Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

  “Lemme guess, this is one of those where it’s supposedly real impressive just to finish, right? Instead of win?”

  “Yup. Same basic challenge as you and your mountain. Man, machine, the road, the clock. Problem is, Stu could probably do that with his old bike. New toy was his bid for the gold.”

  “You think something happened, Nicole?”

  “He isn’t in his quarters, Amy, hasn’t logged back on base since he left Friday. His old wheels are still at Carla’s shop, and she hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him, either. He isn’t the kind to go AWOL.”

  “Alert the Chippies, then?”

  She reached for her phone. “Highway Patrol’s always stretched pretty thin out here, chances are they won’t have any assets available for a full-bore search, especially through wilderness land, unless we declare a full emergency. And even then, they’d probably tap our people to handle the bulk of the work. Sorting through that kind of mess could take an age.”

  “There’s another way, Nicole,” Amy’s brother said with a grin from the other side of the desk, craning his head over for an upside-down look at Nicole’s display. “You can run a whole search pattern without leaving my lab.”

  Nicole looked a silent question at him, hating the way both Cobris seemed to pop out of nowhere.

  “We have regular MilSat overflights, all the telemetry downloading automatically into the base mainframe nexus. I can access it, easy, plug it through to my Virtual CyberSpace System, make it almost as good as being there. Probably better. All the thrills, none of the aggro. Least you should be able to do is eliminate a fair chunk of the possibilities. And, best of all, it even fits in with what we’re supposed to be doing here.”

  “And there I thought it was just an excuse for you to play with your toys.”

  “Better make sure, Nicole,” Amy said waspishly, “he understands you mean the hardware.”

  Alex made a face, as though trying to reduce the exchange to normal sibling banter, but Nicole caught a flash of something behind the eyes that made her wonder.

  Same opening as before, same unreal crystalline sky, same infuriatingly disembodied face floating before her. And—best, or worst, of all, she wasn’t sure—the same sense of being, but without form or physicality. She was here, she existed, she had substance, if only in her own awareness; everything beyond that was totally subject to change. And she felt a thrill of temptation she prayed wouldn’t register on any of Alex’s sensors.

  “I’ve screened the scud out of the atmosphere,” he told her. “What you’re perceiving is a real-time construct, ideal conditions, no sense in making things any more difficult than they have to be. Remember, this isn’t things as they are now; it’s a synthesis of all the available data from the time of Hanneford’s departure up to the current download.”

  “Understood.”

  “Okay,” he said, “integrating Hanneford’s routes.” And brightly colored trails appeared below, a thick trunk of them heading down Rosamond Boulevard and out the main gate, turning north at the town along Highway 14, out across the high desert. Beyond Mojave, the next town along, it started branching into smaller threads, inertial tracks of every previous ride taken by Stu Hanneford aboard his old bike.

  “Shifting to infrared,” Alex said, and the scene turned crimson, the Earth below an abstract patchwork of colors—some bright, mostly muted—representing the heat patterns of the terrain. No indication of anything on the desert, which meant he hadn’t ridden out there in a while, precious little more towards the mountains.

  “Any chance of spotting him? When he left the base, I mean, or perhaps Carla’s place?”

  “I’ve been wondering. Depends on whether his departure coincided with a satellite overflight. Tracking his old bike, that’ll probably be no problem because of the SigNet transponder. The new one, though, with all the traffic on the highway.” He didn’t sound hopeful.

  “Worth a try?” Nicole prompted.

  “Certainly that. An interesting technical problem, actually. Take some time, though. To gather the raw data and then run a screening evaluation.”

  “How do I move?” she asked.

  “Same as you would in a standard simulator, using the sidesticks built into your chair.” She heard the grin in his voice. “Just ’cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. If you don’t mind, I’d like to see how direct induction works.”

  “Come again?”

  “Just think how you want to move. Electrodes in the helmet and your skinsnug should pick it up and respond accordingly.”

