“It’s Adam, you know, he’s helping us.”
“How?”
“He’s looking down from the dreaming heavens, spurring us on.”
Paula didn’t reply. The idea was mildly discomfiting. She based her universe on solid facts. It was easier.
“Aren’t you religious, Investigator?”
“I don’t think I was designed to be, no. You obviously are.”
“I don’t believe in the old religions; but Bradley Johansson actually visited the dreaming heavens. He told the clans what they’re like, what we can look forward to.”
“I see.”
“Don’t believe me,” Rosamund said, laughing. “Ask him yourself afterward.”
“I might just do that.”
They drove on in silence. After a while, Rosamund began to shift the wheel slightly. The ground didn’t seem to be uneven. It hadn’t changed for a long time.
“Wind starting to pick up,” Rosamund said as she caught Paula searching the dusky landscape outside.
“Right.” Paula ordered the jeep’s transmitter to signal again. They should be in range by now. According to the inertial navigation they were level with the entrance to Stakeout Canyon, ready to curve around into it.
“What did you mean, Oscar wasn’t safe from you?” Rosamund asked.
“He and Adam were at Abadan station together; he was part of the terrorist atrocity. Adam knew that if I discovered that I would arrest Oscar.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Time is irrelevant. The people they killed are still dead. Justice must be served. Without that, our civilization would collapse.”
“You mean that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“So you really would have tried to arrest Adam after this was over?”
“Yes.”
“We’d have stopped you.”
“Only this time.” Paula’s e-butler told her the jeep’s transmitter had made contact with the three hypergliders. “Oscar, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. We all are. What’s the problem? I thought you’d be clear by now. You have to get out of Stakeout Canyon.”
“Oscar, I’ve been in touch with Bradley Johansson. He told me it was Adam who made contact with you to ask for a review of the Second Chance logs, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Investigator, what’s this about?” Wilson asked. “We’re about to fly. And you need to get clear.”
“Oscar, that puts you in the clear,” Paula said. “If you were the Starflyer agent you would have taken him captive.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“What are you saying?” Wilson asked.
The jeep rocked to one side as it was struck by a sudden gust of wind. Paula tightened her restraint webbing. “It’s either you or Anna.”
“Oh, come on! We’re all navy, we’ve know each other for years. We already decided it’s either you or one of the Guardians. We’re flying to the summit, no matter what you say.”
“You were all on board the Second Chance,” Paula said. “Oscar, what did you tell Wilson when you went to him with the evidence? Did you tell him you were contacted by the Guardians?”
“Yes.”
“All right, Wilson, you knew there was a connection between Oscar and the Guardians. Did you tell Anna?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Did you tell her?” The jeep was swaying about continually now as the winds picked up. Sand was scudding along the ground.
“I…I don’t think so. Anna, do you remember?”
“What did you say to her? Did you discuss the Second Chance data?”
“Anna?” Wilson entreated.
“She handled the sensors on Second Chance, that gave her easy access to the satellites and the dish. They were her systems; it would be easy for her to cover up any unauthorized use.”
“Anna! Tell her she’s talking crap.”
“Did you tell her Oscar had found the dish deployment?” Paula demanded.
“Anna, for God’s sake.”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” Wilson moaned.
“Anna,” Paula said. “I know your carrier wave is on, please respond.”
“She’s my wife.”
The jeep wobbled badly. Rosamund fought the wheel. “We can’t take any more of this,” she grunted. “We’re not going to reach Anna.”
“Damnit,” Paula said. “It can’t be much farther.”
“Investigator, we are going to die if we carry on.” Rosamund’s voice was emotionless. “That’s not going to accomplish anything, is it?”
“All right, turn around,” Paula snapped. Halfway into the turn another gust slammed into them, and she thought they really would flip over this time. Rosamund spun the wheel violently, countering the tilt. Outside, gray light was seeping into the sky to reveal a thick low cloud base that was moving at a daunting speed toward Mount Herculaneum. The jeep steadied. Rosamund was taking them straight toward the base of the canyon wall.
“Anna, respond please,” Paula said.
“Wilson,” Oscar said. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
“She can’t be!” Wilson said. “She can’t. Damnit, she’s perfectly human.”
“I worked with Tarlo for years,” Paula said. “I had no idea.”
“Work?” Wilson spat contemptuously. “I married her. I loved her.”
“Wilson, Oscar, you have to decide what you’re going to do now. I know this is hard, Wilson, but I expect she will try to crash into one of you.”
“We’ll leave a gap between unhooking from the tether,” Oscar said. “That way she can only go after one of us.”
“That sounds viable.” Paula desperately wanted to offer some practical advice, but she couldn’t even think on how to improve Oscar’s suggestion. She saw the edge of the canyon approaching fast. There was sand under the tires again. Big worn outcrops of rock were cluttered along the base of the canyon wall. Rosamund steered them around a dark jag of abraded lava and braked in its lee; she raised the suspension so the rim settled on the ground. “I hope this is deep enough,” she said as she switched on the jeep’s emergency anchors. The screws on the chassis started to wind down into the hard-packed sand with a strident metallic whine.
“Good luck, both of you,” Paula said.
