I had a small pony bottle on my face initially, for oxygen (I *was* at 45,000 feet after all!) and I also had a much larger bottle of pure oxygen that I was going to turn on at some point. The wingsuit was a fairly good insulator, but at those temperatures, it was still getting pretty chilly, even inside the relatively sealed cockpit of the DaedelusX. Time to get peddling! The transport pilots who’d dropped altitude and paced me slightly below and to my right got a snappy miniature salute before they peeled off and returned to base.
I did fairly well, but not as good as I wanted. The hydrogen in the ridiculously widespread wings helped to keep me aloft, and peddling for pretty serious periods also meant I was burning a lot of oxygen, but I was at least keeping warm. We’d left at early morning, so that I would have the added benefit of daylight – my implant could tell me what direction I was facing, but wouldn’t tell me altitude or wind speed, and I wanted as much ‘safe margin’ as possible.
By the time I could see an island coming up in front of me, I was pretty sure it was Puerto Rico – and it was 13 hours after I’d started. Remember, the sun rises from the east, so I’d gained a bit, on that whole process. That meant I’d averaged nearly 250mph; not bad. I’d been pedaling fast enough to bump my speed, without pedaling so fast I felt I needed to bump my oxygen levels. Both the hydrogen and oxygen tanks were right below my seat to offer more ballast to keep the aircraft level; the oxygen tank was slightly open and was hissing through a straight valve onto a little plastic contraption that was actually helping me pedal, as well. It was early afternoon, 1432h eastern time, so I was doing okay.
The next leg, Puerto Rico to Florida, was another thirteen hundred miles, give or take – but I wasn’t exactly moving in line with the prevailing winds, so it took me slightly longer. I’d also lost some altitude – I estimated I was probably around thirty thousand feet or so. Not really a problem. The thirteen hundred miles with another hundred mile per hour tailwind plus another fifty mile per hour mechanical addition (from yours truly, pedaling as best as I could), meant another nine hours – and it was starting to get dark at this point. I was still at altitude, but the concern was that now I had no daylight to work with, it was dark out, and I had to navigate by eye. AT NIGHT.
I was over the coast of Florida – it was hard to miss the peninsula. The arkscrapers along the coast were visible to the naked eye from my altitude, so I was okay – except for the fact that I was damn tired. I’d been pedaling on and off for the past twenty two hours. If you think that’s no big deal, you try it sometime.
I had another eight hundred miles to go, to make it from the Florida/Georgia border, to New York City – if I could get at least close, I could bail out, make my final insertion, and then get down to where I could find alternate transport. Fortunately, we’d planned this since the prevailing winds STILL helped out – I lazed around, not really pushing the matter, because I didn’t want to overstrain myself before I needed to be at peak performance. I was already in Olympic-athlete condition, but this was going to put a strain even on that.
It should have taken nearly nine hours to make that last leg – and if you’ve been following the math, that meant I would at least have daylight to work with again, but I had also been up for 24 hours, doing the equivalent of approximately eleven or twelve marathons, back to back. I was tired – physically and mentally.
I first knew I was in trouble when I caught myself dozing off. I’d set my implant to notify me if my head nodded more than 30 degrees from vertical, and if I didn’t intentionally respond with “understood, acknowledged, continue”, to scream inside my head to wake me up. That was way too much, and I can still remember how much my heart was beating when it did that – the first time. The second time meant I was out of luck; if I couldn’t stay awake, that was a quick path to dead. I figured I was halfway there; a clock check showed 4am local time.
I started prepping the cabin, and angled back out over the Atlantic Ocean. I gathered my bearings and refilled my pony bottle tank as best I could from the main oxygen tank, and prepped the aircraft – I had had Az’ science team outfit it with small thermite charges that, when I pulled the pin, would break off the wings from the fuselage but retain them with Kevlar cordage – it would pop a hole in the nose so it wouldn’t retain air – and then the smaller hydrogen tank – now mostly empty – and the oxygen tank, also empty after I cranked the valve wide open – would drag the entire aircraft carcass to the deeps.
I collected what little material was worth keeping – I had some protein bars, an unopened energy drink I could stash in a mesh bag under my chute where it wouldn’t get in the way… I was about as ready as I was going to get.
I popped the pins behind and to either side of me and felt the bottom drop out of the aircraft; I rolled backwards with it and dove straight down before flaring with the wingsuit. This one was slightly modified; as I flared, I flexed my deltoid muscles, and the suit deployed additional carbon fiber struts and wing material which bumped my glide ratio to be more along the lines of 3.5:1 – much better than the usual 2 or 2.5.
I arched my back and felt the wings on the suit carve a bit more heavily into the air, and turning my head, I saw the fuselage dropping damn near straight down. That was great – except, somehow, one of the charges had been too much and the components were actually on fire. That wasn’t supposed to happen; it made the parts more visible – especially at night. Shit.
