Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Why don’t we just hide out someplace in the forest with the other ES people?” I asked, taking advantage of Ana’s being off the air.

  “Because if they find all our gear, they’ll have an eye out for us,” Ana said. “We’d have to hump all the way to Route 14. And even then we could still get grabbed. We went over this scenario.”

  “I must have missed that class,” I said.

  “Anyway, the Hippo’s a stealth lander, it has a signature legend, it’ll take us out with no problem.”

  “What if they—,” I started to ask.

  “If they bypass the site we’ll be back in two days and we’ll start digging then,” she said. “No more questions, please.”

  I shut up. What she didn’t say was that if the patrol did find all our gear and everything, it would be a long time before we’d be able to get back here. And Ix was the only place where Jed2 would have entombed himself. Or might have, I should say. If we didn’t dig the royal tombs, we wouldn’t even know whether he’d managed that.

  And then there wouldn’t be any of Jed2’s memories getting uploaded into my brain either. Whatever I’d seen back there, I was going to be keeping it to myself. And from myself, if you follow me. Damn it. On the other hand, in a way I ought to be relieved, because if that did happen, his memories would have erased mine, that is, the ones I’ve formed in the last few minutes, or since whatever point in the downloading our consciousnesses had split, which could—

  “Okay, it’s here,” Ana said. “Two minutes.”

  I nodded. Worry about all that stuff later.

  A big sharp shadow flickered over us. There was a bang and the whine of a big engine starting and then that thwocketing sound, and out past the rash of lily pads the smooth water turned sharkskinny. Above us it seemed like this thing had just appeared out of a fold in the air, a knot of white at the hub of a single long straight arm that turned slowly back and forth like the needle of a big compass. It’s the Hippogriff, I thought vaguely. It must have some kind of fast-ignition system. They’d glided in without engines. Ana waded out under the thing with that GI Jane, Special Forces Handbook movement. Military types take themselves so seriously. She reached up and grabbed a plastic two-man troop cage out of the air. Someone skootched past me into a pocket of JP-5 exhaust. Marena held my arm and we waded out into the eye of the snarling little waterspout. Ana started bundling us into the five-sided cage. She twisted my muddy legs under me so I was kind of kneeling on the mesh. There were orange straps all over. I looked up. The big weird-looking aircraft was hovering in its bubble of downdraft about fifty feet overhead, making minute adjustments. It didn’t want to get any lower and maybe catch its rotors on a tree. Fans of distortion spewed out of dorsal heat-vents like sharks’ spiracles.

  “Wait, where’s No Way?” I asked.

  “Load one, hoist,” Ana said. We jerked up toward a big padded opening in the light belly. I tried to spot the palace to see if No Way or anyone was there, but we were spinning too much. I felt through my pockets. Where’s my phone? I wondered. They’d better not have left it back there. A pair of orange-gloved hands steered the cage up into the dark cloaca. There was that macho smell of motor oil, vinyl chloride, and old leather. The guy with the gloves unbinered the straps, pulled Marena and me out onto the padded floor, and sent the cage down again. I sprawled on the carpet and looked up for the hands’ owner. He was a big guy. He wore a video helmet, but the visor was up and I recognized him as the copilot—or more correctly, according to the readouts, the WSO, the weapons system officer, even though our aircraft wasn’t armed—from our flight from the Stake to Pusilha. It was only a two-man crew.

  “Please take your seats from the previous flight,” he said, as though we were on Virgin Air. It was pretty dark, but there were constellations of LEDs all over everything so you could tell what things were. If you already knew, that is. I stood up, and before Marena could grab me I bonked my head on the vinyl-skinned foam. She steered me into the port bulkhead seat. It was like a big child-safety seat. A tykeish-looking powder-blue bar came down over me with an easy-to-read label in orange letters: CHECK FOR SECURE LOCK. There was a little QWERTY keypad on it. Marena sat across from me so the two of us were closest to where the partition would have been between the hold and the cockpit. I looked around. The passenger windows had been covered, I guess because now it was a military operation, but I could see some of the canopy windscreen past the pilot’s head and below that, starting nearly at my ankle, a wedge of the left chin-bubble window. When the rotors blew away some of the mist, you could see a patch of the river turning black in our chop. Michael and Dr. Lisuarte scrambled up through the low door and past us. Michael had been assigned the seat near the tail to distribute the weight. Hitch came through next, and then Grgur. He climbed in less heavily than I would have thought and then hunched over Marena for a moment, whispering to her, before he went aft to sit across from Michael. The WSO settled into his seat to the right of the pilot. Ana came up last, pulling the cage in after her. I guessed Boy Commando was staying out in the bush. She flipped up a sort of jump seat between and behind the pilot and the WSO. She started to strap herself in but then reached back and around like she was going to hug me. But her hands went above my head.

