After all, there weren't that many fragging single-syllable words that the human throat could pronounce, were there? Or was there more to it than that?
I wondered suddenly if Chantal Monot could answer that one. Chantal, with her whacked-out ideas about Lemuria and sunken continents, and her Andrew Annen-something paintings. (Now that I thought about it, didn't some of them have pyramids in them? Pyramids on the floor of a tropical ocean ...)
With a snort I shook my head and forced away all those flaky imaginings. Sometimes letting your mind wander is worse than obsessing about what's scaring the drek out of you.
* * *
We'd been underway for nearly an hour when the turbulence began in earnest, and I started to appreciate anew the limitations of neoscopolamine. The Merlin started surging up and down in hundred-meter bounds like some kind of chipped-up roller coaster, and if I'd thought the engines had been straining before, I hadn't heard anything yet. Over the mechanical screaming, now I could hear the rattle of the rain against the airframe, driven by mighty gusts of wind. (Or frag, maybe it was hail. Whatever, it sounded like rock salt shot from a Roomsweeper.)
The troopers in their military gear weren't enjoying themselves. They wouldn't admit it to a civilian haole puke like me, of course—frag, they probably wouldn't admit it to each other—but I could see the way the muscles of their jaws were standing out. They were biting back on complaints, or maybe doing the iron-jaw trip to stop themselves from spewing their midnight snacks. Even Pohaku was starting to look a mite queasy. My own discomfort was almost a reasonable price to pay to see proof that he was actually as human as the rest of us. Beside me, Alana Kono was looking decidedly pale. In my peripheral vision, I saw her pull out another neoscope patch and slap it onto her own neck. I shot her what I intended to be a reassuring grin, but judging by the look in her eyes, I didn't quite make it.
And that's when the bottom dropped out. For a second or two we seemed to be in free fall. Kono yelped, and one of the troopers grunted in alarm. The only reason I didn't yell out loud was that I was too busy biting my tongue hard enough to taste salty blood. The engines wailed like banshees as the Merlin's dive bottomed out. We jolted hard a couple of times, almost as though we were taking fire from somewhere ahead of us.
Frag it, I couldn't just sit there. I reached down to unbuckle my four-point. Kono grabbed my hand and shook her head—apparently she didn't trust herself to speak—but I gently pushed her hand away and gave another try at the reassuring grin. This time I apparently did a better job, because she nodded and closed her eyes again.
I clambered to my feet, grabbing at whatever came to hand to keep from pitching onto my hoop—the back of my chair, the helmet of a green-gilled trooper ... I managed to keep my feet somehow, and—getting a good two-handed grip on an overhead rack—I dragged myself forward. A light sliding door was all that separated the troop compartment from the flight deck, so I slid it back.
The flight deck was in total darkness. (I guess I should have expected it, but it still jolted me. Didn't you need some kind of instruments to do that pilot drek?) For an instant I couldn't make out squat, then my eyes adapted and I could see two silhouettes—deeper black against the black outside the cockpit—in front of me. "What the frag's going on?" I demanded.
The silhouette in the right-hand seat turned its head, and I saw two faint pinpoints of red light where there should be eyes.
Okay, that freaked me for a moment, too, before I realized the points of light were the copilot's cybereyes. Stray light from his active IR system, or some such technodrek. "Hele pela!" the copilot snarled at me. "Get the frag out of here, ule!"
I ignored him and grabbed the shoulder of the figure in the left seat. (That had to be the pilot, right?) "What the hell's going on?" I demanded. And, as an afterthought, "How about lighting this crap up?"
For a moment I thought the pilot was going to tell me frag off, too, but then he nodded once. The control consoles came alive with lights, data displays, radar images, and all the other junk that (meta)humans need to play bird. In the bright plasma light I saw the fiber-optic lines connecting pilot and copilot to the panels.
"So what the hell's going on?" I asked again.
"Ino, " the pilot snapped. "Storm. Big fragging storm. What the hell you think?"
