Justine’s hyperglider was tethered just inside the wide opening of Stakeout Canyon, so the nose was pointing east, which put Mount Zeus to her left. In the daytime when the ground crew was rigging the hyperglider, all she could see of that colossus was its rocky lower slope, which formed one side of the huge funnel-shaped canyon. The crater peak could never be seen from the base; it was seventeen kilometers high.
To her right was Mount Titan, the only currently active volcano of the three, its crater rim standing outside the atmosphere at twenty-three kilometers high. Sometimes, at night, and if the eruption was particularly violent, the rose-gold corona shimmering above the glowing lava could be seen from the pampas lands away to the south, as if a red dwarf had just set behind the horizon. Directly ahead of her, forming the impossibly blunt and massive end of the canyon, was Mount Herculaneum. Measuring seven hundred eleven kilometers wide across its base, the volcano was roughly conical, with its twin-caldera summit leveling out at thirty-two kilometers above sea level, putting it a long way above Far Away’s troposphere. Thankfully, the geologists had classed it as semiactive; it had never erupted in the hundred eighty odd years since human settlement had begun, though it had produced a few spectacular shudders in that time.
That vulcanism could produce such huge features on a small planet like Far Away was a wonderful enigma to her. Of course, she’d studied articles on the science of it all, the fact that only a forty percent standard gravity allowed something as gigantic as Mount Herculaneum to exist, while on a world with normal Earth-like gravity it would collapse under its own weight. And the lack of tectonic plates meant that lava simply continued to pile up in the same spot, aeon after aeon.
But none of that cool reasoning could detract from the actuality of the monstrous landscape she’d come to experience. The power and forces amassing around her were elemental, a planet’s strength readily visible as nowhere else. And she was sitting in her pathetic little machine, in a lunatic attempt to tame that power, to make it do her bidding.
Her hands were shaking slightly inside her flight suit as the first hint of dawn emerged, with an outline of slate-gray sky materializing high above the end of the canyon. She cursed Estella-bloody-Fenton for the sight. It didn’t help calm her nerves knowing that Estella was in a similar hyperglider fastened to the rock a couple of kilometers away, staring out at the same inhospitable jags of rock.
“It’s starting,” someone said over the radio.
There was no cybersphere on Far Away; in fact, no modern communications at all outside Armstrong City and the larger towns. A hundred years earlier, there had been a few satellites providing some coverage for the countryside and ocean, but the Guardians of Selfhood had shot down the last of them long ago. All anybody had out here was simple radio, and Far Away’s turbulent ionosphere didn’t offer a lot of assistance to that.
“There’s some movement out here. Wind’s picking up.”
Justine peered through the tough transparent hood of the cockpit. Nothing moved on the bare rock below her. The storms that swept in from the Hondu Ocean to the west were channeled and squeezed by Zeus and Titan to roar along this one canyon between them. It had been scoured clean of any loose soil or pebbles geological ages ago.
“Derrick?” Justine called. “Can you hear me?”
Her only answer was a fluctuating buzz of static as the dawn slowly poured a wan light down into the canyon.
“Derrick?”
The caravan of trucks, four-by-fours, and mobile homes must be clear now, she acknowledged grimly, over Zeus’s foothills and sheltered in some deep gully from the morning storm. All the mad hyperglider pilots were on their own now. No escape.
Somehow this part of it had been missed off the slick advertising and intensive, reassuring briefing sessions. Even the pilot skill training memory implementation hadn’t included it. Waiting helplessly as the wind from the ocean built from a gentle breeze to a deranged hurricane. Waiting, unable to do anything. Waiting, watching. Waiting and worrying. Waiting as fright emerged from some primal place deep in the brain, growing and growing.
“How’s it going, darling?” Estella asked.
“Fine,” you bitch. “Actually, I’m getting a bit nervous.”
“Nervous? Lucky cow. I’m scared shitless.”
Justine instructed her e-butler to run through the cockpit procedures again, checking the hyperglider’s systems. Even with the limited capacity of the onboard array, the e-butler produced a perfect control interface. Its review was instantaneous; translucent icons blinked up inside her virtual vision, everything was on-line and fully functional. “Remind me again why I want to do this?”