  I felt this secure feeling of soft pressure over my ears and I was plunged into deep quiet, a gentle thrumming like a big hummingbird all around me with just a thin underall hiss and the open-system beep repeated every two seconds like a grasshopper’s mating call. She’d pulled a helmet down over my head. It had a regular visor on it, but there were sort of goggle things inside that slid down and gave you an augmented video view out of the helmet’s two lenses. The first time we’d used this aircraft, back in Belize, they’d recommended that we “deploy the AVRV goggles at all times,” in case somebody attacked us with eyedazzler lasers. At first it was all just a blur, but then the thing adapted to my eyes and I was seeing in a different mode. It was sharper than real life, kind of like listening to a violin on your phone instead of on mellow old vinyl. Also, everything was brighter and more contrasty—it adapted to the dark—and, because the cameras were farther apart on the helmet than one’s eyes, it exaggerated the space between things, like in old 3-D movies where everything’s either scraping your forehead or way back in Row Z. Finally, just to complicate the experience, there was text hovering over everything, keyed to different hot points in the aircraft so that it could label the safety features and readouts and even the crew and passengers. And of course it had a scroll at the bottom running through all kinds of data that I couldn’t puzzle out. There was a little flight-plan map in the lower right, though, that was clear enough. It showed our course heading due north by northeast into Belize, crossing the Sarstoon River, that is, the southern border, at its mouth. Well, that seems straightforward, I thought. No problem.

  Was No Way still out there? I wondered again. Was he in trouble? I’d gotten him the hell into this thing. Kind of instinctively my right hand found the little keypad on my toddler bar and flicked at the buttons on it until I found an active audio. A different layer of sound cracked into the muffle-world, like I’d switched from mono to quad.

  “Hey, wait a second, hang on,” I said, but I didn’t hear my voice. I found the MIC button and turned that on too.

  I switched into Marena’s personal channel.

  “Marena?” I asked.

  “Jed, hi, you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said groggily.

  “You understanding stuff ?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. Is No Way still at the site?”

  Ana’s voice cut in on the channel.

  “All passengers stay off the air,” her voice said. Fuck you, too, I thought. Marena’s voice came on.

  “Jed, we can’t find him,” she said. “He may have just taken off.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said, but by the word not I could tell Ana had cut off my mike. I started to take my helmet off, got a taste of how dark and loud it was out there without it, and thought better of it and put it back on.
I focused on the little AUDIO MENU readout in the upper left of my virtual visual field, got the cursor on the pilot audio channel, and switched it on.

  “—for the treetops,” a voice said.

  “Okay, we’re all in, go go go,” Ana’s voice said. I felt myself falling, sucked through a crack in the seat, sinking into the Earthtoadess, as the Hippo lifted off in that sickeningly backward way with its rear end up like a whale’s flukes. There was a sudden increase in air pressure as the doors folded shut. Out past the chin-bubble window, foliage rushed downward and disappeared as we passed into a low raincloud. Water beads fanned out over the bubble. Marena’s voice came back on.

  “Jed, if you need anything, use channel four,” she said.

  I found it and clicked in.

  “No Way wouldn’t just take off,” I said.

  “Jed, he may have gotten cut off by that patrol,” Marena said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Anyway, he never really trusted us. Come on—”

  “I mean—”

  “We’ll call him when we get back,” she said. “This is not the time to argue about this.”

  We hit a pocket of thinner air and slid sideways. Protovomit welled up in the back of my throat. Beyond the windscreen the mist parted and space seemed to curve around us like we were inside a fisheye lens, a second layer of overcast expanding ahead and above. I tucked in my foot as a palm top almost brushed the bubble. We were lower than I’d thought. I looked over at Marena, but she just looked like the Fly, so I clicked into MENU—VIEWS, highlighted MONITOR CREW HI-HUDWAS—which meant helmet-integrated head-up-display and weapons aiming system—and hit WSO. It was like I’d switched heads; I was sitting in the shotgun seat, seeing exactly what the WSO was seeing. I guess the idea behind the eyephone setup was that any helmet could access the viewpoint of any other helmet, so the whole class could all look through the pilot’s eyes so you could all learn about piloting at once. Or the pilot could see what the tail observer saw, or whatever. A whole world of information floated over everything, vectors, velocities, pressure and temperature readings, windows SHOWING AIRSPEED 248 KH, ELEVATION ABOVE SEA LEVEL 381 M, ELEVATION ABOVE GROUND LEVEL 28.2 M, and scrolls repeating warnings like CLOSED TRANSMISSION ONLY, THIS IS NOT A FUNCTIONING DISPLAY, and even notices not to watch if you were epileptic. The view shifted front and I tried to turn my head back down, but of course nothing happened. I was at the dude’s visual mercy, and he was focusing on the false horizon drawn in blue against the clouds. I found the channel that gave me the WSO’s audio.

  “—no te preocupes amorcita, este es el caballo,” he was saying. It was the punch line of some joke.

  “Sí, pues”, a Guate-accented voice responded. It seemed like the WSO was rapping over the radio with the local controller like they were old pals. Maybe this was going to turn out all right. They must have fixed it with the Guates. Only, then, who’d barged in on us back at the site? Just some patrol that wasn’t in on the fix? Maybe they hadn’t wanted to put too many people on the payroll.

