by Laer Carroll
She had seen videos of sky divers in action, so she tumbled her body to a face down fall and spread eagled. The push of the air against her front increased, so she was slowing at least a little bit. The proof was that the air-ski debris was moving downward visibly faster than she was.
A crawling sensation all along her sides brought her attention back to her body. Her shapechanger instincts were growing a thin almost transparent membrane from the outsides of her arms and legs and torso. Soon a tough membrane stretched all down her sides, ripping her bra and panties, which were whipped away by the wind of her fall. The membranes caught the air and she slowed further still. She had become almost a big version of a flying squirrel.
With that thought she twisted her body to change the angle of her fall more and more toward the shore. She did not want to get to shallow water however. She needed deep water for she would go deep when she hit the water.
The water was coming up fast.
She had been deliberately hyper-ventilating. Her chest had expanded with the effort, the ribs unshipping from her spine. Her breasts had receded into her body.
At the last minute she flipped to feet down, brought her legs tightly together, and pointed her toes. She closed her eyes tightly and voluntarily sealed her nostrils. Her arms she kept up at an angle so her body resembled a Y.
When the water hammered at her she swept her arms sharply down with all her ultra-human strength and pushed down with her arms. The upsurge would have broken an ordinary person's arms, but her bones were nearly as tough as steel and her flesh like tire rubber when compressed.
As her body slowed in the water she opened her eyes. A few bubbles rose around her, remnants of a great burst of them when she plunged deep.
Looking out and down she saw an uneven bottom with various spongy and other growths, including a few fans of brilliantly red new coral and older pink dead coral. Sea weed waved lazily. Fish frightened from the vicinity of her great splash began to return. A few nosed around her curiously.
She began to swim upward toward the jostling flashes which were waves seen from below. She burst out of the water and took a deep breath almost sadly. The deeps were very beautiful. She must make opportunities to return to them from time to time.
Looking around she saw that she was about a hundred yards offshore of the little cove of the villa. Perhaps instinctively she had homed in on it.
"Instinctively." During this whole episode she seemed to have become increasingly something inhuman, more so than her usual shapechanger variability. Would she have become a flying creature of some kind if she had fallen from a greater height? Or an underwater creature if she had stayed down longer?
She dismissed the thought to take up later. For coming near her lower and lower over the water was one of the air limousines. Further up and away was a second. And a mile or so away was the orange dragonfly of the air-sea rescue helicopter stationed on the island.
When the nearest limo was almost over her an orange doughnut fell out of the black open doorway in its side. Attached to it was a white line of nylon cord. Moments later a figure appeared in the doorway and dove. It was Rodrigo clad only in his little red bathing suit.
He struck the water and surfaced and began swimming quickly toward her, one arm through the "doughnut" which was a lifesaver float.
She compressed her chest back to normal size, her ribs reattaching to their normal sites. This sank her lower in the water and she dog-paddled leisurely toward him, her breasts re-inflating to their human shape. Which reminded her. She was nude except for her tennis shoes.
Rodrigo stopped a yard away from her, staring at her face.
"Jesucristo, tu — tu'está vivo —"
"Como ve —"
"Let's get you out of the water. You must be freezing. And..."
"No, Roddy." She smiled, using his hated nickname. "I'm like a fish in water. And I'm not going up a ladder with you watching from below. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not wearing anything."
If he hadn't before he did now. He stared briefly. The water level was several inches below her skin and the water was clear. Her rosy-tipped breasts were very visible.
He quickly turned his head, then looked upward. The limo was now just a few yards away and a few feet up. Its four jets were churning the water at its front and back and its paramagnetic field was dimpling the water in several places. Directly underneath the open door the water was only disturbed by the usual waves, however.
He eeled over to the limo and put his foot on a submerged ladder step, then grabbed a hand-hold and went up the few more steps into the door. Moments later he came back with a stained canvas tarpaulin used to cover painted surfaces.
"This is the best I can do," he yelled. "Come on. I won't look."
He held out the rough material and turned his head. Nevertheless, when she climbed up into the limo and took the canvas from his hands he did sneak a peek. Dedicated to his Mariana he might be but his instincts were well in place.
He slammed the sliding door closed as she walked bent over to the row of seats just behind the pilot's partition .
"Hi there," she said to the pilot. It was Mihir.
"Thank God your safe," he said as he glanced back at her. He returned his attention forward and lifted the limo into a climb toward the villa. He was also talking into the microphone clamped to his head, telling someone "She is safe. She looks fine."
Mihir landed the limo as close to the front of the house as he could without damaging anything. As soon as Rodrigo slid open the door Selena, Elena, and Margaret-now-Peggy Pennebaker crowded in, Peggy carrying a thick white bathrobe and Selena dangling a pair of shower flip-flops in her hands.
Quickly they replaced the tarpaulin with the bathrobe and her soggy tennies with the flip-flops and hustled her into the house. At one of the luxurious bathrooms they got her into a hot shower to "up her core temperature" in Peggy's words.