“Because it beats the hell out of breakfast in bed,” Estella told her.
“In a five-star hotel.”
“On a Caribbean island, with a veranda overlooking the beach.”
“Where dolphins are playing in the water.”
It was getting a lot lighter outside. Justine could finally see some thin streamers of sand drifting past the hyperglider. They must have blown in from the coast, she thought. She switched the weather radar to the main console screen, studying the blobs of vivid color as they surged and squabbled against each other. The storm was definitely on its way; scarlet ribbons representing dense high-velocity air were seeping across the screen like some kind of fresh wound, always expanding.
In a way she was glad the storm was heading in from the west, creeping up on her from behind. It meant she couldn’t watch the hammerhead clouds as they devoured the sky. She was quite frightened enough as it was. Even now she wasn’t sure she was going to make the flight. There was an option to just stay here; the hyperglider was currently configured into a smooth, fat cigar shape, the wing buds confined below the main fuselage; she could simply keep the tethers wound in, and let the winds roar around her until it was all over. Many had, so she’d been told, bottling out at the last moment. Right now, in the middle of the annual storm season, it was an average five-hour wait for the gales to sweep over.
Within twenty minutes, the wind was strong enough to start shaking the hyperglider. If there was sand out there, she couldn’t see it anymore. Red waves washed continually across the weather radar screen.
“Still there?” Estella asked.
“Still here.”
“Won’t be long now.”
“Yeah. Are you getting the same readings from your radar? Some of those airstreams are almost two hundred kilometers an hour already.” The digital figures for wind speed were blurring, they were mounting so fast. At this rate the storm’s central powerhouse would be overhead in another forty to fifty minutes, and those were the winds she wanted. If she took off now, the hyperglider would simply be driven into the base of Mount Herculaneum.
The radio band seemed to be full of bad jokes and nervy bravado. Justine didn’t join in with any of it, although listening was a strange kind of comfort. It helped keep away the sense of isolation.
Clouds were rampaging across the sky now, gradually becoming lower. They blocked the rising sun, cutting the illumination to a gloomy twilight, although she could still see the swollen tatters of rain charging off into the distance. The rock around the hyperglider began to glisten with a thin sheen of water.
“Wind’s reaching two hundred,” Estella called out. There was dread mingling with anticipation in her voice. “I’m about to release. See you on the other side, darling.”
“I’ll be there,” Justine yelled. The fuselage was shaking violently now, producing a steady high-volume thrumming; even the howl of the wind was penetrating the heavily insulated cockpit. The screen displays on the console in front of her were jumbled thanks to the quivering, jittering lines of color, completely out of focus. She had to rely almost completely on the more basic information inside her virtual vision. Gray mist was a constant blur outside, eliminating any sight of the sky or canyon walls.
Then it was time. The winds along the ground of Stakeout Canyon were over a hundred sixty kil
ometers an hour. Her radar showed the storm’s leading edge was now boiling up Mount Herculaneum ahead of her, and that was the critical factor. Those winds had to be there to carry her a long, long way. Without them, this was going to be a short trip with one very abrupt ending.
She put her hands down on the console’s i-spots, fingers curling around the grip bars, plyplastic flowed around them, securing them for what promised to be a turbulent flight. The OCtattoos on her wrists completed the link between the i-spots and her main nerve cords, interfacing her directly with the onboard array. Virtual hands appeared inside her virtual vision. Her customization had given them long slender fingers with green nails and glowing blue neon rings on every finger. A joystick materialized amid the icons, and she moved her virtual hand to grasp it. Her other hand started tapping icons, initiating one final systems check. With everything coming up green, she ordered the onboard array to deploy the wings.
The plyplastic buds swelled out, elongating to become small thick delta shapes. The thrumming increased dramatically as they caught the wind. Tethers were being strained close to their tolerance limits. Justine prayed the carbon-reinforced titanium anchor struts, driven fifty meters into the naked rock by the support team, would survive the next few minutes.