I reoriented myself and pinged my altimeter (dammit, why didn’t I think to try that before??) with my implant. I was just over twenty thousand feet – still a bit high, but it was still very early morning, no light behind me to make me obvious. Snap decision time… and I deployed my chute. This was also modified – it wouldn’t stall, but I could get a lot closer to stall speeds with it – and extend my glide ratio to nearly five to one. I had about 20 miles to go, and I nursed it – if I was lucky, I wouldn’t end up in the water. I focused on the nearest point of land, intentionally flexing my eyebrow muscles and clenching my jaw in time with my heartbeat to keep myself awake – alternating so I wouldn’t get used to the rhythm and fall asleep.
I’d figured I was far enough away the fuselage wouldn’t attract much if any attention; I’d also figured I was close enough that between my wingsuit and parachute, I’d make it to dry land. Half right isn’t so bad, is it? I was exhausted, mentally spent, and what little adrenaline I had left was barely enough to keep me afloat after I splashed down. I easily had half a mile to swim to shore in the early morning hours without even moonlight to help. Try it sometime. It’s not as easy as you think – and I had only the light from the arkscraper in what I hoped was Virginia Beach to guide me in.
As it turns out, I was all turned around. When I was closer, and had been drifting pretty solidly north of the arkscraper, I realized there was no way I was looking at Virginia Beach. It had to be further south, because if I was aiming for Virginia Beach, I should see Cape Charles – and what I was seeing looked nothing like it.
A quick check of some maps I’d stored in my implant (I’d already told it to disconnect long before, since I didn’t want it giving away my presence to the national network) suggested I was probably further south, and aiming for Charleston, North Carolina. Shit. That meant I’d dozed off even worse than I’d realized.
I was still tired, and as I drifted quietly towards the coast, I also had the unpleasant feeling that I wasn’t on a good glide path – which is to say, I must have fallen further than I thought, since I should have had enough height to coast right to the beach – and unfortunately, it was looking like I was in for a swim. Double shit.
The water wasn’t too choppy, but it also wasn’t exactly the most pleasant experience – I was tired, exhausted, and not at the top of my game mentally, and now I had to swim for probably another half mile to hit the sand.
I’d ditched the parachute – drinking the energy drink and filling the bottle with water in the ocean, capping it, and using it to help weigh down the chute so it
would sink. It would be slow, but better than nothing. I used the wingsuit as a flotation device, blowing air into it periodically so that the billows in it would give me some additional flotation and give me a chance to rest as I was swimming into shore.
I caught myself dozing off several times – usually when I got a face-full of cold (Hey, it was March after all) saltwater, sometimes in my mouth.
The worst of it was, when I woke up because someone was calling my name.
“JAMES! Wake up you stupid fuck!”
“Wha..” I was groggy, tired and mentally just not at full capacity. You’d figure after a mere 24 hours or so, I’d be fine. My eyes opened, and I swear to god, I saw McDirk prodding me with some sort of pole.
“Wake up dammit!”
“’m wake, the fuck ‘r you talking abo..” then my eyes snapped full open. It WAS McDirk, and he WAS prodding me with a pole.
I grabbed the pole and he hauled me into a small craft, and when I was situated, he turned and cranked up the engine – aiming for a much larger vessel not too far away.
“I got a coded message from Breshears that you’d be headed this way, when he didn’t get a response on time from you. Good thing he snuck that transponder into your chute. I always told you those things would kill ya. Happy Birthday, dumbass.”
Well, I wasn’t happy about it, but I was also glad that my support team was catching things I’d not planned for. I’d likely have been okay but it was nice not having to struggle for it.
I’d actually planned on getting down to McDirk’s area at some point anyway. I wasn’t here just to sight-see; I wanted to get the feel for how things were going ‘back home’ – since I wasn’t allowed to be here anyway – and part of that was to clear the path for legitimization of the shell corporations we’d established previously, and make them more than just “shells.”
We spent the majority of our time together on his boat – a gorgeous yacht that frankly, I was surprised to see – most people seemed to be spending their time indoors, inside arkscrapers or mallmunities, and not really venturing out. Things had changed in the last couple of decades, as the media’s influence over the population stretched further and further.
We clarified the business cases for over three dozen companies, spread across three levels and eighteen industries – several of which were “competitors” – and I had Steve send the files for signature through the network to my implant, with a promise that I’d sign in and get them signed and sent back to him as soon as I was back in Africa. It didn’t really matter; he was listed as the chief operating officer of the conglomerate entity that ran it all, with authority to make decisions when I was deployed. His loyalty was assured through a healthy chunk of stock to begin with, and, it was unlikely that I’d ever take a direct hand in running the company – that was more his speed; I just wanted the financial returns out of it.
I collected some additional hard currency from him, and was on my way – my end goal was Manhattan; I wanted to take up residence in a nearby mallmunity that would let me do a few things, but which would also give me access to the largest population concentration in the country. That would let me get a sampling of where things stood at home, which would further dictate the plan I’d been considering for a while: using what I’d learned and what I knew, to play a much more forceful role in the leadership of the country that had given me all of what I’d learned and what I knew.
