Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

  Matai’s fingers on her arm made Nicole jump, eyes wide with shock for a wildly disoriented moment until she regained her inner bearings. Very gently, because humans tended to get understandably nervous when Hal claws came too close to their eyes, Matai stroked her fingers across Nicole’s face, dipping them after each into a bowl of clear ointment, repeating the process down her neck and torso, along her arms, shifting position to continue on her back. Almost immediately, Nicole realized Matai was crafting a pattern and as she looked down at herself, unsure whether it was a trick of the light or some facet of the hallucinogen or a synthesis of the two, she saw her body glow with an exotic display of Hal striping. She wanted Matai to stop, there was a ball of panic in her throat choking off her air, a terror that each brushstroke was casting her more and more adrift. She was trembling, as she never had her whole life, body in total rebellion from a mind that had abdicated all authority.

  Stop it, she screamed silently, hating the way her inner voice cracked into the upper register, just like a girl’s stop it!

  Matai paused, Nicole assumed to admire her handiwork, then poured some of another potion she’d been mixing into Nicole’s palm, followed by a clear indication of what Nicole was to do with it. So, Nicole began applying it to Matai’s arm, working it into the Hal’s downy fur and skin beneath with a gentle massage as she made her way up to the shoulders. Sense memory here as well, of Hana describing the family communal bath back home in Japan and how hard it was because the family was bi-hemispherical shifting between there and the States—where folks weren’t anywhere near so relaxed about their bodies—and then back again.

  “Perhaps it’s context,” she murmured, realizing only belatedly she’d spoken aloud. Didn’t much matter, she decided, since Matai didn’t understand. The Hal was still singing softly to herself, probably wasn’t even aware of it—Nicole certainly wasn’t most of the time when she did the same—though the tenor of the tune seemed far more at ease than earlier. Nicole kept on talking, her voice low and reflective, the sound of it a refreshing anchor to the familiar, countering the shrieking cacophony inside her head. “I don’t seem to be so... inhibited in space. But then it’s hard to be shy when your job’s to stuff your partner into a pressure suit, and make sure everything fits where it’s supposed to, including the plumbing. Hard to tell who was more embarrassed back in training the first time that chore came along, us or the men. Maybe it is like Hana’s transitions from Japan to America—the attitudes accepted as commonplace in one country make you feel totally ashamed in the other.”

  She’d reached Matai’s back, feeling the play of the Hal’s muscles beneath her hands, gathering a gradual, physical awareness of her body to complement the remote observations and descriptions. At first, she knew she was being incredibly clumsy, but as time passed, she began to find the patterns that lay beneath the skin, the sense of where the elements fit and where they were ever so slightly ajar, managing once or twice to bring a small sigh of pleasure from the Hal as she smoothed the kinks out of a wayward muscle. The texture of fur was markedly different down Matai’s left side and a gentle touch told Nicole the flesh itself had the pucker of old scar tissue. A wound, covered by a graft.

  “Where’d that come from?” Nicole asked in English, although she could have in Hal. The question was rhetorical, not because she wasn’t interested—quite the opposite, she was intensely curious—but this wasn’t the time or place. She was losing herself in the mindless flow of the exercise, a simple task that she was doing well. There was a tempting luxury in this act of service, release from the demands and pressures she’d have to face once more outside. To be told what to do, to have a place unassailably her own, no more need to take risks or to fear the consequences.

  And then it was her turn, and Nicole found herself in the grip of a strength that matched her own and to which she surrendered, with an immediate enthusiasm that would have frightened her had she the energy to care. Until Matai started work, she hadn’t known she was so tense, her own muscles stretched taut as steel cords, and the groans the Hal massage pulled from her were as much weary pain as pleasure.

