The cliff was twelve kilometers away, and she was down to three kilometers from the canyon floor. Water had become so dense, it was as if the hyperglider was surfing along inside the crest of some crazy airborne wave. The sun had risen above the volcano’s slopes, shining down into the top of the canyon. Suddenly it struck the chaotic foam whipping around the hyperglider, and the world flared into a thousand tattered sparkling rainbows, birthing and dying, clashing and colliding. Justine laughed in dazed appreciation at the astounding sight.
Three kilometers ahead of her, the gushing rivulets merged into a single writhing torrent two kilometers above the floor of Stakeout Canyon. That was a couple of kilometers from the cliff. The rocky constriction was at its narrowest, the pressure at its highest. There was only one way the churning river could escape.
Justine slid the hyperglider above the water, staring down on it in utter disbelief. The rainbows fizzled out abruptly. Rock slammed up into her vision to replace them, terrifyingly huge walls of it, stretching up halfway to heaven. Right in front of her, the flying river curved upward and began the long, impossible powerclimb to freedom as the entire storm went vertical. Blasting out an eternal thunderclap, the wind reached three hundred kilometers an hour. She knew she was yelling wordlessly, but couldn’t hear herself above the cacophony bombarding the cockpit.
The hyperglider was wrenched upward. G-force slammed Justine down into the seat again. Her knuckles grew white as she clenched the grip bars, fearful she’d lose contact with the i-spots. She wrestled the wing surfaces to obey in a desperate bid to maintain stability within the geysering air. Water rose with her, defying gravity to shoot up parallel to the cliff. Even with the hyperglider demanding her full devotion simply to survive the demented air currents, she spared the time, a couple of precious seconds, to stare at the incredible phenomenon. A waterfall going straight up.
At five kilometers altitude, the foaming sheet of water began to break apart again. The immense upright storm was beginning to spread wide as it reached the top of the canyon. Pressure and wind velocity were weakening. Throughout it all, Justine steered the hyperglider directly up the central track. Water and cloud cascaded away on either side as she burst out above the rock, two immense waves of vapor falling back down in swan-wing curves to crash onto the volcano’s lower slopes. Only in the center of the maelstrom did the wind keep howling, thrusting her forward and upward.
Mount Herculaneum’s gigantic bulk became visible below her, a desolate ground of shattered stone and saturated gravel extending for tens of kilometers around the top of the canyon. Gradually the harshness began to give way to the more welcome stains of ochre and avocado-green as the plants reasserted themselves. Tiny grasses rooted hard in crinkled fissures, hardy tropical moss welded to boulders. The storm continued to rage above them, seeking its escape to the quieter skies in the east by sliding around the slopes to the north and the south.
Justine modified the wing camber again, maintaining her speed, but rising ever higher. She was tracking a straight line between the canyon and the summit, never deviating to either side. Grassy meadows with sturdy scrub bushes passed below her now. Temperate lands, the plants lashed and cowed by the unremitting storms, but always flourishing. The twin cataracts of erupting water from the canyon were fifteen kilometers behind her, and the clouds were parting, pealing off right and left to find their own route around the volcano. Justine sought another path through the clear sunny sky ahead and above. Her speed was still colossal, sufficient to carry her well clear of the storm, but not quite enough for her ultimate goal. She began scanning the weather radar.
As if the volcano’s western midsection didn’t have enough to contend with, twisters were skittering over the rumpled slopes, a legacy of clear air turbulence from the storm. She could see them through the canopy, spindly strands of beige ephemera, whipping violently back and forth across the land. They came in all sizes, from mild spirals of dust, to brutal, dense vortices reaching kilometers in height. The onboard array plotted their courses, eliminating those too weak or too distant for her purpose. Not that any of them were truly predictable. This was where human intuition came in—and luck.
There was one, twenty kilometers ahead, and slightly more southward than she would have preferred. But it stood nearly five kilometers high, siphoning up car-sized boulders as it wove its erratic course. Justine banked around, lining the hyperglider’s nose on it. She acquired yet more speed as the craft sank closer to the ground. The wings and vertical stabilizer shrank inward, thickening as they went. Her eyes were mesmerized by the wild pirouettes of the twister’s base, leaving her hungry for a pattern, any sort of clue to which way it would swerve next.