As if to emphasize what the pilot was saying, the Merlin did another one of those roller coaster plunges, fragging near bounding me off the overhead. Neither pilot nor copilot moved; they kept their arms loosely crossed over their chests. But, from the sudden tightening of their muscles in their jaws and around their eyes, I knew they were working as hard mentally as if they were hauling back on physical control yokes.
"Do you usually get storms this bad?" I asked as soon as my heart had cleared my airway again.
"No way, brah." It was the copilot who answered me this time. "Never bad as this, yah?"
"So what the frag's happening, then?" I pressed even though I was afraid I knew the answer.
"Something fragged," the pilot responded. "Up ahead."
"Where are we, anyway?"
"Passing over Kihei, altitude twenty-nine-fifty meters. Airspeed two hundred, ground speed closer to fifty."
That little gem of information didn't make my gut feel any better. Airspeed 200, ground speed 50—that meant the little Merlin was fighting a headwind of 150 kilometers per hour.
I tried a quick glance out through the canopy. Nothing—quite literally squat. Rain was hitting the windscreen faster than the wipers could clear it, almost as if it was being flung from buckets or sprayed from a fire hose. Beyond that was just blackness. No ground, no horizon, no stars. Nothing.
I gestured to the canopy. "Have you got some instrument that can see through this drek?" I asked.
Nobody answered aloud, but the display on one of the console's screens changed. In computer-enhanced false color, I could see the towering slopes of a huge mountain.
Haleakala, it had to be, rearing up ahead of us.
The colors on the display were wrong, but the contrast and contours were off, too. It took me a moment to understand. I wasn't looking at the mountain via visible light. This display had to be generated by some kind of FLIR pod—Forward-Looking InfraRed—slung under the Merlin's belly. I was seeing by heat, basically.
Which added a threatening significance to the glow that seemed to be emanating from the top of the mountain. On the FLIR screen, an amorphous plume of pale light sprouted from the top of Haleakala, silhouetted against the blackness of the sky. It shifted and shimmered like Global Geographic trideos of the aurora borealis.
"What the frag's that?" I demanded, stabbing a finger at the display. "I thought Haleakala was a dormant volcano."
"It is, brah," the copilot said shortly, "since twenty eighteen. Don't know what that is." He turned to me, his cybereyes glowing like sullen embers. "Mo' bettah we head back, yah?" he asked hopefully.
Good fragging idea. But, "You've got your orders," I told him.
He turned away, muttering something in Hawai'ian under his breath. I didn't need a translator to get the drift: Mo'bettah the haole have himself a brain aneurysm . . . right fragging now!
The Merlin jolted again, seeming to stagger in the air. I grabbed onto the backs of the crew's seats, bracing myself with legs widespread. Either the neoscope in the narco-patch was wearing off, or the fear was really starting to cut through the chemical well-being. I didn't like where I was, chummer, not one little bit.
Again the tilt-wing staggered, left wingtip dipping sickeningly before the pilot could recover. In that instant something slapped against the canopy—a solid sheet of water, it sounded like, not discrete drops anymore. The engines wailed.
And I saw something that shouldn't—couldn't—have been there. A face, chummer. A face, pressed against the transpex canopy. There for an instant, and then gone, staring into the flight-deck with eyes that weren't quite human, grinning with a kind of unholy glee.
"And just what the fr
ag was that?" I yelped.
For an instant I thought—I hoped—the crew hadn't seen anything, that my imagination was running away with me. But then that hope died as the copilot turned to me, his face suddenly ashen in the plasma-light. "Uhane, hoa," he gasped. "Spirit. Storm spirit."
Oh, just fragging peachy. I turned—almost pitching to the deck as the Merlin jolted yet again—and bellowed back through the door into the passenger compartment. "Akaku'akanene! Get your feathered hoop up here, now!"
It didn't take the goose shaman more than fifteen seconds to join me on the flight deck, but that was still enough time for the Merlin to jolt and jar another couple of dozen times. In the plasma-light of the displays, her eyes glinted coldly like glass beads. She didn't speak, but her body language perfectly communicated the peevish question, "What?"
