical stabilizer. The shaking began to lose its urgency, though the howl of the wind outside was still growing. Oscar expanded the wings farther, deepening the camber to generate more direct lift. With the tether cables reporting a huge strain, he began spooling them out at a measured rate, scrupulously keeping his ascent at the recommended pace. This was not the time, he decided, for cutting corners, no matter what the stakes.
Tatters of mist shot past the cockpit, twined into a sheath that restricted his visual range to little more than twenty meters. Rain was battering aggressively into the fuselage with loud drumbeat reverberations. As he climbed higher the cables began shaking with unlikely harmonics. He was constantly adjusting the wings to try to keep the hyperglider stable.
“If this storm isn’t enough for Samantha to work with, I don’t know what is,” Wilson said. The radio link wasn’t good, but the static-creased words contained a formidable determination.
Oscar clung to his friend’s voice, the contact with another human was suddenly tremendously important. When he scrutinized the weather radar again he could see the scarlet and cerise flow waves of the storm rushing down Stakeout Canyon, overlapping and twisting at a giddy velocity. The speed around the fuselage had now exceeded a hundred sixty kilometers an hour. Indigo stars marked the other two hypergliders; both were in the air, about the same height as he was. So she is alive and kicking, then. It had been a foolish fantasy that her silence meant she was somehow inactive.
“Yeah,” he said as he rose past the thousand-meter mark. “I don’t like being inside it; I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end.”
“Adam only meant for you to do this, didn’t he? That’s why he put you through the memory implant procedure. There was no moisture damage. He wasn’t going to let me and Anna fly.”
“No. He was going to explain it to the Guardians and use them to make sure the two of you stayed on the ground. Bloody idiot, as if my flying can guarantee a landing on the summit.”
“Why didn’t he tell us you were in the clear?”
“He would have to explain why to the Investigator, that we knew each other from way back, which was why he contacted me in the first place.” The hyperglider lurched alarmingly to starboard. Oscar brought it back with steady pressure on the joystick, flexing the wings. The craft rolled back to its level position. He concentrated hard on the weather radar, though even that had trouble spotting the extreme airflow turbulence inside the jetstreams.
“Is that important?” Wilson asked.
Oscar ground his teeth together. For decades he’d assumed that this moment, if it ever came, would be cathartic. It wasn’t. He hated himself for confessing, for what he had to confess. “I’m afraid so.”
“So why did he know you?”
“We both got involved with student politics at the university. It was stupid. We were young, and the radicals knew how to exploit that.”
“What happened?”
“Ultimately? Abadan station.”
“Oh, Jesus, Oscar, you’ve got to be kidding. That was you?”
“I was nineteen. Adam and I were in the group which planted the bomb. It wasn’t meant for the passenger train. We were making a gesture against the grain dumping. But there was some snarl up on StLincoln; the express was running late so traffic control gave it priority, they pushed the grain train onto a different line.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah.” Oscar watched his altitude go through the fourteen-hundred-meter mark. It was difficult to see. Tears were washing down his cheeks. He ordered the wing configuration change ready for flight. “The Intersolar Socialist Party took pity on me and paid for me to undergo an identity change on Illuminatus. I’ve been … I don’t know. Making amends? Ever since.”
“I’ll be damned. This really is a day for revelations, isn’t it. I guess we’re all strangers in the end.”
“Wilson. No matter what … if you hate me now. I’m glad I knew you.”
“I don’t hate you. So is Oscar your real name?”
“Hell no.” He checked out through the cockpit canopy, seeing the wings curving away on either side. Virtual vision showed him the tailplane morphing into a broad triangular stabilizer. Deep in his gut he was tensing himself up for the release. “I used to be a big film buff. I loved all those fabulous musicals and cowboys and romances they used to make back in the mid-twentieth century. Oscar awards, see? And the biggest star they ever had was called Marilyn Monroe.”
“Well, Mr. Star Award, you named the tactic: two on one.”
Oscar saw Wilson’s hyperglider disengage. Its indigo star went shooting off down the carmine river flooding the length of Stakeout Canyon.
He could almost hear the calculation that Anna must be making. Out of all of them Wilson stood the best chance of reaching the summit. The longer she left it the more difficult it would be for her to catch him and presumably force some kind of collision; but if she disengaged before Oscar he could pick his own moment anytime in the next hour or so, and make his flight completely unimpeded. It all depended on how much faith everyone had in his ability to fly the foreshortened parabola.
Anna disengaged.
She was twenty-five seconds behind Wilson.