  “Terrific. It reads my mind.”

  “Fortunately for me, I suspect, only in the most limited sense.”

  “Touché. I wondered why you were so insistent on my changing.”

  She thought about moving forward and to her amazement did precisely that, until she came to a stop over the Kiavah Range. Alex had shifted the view back to normal vision, once more overlaying the ground with Hanneford’s multiple trails.

  “Too many, Nicole,” he said disgustedly, “too scattered, no real pattern to them. Didn’t seem to play any favorites.”

  “Maybe. Lemme see a schematic of the Baja course, can you do that?”

  “Compressed, yeah. Otherwise, it’d stretch over three hundred klicks.” And it appeared before her in the air.

  “Focus on the mountains,” she said, and when the Baja display did, she sat and pondered awhile, unaware that her body had manifested itself, clad in a flight suit, floating in the middle of nothing, humming a Lila Cheney tune as she tapped her lip again.

  “Looking for a physical match?” Alex asked.

  “That was the idea. I figure he was trying to approximate the conditions of the race.”

  “Logical. I had the same idea. A bust, though. Terrain’s similar but that’s about as close as it gets.”

  She looked more closely at the Baja projection. “Some seriously gnarly stretches in there,” she said.

  “A fact. That’s where the boys like to push. If you like, I can give you a taste... ”

  And before Nicole could object, she was on the deck, straddling a top-line mountain racer, struggling to maintain control as she rocketed along a track that was more path than road, sheer wall on one side, equally sheer drop on the other, at a speed that courted suicide.

  Another bike pulled up beside her, Alex, in boots and leathers, sun-streaked hair blowing straight back from his forehead. Shades but no helmet. She had no chance to worry about her own appearance, corner came fast, too fast, kick down two gears, touch of brake, careful not to lose it as the back wheel spun sideways, use the offside leg for the quickest of pivots (snag the heel and you risk pitching off, or a broken bone), then open the throttle to keep pace with Alex, who managed the same maneuver with insouciant ease. Instead, though, she pulled to a stop and swung off the bike, unzipping her flight suit and pulling it off her shoulders, wishing there was a T-shirt underneath instead of the skinsnug so she would have softer material than her sleeves to wipe the grit from her eyes.

  “Didn’t think you were the kind to give up so easy,” he called, turning back towards her.

  “And I didn’t think you were such a consummate asshole,” she shouted back, hearing a ghost giggle deep in the distance that she figured was Amy, off in Standard Reality, enjoying the scrap.

  She strode to the edge of the precipice, automatically tying her loose sleeves around her waist to get them out of the way, part of her marveling at how completely she was relating to this reality. Nasty drop. With nothing really to stop a fall but the bottom. The center of the track was hardpan, worn by a lot of use and baked by the merciless sun, but the shoulders were dangerously soft. Stay in the groove, there was no problem. But that groove was frighteningly narrow, with an equally small margin for error.

  “This is it,” she asked Alex, “Baja, no bullshit?”

  He shrugged. “What you see is what should be, as good as my data can make it.”

  “GIGO, chum.”
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  He bridled, but reined in his anger before he could lash out at her. “No garbage, L’il Loot, in or out. My sources include LandSat geo-scans, topographical surveys, orbital video. It’s as real as it’s humanly possible to make. Be better than real,” he muttered, “once I rig an interface to the Halyan’t’a crystals.”

  “Pull the plug, Alex, I’m outta here.”

  At first, all she did was lie on the couch, amazed at how exhausted she felt, especially since this withdrawal lacked the adrenaline surge that triggered the last one. Then, she groped for the desk phone, tapped in the code—it took two tries—and the handsome features of Ray’s youngest appeared on screen.

  “I’ll need a bike, Carla,” Nicole told her.

  “No problem. Gassed and ready when you get here.”

  “Figure a half hour, tops. I’ll need to borrow some gear as well.”

  The other woman shrugged. “You want, Nicole, we got.”