  Finally, Matai slipped into the water with barely a stir, Nicole following with what she was sure was the grace of a boulder, letting the raw warmth of the bath saturate her body as she sank neck deep. It was a luxurious lassitude that made her want to stay where she was until she shriveled like a prune. She dimly registered voices, a conversation that casually mixed Hal and English, but she paid it little mind. She was thinking of herself in a way and to a degree she usually didn’t allow, head chock-a-block with hopes and dreams and too many fears, so much so that she broke from Matai’s grasp—the Hal had been giving Nicole’s skull a second lather, with fingers that seemed to have a direct line to the young woman’s pleasure centers—and dunked her head underwater. Finding no place at that end of the tub shallow enough to stand, Nicole levered herself out of the water, pausing in midmotion to remain poised at the full extension of her arms, legs still immersed before letting herself sink back. As though the water had become her native environment, the world of the air having no more place for her. She didn’t turn back to Matai though, but held herself on the lip of the tub with chin resting on crossed arms, each hand to the opposite shoulder.

  Again, with scarcely a ripple, Matai climbed out of the tub. When Nicole looked up, she saw the Hal wrapped in a white robe that vaguely resembled a cross between the ancient Roman toga and the Indian sari, gathered snugly about the body with one end tossed over a shoulder, leaving the other attractively bare.

  Matai reached out both hands, Nicole instinctively taking them, and with an ease that left her breathless was pulled out of the water. She looked for a towel, but Matai held out another robe, arranging it about Nicole with a brusque, no-nonsense efficiency that seemed more in keeping with the engineer, Tscadi. Nicole’s head was swimming, the fatigue she’d felt earlier crashing back with a vengeance, hammering at her with the same inexorable force of Atlantic breakers on the Nantucket shore. She knew she hadn’t a prayer of making it through any sort of meal, much less to her own doorstep, and prayed the Hal wouldn’t think the less of her for collapsing at their feet. She wasn’t even sure she’d make it out of the bathroom. Matai seemed to sense that, because she stayed close at hand, one arm about Nicole’s waist, to prop her up.

  As they stepped towards the door, however, Nicole caught sight of their reflection in a mirror. And was seized by an unaccountable sadness when she saw only Matai and herself, as herself. The stripes the Hal had added weren’t there, in reality or imagination, only a tall, slim form that was a shade too thin than was good for her, who seemed as out of place here as she felt in the world outside. Even the earring had faded, magic all gone, leaving only a magnificently styled piece of jewelry.

  Her knees started to buckle, Kymri looming in the doorway before the sound of Matai’s call had faded, scooping Nicole up as though she weighed nothing, carrying her to a sleeping alcove and tucking her snugly abed. Left to her own devices, Nicole would have collapsed where she was. There was nothing within her to drive her on. Better instead to cast her fate to other hands.

  She wasn’t sure if those were thoughts or words and tried to tell herself it was no concern of hers that there was a sudden sadness in Kymri’s eyes, a twist of disappointment—swiftly masked when he saw her watching—to his features. It was as though she’d just faced some test.

  And failed.

  * * *

  six

  She was staring at the vending machines, with no interest in anything they had to offer but even less in making the effort of heading over to the commissary, when Ray Castaneda called out to her, his richly accented voice echoing hollowly across the hangar. As always, the dark grease stains highlighting the Line Sergeant’s hands belied his spotless uniform, eloquent testimony that no matter how gleamingly high tech the world became, there would always be a need for someone to get down and dirty with the hardware.

  “Got
some time, Nicole?” he asked.

  “Breakfast, at least,” she replied, punching out a teapak for herself, a can of juice for him.

  “Figured you’d want a look-see at your pride-and-joy the moment she was ready.”

  “The Baron?”

  “Signed off first thing this morning, full FAA inspection, certified fit to fly.”

  “Hot-diggety-damn!” And she swept the shorter, stockier man off the ground in a twirling embrace that left him laughing and her a little breathless. Working for Kinsella and taking care of the Halyan’t’a team had kept her running five-ways-from-Sunday pretty much ever since her arrival, so she hadn’t had anywhere near the time or energy to put into repairing her plane that she wanted. Fortunately, though, Ray Castaneda hadn’t minded picking up the slack.