Oscar’s virtual hand punched the disengage icon. G-force shoved him down hard in the seat. The hyperglider streaked away at over a hundred ninety kilometers an hour. Roiling air buffeted the wings mercilessly. He’d envisaged keeping the craft steady while watching the movements of the other two, waiting for whatever moment presented itself. Instead he was thrust into an immediate battle for simple survival. All he cared about was maintaining altitude. The two terrifying canyon walls jumped out of the radar screen at him as the winds impelled him from side to side. He countered each floundering swerve movement the screaming storm f
lung at him, tilting the joystick with a fear-burned calmness. The wings shifted obediently, tips twisting and flexing to produce a response so quick he had trouble registering it before it became overcompensation.
For a split second he searched out the two indigo stars. His e-butler projected their course trajectories. The slender topaz lines it sketched intersected before the end of Stakeout Canyon. Then the vast rock walls were closing in again, and the instabilities clawing at the fuselage intensified. It grew darker outside as the shreds of clouds threaded within the storm were wrenched back into a single wild braid high above the ground. Big raindrops smashed against the cockpit in a sudden wave. The hyperglider yawed under the assault. Oscar struggled to right the craft again. He had to reduce the wing size, increasing control at the cost of the acceleration that the previous wide curve had given him. There was no noticeable loss of speed, and it was easier to force his way back into the center of the canyon, keeping above that writhing arterial cloud. The radar found the end of the canyon wall twenty kilometers ahead, a vertical cliff that stretched up off the screen.
He checked the other two hypergliders again. Anna was flying with mechanical exactitude. Her wings hadn’t been trimmed down, yet somehow she was maintaining her vector, closing fast on Wilson. She didn’t have to worry about maneuvering into the right position to go vertical at the end of the canyon. She didn’t have human concerns to distract her anymore. Her hyperglider streaked on like a missile. Wilson couldn’t move away; if he was to soar up the incredible waterfall that flowed out of the canyon he had to hold his course perfectly steady.
The skills of some long-departed pilot had settled calmly into Oscar’s mind now, allowing him to manipulate the joystick in kinesic synergy with the hyperglider, bestowing a flawless control over the aerodynamics at some animal-instinct level. Amid the darkening sky and belligerent uproar of the storm he watched the express train from StLincoln leave the tracks in a cloying oily fireball, saw the carriages jackknife and crumple, caught sight of the broken charred bodies sprawled along the side of the tracks. He knew them all now, every night for forty years their faces had filled his one and only dream.
His virtual hand manipulated the wing configuration again, molding it into a wider, longer planform among the red warning symbols thrown up by the onboard array. His speed increased, and he lowered the nose, hurtling down toward the torrent of white foam that soared through the air two kilometers above the canyon floor.
“Wilson?” he called above the cacophony.
Savage rivulets churned around the hyperglider fuselage to be sliced apart by the rapier blade wings. High above, the sun rose over the summit of Mount Herculaneum.
“I hear you.”
The sunlight broke apart on the water, scattering into a seething cloud of ephemeral rainbows. Oscar smiled in delight at the beauty of this world’s bizarre nature. Directly in front and below a dazzling white cruciform shape surfed along the top of the coruscating foam.
“My name is Gene Yaohui.” As he said it, he plunged into the glorious vortex of light and water, crashing straight into Anna’s hyperglider.
It had happened before, many times, back when he was flying with the Wild Fox squadron. It was such a tight institution that they willingly lived each other’s lives in the air and on the ground; they trained together, they partied together, went to the big game together, flew missions together, served overseas together. On base he knew the wives and kids of every other pilot, their money troubles, their fights, their grocery orders; while in the air he knew the performance and limit of each man flying. They were as close as brothers.
When they flew combat missions some didn’t come back. The radar showed them die, its neat little neon-green symbology on the HUD printing up CONTACT LOST codes where their plane had burst apart from a missile strike to fall like a meteor in flaming ruin. Each time, a part of himself had been wrenched away into the crash leaving a void that would never be filled in quite the same way again. But you carried on because that was what the guys wanted, you knew them well enough to be certain. It was that knowledge that gave you the strength to carry on.
And now, three and a half centuries after he thought he’d lost his last squadron buddy, Wilson Kime watched the radar symbols of his wife and best friend tumble out of the sky to smash apart on the implacable rock far below his hyperglider.
“Good-bye, Gene Yaohui,” he whispered.
Two kilometers ahead of him, the river that streaked through the air performed its magnificently paradoxical curve and charged up parallel to the immense cliff face. Orange positioning vectors printed themselves around his virtual vision, and he moved the joystick calmly, lining the craft up on the correct approach path. He withdrew the wings back into a short swept-back planform as the canyon walls rushed in on either side. The waterfall was directly ahead, a sheet of silver ripples ascending at over three hundred kilometers an hour. He held his breath for a long heartbeat.
