He frowned, puzzled. Then his frown cleared. “Of course. They can jump all by themselves. I forgot.” He eased the car forward as the one in front of them, a dark green late model Mercedes, started to rumble as the particle accelerator wound up. “Your work for the agency must be interesting.”
“It is,” Mariana agreed. “I have one of the best jobs in the world.”
He leaned forward, frowning, and ran through the jump coordinates. “That’s odd,” he muttered and punched in the coordinates again. They drew level with the sentry and the computer gave a little chirp as it connected with the sentry and exchanged information.
Ahead of them, the Mercedes tore down the strip, its stubby wings extending. As the wings lifted the car, the main thrust kicked in. With a roar, the Mercedes climbed into the air on a steepening arc, growing smaller with a speed that always astonished Mariana.
“We’ll be into the upper atmosphere for this one,” Laszlo said. “I’m going to seal the cabin.”
There was a faint hiss of air and the muffled sensation that came from being enclosed in a vacuum bubble. The vacuum shielded them from nearly all external noise.
The sentry switched to green.
“Ready?” Laszlo asked.
She nodded and drew in a deep breath.
Laszlo initiated the jump and the car leapt forward, pressing them into their seats. It was just as well human control wasn’t needed for the jumps—they would have found it next to impossible to fight the g-force and lift their arms.
The limousine lifted its nose and climbed into the air. Mariana could feel the vibrations through her seat, created by the roaring exhaust that gave them their lift. The roar, the sense of power thrusting them up into the sky, clawing for altitude, was unique. Not even the cable cars that rose higher than the atmosphere—even higher than they were climbing—gave this sense of sheer energy and strength.
Slowly, the effort to climb diminished. The sky grew darker around them, shifting through some of the most beautiful indigos and blues that Mariana had ever seen. The atmosphere was thinning, letting the absolute black of space peer through. Her arms and feet shifted, as gravity diminished.
“How are you with weightlessness?” Laszlo asked. “Do you want artificial gravity?”
Mariana shook her head. “We’re strapped in and it’s only a few minutes.” Her hands weren’t quite lifting off the armrests yet, because they were still climbing. As they reached the apex, the roar faded to almost nothing and she could feel her body lift and push against the belts.
She drew in a breath, delight filling her. Earth laid under and ahead of them, a milky dark blue glow. The curvature of the globe was a foggy arc, thanks to the atmosphere, but that made it look powerful and mysterious. “It looks so beautiful,” she whispered.
“Evergreen is stunning,” Laszlo said, “but nothing compares to Earth.”
The dashboard lights flickered. Mariana’s heart, already working hard, gave an extra heavy beat. “Did you see that?”
Laszlo reached out to the computer screen but before his fingertips could touch it, it went blank. Every light in the dashboard went out, leaving them in darkness, relieved only by the dim glow of the world below them.
“Du Hurensohn!” Laszlo swore.
The screen flickered and all the indicators and courtesy lights came back on. Data streamed across the screen, too fast to read.
“It’s resetting itself,” Mariana breathed. This time her heart squeezed with genuine fear. “Has our parabola been lost? The landing beacon?”
Laszlo settled into his seat squarely and reached for the manual controls, curling his fingers around the wheel. “We have to assume it’s gone,” he said flatly. “You work on getting the computer up.”
“And you?” she asked, shifting in her seat so that she was facing the computer more directly. Her arm brushed his, for she was almost perched on the center console.
“I’m going to have to dead stick this down to the ground if the computer has lost the beacon or the parabola.” He glanced at her and gave her a stiff smile. “Put your head out the window and tell me when you see Brazil.”
Mariana swallowed. “You’re joking, of course,” she said as steadily as she could.
“Just a bit. We’re going to have to eyeball our way down, though. When we get closer to the ground, I’ll take the first landing strip we spot.”
“Not if I get this thing up and running again,” she said. The screen was giving status updates. “It’s firing up all the flight modules.”
“Force the navigation routine to boot first,” Laszlo said.
“I already have.” She bit her lip, waiting for the screen to report that navigation was operational. “How long before we start diving?”
“Look,” Laszlo said softly.
She looked up. The curve of the earth was rising over them.
“Too late,” Laszlo added. “We’re already descending. Leave the computer be and strap in.” He jabbed at the useless screen. “I’m taking it off line. I don’t want it trying to override me half-way down.”
Mariana tightened her seatbelts, struggling against g-force and inertia. While she fought with the fastenings, she tried to kill off her worry. All jump car drivers had to navigate a dead car down to the ground as part of their license examination. Every year there were genuine emergencies when cars lost their way and had to land wherever they could. Very few of those incidences ended up badly, unless the driver panicked.
She glanced at Laszlo. He looked like he was a million miles away from panic, although his face was tight with concentration, the high cheekbones drawn. His jaw was square and tight.
Briefly, she considered calling the agency, or reaching out to whatever emergency service the computer could connect with, but the screen was still running through re-initialization procedures. Phone facilities would be one of the last applications it would work on. She had told it to concentrate on navigation and safety routines and it was obeying.
The slope and rate of their descent increased and now the air was getting thicker, biting at the wings and hissing across the streamlined body of the car.
