Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

  Not much sign of use in the years since his death. The other pilots and staff personnel preferred covering their klicks on the high-school track, or the ParCours exercise circuit that snaked through the base proper. This terrain was a little too wild, with too much chance of turning an ankle on a wayward rock, or worse. Hurt yourself, you didn’t fly. And if you couldn’t fly, why else come to Edwards?

  “You okay?” a voice called from a small ways up the trail, and Nicole was surprised to see Amy Cobri chugging towards her. She was all gangly legs and arms, mismatched bits just starting the spurt out of childhood with only the barest promise of the adult to be, tucked into the latest in designer sportswear. By contrast, Nicole wore sweats—long-legged, long-sleeved—against the predawn chill, unadorned plain greys.

  “Done for today,” she replied, absently kneading her right thigh, keeping as wary an awareness of what was behind her as in front.

  “What’s the matter, you hurt?”

  “No,” she told her, which was true, “habit, I guess, from the memory of pain,” of which there had been a lot. With a small groan, she straightened up, glancing over her shoulder towards the east, where the sky had almost completely paled in prelude to the sunrise. There was a preternatural stillness to the air, a small sense of the way things might have been in ages past, and she wondered if there were places—and moments—like this on s’N’dare. And, with a flash of bitterness, if Ben Ciari had enjoyed them.

  “Musta been a righteous mess, huh? For it still to bother you? I mean, it was ages ago, right?”

  “What are you doing up here, Amy? This is restricted turf.”

  The girl shrugged, face twisting dismissively as she dug a toe into the dirt and looked down towards the base. The shoes were at odds with the rest of her outfit. Top of the line trainers, but well worn, indicating hard and frequent use. “Wanted a place to run,” she said finally.

  “Plenty down there.”

  “You run up here.”

  “I’m allowed.”

  “No one said I couldn’t,” with a bit of defiance.

  “Yeah, right,” Nicole scoffed, “as if you asked.” And Amy, caught, allowed herself a gleefully elfin grin.

  “Track’s boring,” she said, “I mean, all you do is run ’round in circles, major thrill. And you see one PC circuit”—meaning the ParCours—“you’ve seen ’em all. ’Sides, I hate crowds.”

  “Why?”

  Another shrug.

  “We should get back,” Nicole said.

  “Where’s the hurry? Big Bitch... ”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Colonel Kinsella.”

  “I know who you meant, young lady.”

  “Hey, I call ’em as I see ’em, that a crime?”

  “There are crimes and crimes, Amelia.”

  She cocked an eyebrow full of practiced cynicism, striking an attitude that would have had Nicole in stitches were it not for the fact it wasn’t at all an affectation. “You telling me, Nicole, after the way she’s been riding you, you haven’t thought a lot worse?”

  “What I think, and choose to say, kiddo, is my business.”

  “So why can’t I claim the same privilege?”

  “Just be a little more tactful, okay?”

  “No prob. Didn’t figure you for such a total flatline, though.”

  “What, brain dead?”

  “Not quite. Just lacking in interesting spikes.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “But then, the more people you come to know, the more the curve flattens out. Real depresso. I mean, what’s the point in playing if there’s no one in your league?”

  “So I’ve heard your brother say.”

  Amelia blew a Bronx cheer in the direction of the airfield. “Major disappointment. All he does is crawl into his box and fake it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a master of simulations. Has such a good time inside his own head you have to drag him kicking and screaming into the world. I mean, why fly for real when a remote can do it for you? All the sensations, none of the risk.”

  “You prefer the risk?”

  A grin. “Where’s the fun, winning, if you rate the game?