The hyperglider’s descent became a fearsome dive. She swayed it in time with the base of the twister—judging, anticipating. Wings and stabilizer were down to nothing more than stubs, giving her minimal control. The ground was barely five hundred meters away. Ahead of her, the twister altered course again. She knew it would hold steady for perhaps a couple of seconds, and pushed the joystick forward, arrowing the craft straight at it. At the last moment she pulled up, watching the nose trace a sharp curve. The horizon fell away, leaving her with a sky that faded from glaring turquoise to fabulous deep indigo.
Then the hyperglider penetrated the twister. Enraged dust and whirling grit surrounded the fuselage, holding it tight. The wings and rear stabilizers bowed around, forming a stumpy propeller as the nose finished its arc to point straight up along the wavering unstable core of whirling air. Wing blades bit deep, spinning the fuselage and thrusting it up in one potent motion. Particles from sand up to alarmingly large stones hammered away on the fuselage. The multiple impacts sounded as if she were being hit by machine-gun fire. Structural stress levels quickly went to their amber alert levels. She flinched almost continually from the stones smacking against the cockpit transparency, not a foot from her face.
Despite that, this was the moment: the reason she was here. Not everybody got to this point. Some were smeared along the floor and walls of Stakeout Canyon. Others who’d actually managed to fly up the waterfall never found a twister, or messed up the entry. But her foreign memories had played true, giving her the skill. All she had to provide was the determination to back it up. That was what she’d come to this place for, finding out if she was still the same impetuous carefree person she remembered from her first life.
Motors whined loudly below her back, providing a counterspin to the forward fuselage. It helped enormously with stability, as well as holding the cockpit steady. That was the theory, anyway. She still felt dizzy and queasy, not that there was any visual reference to check if she was spinning. Virtual vision graphics showed a modest rotation that the onboard array was trying to compensate for. Acceleration was pushing her painfully deep into the seat.
It was only moments later when the hyperglider shot out of the top of the twister like a missile from its launch tube. Even though she’d only been inside for a few moments, her velocity had almost doubled. Fuselage motors strained again, halting the counterrotation. The hyperglider’s wings and rear stabilizer lengthened, this time taking on a more normal planform; straight narrow wings and a cruciform tail. There was very little atmosphere to affect them now, the hyperglider was sliding quickly and smoothly through the stratosphere. However, she did angle them so the trajectory bent slightly. The craft was chasing a simple ballistic curve, the apex of which would be nine kilometers above Mount Herculaneum’s summit.
She watched the pressure display digits wind down until it was registering an effective vacuum outside the fuselage. The sky had changed from blue to midnight-black. Stars shone strongly all around, while dazzlingly bright sunlight poured into the cockpit.
The contrast was astounding. From the pummeling terror of the storm to the utter silent serenity of space in a few seconds. Even though this environment was every bit as lethal to a human as the storm, she felt strangely secure up here. Her yammering heart began to subside. She
eased the seat straps away from her shoulders, and craned to get a good look outside.
She was almost level with the summit of Mount Herculaneum, and still rising. The volcano spread out below her, its lower slopes lost below the clouds. Far behind the hyperglider’s tail, the storm emerged from Stakeout Canyon to boil away furiously around the immense rock barrier. Twisting her head to starboard she could look down into Mount Titan’s crater. Right at the bottom of it was a demonic scarlet glow from the lava lake, partially obscured by webs of thick black smoke. Broad tendrils waved upward, thinning out as they reached the lip to disperse into a haze that drizzled flaky gray ash across the upper slopes. She was mildly disappointed it wasn’t in full eruption; locals working as crew for the caravan had enthused about Mount Doom (as they called it, only half jokingly) in full flow.