I grabbed the copilot's shoulder. "Tell her," I instructed. The man gabbled quickly in Hawai'ian. I picked out a couple of words here and there—uhane, haole, and lolo among them—but that was it. When he was done, the birdboned kahuna nodded.
"Nene signs of danger," she said to me. "Much power ahead."
Well, no drek, Sherlock, I managed not to say. "What about the spirits?" I demanded.
"I feel their presence." Her voice was calm, fragging near conversational.
"Well, bully for you!" I snapped. "Can you feel a way of getting rid of them?"
She shrugged her scrawny shoulders. "They stand guard," she pointed out.
"I'd kinda guessed that," I said dryly. "Can you persuade them to go guard somewhere else?"
"They guard the fabric," the kahuna shot back, her voice suddenly sharp. "They guard the pattern."
I blinked at that. What the frag was she talking about? Unless ... "They think we're part of that drek?" I pointed again at the ghostly plume of light on the FLIR display. "Is that it? Christ, then tell 'em we want to stop it, for frag's sake!"
Akaku'akanene shrugged again. "They don't believe me."
I ground my teeth together so hard that pain shot through my jaw muscle. "Then be more persuasive," I grated.
The Nene shaman nodded and closed her eyes. The Merlin still jolted and jostled, but somehow she kept her balance perfectly—almost as if she could anticipate every movement of the small craft and adapt to it.
I didn't know if it was my imagination, or whether the kahuna had somehow gotten her message through, but after a few moments it felt as though the buffeting had diminished. The airframe still vibrated, the engines still complained, but at least the camival-ride whoop-de-doos seemed to be under control.
"Better?" I asked the pilot.
He nodded. "Altitude thirty-one hundred. Airspeed, two-ten. Ground speed one hundred. Ten klicks out." He glanced back at me over his shoulder. "Any instructions for the approach?"
I gave him my best pirate's smile. "Whatever'll get us there in one piece."
"Echo that, bruddah. Nine klicks."
On the FLIR display the volcano was looming large. The periphery of the giant heat plume was still amorphous, fuzzy. But for the first time I thought I could make out some kind of internal structure to it. There seemed to be semicircular wave-fronts propagating through it, like ripples spreading across a smooth pond from a dropped stone. Something bizarre was going on down in the crater, that was for fragging sure.
I turned back to the door into the passenger compartment. "We're about eight klicks out," I told "my" fireteam. For an instant I felt like I was in the middle of some ancient flatfilm about Vietnam. "I think this is going to be what they call a 'hot LZ'," I added dryly.
The plane echoed with metallic castanet-clatter as the squad locked and loaded. I thought about my own weapon, that ever-so-wiz assault rifle, on the floor under my vacant seat. Having something lethal to cling to like a security blanket would have made me feel a touch better about the whole thing, but it would have meant sacrificing one of the two hand-holds that was keeping me from measuring my length on the cabin floor. All in all, on balance, I figured I'd pick up my playtoy later.
When I turned back to the control console, the pilot had killed the FLIR display to replace it with a complex hash-work of approach vectors, wind axes, and all that other pilot drek. I didn't begrudge it to him. On reflection, I'd much rather he knew what was going on than me.
Beside me Akaku'akanene was still doing her balancing act, maintaining her equilibrium better than I was despite the fact she wasn't holding onto anything. Her eyes were still closed, and in the instrument lights I could see a bead of sweat tracing its way down her temple. God, suddenly I wished I knew what she was doing ... so I could understand, of course, but also so I could help. Judging by the motions of the Merlin, she'd persuaded at least some of the storm spirits—or whatever the frag they were—than we weren't a threat to the "fabric" or "pattern." If the addition of my concentration could help her convince the rest—or stop the ones she'd already convinced from changing their insubstantial minds—then I'd gladly give it my all.
The blackness was still unbroken outside the rain-blasted canopy. We were still in the middle of the stormclouds I'd seen gathering a few hours earlier. Mentally, I thanked whatever gods there be that there wasn't any lightning.