  “Anyway,” she continued, looking upward and stepping into a more than respectable pirouette, “Colonel Kinsella”—smile and a bob of the head Nicole’s way to make sure she noticed—“is flying her HOTOL evaluation this morning, first reentry from orbit. Even if she touches down on schedule—which she won’t because there was a one-hour hold on her departure from Sutherland—she’ll be in debriefing for the better part of the day. Plenty of time for you to beat her to the job. Assuming she even shows, which is doubtful—’cause if it’s aprimo approach she’ll be out celebrating and if she augers... ”

  “Don’t say that,” Nicole snapped with an edge she hadn’t meant to be there, “about anybody.”

  “Well,” Amy finished offhandedly, “if it’s less than primo, she’ll probably drown her sorrows.” She didn’t bother hiding her unspoken subtext, and maybe herself along with ’em!

  “You two have a problem?”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “Where’d you hear about the hold?”

  “I heard.”

  “You weren’t kidding, were you, at the reception—you really do have this place wired.”

  “No big deal, trust me. It’s a whole lot easier than it looks.”

  “That what passes for fun, punching buttons in the hierarchy to see it jump?”

  “Has its attractions. ’Sides, how’re you s’posed to know your limits if you don’t push ’em? Isn’t that what Edwards is all about?”

  All depends on the consequences, Nicole thought, knitting her fingers together and reaching both arms high overhead, stretching the full length of her body and making a small face at the twists and pops she felt along the way. Is that a word—is it even a concept—that has any meaning to you Cobris? And then, follow-up thought: Cut her some slack, Nicole, she’s just a kid, doing pretty much what you did at her age.

  “So, you gonna run some more, or what?”

  Nicole shook her head. “With or without the Colonel,” she told Amy, “I got work. Sun’s up. Air’s already warming. If you’re not careful, it can get pretty brutal out here. A lot faster than you think.”

  “The base is right over there, Nicole, how hairy could it get?”

  “You’d be surprised, kiddo.”

  There was no conscious recognition of the attack, a multitude of things seemed to happen simultaneously, plastering themselves across her awareness like splashes of paint thrown randomly against a wall, each color individual and distinct when it struck, but blurring into an amorphous whole as they ran together on their way down to the ground. Sensation of movement combined with a flash of something on the periphery of her vision combined with perhaps the faintest scrabble of bare feet on dirt combined with Amy’s squeak of surprise—all triggering an instinctive, instantaneous response.

  She spun on the ball of one foot, dropping as she turned on her pivot leg, registering Kymri charging her—deeper awareness, not even considered until much later, of how the brilliant glow of sunrise lit up the tips of his fur, so that he seemed to be edged in a corona of light—slitting her eyes to protect them, because he was coming out of the sun and a careless glance would dazzle-blind her. Kicking off the pivot leg the instant she landed in her crouch, using the other leg for even more speed, hugging the ground as she went for his ankles, forcing him to spring awkwardly over her or be tripped.

  She made him leap, but there was nothing awkward about it. And by the time she reached her feet, rolling with smooth, desperate speed into a martial-arts stance that had nothing to do with the manual and everything with what Ben Ciari had taught her about close-combat grunt fighting, he was gone.

  She didn’t waste time looking, but grabbed Amy by the wrist and headed off the trail, climbing—in a fair imitation of a mountain goat—from rock to rock.<
br />
  “That,” the girl gasped, “that was one of the Halyan’t’a.”

  “Yup. Kymri, the Commander-Pilot.”

  “He tried to kill us!”

  “Hardly. If he were serious, he’d have used a weapon.”

  Amy broke Nicole’s grip with a violent tug that nearly overbalanced the pair of them.

  “You mean this is a stupid game,” she shrieked.

  “Tag,” Nicole said calmly, “he’s it. Sanctuary’s my bike.”

  “That’s crazy!” Amy’s voice was shaking, a mixture of adrenaline-laced terror and exertion. She was in superb shape—private trainer saw to that—but even the finest tournament muscles were put to the test by this open-field terrain.