  We headed almost due east, down out of the high bluffs over the rapids, and then veered east by southeast as the Chisay bent into the Río Cahabón. A gray chalk cliff came up in front of us, and instead of hopping over it the pilot dug into a turn around it, staying low and over the center of the river, so that it felt more like we were snowboarding than flying. Foliage seemed to envelop us and then we were around it and into an expanding void.

  A different voice came onto the main communications channel. “Es este el vuelo 465-BA del Poptún?” the voice asked. “You are 465-BA out of Poptún?” The ID readout said he was calling from Guzmán Base, the Guate City military airport.

  “Correcto,” the WSO said.

  “żPerdone la molestia, mas el OC dice qué pasa?”

  “There’s some kind of a problem south of Chisec,” the WSO said in Spanish. “Corporal Olaquiaga at Poptún Base told us to respond.”

  “Okay. You seem to be off schedule today, though.”

  “No kidding, that’s why we’re going back.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. He’s pretending we’re a Guatemalan air force plane. Trying to fool the air traffic controllers for as long as possible. Which means we don’t have support within the Guate military.

  The Hippo climbed a thousand feet as we hopped over the source of the Oxec, between Cerro Tabol on the left and the west flank of the big Sierra de Santa Cruz on the right.

  “—that ID by us again?” the Guate voice was saying.

  “GAC 465 BA, 20380-821809-234874211,” the WSO said.

  “We have to check that,” the voice said, “otherwise they’ll give you trouble at the border.”

  “I’ll call them,” the WSO said.

  “Why don’t you just hang out where you are for a second? Slow down.”

  I flicked to Marena’s channel, channel 4, and beeped her. She flicked in. I told her the Guates sounded like they were getting antsy.

  “It’s probably not a problem,” she said. “They’re looking for flights coming in, not going out.”

  “—but why the heading?” another Guate voice was asking.

  “There’s a chance some of the terrorists may have left by truck earlier this morning,” the WSO lied. “He wants us to see if we can spot them at the border.”

  “Yeah, okay, but I have to account for all flights near the DMZ,” the controller said.

  “You should call Olaquiaga,” the WSO said. He started giving a string of call numbers.

  “He’s not at that base, you have to call the CO there.”

  “Can you patch us in?” the WSO asked.

  “You have to hail him with your own band.”

  “I’ll do it,” the WSO said.

  He cut the radio channel. The pilot—who I guess didn’t talk unless it was necessary—came on the ALL PAGE channel. That is, he was talking to us, not to anyone outside the Hippo. “Okay, be advised,” he said, “we are going to increase our airspeed.” Before he finished, my head stuck to the right wing of the seat and I could feel the loose skin of my cheeks creeping backward in the four or five extra Gs. He’d tucked in the rotors and fired the forward jets. Guess that blows our low profile, I thought.

  “Just hang out for a second,” the Guate controller’s voice said.

  Ana’s voice came onto the channel. “So what do you think?” she asked.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing,” the pilot’s voice said. “Let’s just stay on at this speed.” His right hand hovered delicately around the cyclic stick cradled between his legs.

  The Guates squawked in again.

  “465 BA, this is Guzmán Base CG, what are you doing?”

  We didn’t respond.

  “You have to get a new order or reverse heading and land here,” the controller said. “Sorry.”

  “No me quiebres el culo,” the WSO said. “Don’t bust my ass. You’re not telling us to head back.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Olaquiaga se va a cagar,” the WSO said. “Olaquiaga’s going to shit himself.”

  “Yo no te puedo asegurar que llegues salvo,” the voice said. “I can’t make it safe.” “Te van a chingar por el culo. Agarra la onda.” “They’ll fuck you up the ass over there. Come on, go with it.”

  The WSO paused.

  “Bueno, reconocido, Guzmán.”

  “Bueno,” the voice said. It clicked off.

  But we kept going. On my little map the flight plan had shifted. Now it went south down to the Lago de Izabal, and then out into the Mar de las Antillas, that is, the Caribbean Sea. I guessed the idea was to make them think we were heading back and then head out low over the water, where there wouldn’t be any large antiaircraft installations.

  The Guate controller dude came back on the radio.

  “465 Barcelona Antonio, aterrize en seco,” he said.

  “Somos responsables del seguridad del Corporal Olaquiaga,” the WSO lied.

  “No contestes. Pararse en seco desde ahora.”

  The WSO clicked off. “Okay, they’re not buying it,” he said on the PAGE channel.

  “465 BA, tomar tierra a Pop
tún,” the Guate controller screeked. “Esto es el último apelar.”

  “No puedo,” the WSO said. “Please call your commanding officer.” He clicked off and went back to PAGE. “Okay, that’s fucked,” he mumbled. “Let’s get a directive here.”

  The pilot slowed, leveled us off, and swung the nose around like he was going to head back inland.

  Marena’s voice came on. “What are you doing?”

  “Uh, they’ve basically got us cut off,” the WSO said.

  “We have to decide,” Ana said. “Either we let them land us or we go to Case B.”

  “Okay,” Marena said.

  “Okay what?” Ana’s voice asked. Pause. “It’s your call.” She spoke a little more clearly than usual, making sure the flight recorder got every word.