  “You’re an angel.”

  “You’re going out,” Alex asked.

  “If Stu’s in the mountains, it’s the only way we’re going to find him. Certainly the only way we’re going to help him. That country’s too rough to depend wholly on airborne reconnaissance.”

  She stopped by her desk to gather some things from her desk, including keys to the jeep assigned to the project, and leave a brief note in Kinsella’s buffer, both Cobris pacing beside her.

  “You don’t need to go on the ground,” he said. “Put a drone in the air—one of the long-duration Boeings—with a real-time livelink to my system. Guaranteed, faster and easier.”

  “Alex,” Amy said with exaggerated patience, as though to a child, “some people like to get their faces dirty.”

  “At least my way,” speaking to Nicole, deliberately ignoring his sister, “you’re available if Kinsella comes calling. You’ve no authorization to leave the base.”

  “You know your system, Alex,” Nicole said. “You try it your way, I’ll go mine. We’ll backstop each other, all right? One way or the other, someone’s got to go in there. Might as well be me.”

  They reached the jeep and Amy hopped into the passenger seat.

  “I haven’t time for this, kiddo,” Nicole snapped, “out,”

  “Then don’t waste it,” Amy snapped back, matching tone for tone, “drive.”

  Effing Cobris, she thought—only the pronunciation got jumbled in her mind and it came out “Cobras.” Apt.

  “C’mon, Nicole, you figure on doing this yourself? Alex helps his way”—said in a way that made plain how little she thought of that—“I can in mine.”

  “Better be careful,” Alex noted with some acid of his own, Nicole looking from one to the other in astonishment. “Kid’s not under warranty anymore. Papa won’t like it if she’s broke.”

  Amy’s reaction was an unprintable so foul it made Nicole stare in amazement. The girl leapt from the jeep and dashed back towards the hangar. Nicole found her just inside the door, deep in the shadows where no one could see unless they were really looking, face to the wall as she hammered her left fist again and again against the cinder block. Nicole reached out, but Amy turned violently and strode away, with a stiff-legged, herky-jerky motion that told eloquently how furious she was. Whatever Alex had meant, he’d struck a nerve that was about as raw as it could be. Nicole wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be around when Amy got even. Because she was sure that’s what was in the cards.

  “He didn’t mean it,” she said lamely.

  “What d’you know?”

  “Not a damn thing, except that it’s the nature of brothers and sisters to needle the living hell out of each other and that even among the most loving siblings, that can occasionally get out of hand. That’s all.”

  “Spare the homilies, okay.”

  “And spoil the child?”

  Nicole didn’t need to see Amy’s expression as the girl looked back over a shoulder towards her to know she’d made a very rude face.

  “That was so bad,” she said.

  “The nature of test piloting,” Nicole said, “you try this, you try that, you try anything and everything, in hopes that eventually you’ll score.”

  “Or crash.”

  “Well, there is that. He’s right, though”—and pressed on despite the shadow of anger from Amy—“it could be a rough ride and I’ll have enough to worry about without adding you to the mix. Pass on this, Amy. Please.”

  There was a moment when Nicole thought the girl was going to make a fight of it but then she gave a shrug and a nod. And that was that.

  At Carla’s, Nicole stuck her head under the cold-water tap, wishing she could just do a slow tumble forward until her whole body was immersed. The landscape shimmered in the midday heat and the simple act of breathing turned the mouth into a baking oven. Sunlight bounced off the faded sand with a brilliance Nicole thought reserved for arctic snowfields, so intense she was forced to narrow her eyes to slits even behind sunglasses and she grimaced at the first warnings of a headache deep inside her skull. Nicole kept her flight suit and added a padded leather jacket, gloves, helmet, and a pair of racing boots that clipped snug ’round her legs all the way to the knee. A radio transceiver was built into the helmet, and her PortaComp was duck-taped to the handlebars along with a reserve walkie-talkie. A seat-pack went on the pillion, water and medical supplies. Lastly, Nicole checked the transponder, both with Carla’s terminal and Alex back at the base. Whatever happened to Stu, she wasn’t about to take any chances.