With my bank accounts expanding at a rapid pace, thanks to McDirk’s input and efforts, and my “ghost” account available to draw on (which I had ZERO plans to use at the moment, since it would require an implant identity that frankly, I couldn’t afford to expose right now), I set off towards the “Big Apple.” I never did understand why people called it that, but that’s what most of the rest of the country still called New York City, informally. I dressed in common everyday clothes, looking a bit worn but still in good condition, keeping only my scuffed and beaten up combat boots on. I hitched rides, occasionally paid for transport, or walked – but eventually made it to New York.
I hunted for a while, and eventually came across a mallmunity on the other side of the Hudson from Manhattan.. I didn’t want to risk being seen by anyone who might have recognized me, even with my scruffy beard. Not to mention, that whole island was soaked with intelligence gathering, and frankly, I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of trying to make myself seem to be someone other than who I was.
Instead, what I did, was find a quiet little place that I could pay cash for (there are always people interested in collecting hard currency in exchange for being, shall we say, a little lax in their paperwork), and which would give me a roof over my head. The place was rather run-down, but offered me the nondescript place I wanted to be able to call ‘home’ until I started making my way back to Africa.
I needed a cover story for how I made that cash – it just wouldn’t do to magically have enough hard currency to pay the rent, groceries, etc… without some tangible explanation.
Chapter 37: Purposes and Intents
I’d found a place in late June and was headed back after a recon mission to the arkscrapers in Manhattan when I actually watched some poor old lady nearly get mugged. Four punks, a lot like what I must have looked and acted like, a long time ago, set on her when she was making her way into the mallmunity I lived in.
I swear, I didn’t even think about what I was doing until I was already wading into the fray, a kick blowing out one’s knee while a fist lashed out and punched another in the throat – two down, and the other two pulled knives.
I laughed, and the sound of my own voice in my ears made me laugh harder. They looked at me slightly dubiously, but the sound of their comrades groaning in pain set their resolve in place, and they came at me.
Now, I never mentioned this before, but a part of the training that Sensei Kim taught me, specifically dealt with weapons – weapons of all kinds, and not just using them, but also defending against them.
In this case, I didn’t want to pull out Rage; that would have given these two useless skin-bags a reason to run – and I wanted them right where they were. The easiest solution then, was to find a way to deal with the knife that each one held. I could get fancy, or I could do it plain – and I chose to be plain about it. Two steps sideways and I was beside the poor guy who was choking to death as he tried to breathe through a crushed throat; all he was wearing were pants, some sort of odd looking shoes, and a cheap t-shirt. With my eyes still watching the two guys circling as I moved, I crouched and grabbed the nearly-dead streetganger’s shirt and ripped it down his back, and then yanked until it came away in my hands. Twisting and stretching it in my hands gave me what amounted to a short length of make-do cordage… and then they made their second mistake – they tried to charge me at the same time, one from either side. Unless you train to do that – to work together with a teammate to attack a single defender, don’t do that. Ever.
I took two steps towards one, the t-shirt-now-rope held slightly out in front, one end in either hand, and as the guy tried to stab me in the chest, I pulled the t-shirt/rope upwards and crossed my hands one over the other, trapping his hand. The guy behind me was probably close enough to stab me in the back, so I continued moving past the one I’d chosen to hit first – and twisted his arm around, still held by my t-shirt rope. I pulled upwards and uncrossed my hands after looping it around his head now that I had moved behind him, and he sliced open the side of his face with his own knife, while I was choking him. His buddy had, yes, tried to stab me, likely figuring that the guy I’d went for would stick me and hold me in place – so when I moved right past the first guy to one side, the one behind me who’d been trying to stab me in the back, stuck his blade right into his partner’s chest.
The first guy, the one I’d already wrapped up, was gasping for air – it sounded like he’d gotten a lung punctured and I momentarily felt bad for him, knowing what that was like – and then I wrenched my hands across his neck again, letting go of th
e t-shirt and grabbing his head to twist it as hard as I could. Once I heard the dull snap inside his neck, I reached over his shoulder and snagged the knife out of his now limp fingers as he fell.
The blade wasn’t anything to write home about; it was little more than a piece of thin steel that this kid must have found somewhere, and painstakingly ground down to a point, and then continued grinding a (really bad) edge onto.
Attacker number two was now obviously in mental distress – he couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened; there had been four to start, one was dead from both my efforts and his buddy’s blade. Another was dying – maybe dead by now – from a crushed throat. The third was groaning on the ground with his hands surrounding his destroyed knee, and the last one, the one I faced, just stared at me.
I realized he didn’t have his knife, but I didn’t know what he’d done with it – then I looked down and realized that when he stabbed his buddy, entirely unexpectedly, the surprise of it meant he’d left the knife in the body – I was now the threat to him.
He turned and started to run, and I hefted the cheap, home-made blade I held… Yep, this would do. I judged the direction and distance of the last gang member, and let fly with a smooth overhand throw – and watched him fall over, face-first, with his buddy’s blade buried halfway into his spine, between his shoulder blades. Damn. I’d meant to hit him in the neck.
Rage & Fury Page 37