  Nicole put her hands to her side and looked back the way they’d come. A couple of hundred meters, easy, flat out, up a steep grade of jumbled, broken scree—a nasty stretch, no wonder everything ached. No sign of Kymri. Wouldn’t be, though. She’d learned, the hard way over the past weeks as they played together, how good he was at camouflage. He had a way about him, an inner stillness, that somehow made your eye glance right past him, as though he wasn’t there or had somehow become transmuted into a natural part of the local landscape. So, she’d stopped trying to spot him by actively searching; instead, turning over the job to her back-brain. A matter of watching with all her senses, sort of taking inventory of the setting about her, waiting for the one anomaly to show itself. Ciari’d taught her that.

  There was a shallow depression, running along the backside of the ridge, nothing much to speak of, save that it would mask them briefly from sight. Likewise, they wouldn’t be able to see Kymri, and if he caught up to them while they were in it, the game would be all but over.

  Two long steps took them into the arroyo—she figured a couple of seconds grace while Kymri considered the options, before he made his move—and the moment they were under cover, Nicole whipped off her sweatshirt and tossed it at Amy, telling her to put it on.

  “Wha’ for,” was the indignant reply, the girl holding the shirt as though it had a bad smell, which, considering the morning’s activities, probably wasn’t that far off the mark.

  “A glance at your leotard’ll tell him who you are,” Nicole told her, “in my shirt, he’ll need a second look. If there was time, I’d give you the pants as well. Now, quit arguing, put it on, and go! Out the other end, fast!”

  Now, the sun was in Nicole’s favor. That was partly why she’d headed uphill in the first place. If Kymri angled to intercept them anywhere near the end of the arroyo, he’d have it right in his eyes. Especially now that the few minutes since sunrise had lifted it at least three solar diameters above the horizon.

  Amy was a quick study, donning the shirt without breaking stride and bursting out of the arroyo like an Olympic sprinter going for the gold. Kymri made a move, realizing almost immediately—and quite a bit faster than Nicole had anticipated—his mistake. But by then, she’d rolled out of her own hiding place, into position behind him. She wore a regulation T-shirt underneath her sweatshirt, painfully aware of how bright the white cloth was, but that couldn’t be helped. In this direct sun, she wasn’t about to strip down to bare skin. Especially when the move would give her away.

  He hunkered down on his haunches, head cocked a fraction to one side, and Nicole allowed herself the smallest of smiles. Not that easy, buster, she thought, up-sun and downwind, it can’t get much better than this. The barest breeze tickled her body from one direction, while the sun warmed her from the other. A stone was digging into her side, mostly an annoyance at this stage, and off in the distance she heard a birdsong. It was a sinfully peaceful moment and she knew that if she surrendered to it, she’d probably broil before she woke. And yet, she couldn’t help taking a long moment to simply look at the Hal. At rest or in motion, she found them a constant delight; the more she learned, simply from being with them, the more she wanted to know.

  Amy broke the stalemate, heaving a baseball-sized rock in Kymri’s direction. He caught it with a casual ease that would have broken the heart of any baseball manager, and in the same fluid motion, without even a glance in her direction, tossed it right at Nicole.

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered, rising slowly to her feet, shaking her head at the sharp, throaty noises that passed in him for laughter. He was a joy to watch, blessed with a slinky, insolent grace that made Nicole feel like a slug. It was as though the rule of gravity didn’t apply, save as a convenience that kept them tethered lightly to the ground. Not so much that they were especially fast or strong—though Kymri was both—but in the way one movement flowed seamlessly into the next, like a piece of perpetual, instinctive choreography. Kymri, like Shavrin, was centered in a way Nicole felt she could only dream of; physically, nothing seemed to faze him. Like the Terrestrial felines they remotely—disconcertingly—resembled, the Hal had the knack of always landing on their feet and looking like that was their intent all along.

  “You had me,” she said.

  He made a deprecating tilt of the head. “My range of awareness is sharper, Shea-Pilot. And when a diversion is cast in one direction, common sense dictates intensified vigilance in the other.”