Rosamund cut the mike and faced Paula. “You didn’t tell him you know about Abadan.”
“Oscar has enough to worry about right now. I didn’t want to impede his effectiveness. He’ll find out if he survives.”
“I don’t know about the Starflyer, but you frighten the living crap out of me.”
“She didn’t know.” Oscar repeated the phrase like a mantra; he’d lost count of how many times he’d said it now. The emptiness of human silence was oppressive and demoralizing as the furious wind rose in counterpoint around the hyperglider. A sense of isolation was folding around him like the caress of interstellar space. Anna: lost beyond redemption goodness knows how many years or decades before. While Wilson had withdrawn into a private hell of anguish and grief. “The human part of her was drawn to you. That’s still alive.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Wilson answered curtly. “I’ve had wives before.”
“Not like this, man; we saw flashes of the real Anna. She’s still there. Lost. She can be re-lifed and her memories edited.”
“After we kill her now. Is that it?”
Oscar winced. The whole conversation was made even more disquieting by the little emerald symbol shining in the corner of his virtual vision showing that Anna was still on the air, receiving everything they said. Maybe silence is best. “What do you want to do?” he asked warily. Wisps of fine sand were drifting past the cockpit, whipped up from the wet desert out beyond the gaping canyon mouth.
“Get to Aphrodite’s Seat. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we do.”
Oscar resisted letting out a long breath of relief. At least his friend was starting to focus. T
hat was the thing about Wilson, an ability to put the human element aside while he made choices. It was probably what made him so good at command. The parallel between that and Starflyer agents was one Oscar didn’t like to think of.
“We’ll get there,” Oscar said. “After all, there’s not that much she can do.”
“You think?”
Oscar was very close to turning his radio off and just keeping the hyperglider on the ground while the storm raged. The universe can survive without me, surely? Just this once. If he could just do what Wilson did and turn off his emotions.
The hyperglider shook as the wind strengthened around it. Overhead, the gray clouds had merged into an unbroken rumpled ceiling above the stark canyon. “Whatever you want to do, I’m with you,” he told Wilson. It was a cop-out and he knew it, transfer responsibility to someone else. But then that’s what he’d been doing ever since Abadan.
He checked the weather radar with its false-color mating jellyfish patterns. The whole cockpit was juddering now, wobbling the images on the little screen. It showed him a salmon-pink tide of wind channeled by the overbearing walls of Stakeout Canyon and reaching close to a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere in the invisible distance ahead of the hyperglider’s nose, the stormfront had reached the base of Mount Herculaneum.
“Confirmed go status,” Wilson responded with toneless dispassion.
Oscar smiled tenderly at the absolute professionalism; in his own fashion Wilson was showing him the way. Okay, if that’s what it takes to do this, I’m game. “Roger that. I’m beginning ascent phase.”
He brought his hands down on the console’s i-spots, gripping the concave handholds. Plyplastic flowed over his wrists, mooring them into place for the flight. His e-butler reported a perfect interface with the hyperglider’s onboard array.
Oscar put Anna aside and allowed the memories to come to the fore. Not his memories, but the skill belonged to him now, merging him with the hyperglider. A red and violet virtual hand gripped the joystick that had materialized in front of him. His other hand skipped across the glowing icons.
The plyplastic wing buds began to flow, extending out from the fuselage into a simple delta configuration. Oscar was rattled from side to side in the cockpit as they caught the wind. He disengaged the forward tether lock, and the hyperglider leaped about wildly. His own sparse piloting knowledge buoyed by the recent skill implants helped him counter the movement with relative ease, keeping the craft as level as possible.
He allowed the front and rear tether strands to unwind, and adjusted the wings to provide some lift. The hyperglider began to rise away from the floor of the canyon, tugging hard at the cables as the wind tore at the fuselage. Once he was fifty meters high he adjusted the tail fin into a long vertical stabilizer. The shaking began to lose its urgency, though the howl of the wind outside was still growing. Oscar expanded the wings farther, deepening the camber to generate more direct lift. With the tether cables reporting a huge strain, he began spooling them out at a measured rate, scrupulously keeping his ascent at the recommended pace. This was not the time, he decided, for cutting corners, no matter what the stakes.
Tatters of mist shot past the cockpit, twined into a sheath that restricted his visual range to little more than twenty meters. Rain was battering aggressively into the fuselage with loud drumbeat reverberations. As he climbed higher the cables began shaking with unlikely harmonics. He was constantly adjusting the wings to try to keep the hyperglider stable.
“If this storm isn’t enough for Samantha to work with, I don’t know what is,” Wilson said. The radio link wasn’t good, but the static-creased words contained a formidable determination.
Oscar clung to his friend’s voice, the contact with another human was suddenly tremendously important. When he scrutinized the weather radar again he could see the scarlet and cerise flow waves of the storm rushing down Stakeout Canyon, overlapping and twisting at a giddy velocity. The speed around the fuselage had now exceeded a hundred sixty kilometers an hour. Indigo stars marked the other two hypergliders; both were in the air, about the same height as he was. So she is alive and kicking, then. It had been a foolish fantasy that her silence meant she was somehow inactive.