Sasha let them, even though none of it was necessary. She was perfectly all right. Even the salt left on her skin by the evaporating salt water had been thriftily absorbed by her shapechanger skin. Her friends needed to take care of her and to reassure themselves she was all right.
Sasha shampooed her hair leisurely while letting the hot water "warm her up" for ten minutes. That was as long as she was willing to humor them.
Outside in the living room, clad in another bathrobe, she sat sipping a cup of hot tea well laced with cream and sugar, forcefully prescribed for her by Peggy.
"I almost died," said Selena, sitting on the couch beside her, one knee under her so she could turn her body to face Sasha, "when I saw the 'ski break apart. Up till then I still hoped you could get the battery online again."
Owen Allerbee said gloomily, "We lost all telemetry when the power went out. But it's all recorded so we can at least start there with the post-mortem. I'm just glad no one has to do a post-mortem on you!"
There were two post-mortems, fact. The development team did one. And a team sent from Prince Enterprises did theirs. It took both of them a little over two weeks.
During that time Sasha was out of air-ski work. Not that she was any the poorer for it. She was still paid her "consultant's fee" and had her other sources of income plus several million dollars saved or invested.
She also had to endure the by-now familiar boost in her fame, or notoriety. The Prince developer's had been routinely and automatically videoing her progress in the tests. But so had tourists on daily catamaran and helicopter transportation services for Catalina Island.
The tourist videos had gone on the web that day, as had the clearer and steadier and better magnified developer videos. That latter had been the decision of Bluebird Enterprises, with Sasha's consent. They (or Anna Prince?) had felt it better to turn potentially bad publicity into a fairy-tale of heroic survival.
It helped that Sasha looked like a princess. And had many pictures of her online in almost nothing and in fabulously expensive fashions hobnobbing with other celebrities. Fo
r that was what she was now, if she had not been before. The tale spread to even the least-developed parts of the planet.
Sasha took to wearing her jeans and tee and tennies with shades and pony tail out the back of her billed cap for reasons other than comfort.
Then on a Thursday she got a phone call from Victor Wang asking her to a meeting at 10:00 am the next day.
Sasha did not wear her "disguise" today. She had let her hair go perfectly straight. It fell down around her shoulders in a silky platinum waterfall. She had let her skin go porcelain white. She wore heels of dark blue and a dress suit with a skirt just below the knees. It was a pale shimmery blue. Her blouse was white silk with the faintest of watermarks.
"Good God," said Rodrigo when she entered the conference room directly from the roof parking garage. "A goddess visits us!"
"Hello, RODDY."
The only makeup she wore was a pale blue outlining of her eyes. When she turned her blue eyes on someone it was as if the sky looked out at them.
Selena looked back up at Sasha at the conference table as Sasha moved to sit beside her.
"Dressed for the execution, I see." The red-head had dressed for the event in emerald green, likewise inspired seemingly by the magisterial nature of today's conference. Likewise was Elena across the table with Peggy. Her dark Italian looks were accented by the black and white of her outfit. Peggy was in bright red with her grey her in a loose fashionable coif.
Most of the other women and men also had dressed somewhat formally. A few were in their usual comfy clothing. Beret and Bowler (which is how Sasha thought of those two engineers, despite knowing them very well now) had not forsaken their head gear.
Sasha imagined them facing a hurricane thus dressed and giggled.
"What? You don't think we're in trouble?" Mihir was taking a seat across the table beside Rodrigo. For the first time ever he did not seem to be thinking of something secretly amusing.
Sasha spoke loudly enough for the entire table to hear her.
"I'm always prepared for corporations to stupidly sacrifice its employees. But I know Anna Prince and this is her company, not a toy for some board of directors. If we deserve a whipping we will get it. And we do not. We are one of the best collection of engineers on this planet. We were excruciatingly careful and thorough, and on this project our work was fucking brilliant."
Sasha never cursed in public.
Which was the moment Anna Prince came in the door with Victor Wang. She was clad in black and white casual fashion costing thousands of dollars which went well with her long curly hair. Wang did not look upset and Sasha could read his "inscrutable Oriental" face very well by now.
As the two walked by on the opposite side of the conference table Anna glanced at Sasha and winked. Sasha nodded to her.
At the head of the table Victor Wang glanced around the room. At his side Anna Prince settled into an ergo chair and looked down the table. Today there were no last-minute hurried arrivals.
"Good to see everyone could make it." He paused.
"I'll now turn this meeting over to Ms. Anna Prince." He sat in a chair opposite Prince, who got up and took his place.
The billionaire head of one of the richest industrial complexes on the planet smiled at everyone.
"I'm pleased to be with a group of people who are, as Sasha says, fucking brilliant. And I only have good news to report to you."
She paused a moment and went on. "My audit team agrees in every particular with your fault-isolation team. The problem lies here."
At that the screen behind her came on and she stepped far enough to the side so that the sketch on the screen was visible to everyone.