  He was breathing more easily than she, but Nicole noted a sheen to his skin and allowed herself a hint of a smile that today’s game had at least raised a sweat.

  “We’re done,” she told him, and this time meant it. He nodded, sudden instinct prompting the pair of them to simultaneously look straight upward in time to catch a flash of sunlight on metal high overhead a split second before a faint boom—that was felt more than heard—shivered the air around them.

  “A flight coming off the Frontier,” she noted, “downshifting through transonic. Be on the ground soon.”

  “Kinsella-Colonel?”

  “Far as I can recall, she’s the only mission due this morning.”

  “Am I in error, Shea-Pilot, or are you not assigned to me and mine as liaison?”

  “No mistake.”

  “Then do I not have primary access to your person? Save perhaps for Sallinger Colonel-Commander?”

  She shook her head, adding a small, reflexive shrug. “Kymri,” she said, “I’m a Second Lieutenant, and thanks to the time I spent in hospital, I’m behind the curve for my promotion to First. The more the Air Force orients itself towards space, the less people it’ll need down here in the atmosphere. They can pick and choose, competition for slots is already fierce as a dogfight. I got more enemies now, I think, than most make in a career; I’d rather not add to the list.”

  “And you suspect that possibility where the Kinsella-Colonel is concerned?”

  “Why push my luck?” A heartier sigh, more to close the thought than as an expression of frustration or despair. “She certainly rides me hard enough.” And she made a face at how childishly whiny she sounded.

  From Kymri came a noise that mingled disgust and contempt, and Nicole wondered if it was for her, until he said, “I do not wish to see you so troubled.”

  “Makes two of us.” She smiled, starting along the trail to where Amy was waiting, keeping a respectful distance from the Halyan’t’a. But his hand on her arm stopped her.

  “I was not referring entirely to Kinsella-Colonel,” he continued, staying uphill of her so that they were at eye level. “Questions have been raised about what happened on the Moon. Concern has been expressed.” She didn’t need to be told by whom, and wondered how the news had made the round-trip to s’N’dare so quickly.

  “I appreciate it, Kymri. But it isn’t necessary.”

  “You do not understand. You are of Shavrin’s House, bonded by Oath and Blood.”

  “Please tell her then not to worry. I can take care of myself. And I have friends. We look after our own.”

  “So do we, Shea-Pilot. That is all I wished to say.”

  She mulled that one over as she returned to where she’d stashed her mountain bike, at the bottom of the hill, noting that Amy had arrived on one of her
own. One of the last things the Hal Commander had done, before her departure home from the Moon, was adopt Nicole. The moment had come out of nowhere, they were at the top of the boarding ramp to the shuttle that would take the newly established Terran Embassy up to the starship waiting in Lunar orbit, for the trip outbound to s’N’dare. The final call had just sounded, when Shavrin took a silver and fireheart necklace from her own neck and placed it around Nicole’s.

  “ ‘Of my House,’ ” Nicole breathed, surprised at how readily the words popped from memory, “ ’art thou become, of my flesh art thou made; thou art to me as a kit from mine own womb, bearing rights, titles, honors, and assigns as do pertain thereof. Blood hast thou shed on my behalf, blood have we shared to bind our spirits forever.’ ” At the time, she hadn’t given a thought for the consequences, probably wouldn’t have mattered if she had, she owed Shavrin far too much to back away from such a gesture. That was all she figured it really had been, a gesture. An impulse formality with no meaning or resonance beyond the moment. But now she thought about it, she knew that was wrong. On occasion, Shavrin acted from instinct—partly, that’s what prompted her to accept and trust the Terrans when she encountered Nicole and the Wanderer survivors—but those actions were never casual. What she said, she meant. And obligations were taken seriously. Clearly, Shavrin considered herself at least partially responsible for Nicole’s welfare, which left Nicole wondering how she was obligated in return.