House of the Sun s-17

by Nigel D Findley

  So I crammed my fears way down deep into the back of my brain, and I kept tight rein on my impulses. No heavy security armor or miniguns for this kid. I picked out a nice, familiar set of Level 3 form-fitting body armor, and-okay, maybe I overreached myself on this one-an Ares high-velocity assault fire. As an afterthought, I picked myself out a nice assault vest-basically, a harness with the sole purpose of carrying an obscene number of spare ammo clips- and I was ready.

  When I came out of the armory, my "troops" were waiting for me: Pohaku, Kono, and eight hoop-kicking military types.

  Well, okay, apparently they weren't my troops. When I stumbled out, weighed down with lethal ordnance and feeling like a cheap knockoff of Slade the Sniper, they didn't spare me so much as a glance. Instead, their attention seemed focused entirely on Pohaku. For a moment I considered bitching about it, but then my better judgment overrode the testosterone overload the armory seemed to have caused. What the frag did I know about leading troops? Sweet frag all, that's what. Much better to leave it to someone who at least thought he was qualified.

  Pohaku's expression told me he shared my viewpoint. He spared the time to shoot me a nasty sneer, then turned to my "troops" and snapped, "E hele!" The fire-team took off at double-time, with Pohaku picking up the rear. Kono was there, too, and she gave me what could have been a smile of sympathy. But then she was double-timing it after the combat troops as well.

  Akaku'akanene was still hanging back, waiting for me. The shaman hadn't slapped on any armor or picked up any weaponry; apparently, she was content with her shapeless sack of a dress. She turned to me and gave me a gap-toothed smile.

  Wonderful. Moral support from someone who talked to geese. I turned and jogged after the receding backs of me military types.

  Out onto the apron we went, and I saw my contingent piling aboard a Merlin, a tilt-winged VTOL built along the same lines as a Federated-Boeing Commuter, but much smaller. I glanced back over my shoulder. Akaku'akanene was bringing up the rear, but at her own casual pace. The Merlin was already spooling up its engines, and I considered yelling something to hurry the old scag up…

  And that's when I froze in my tracks. Not my idea-every goddamn muscle in my body seized up on me at once. I teetered for a moment on one foot, then started to overbalance as the vulcanized composite of the apron began to swing up toward my face.

  In that instant my muscles unlocked again, and I did the kind of broad, lurching recovery that you expect from circus clowns. Cursing under my breath, I looked around me, knowing what I'd see.

  There he was, just as I expected. Quinn Harlech, or whatever the frag his name was. He was cloaked in shadow… even though the section of the apron he stood on was well lit. He was wearing some kind of military uniform, but a couple of decades out of date. If his grin had been any broader he'd have swallowed his pointy ears as he swaggered up to me.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. Akaku'akanene was a few meters behind me, looking madder than a wet cat. She was frozen in midstride, precariously balanced on the toe of one foot and the heel of another. She could still breathe, but she didn't have any fine muscular control of her throat or mouth-I knew that because her attempts to curse and bitch came out like, "Aaaaargh, aaaargh!"

  Quinn Harlech took a step toward me, and instinctively I tried to bring my shiny spanking new Ares HVAR to bear. No luck. I could still breathe-thank the spirits for major favors-and I could still keep my balance, but I couldn't zero the assault rifle on the elf's chest. Momentarily, I considered butt-stroking him across the face with the rifle stock… and instantly the muscles I'd need for that move seized up on me, too.

  "All right, already." I snarled. "What?"

  Harlech smiled, but it wasn't the self-confident expression I remembered from our last encounter. If anything, he looked like some teenager trying to explain to his dad how he'd "creased" the family 3220 ZX. "Gerelan-o ti-makkalos-ha, goro," he said. "Forgive my stupidity, Mr. Montgomery." He shook his head. "I misunderstood. It's been long"-he frowned-"very long, since I mistook matters so badly."

  Again I tried to bring my rifle into line. Not so much because I wanted to cut him down, but just to see if I could.

  I couldn't.

  "What the frag are you talking about, you slot?" I demanded.

  Harlech shrugged uncomfortably. "I misjudged you, Mr. Montgomery," he said. "I thought you were a destabilizing influence. Instead, you were striving to stabilize the situation. I misinterpreted your place in the zarien. Do you understand?"

  "Actually… no," I told him.