Laszlo was studying the way ahead of them. There was no cloud cover, which was a small piece of luck. But there was no earth beneath them either. Just the deeper blue of ocean.
“The Atlantic beneath us,” she said.
“Brazil is ahead.” Laszlo’s voice was still soft. Controlled. “The car corrected its direction on the climb up, so we’ll arrive on the right continent. We just have to spot where we arrive.”
Mariana looked at the rolling horizon ahead of them. Was there a hint of brown or green? Or was it just wishful thinking?
But slowly, as their descent became a shrieking subsonic cry, the edge of a landmass defined itself among wisps of cloud and haze. She measured how far it was from them, then glanced at the altimeter. “It’s going to be close.”
“Close, I can deal with,” Laszlo replied. “I’m going to try and bring the nose up, see if we can glide for a bit. It’ll give us more time to see a strip once we’re over land.” He gripped the wheel harder and strained to draw it toward him, which would level out the car and slow down their rate of decent. There would be no power assist yet. He was using pure strength to physically haul the nose of the car up higher and he was fighting the powerful airstream, gravity and inertia to do it.
“Even a couple of degrees….” he growled as he hauled. Then he rammed his boot up against the dash, regardless of what controls he was pushing against. He threw more of his bodyweight and muscle power into fighting the descent.
“Let me help,” Mariana said, as she reached for the buckles on her belts.
“No. I need you to watch ahead. The earlier you can spot a strip the better.”
“You really weren’t joking about looking for Brazil, were you?”
“Brazil, no problem. I think Macapá...is probably...exceeding expectations.” He spoke shortly, breathlessly, for he was putting everything he had into liftin
g the nose, even a little. “You might also...watch out around us. We’re way out of our lane now. There could be anything...coming at us.”
Mariana drew in a shaky breath. “Oh, lordy,” she murmured as she looked around the sky in all directions. The air was clear. No approaching dots, no craft, no jump cars. They weren’t high enough to worry about satellites. Then she gripped Laszlo’s arm and pointed with her other hand. “Look! That line snaking up into the air! That’s the beanstalk, isn’t it?”
The cable that rose from the ground up into the outer atmosphere looked like a thin pencil line, dark against the greyish air. “We’re miles away,” she added. They weren’t even pointing in that general direction.
Laszlo shook his head. “Forget about it. Look for a strip.”
“Or something flat and open?” she suggested.
“In Brazil?” He shook his head again. “You’ve never been to Brazil,” he accused, but didn’t explain any farther. Mariana didn’t pester him with more questions. Instead, she looked ahead, trying to identify landmarks. It would be difficult to spot a landing strip unless they were right over it, she realized, for a strip would be a featureless, flat line on the earth, invisible except when directly above it.
She realized she was kneading her fingers and knuckles and deliberately put her hands back on the armrests and squeezed them to keep her hands still. She watched the coastline creep closer and enlarge as they dropped lower.
When she realized that the little dot she was looking at on the edge of the coast wasn’t a pebble, but an entire peninsula, she quickly readjusted to the scale. If that was a peninsula, then the dark green that she had thought was mold was vegetation. The coast, she realized, was rocky, thick with jungle and probably inaccessible. Of course a flat open surface wouldn’t just appear for them. Brazil was covered in jungle, everywhere people hadn’t carved into it to build their towns and cities.
Now she had a sense of their height and speed relative to the land, ahead, Mariana could see they were going to be very low by the time they were over it. It wouldn’t give her any time at all to spot a strip.
She considered the pale, thin rinds on the edge of the landline. They were beaches and coves. “What about a beach?”
Laszlo glanced at her quickly. He was still fighting the controls, trying to bring the nose up out of their uncontrolled dive. He considered her suggestion for a few seconds. “If you find one long enough, I’ll take it,” he decided. “I’ll try to angle the nose around so we’re flying down the coast. You can help, this time. Grab the wheel and pull it toward you.”
Easier said than done. Mariana curled her hands around the wheel just beneath his right hand and pulled. Exactly nothing happened.
“Keep pulling,” he said breathlessly. “It’ll turn easier than it will pull up.”
Easier was relative. It was like tugging on a stick buried in dried concrete. But after sixty seconds, she realized that the coastline had altered its angle. “It’s working!” she breathed and hauled even harder on the wheel. For another ninety seconds they worked to bring the car around, at the same time Laszlo fought for more altitude.
Mariana looked ahead. The coastline was running parallel with them, now, just to the left.
“There—that’s long. It’s almost a straight cove.” She pointed.
Laszlo looked. “It’ll do.” He stopped fighting the wheel and instead used it to minutely adjust their line of approach. They were fully gliding now and still descending. The pale crescent ahead grew larger, wider and longer.
“Hold on,” he snapped.
Trees whipped past on Mariana’s right, telling her how fast they were really going. She braced herself as the car dropped lower and lower…then brushed the sand lightly and rose again as the wings provided lift.
“See if the computer can retract the wings,” Laszlo said.