"In case some of you don't recognize this, this shows two power connectors. Normally they mate perfectly and once twisted together lock into place so tightly that extremes of heat and vibration and stress cannot separate them. Indeed, in a few days the mating surfaces so tightly connect that they bond at the molecular level, in effect welding themselves together."
She studied the faces of the people in the room. The gazes of all but Sasha were glued to the screen, their engineering minds engaged. Sasha was watching Anna. Anna's gaze brushed across Sasha's and (only to Sasha's perception) she smiled.
"The reason for the problem is that here—" One of the connectors briefly flashed a few times. "—this connector was made with a cheaper substitute material. This, to use an engineering term, fucks everything up."
There was mild laughter in the room.
"You can get more details in the project audit files. I'll not bore you with them." This was, Sasha was sure, deliberate irony. Engineers doted on such finicky details.
"The responsible heads of this subcontracting company have been indicted. I will make sure they are punished to the full extent of the law." There was no irony or humor of any kind in her voice now.
"This sort of problem could have only been found by pushing the air ski to and beyond its performance envelope. This is something Sasha Canaro is especially good at. Maybe the rest of you would have found it eventually. But maybe not, even though you are 'fucking brilliant'."
The laughter was stronger this time.
"One thing I'm sure of. Only Sasha's calm and instant response to this emergency, and her superior athletic skills, allowed her to survive this event.
"From this we have learned. From today on in all the companies under my influence tests such as these will be done to the destruction of the vehicle, and done by the kind of twisted mind Sasha so brilliantly displays."
"Hey!" said Sasha. The laughter was quite general this time.
"These tests will be done by a combination of robotic and human test pilots. I'd like to do away with the risk completely, but humans have millions of years of evolution to turn us into very delicately precise perceivers and comprehenders of situations. It will be long before any robot can equal us.
"And why should we want them to? We want them to do the things we can not do, and vice versa. I confidently predict that thousands of years in our future there still will be this synergistic partnership of unlife and life."
She sounded so certain. Was she an alien? That would explain her impervious skin. But it did not explain why the genetic material she shed just by living clearly conjured up an image of an exotic but clearly human creature.
Sasha gave a mental shrug. However this woman came to be, and whatever she was, she had shown herself to be a compassionate, caring person, and that was enough for Sasha.
"There is another aspect of this project which Victor has suggested to me. As the air ski approaches its, for now, final form and goes into production, other alternate air ski possibilities need to be explored. In partnership with several companies, Prince Enterprises will help develop air skis which run just on its ground effect. Some of these will run in water and some will run on the land. Others will retain the paramag jet flight capability. And there are other possibilities I can't even imagine.
"Starting today, as you complete this project, I want you to begin thinking of those possibilities. If you feel like it, maybe with partners from here and elsewhere, make up a proposal and submit it through channels. There are those who WILL hear you, or I will be, to use another technical term, highly pissed."
By now the room was at the same time relaxed and energized. What a crowd handler this woman was!
"Before I give this meeting back to Victor and go off to another meeting I must attend I want to tell you that unfortunately, for you anyway, Sasha will not be with you. I have other tasks for her, if she wants them. Among them are some of the high-risk jobs she enjoys. But before that I want her to become the face of the air ski."
Rodrigo showed his usual irreverent form. He spoke up.
"I'll bet it will be more like the 'body of the air ski' from seeing her in those bikinis she likes so much."
The "face of the air ski" did indeed include much of the "body of the air ski" in skimpy glory in the months to come. Sasha gave up her apartment
in Park Slope in New York state, moved to the West Coast, and got an apartment in Pasadena in the same complex as Silvana. It was close enough to her sister for them to spend time together but in a building across from the swimming pool enclosed in a box made by the buildings. This way they had access to and privacy from each other.
It also had a lockable garage with a remotely controllable door. With apartment management approval she got a special electrical outlet installed which let her trickle-charge her superbattery overnight.
When she needed a fast charge she could drive three miles to the campus of the California Institute of Science and Technology. It had established a charging station for the several air limousines bought by CalSciTech (or just CalTech) for flying to the several research stations it operated. The biggest of those was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory just north of the Rose Bowl. It had the responsibility for creating and managing all deep-space exploration vehicles.
Being so close to Caltech had another advantage. It offered numerous popular and advanced scientific lectures. Those of Ricardo Fino, world-renowned physicist, were her favorites. He spoke clearly but never spoke down to the audience and was very witty and playful.
By the end of the year her role as the face of the air ski had just about played out. Air skis were becoming quite popular, especially the cheapest models. She was beginning to wonder if she ever would hear what Anna Prince would like her to do for Prince Enterprises beyond that role.
Not that she was out of work. Her fees had gone up because she was quite popular as a model. And Prince had plenty of chances to talk to her about new work. They crossed paths at parties as well as other events and they chatted about many things with each other.
Then in the middle of the week after Christmas Sasha got an email: Could she spare an hour or two to Prince the next evening? At the Pendleton Bluebird Securities HQ?