  She didn’t push things along the eighteen-odd miles into Mojave, using the time to get reacquainted and comfortable with Stu’s bike. She’d ridden it before, quick runs into town for Stu when he had duty; that was why Carla had suggested she take it today. She didn’t own a car, hadn’t seen the sense of it since she figured on spending most of her career off-planet.

  “What are you looking for?” Alex asked over their com link.

  Part of the answer was a reflexive shrug. “I’m not really sure,” she said aloud.

  “He could’ve gone anywhere.”

  “That’s a fact. The key is trying to think like him, figure what he wanted and hope that’ll lead us down the same path.”

  “Nicole, remember the terrain schematics, this is nothing like Baja.”

  “Not form, Alex, content. You don’t replicate the details, you try for the sense of things. Where are you?” she asked.

  “Ten kay, in a counterclockwise racetrack pattern paralleling the highway. Off to your left, roughly ten klicks ahead, rolling into my first turn.”

  She looked, but the air was too hazy, the target too small and far away, couldn’t see a thing.

  “Nice try, Shea. Pretty much on the button with vectors and angles. Next time, use binoculars.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Best optics money can buy.”

  “Such as?”

  “Baby Boeing, like I said. Condor. Twin-fan remote drone.”

  “Impressed.”

  “Only if it does its job. Want to compare notes?”

  She pulled off the highway, unfolded the computer’s display plate, blocking the sun with her back to put the screen in shade so the data would show better. A tight-scale map appeared, illuminating their position, the drone up in the corner heading “down” the race course towards them, and all Stu’s myriad routes into the mountains.

  “Alex,” Nicole called, “paint the tracks in three-D, willya?”

  “Go you one better, take ’em in sequence, north to south as the drone flies by, livetime video—I assume your screen can handle that,” he added, as an afterthought.

  “I’ll let you know.” And the display turned from computer schematic to a crystal-clear video picture of the Sequoia National Forest, towards the southern end of the Kiavah Mountains. It was a midrange image, neither too close nor too far away, and threading their way west off the highway were all the trails they’d pulled from Stu’s file.

  She took a salt tablet as she w
atched, a swallow of water from her canteen to wash it down. There was no breeze to speak of, the air stirred only by the occasional passing car, and then only to coat her and the bike with another layer of dust.

  “I told you,” Alex said.

  She made an interrogative noise.

  “Shoulda stayed with me, L’il Loot. Could be doing the job in air-conditioned luxury on a nice comfy couch, cool drinks at hand... ”

  “Give it a rest, Cobri. And how the hell?” But even as she voiced the question, the answer popped into mind.

  “You’re still wearing the skinsnug,” he told her. “I’m pulling in a full range of telemetry. What you feel, I’m recording. Actually, I’m really grateful. I’ve never had so comprehensive a physical data base from anyone other than myself. The more information I have of my subject, the more completely I can configure the Virtual environment. I guarantee, Nicole, what you’ve been through here is nothing compared to what I’ll be able to do.”

  “Oh, joy,” she said. “Any residual images that look promising?”

  “Only what we saw before. Hardly anything, I’m afraid, worth speaking of. Here, here, here... ” And tags appeared behind each appropriate trail.

  “No sign of anything?”

  “Well”—thoughtful but a little miffed—“I hate to concede any limitations, but there are a couple or three routes where I can’t get decent imagery. At least not with this bird.”

  “Lemme see.” And he did.

  “Windy little bugger,” Nicole muttered, “where does it intersect Fourteen?” About a half-dozen kilometers ahead, no name on the road, hardly any road—in the accepted sense of the word—to speak of when Nicole reached it a few minutes later. Hardpan dirt, demarcated by use.

  “I’m going in,” she told Alex.

  “What makes this one so interesting?”