Eight and a half kilometers above the summit of Mount Herculaneum, the hyperglider had reached the top of its arc. Its trajectory was flattening out as Far Away’s low gravity slowly began to reassert itself. The planet’s horizon rose into view beyond the nose. A crisp white curve against the black of space. Directly below her were the twin caldera, two vast indentations in a drab russet plain of solidified lava waves and broken clinker.
Justine’s radio picked up a few scattered words, heavy with blasts of static, from the expeditions trekking over the airless surface. Hiking trips to the top of Herculaneum were another of Far Away’s principal tourist attractions. It wasn’t difficult, the slopes weren’t particularly steep, and the low gravity gave offworld visitors an easy time of it. But the last half had to be covered in pressure suits; and the only real view, sensational though it was, came from Aphrodite’s Seat, the clifftops just below the caldera plateau. Anyone wanting to walk to the actual highest point, an unimpressive mound on the wall of the northern crater, faced a long dreary slog across a lunar-style landscape to reach it.
With the hyperglider’s nose now dipping slightly, Far Away filled most of the universe to the east of the volcano. From her supreme vantage point, Justine could see the Dessault Mountains stretching away ahead and southward. Small sharp pinnacles stabbed up through the gentle whirl of clouds. They guarded the high desert south of the equator, a cold land almost devoid of cloud. Over to the east she could see a smear of deep greens, where the steppes began their long roll toward the North Sea and Armstrong City.
The horizon’s pronounced curve presented the illusion that she was seeing an entire hemisphere of the planet, like some ancient god of myth gazing down on Earth. Although Far Away lacked the softer textures granted to the old gods of Mount Olympus. The white clouds covered a graded spectrum of miserable browns and grays. Despite close to two centuries of human endeavor, the planet’s land surface was nowhere near recovered from the mammoth, and utterly lethal, solar flare that had called people here. Tough, independent-minded settlers had pushed out from Armstrong City, planting their seeds and spraying energetic, wholesome soil bacteria across the empty miles of dusty sand, but the biosphere remained tenuous, its progress toward full planetary enrichment slow. So much was still desert or blasted earth; very, very little of the planet’s original flora and fauna had survived the radiation. The greenery she could see was alien to this place, invaders colonizing a near-dead world.
She soared silently and smoothly over the towering cliffs of Aphrodite’s Seat that guarded the eastern approach to Herculaneum’s summit. Many kilometers below them was the glacier ring that encircled the entire volcano, extending hundreds of meters across the bare rock. Sunlight glinted from the gritty fractured ice, producing a halolike aura at the upper limit of the atmosphere. Sheltering beneath the glare were the alpine forests, gene-modified Earth pines that had been introduced here as a beacon of life and color that could be seen for hundreds of kilometers. She smiled down on them, as she would any old friend, grateful for the comfort of familiarity that they brought.
Ghostly waves of blue and green began to shimmer across the weather radar screen as the hyperglider sank back into the upper atmosphere, showing her the pressure building outside the fuselage. Justine extended the wings again, shaping them into a broad delta. After a while, the cockpit began to tremble as the leading edges bit deeper and deeper into the air. Aerodynamic forces started to take over from the ballistic impetus.
Justine slowly shook off the dreamy lethargy that had captured her during the flight over the volcano. Practical decisions had to be made; from this altitude she could easily coast along for four or five hundred kilometers, putting her well clear of the volcano. But ahead, that would put her into the Dessault Mountains; while north and south would take her back into the divided wings of the storm. There was also distance to consider, the farther she flew now, the longer it would take the caravan to recover her. She altered the hyperglider’s pitch, putting the nose up so the air would start to brake her speed. Her rate of descent increased, which she balanced against the slope below, maintaining the same height above the ground. Clouds flashed around her, ablaze with bright monochrome light, as she passed through the level of the glacier ring. When the hyperglider fell out of their base she was above the pine forests. She could see grasslands stretching out beyond them. Easy enough to land on, but they were still high. It would be cold.