I almost pitched backward as the Merlin took on a steep nose-up pitch. From behind and to both sides I heard the scream of the engines change pitch. A computer schematic on the control console confirmed what I'd already guessed: The wings were pivoting again, from forward flight to V/STOL mode. We were on our way in. I drew breath to yell word back to the troopers ...
And fragging near swallowed my own tongue. Without warning the Merlin cleared the clouds, popping down out of a ceiling of roiling blackness. For the first time I could see the peak and crater of Haleakala volcano with my own eyes, without the need for FLIR intermediaries.
First impression: Spirits, what a blasted hellhole of a wasteland. Nothing grew; nothing lived—nothing seemed to ever have lived here. Just barren rock—rough, scattered scree slopes. Cinder cones. Outwellings of solidified magma. Precipitous slopes, vertical cliffs ... klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape. For an instant I didn't know where the image of the lunar surface had come from, but then I remembered. Back almost a century ago, when NASA was trying out their Lunar Rover designs, they'd picked the Haleakala crater for the tests, because it was the closest to the rugged emptiness of the moon that could be found on this planet.
Second impression: Holy fragging drek, I could see those klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape ... and I shouldn't have been able to. We were on top of a fragging mountain, three thousand meters up, and the cloud deck was so solid there was no chance for a single photon of moonlight to make it through. Yet the whole blasted prospect was illuminated—not as bright as day, by any means, but about like twilight.
It was a strange illumination, too: cold, sourceless, shifting, ebbing and flowing. I could see the source, roughly ahead of us—an area of what looked like absolute chaos. Light bubbled and roiled in the depths of the crater as though it were a physical fluid. Spreading up into the sky, in an ethereal fan-shape, the air itself seemed to glow with a pearly radiance. This had to be the visual equivalent of the heat-plume the FLIR had shown me, I realized instantly.
In the midst of the rolling, churning light were motionless points of brilliance, much brighter than the shifting illumination surrounding them ... but somehow sterile, dead. It took me a moment to understand those points were artificial lights, arc lamps set out by the kahunas of Project Sunfire so they could prepare the process that now seemed well advanced.
Something flashed by the Merlin's canopy, going like a bat out of hell. A well-chosen simile, since it seemed to be a mass of pure liquid fire about the size of a man's head. It was past and gone before I could make out any details, leaving a blue-green streak of afterimage across my visual field. As if my vision had suddenly become attuned, I saw there were many ... things ... flitting and hurtling around the central mass of light. Balls of fire, sheets of heat lightning, uni
dentifiable shapes moving so fast my mind couldn't make sense of them. They seemed to be orbiting that central light, like chipped-up moths dancing around a porch light. And that, too, seemed to be a well-chosen simile. I couldn't be sure, but neither could I shake the feeling I was seeing a kind of approach-avoidance behavior going on. The things—whatever they were—were both repelled and attracted by the drek going down in the center of the crater.
The magic drek going down. Deep in my gut where the truth lives, I knew it was magic, seconds before my intellect caught up and figured it out logically. I could feel the magic, deep in what I laughingly call my soul—like I'd felt it when Scott's fetish had cut loose, the instant before he blew Tokudaiji-san's skull to fragments. It was like vertigo, like that flip-flop your stomach does when a super-express elevator momentarily goes into free fall. It was like that, except it wasn't my stomach doing flip-flops but . .. something else. It was like I'd suddenly, momentarily discovered new senses, and the information those senses were feeding me prompted a reaction from a part of my body I previously didn't know existed.
It was over in an instant as if it had never happened, as if I'd never recapture that sudden broadening of perspective ...
For me, it was over in an instant. Not so for Akaku'akanene.
Which made sense if you think about it. If the level of magical activity down in the crater was enough to twist the guts of a mundane like me, what would it do to somebody who actually savvied that mana drek? Beside me, Akaku'akanene's eyes snapped open in a face suddenly pasty white. She opened her mouth to groan, and then she was lurching across the flight deck, her extraordinary stability suddenly gone. I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her upright an instant before she would have pitched over into the pilot's lap. (Vehicle control rig or no, I couldn't help but think an unannounced visitation to his groin by a little old lady would have messed up his control of the plane, at least a little.)
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