Some little demon inside said: Last chance to stay put, and live.
Justine moved her virtual hand and flipped the forward tether icon. The locks disengaged, and she was immediately shaken violently from side to side as the hyperglider fishtailed. An instinctive response from the implanted training memory came to her aid. She twisted the joystick, and the wings bent downward several degrees. A touch on the rear tether icon, and the two strands extended. The hyperglider lifted twenty meters into the air, still shaking frantically, as if it was desperate to be rid of its final restraints. Justine halted the tether extension, and began to test her control surfaces. The rear of the hyperglider was quickly shifted into a vertical stabilizer fin. Wings expanded a little farther, angling to produce more lift. Finally, once she cleared the ground, the dreadful thrumming vibration faded away—although never cutting out altogether. Now all she had to contend with was the awesome roar of the wind as it accelerated toward two hundred kilometers an hour.
At this point, the hyperglider was nothing more than a giant kite. Very carefully, she began to extend the rear tethers still farther. They played out behind her, and the hyperglider rose eagerly away from the ground. After two minutes of careful extension, she was a hundred meters high. The ground wasn’t visible, for which she was obscurely thankful. Tatters of mist were scudding past so fast they prevented her from seeing anything beyond twenty or thirty meters. Raindrops that hit the cockpit transparency immediately hurtled off, scoured clean by the tremendous air velocity. Constantly flexing the wings to compensate for turbulence, she began extending the tethers again.
Twenty-five minutes after leaving the ground, she was fourteen hundred meters high. It was a cautious ascent, but the two tether cables were shaking with a harmonic that set her teeth on edge. Justine configured the plyplastic hyperglider for freeflight. The wings flowed outward, reaching a hundred ten meters at full span while curving around into a crescent shape; from above it made the hyperglider look like a giant scimitar blade, with the cockpit bullet jutting out of the apex. Behind her, the rear fuselage performed a vertical stretch, becoming a deep triangular stabilizer, its tips twitching with near-subliminal motion to keep the craft lined up accurately in the windstream.
She reached fifteen hundred meters in altitude. The wings curled fractionally along their length, presenting the most efficient lift capture profile to the wind. Looking at the figures on the console screen, she couldn’t believe the strain on the tether cables, almost all the safety margin was used up.
Justine sucked down a deep breath as the raw elements screamed around her. If she had the courage, this ought to be the ride of a lifetime. If… She thought back to all those years she’d lived through, from this strange viewpoint they all seemed so achingly identical, and boring.
A virtual finger reached forward, almost reluctantly touching the disengage icon.
The g-force slammed her back into the seat as the hyperglider cut free, bringing back the weight she hadn’t felt since she arrived on Far Away. The craft hurtled toward the blunt end of Stakeout Canyon at two hundred kilometers an hour. Immediately it lurched to starboard and began to descend. She twisted the joystick to compensate—not fast, smooth and positive—shifting the wings to alter the airflow. The response was astonishingly quick, sending her swooping upward. Then a near-spin started, and she flipped the stabilizer tips to counter it.
Every moment demanded her total concentration merely to hold the hyperglider roughly level. It wasn’t just the featureless wrap of cloud that cut her off from the outside world. Her attention was focused solely on the attitude display and the radar. As Stakeout Canyon narrowed, she had to hold her course directly down the center. All the time the rock walls closed in toward each other, growing steeper in the process, the furious buffeting increased proportionally. Wild turbulence was constantly trying to swirl the craft around into a spin, or pull it down to oblivion.
She wasn’t even aware of time passing, only the frantic, exhausting fight to keep the hyperglider on track. If she let it ascend too high, the massive upper windstreams would carry it away over the sides of the canyon as they gushed up and away, expanding in release from the escalating pressure at the base of the walls. She would wind up somewhere on the weather-blasted and boulder-strewn midslopes of Zeus or Titan, hundreds of kilometers from the recovery vehicles of the caravan.