The grasslands grew more lush and verdant as she flew on. Swirls of wind from the lower slopes began to affect the hyperglider, shaking it with growing strength. Bushes and trees speckled the grasses, building swiftly to a dense tropical rainforest that formed an unbroken skirt around the eastern base of the volcano. Looking down, she could see the small black dots of birds flitting amid the treetops. She was already eight hundred kilometers from where she’d started, and that was in a direct line. The caravan would have to go all the way around Mount Zeus before it even reached Herculaneum. Justine sighed, and pushed the hyperglider down toward the rainforest canopy.
This close, it wasn’t as dense as she’d thought. There were clear swaths, shallow valleys with fast silver streams that had hardly any trees at all, lines of dangerous crags. Several times she saw animals racing across open spaces. The Commonwealth Council’s biosphere revitalization project had certainly been successful here.
The radar switched to ground-mapping mode. Justine was searching for a reasonable patch of ground to land on. Although, in extremis, the hyperglider could come down in a patch barely a hundred meters long, she didn’t fancy trying that. Fortunately, the scans revealed a straightish stretch three kilometers ahead and to the north. She brought the hyperglider’s nose around, lining it up. The clear ground was easily visible amid the trees. It looked like there was a clump of rock a third of the way along. Nothing too serious. When she switched the radar to a higher resolution, it showed a narrow, shallow gully running across one end of the clear ground. She started her prelanding flare, shrinking the wings in again, enhancing the camber. The edge of the long clearing rushed toward her. Three of her console display screens distorted into a hash of random color.
“Shit!”
Her e-butler was slow to respond, reporting several processors dropping out of the onboard array, even her inserts were degraded.
“What’s happening?” she demanded. Her virtual hands flickered and vanished.
A gust of wind slewed the hyperglider to starboard. She groaned in dismay as the cockpit tilted. The console screen displays were making no sense.
“Multiple electronic system failure,” the e-butler said. “Compensating to restore core function.” Hands wavered back into her virtual vision. “You have control.”
Justine automatically countered the dangerous roll with a simple wing twist. The little craft responded sluggishly, forcing her to accentuate the maneuver. When she glanced up from the console she cursed. She was already over the clear ground, and losing altitude fast. All her display screens had righted themselves. Control surface responses were instantaneous again.
She initiated the landing sequence. The wings rotated through almost ninety degrees, braking the last of th
e hyperglider’s speed. It began to sink as if it were made from lead. Twenty meters from the ground, and with almost no forward motion at all, she altered the wings again. They shot out into huge, thin concave triangles, generating as much lift as possible from her stall speed. The landing strut wheels touched and rebounded. Then she was bouncing over the rough terrain for forty meters before the wheels finally halted. The wings and stabilizer shrank back into their buds.
Justine let out a huge breath of relief. The cockpit canopy hissed as the seal disengaged, and it hinged upward. Plyplastic flowed away from her hands, and she let go of the grip bars. She released her helmet catches, and took it off. A somewhat nervous laugh escaped her lips as she shook her sweaty hair out. All the hyperglider’s electronic systems were back on-line.
The craft had come to rest on a slight incline in grass and some purple leaf plants that were long enough to brush the bottom of the fuselage. A stream burbled away, twenty meters to her left. Hot humid air was already making her perspire. Birds were crying overhead. The surrounding wall of the rainforest was draped in thick ropes of vine that were sprouting a million tiny lavender flowers.
Justine clambered over the side of the cockpit and dropped to the ground in an easy low-gravity curve. Only then did the enormity of what she’d done hit her. Both legs gave way, and she fell to her knees. Tears blinded her eyes, and she was laughing and crying at the same time, while her shoulders shook uncontrollably.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, I did it,” she said, sobbing. “I did it I did it, I goddamn did it.” The laughter was turning hysterical. She gripped some of the grass strands and made an attempt to calm herself. It had been a long time since she had given in to raw emotion like this, a sure sign of youthfulness.
Her breathing steadied, and she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, smudging away the tears. She climbed to her feet, careful not to make sudden moves. In this gravity her inertia played havoc with all normal motions. A few birds were flapping about overhead, but that was about the only motion. The sun shone down, making her squint. Its heat made the skin on her face tingle. And the humidity!
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 12