The hyperglider was abruptly torn upward with a force that thrust him down into the seat. He grappled with the joystick, wrangling the wing surfaces to keep the craft perfectly level as it stood on its tail and blasted straight up for the pristine sapphire sky. Wilson breathed again, then he was suddenly laughing, only it sounded more like a defiant snarl that the Starflyer would hear and know.
Peaking out at five kilometers, the vertical waterfall began to break apart as the immense pressure that created it lessened, escaping from Stakeout Canyon’s brutal constriction. The water parted into two cataracts of looser spume, gushing away north and south onto the huge volcano’s lower slopes. Wilson rode the residual blast of air from the escaping storm, letting it carry him still higher, maintaining velocity. As he soared above the grasslands of the higher, temperate slopes, he watched the massive cloud bands below him tumbling away around the volcano where they would engender the planet’s revenge on the other side.
The radar started to pick out the twisters up ahead as they birthed out of the clear turbulence that marked the upper fringes of the storm. He watched them whipping around, translucent columns skating erratically across the ground that would suddenly be plunged full of dust and stone as they sucked up an exposed patch of soil. The onboard array started tracking them, winding in his options.
Three were in the right area, all of them large enough. One he dismissed, its oscillations too unstable. Out of the remaining two, he simply went for the nearest.
He eased the joystick forward, aiming the nose at the whirling base of the twister, matching the semirhythmic way it skewed from side to side as it snaked its way upslope. The hyperglider’s wings and tailplane were pulled in to simple shark-fin steering flaps as he dived in toward the target. Holding steady, intuitively aiming for where he knew it would go. If Gene Yaohui can aim straight, then I sure as hell can. Our purpose will go on, will succeed.
Wilson tugged the joystick back, pulling the hyperglider into a steep climb as it slid into the twister. The canopy was instantly bombarded with sand and gravel; larger chunks of stone made him cringe as they impacted. Fuselage stress levels peaked. Motors whined directly behind his seat, spinning the forward section of the hyperglider in counter to the twister rotation, adding stability to the climb. The wings had morphed again, becoming propeller blades to tap the tempestuous power of the twister.
Seconds later the hyperglider burst out of the top of the twister. Wilson began an urgent review of the flight vector. He’d gained enough velocity to fly the complete arc over the summit. Good, but not what he wanted. The wings altered their camber, pitching the nose up in a modest aerobrake maneuver. There wasn’t much time, the gases were thinning out rapidly as he left the stratosphere behind. He extended the wings farther still, and angled them to increase their drag on the tenuous gusts of molecules that were slipping past the fuselage. In his virtual vision, the projected parabola slowly sank back down into the one he’d plotted, giving him an impact point a kilometer and a half behind Aphrodite’s Seat.
The
hyperglider sailed up out of the atmosphere. Space reverted to familiar welcome black outside, the stars as bright as he’d ever seen them. He watched beads of moisture smeared across the fuselage turn to ice. Beneath his starboard wing, Mount Titan’s crater bubbled with gloomy red light as the lava churned and effervesced, spitting out smoky gobbets of stone that chased parabolas of their own down into the atmosphere where they burst apart in crimson shock waves. In front of the nose, Mount Herculaneum’s flat summit tipped into view as the hyperglider reached the apex of its trajectory, presenting a dismal umber plain of cold lava dimpled by the twin caldera.
Wilson saw it but that was all; there was no interest, no marveling at the vista. He’d honored those taken from him, he’d flown the perfect flight for them. That alone was victory. There was nothing else left for him to do, no adjustments to make. Tiny cold gas reaction thrusters kept the hyperglider level up here in the vacuum. Gravity would bring him down where they’d chosen. That was his last memory of the three of them: gathered around the projected map back in the hangar, squabbling excitedly over the best patch of ground, ignoring the sullen armed Guardians as they glowered at the inappropriate jollity. Oscar and Anna, the two people he would have vouched for above anyone else. People who’d never really existed to begin with.
The hyperglider sank swiftly down toward the fissured surface of the summit. Too steep for comfort. Nothing I can do, this is all gravity now. Already the rest of the planet had vanished below the false horizon of Aphrodite’s Seat where the lava ended in sheer cliffs over eight kilometers high. Wilson was alone in space above a rugged circle of lava that was a lot more craggy than the images had hinted at. Shards of clinker littered the ground. He checked his helmet seals again, then made sure the suit’s environmental system was switched on. The wings were drawn back to a ten-meter span, their tips curled down in case they were needed for stability should the wheels be damaged on impact.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 226