She worked her way through the menu quickly and used the command override to retract the wings. There was a bump and the sound of hydraulics. The car abruptly dropped a foot or two. Sand hissed under the wheels. They were thrown forward as the soft sand snagged the tires, slowing them more effectively than brakes. The left hand wheels were running on the moist sand just above the waterline, but the right wheels were in the dry stuff. The car hooked to the right like it was turning on a pivot.
Mariana gulped back her cry and threw up her hands.
The car came to an abrupt halt. The engine quit with a hiss and silence fell.
She straightened up in her seat.
“Are you hurt?” Laszlo asked, his hand resting on hers.
She shook her head. “Winded,” she confessed, for the belts had squashed her chest and compressed her lungs, making breathing difficult.
He rested his head back against the seat and blew out his breath. “Drunks, fools, children…and us,” he muttered.
“You were brilliant,” Mariana told him. “You saved us both.”
He turned his head against the headrest to look at her and smiled grimly. “Wait until we’re back in civilization before you say that.”
“It could have gone very badly for us,” Mariana countered. “But we’re down in one piece. The rest is just details.”
Chapter Six
Somewhere in Brazil…maybe, 2265 A.D.
Twelve hours later, Mariana knew that the details might very well be the death of both of them. She stared at the short man standing in front of them, wishing mightily that she had thought to learn even a rudimentary Portuguese vocabulary, for that was all he spoke. He was speaking it at a great rate.
It would be fair to say he was madder than a bee in a bottle and that was a problem because as far as Mariana could guess, this man was the head of the village they stood in the middle of.
Twelve hours before, when they had eased themselves stiffly out of the car and onto the hot sand, Laszlo had started digging through the storage compartments, looking for anything useful. The computer was quite dead. Retracting the wings had been its swan song. Sending a message for help via the car was out of the question.
“We’ll have to walk,” Mariana summarized after failing to get a glimmer of life out of the computer. She began to slog through the soft, dry sand toward the tree line.
“Where are you going?” Laszlo demanded.
“To look for a path. I don’t think the limousine comes with a machete.” She pointed to the small pile of objects he was pulling out of the compartments. “There will be a path somewhere along the beach. A path means we don’t have to cut our way through the jungle. It will also lead somewhere. Once we find other people, then we can figure out how to get to Macapá.”
Laszlo considered that for a moment, his green eyes frank and assessing. “See if you can find a creek or some source of fresh water, while you’re scouting. We’re not going to freeze here, but we’ll want water sooner than later. I’ll see what we can cobble together from this lot.” He nudged the pile with his boot.
Mariana had found the creek and the path together. They emerged from the jungle through a break in the shallow cliffs that started just behind the tree line. It made sense that any path would use the cut through the cliffs.
She had returned to the car, to find that Laszlo had uncovered an empty champagne bottle tucked in the dark corner of one of the side cabin compartments. “A remnant of a party. If this is the way the rental company cleans their cars, it’s no wonder the damn thing fritzed on us halfway through the jump.” His scowl was thunderous. “God knows what the computer maintenance was like…clearly, it wasn’t good enough.”
“It could have been worse,” Mariana pointed out. “The engine could have quit halfway up the climb. The wings could have fallen off.”
He grinned at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the wings falling off a car. Sorry, I’m grousing. It’s sheer bloody luck we’re both standing here. But now I know we’re here and not in Macapá because some idiot was too lazy to take care of the car. They’re going to hear from me about this. In capital
letters.”
Mariana nodded. “And they deserve it,” she agreed, “but I don’t think it was luck that got us through at all. Let’s get to Macapá first. Then I’ll hold your jacket while you beat the crap out of them, okay?”
Laszlo laughed shortly. His mood became sunnier after that and he followed her back up the beach to the creek. He carried the bottle, the only remotely useful item in the entire car.
Mariana made a mental note to look into what equipment and survival gear was stored in the agency cars, when she got back to the villa. Vampires were virtually indestructible but they weren’t the ones who used the cars.
The path followed the creek for two miles into the jungle. The air grew hot and humid once they were away from the beach and the small breeze there. It had been just after one in the afternoon, local time, when they had landed on the beach for Macapá was four hours behind Rome. The sun was high overhead and the air was still and thick.
The path was wide enough for two people to walk side by side, but Laszlo told Mariana to stay behind him. He was still carrying the bottle and it would make a good club if they needed it.
Once the path turned away from the creek, Laszlo filled the bottle one last time and they headed north along the path. It was in the wrong direction to the one they wanted to go, but even Mariana knew enough about survival in the jungle to know that wandering off the used by-way was the equivalent of committing suicide.
She slapped at bugs that feasted on her exposed skin and kept silently walking behind Laszlo. The path meant civilization of a sort. They just had to find people. Any people.
After four hours, the path spilled out onto a highway and they halted by the dark tarmac, staring at the unexpected sight. A freshly-painted yellow line ran decisively along its middle, proving it was a viable road.
Mariana looked at Laszlo. “Any idea where we are?”
He shook his head. “Let’s find some shade and sit a while. See who comes along.”
They settled under a wide-leafed tree that Mariana didn’t recognize and shared the water while they listened to the sounds of the jungle. It was alive with beasts and birds.
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