“Yeah,” he said as he rose past the thousand-meter mark. “I don’t like being inside it; I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end.”
“Adam only meant for you to do this, didn’t he? That’s why he put you through the memory implant procedure. There was no moisture damage. He wasn’t going to let me and Anna fly.”
“No. He was going to explain it to the Guardians and use them to make sure the two of you stayed on the ground. Bloody idiot, as if my flying can guarantee a landing on the summit.”
“Why didn’t he tell us you were in the clear?”
“He would have to explain why to the Investigator, that we knew each other from way back, which was why he contacted me in the first place.” The hyperglider lurched alarmingly to starboard. Oscar brought it back with steady pressure on the joystick, flexing the wings. The craft rolled back to its level position. He concentrated hard on the weather radar, though even that had trouble spotting the extreme airflow turbulence inside the jetstreams.
“Is that important?” Wilson asked.
Oscar ground his teeth together. For decades he’d assumed that this moment, if it ever came, would be cathartic. It wasn’t. He hated himself for confessing, for what he had to confess. “I’m afraid so.”
“So why did he know you?”
“We both got involved with student politics at the university. It was stupid. We were young, and the radicals knew how to exploit that.”
“What happened?”
“Ultimately? Abadan station.”
“Oh, Jesus, Oscar, you’ve got to be kidding. That was you?”
“I was nineteen. Adam and I were in the group which planted the bomb. It wasn’t meant for the passenger train. We were making a gesture against the grain dumping. But there was some snarl up on StLincoln; the express was running late so traffic control gave it priority, they pushed the grain train onto a different line.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah.” Oscar watched his altitude go through the fourteen-hundred-meter mark. It was difficult to see. Tears were washing down his cheeks. He ordered the wing configuration change ready for flight. “The Intersolar Socialist Party took pity on me and paid for me to undergo an identity change on Illuminatus. I’ve been…I don’t know. Making amends? Ever since.”
“I’ll be damned. This really is a day for revelations, isn’t it. I guess we’re all strangers in the end.”
“Wilson. No matter what…if you hate me now. I’m glad I knew you.”
“I don’t hate you. So is Oscar your real name?”
“Hell no.” He checked out through the cockpit canopy, seeing the wings curving away on either side. Virtual vision showed him the tailplane morphing into a broad triangular stabilizer. Deep in his gut he was tensing himself up for the release. “I used to be a big film buff. I loved all those fabulous musicals and cowboys and romances they used to make back in the mid-twentieth century. Oscar awards, see? And the biggest star they ever had was called Marilyn Monroe.”
“Well, Mr. Star Award, you named the tactic: two on one.”
Oscar saw Wilson’s hyperglider disengage. Its indigo star went shooting off down the carmine river flooding the length of Stakeout Canyon.
He could almost hear the calculation that Anna must be making. Out of all of them Wilson stood the best chance of reaching the summit. The longer she left it the more difficult it would be for her to catch him and presumably force some kind of collision; but if she disengaged before Oscar he could pick his own moment anytime in the next hour or so, and make his flight completely unimpeded. It all depended on how much faith everyone had in his ability to fly the foreshortened parabola.
Anna disengaged.
She was twenty-five seconds behind Wilson.
Oscar’
s virtual hand punched the disengage icon. G-force shoved him down hard in the seat. The hyperglider streaked away at over a hundred ninety kilometers an hour. Roiling air buffeted the wings mercilessly. He’d envisaged keeping the craft steady while watching the movements of the other two, waiting for whatever moment presented itself. Instead he was thrust into an immediate battle for simple survival. All he cared about was maintaining altitude. The two terrifying canyon walls jumped out of the radar screen at him as the winds impelled him from side to side. He countered each floundering swerve movement the screaming storm flung at him, tilting the joystick with a fear-burned calmness. The wings shifted obediently, tips twisting and flexing to produce a response so quick he had trouble registering it before it became overcompensation.
For a split second he searched out the two indigo stars. His e-butler projected their course trajectories. The slender topaz lines it sketched intersected before the end of Stakeout Canyon. Then the vast rock walls were closing in again, and the instabilities clawing at the fuselage intensified. It grew darker outside as the shreds of clouds threaded within the storm were wrenched back into a single wild braid high above the ground. Big raindrops smashed against the cockpit in a sudden wave. The hyperglider yawed under the assault. Oscar struggled to right the craft again. He had to reduce the wing size, increasing control at the cost of the acceleration that the previous wide curve had given him. There was no noticeable loss of speed, and it was easier to force his way back into the center of the canyon, keeping above that writhing arterial cloud. The radar found the end of the canyon wall twenty kilometers ahead, a vertical cliff that stretched up off the screen.
He checked the other two hypergliders again. Anna was flying with mechanical exactitude. Her wings hadn’t been trimmed down, yet somehow she was maintaining her vector, closing fast on Wilson. She didn’t have to worry about maneuvering into the right position to go vertical at the end of the canyon. She didn’t have human concerns to distract her anymore. Her hyperglider streaked on like a missile. Wilson couldn’t move away; if he was to soar up the incredible waterfall that flowed out of the canyon he had to hold his course perfectly steady.
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