Without any warning, the radar picked up the end of the canyon, twenty-five kilometers away. At this point, where the three volcanoes intersected, Mount Herculaneum was a simple vertical cliff, six kilometers high. Her own altitude was three and a half kilometers. Outside, the wind speed was still increasing within the constriction. The weather radar screen flared lurid scarlet around the edges as it tracked the lethal currents and shock waves reverberating off the rock. Darkness deepened around her as the shredded clouds were crushed back together.
Justine retracted the wings slightly, sacrificing the propulsive push they generated for a little more maneuverability. It had begun to rain steadily outside the cockpit now, thick droplets slashing along beside her. Paradoxically, visibility began to lift. The clouds were recondensing under the pressure. Droplets began to merge together for an instant before the raging winds tore them apart. Then they would re-form a second later, larger this time as the pressure continued to build relentlessly. Semicohesive horizontal streams of water churned and foamed around the hyperglider fuselage.
The cliff was twelve kilometers away, and she was down to three kilometers from the canyon floor. Water had become so dense, it was as if the hyperglider was surfing along inside the crest of some crazy airborne wave. The sun had risen above the volcano’s slopes, shining down into the top of the canyon. Suddenly it struck the chaotic foam whipping around the hyperglider, and the world flared into a thousand tattered sparkling rainbows, birthing and dying, clashing and colliding. Justine laughed in dazed appreciation at the astounding sight.
Three kilometers ahead of her, the gushing rivulets merged into a single writhing torrent two kilometers above the floor of Stakeout Canyon. That was a couple of kilometers from the cliff. The rocky constriction was at its narrowest, the pressure at its highest. There was only one way the churning river could escape.
Justine slid the hyperglider above the water, staring down on it in utter disbelief. The rainbows fizzled out abruptly. Rock slammed up into her vision to replace them, terrifyingly huge walls of it, stretching up halfway to heaven. Right in front of her, the flying river curved upward and began the long, impossible powerclimb to freedom as the entire storm went vertical. Blasting out an eternal thunderclap, the wind reached three hundred kilometers an hour. She knew she was yelling wordlessly, but couldn’t hear herself above the cacophony bombarding the co
ckpit.
The hyperglider was wrenched upward. G-force slammed Justine down into the seat again. Her knuckles grew white as she clenched the grip bars, fearful she’d lose contact with the i-spots. She wrestled the wing surfaces to obey in a desperate bid to maintain stability within the geysering air. Water rose with her, defying gravity to shoot up parallel to the cliff. Even with the hyperglider demanding her full devotion simply to survive the demented air currents, she spared the time, a couple of precious seconds, to stare at the incredible phenomenon. A waterfall going straight up.
At five kilometers altitude, the foaming sheet of water began to break apart again. The immense upright storm was beginning to spread wide as it reached the top of the canyon. Pressure and wind velocity were weakening. Throughout it all, Justine steered the hyperglider directly up the central track. Water and cloud cascaded away on either side as she burst out above the rock, two immense waves of vapor falling back down in swan-wing curves to crash onto the volcano’s lower slopes. Only in the center of the maelstrom did the wind keep howling, thrusting her forward and upward.
Mount Herculaneum’s gigantic bulk became visible below her, a desolate ground of shattered stone and saturated gravel extending for tens of kilometers around the top of the canyon. Gradually the harshness began to give way to the more welcome stains of ochre and avocado-green as the plants reasserted themselves. Tiny grasses rooted hard in crinkled fissures, hardy tropical moss welded to boulders. The storm continued to rage above them, seeking its escape to the quieter skies in the east by sliding around the slopes to the north and the south.
Justine modified the wing camber again, maintaining her speed, but rising ever higher. She was tracking a straight line between the canyon and the summit, never deviating to either side. Grassy meadows with sturdy scrub bushes passed below her now. Temperate lands, the plants lashed and cowed by the unremitting storms, but always flourishing. The twin cataracts of erupting water from the canyon were fifteen kilometers behind her, and the clouds were parting, pealing off right and left to find their own route around the volcano. Justine sought another path through the clear sunny sky ahead and above. Her speed was still colossal, sufficient to carry her well clear of the storm, but not quite enough for her ultimate goal. She began scanning the weather radar.
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