  As Maintenance’s Boss NonCom, there was virtually nothing he didn’t know about aircraft and he pretty much defined his schedule according to need. Mostly, these days, that meant working with Tscadi, comparing notes on the respective shuttles, but he always seemed to find time for Nicole’s Baron.

  “Everybody wears digital these days,” he told her after they’d pulled one of the engines and taken it to bits, the pair of them slumped against the hangar wall on their fannies, nursing a six-pack, Nicole staring in mute despair at the slagged ruin of the blown cylinders, wondering (and not for the first time, either) why the force of the explosion hadn’t torn the whole assembly completely off its mountings, and the wing along with it, “it breaks, you toss it and buy a new one. Practical, cheap, useful, I got no quarrel with that. But that still doesn’t deny the beauty of a fine, old, mechanical Swiss watch. The craft that went into making it, that goes into keeping it running. Same applies here. These brutes”—and he waved an arm to encompass not simply the shuttles but just about every major aircraft on the Edwards line—“they need an army. And every component’s modularized. You got a bust, you pull it, you slug in a new one. Takes a lot of skill, but not much craft. This, though”—and he stabbed a thumb towards her plane, suspended on jacks so the landing gear was off the floor—“whole other thing entirely. One person can hack it all. Requires not simply the skill to know what to do, but the craft to make it work.”

  He’d done both—skill and craft—proud, the old bus looked factory-fresh. In fact, she’d lay any odds and any amount that Beechcraft itself in Wichita couldn’t have done a better job.

  “Pulled the main panel,” he explained as he paced her through the walk-around inspection, Nicole checking every inch of the plane’s exterior, “took the opportunity to upgrade all your electronics hardware.”

  “Ray, you’re kidding,” she rounded on him from the open cowling of the bad engine, where she’d been examining the repairs, “I pretty much gutted my bank balance paying for this, I’ve got nowhere near enough left to cover anything more.”

  “That’s not your concern, actually,” Alex said from the other side of the fuselage, where he’d approached unseen. “Consider it my way of apologizing for what happened.”

  She wasn’t sure she liked that, but wasn’t sure why.

  “Jesus, Nicole, cut me some slack,” he protested, picking up on her thought. “I’m not trying to buy you off, just balance the scales. Even if only a little.”

  “There was no need.”

  “Actually, there was. I was out of line in what I did, and in what I said that night at Hotshots. So I’m sorry. It is a nice piece of work,” he conceded, patting the Baron’s nose, “if you like antiques.”

  She smiled thinly and wiped a chamois over the metal where he’d touched it. “Same goes for flying it,” she said, “as maintaining it. Needs skill and craft.”

  “Care to show me? After all, no sense having the silly thing if you never use it, am I right?”

  “Well, it’ll need some exercise. I suppose I can clear a quickie slot later today.”

  “Actually, I had something else in mind.”

  “I’ll just bet.”

  “Seriously. You sail, yes?” She nodded, that was no secret. “I have a boat, moored down in San Diego. Who needs her workout as much as your wings here. What say we take next weekend to do both? C’mon, Nicole”—she was reflexively shaking her head—“you can’t bullshit me that you’ve got work, ’cause I’ve got the clout to make it go away. Not, of course, that I’d ever use that influence on your behalf”—she was giving him a dangerous look—“nosiree, not a chance, be more’n my life was worth.” His tone made plain how little he thought of that attitude; power for him, she realized, was like the plane for her, what sense having it if it was never to be used?

  “Compromise? A day sail, okay?” he was saying. “We’ve both been working ourselves stupid, we could use the break. A sail, some sandwiches, maybe a nice dinner in town, fly home after.”

  She let him stew while she finished going over the engine, locking down the cowling, wiping her hands on a work towel handed over by Ray, whose poker-faced expression was totally undercut by the puckish gleam in his eyes.

  “Off the ground at first light,” she said.

  “I’ll be here,” was Alex’s reply. “Give yourself half a chance, L’il Loot,” he called as he sauntered off towards his lab, “you might even have fun.”

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered, thinking, What have I done?

  “Yeah,” Ray agreed good-humoredly, her basilisk glare having not the slightest effect, “right.”

  There was no sign of Stu Hanneford in the office, no message from him in her buffer, no answer when she rang his quarters.

  “Oh, Stuart,” she muttered at her desk, rubbing her palms together in a nervous up and down motion, then tapping them a few times, rubbing then tapping, “oh, Stuart.” This was totally out of his profile. No way was he the type to go AWOL, and if something had happened, he would have contacted the base. Which left only the possibility Nicole didn’t want to think about.

  She grabbed the flatscreen display off its cradle and lit up the system, tapping a sequence of commands into her keyboard.

  “What’s doing?” Amy Cobri said. “I was waiting where we always meet. Kymri was out and running but you never showed.”

  “Pardon me, Miss Amelia, but aren’t you supposed to be in school or something?”

  “And good morning to you, too, Miz Lieutenant Shea,” Amy retorted as she plonked herself down in a chair.

  “Sorry. I... ” didn’t want to see Kymri, she thought, but said, “wasn’t feeling up to it this morning.”

  Amy shrugged. “I don’t do school, any more’n big bro. Partly the Pops worrying about security, mostly ’cause no curriculum can keep up with me.”

  “Congratulations. But don’t you miss the social side of things?”

  The expression Amy made told Nicole how eloquently little the young girl thought of that.

  “So what,” Amy prompted, “is doing?” She rolled her chair over and craned a look at the screen. “You’re accessing Sig-Net?”

  “To see if Stu Hanneford’s bike is listed.”

  “Oooo. He been a bad boy. That’s right,” she said, “he’s always the first one in, very proper little flunkoid.”

  “Amelia,” Nicole said with a quiet but noticeable warning edge to her voice.

  The girl shrunk ever so slightly into her seat.

  “He was all hot to take his new wheels out onto the desert,” she said as Nicole’s display resolved into a local schematic of Rosamond, with a transponder flash just off the main highway.

  Nicole nodded, keying in another query to confirm what she already suspected. “He was entered in the Baja Enduro motocross next month.”

  The location was Paul’s Two-Cycle, the best place on the high desert for bikes—and, to many, one of the best in California—owned and operated by Ray Castaneda’s daughter Carla. A phone call determined that Stu had left his old bike there Friday while going off on a shakedown run aboard the new one. Because it was brand-new and undergoing constant tune-ups and modifications, it hadn’t been
listed on the Net, so there was no way to track him. At least, not directly.

  A quick command produced the last month’s tracking telemetry on Stu’s bike. Most modes of transportation were tagged these days; even though there were more than a few grumbles about the “Big Brother” aspect of having vehicles constantly monitored from orbit, there was also no denying the effect it had on theft, or the way it speeded assistance to accidents, especially out in the boondocks. Or, ultimately, how the satellite tracking—combined with on-board inertial guidance microprocessors—made it virtually impossible to get lost. Tap in the right commands, your dashboard display would not only show you the best route from A to B, but places to stay and eat, local points of interest, things to do along the way. Essentially, the same technology and features that kept aircraft and ships on course brought down to earth in every respect.

  In Stu’s case, the request got Nicole a whole, tangled cat’s cradle of trails, branching off California 14 into the Sequoia National Forest, with a few heading the other direction, out onto the raw desert.

  “Son of a bitch does like to travel,” Nicole muttered.

  “Lot more to the mountains than the desert,” Amy noted.

  “Baja route runs mostly through rough terrain. Desert stretches are hot and dusty but no great challenge. Or so Stu said. It’s the high-country heart of the race that’s the backbreaker.” She leaned back in her chair, one arm wrapped around her waist while she absently slid the three middle fingers of the other back and forth across her lower lip, considering data and options and liking neither.