  "I was striving to eliminate a force that supported the se-curo ja-rine" he said earnestly. "The Chaos. That's what I thought you were. In fact, my actions might well have precipitated the se-curo ja I was trying to prevent. Will you forgive me, goro?"

  I shook my head slowly. "Maybe," I said. "If I ever understand what the fragging hell you're talking about."

  "Let me help put things right." Harlech reached out toward me, a gesture of pleading. "I can, you know. Let me come with you."

  And that's when I laughed. "You've got to be farcing me."

  His monoblade-sharp blue eyes flashed. "I know things you'll never know, Mr. Montgomery," he said softly, insinuatingly. "Do things you'll never be able to do. Things you can't succeed without."

  "Then I'm fragged, aren't I?" I shot back, my voice harsh. "I'd rather French-kiss a fragging juggernaut than trust you, slot."

  I could feel the elf's sudden anger, like a static charge in the air around me. But then I felt him willfully suppress it. "At least let me accompany you," he said reasonably, gesturing toward the Merlin.

  "Frag you," I told him. "You try to get on that bird, I'll have you cut down in your tracks."

  Harlech lowered his head, glaring up at me from beneath his dark brows. In that moment I felt real fear. "Do you really think you can do that?" he whispered.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Akaku'akanene, still struggling against the magical control immobilizing her. "Maybe not, Quinn," I said conversationally. "But what do you want to bet? Are you willing to bet your life that you can control me and the soldier-boys on that bird… and keep her from tearing your liver out?" I gestured with my chin toward the Nene shaman. "Do you want to bet on that, Quinn?"

  I watched as the elf's eyes narrowed, and my gut churned with the conviction mat he could manage it. But men his frown eased, and he shrugged lightly. "A point to you, my friend," he said. "But you will find it difficult to keep me away from Haleakala, you know. I will be seeing you again."

  Harlech turned away, his old-style camouflage coat flaring behind him like an abbreviated cloak. Again-out of a sense of completion, if nothing else-I tried to bring my assault rifle to bear.

  My muscles worked this time, for a wonder. My finger touched the trigger, the sighting laser burned, a ruby firefly tracked across to rest on Harlech's spine…

  And in that instant he changed, momentarily shifting into an extended prismatic after-image. An instant later, he was gone as if he'd never been.

  With an effort I backed off on me trigger, a gram or two before it broke. Something told me that hosing down a Hawai'i National Guard base in the middle of the night wouldn't be the smartest thing I'd ever done.

  24

  Pohaku, Kono, and the military team were looking a tad edgy by the time I climbed aboard the Merlin, but I wasn't about to explain to them what had kept me. For that matter, Akaku'akanene was acting a mite testy, too, but I wasn't really in the mood to talk to her either.

  The Merlin was set up as your standard troop carrier, with basic sling seats bolted to the fuselage on both sides, facing inward. Clambering up the ladder, I saw one empty seat, up forward-beside Alana Kono, as a bonus-so I excused my way past the troops and slumped down into the kevlar fabric. I buckled up the four-point harness and then stashed the assault rifle under my feet, hooking its sling onto a retention bolt. In my peripheral vision I saw Akaku'akanene giving me a solid dose of stink-eye as she buckled
in toward the tail of the plane, but I made sure not to make eye contact.

  Someone outside folded up the ladder, before slamming and locking the hatch. The engines ran up, a howling turbine shriek that came right through the fuselage and drove into my ears like icepicks. The Merlin bobbled and shook, and men lifted up, up and away.

  I'd ridden in Merlins and their ilk before, of course; who hasn't? So I wasn't expecting any problems with motion sickness. Of course, what I was familiar with was the civilian configuration of the tilt-wing bird, with comfortable, forward-facing seats and lots of windows. The military configuration? It sported the most uncomfortable seats I've ever gone a long way to avoid, and no windows whatsoever.

  No windows. Ever think about what that means? A tilt-wing VTOL like a Federated-Boeing Commuter or a Merlin takes off and climbs like a helicopter… which means that it generally takes a serious nose-down pitch when it's climbing out. So how does the old sensorium interpret mat? The floor's horizontal, chummer-that's what the eyes and the brain say, because floors are always horizontal. But the inner ear says the floor's at least 20 degrees off horizontal. It's that mismatch between what your brain knows and what your inner ear's saying that causes serious motion sickness. Typically the cure is to look out the window and get a reality check from the horizon…

  No windows in a military transport, chummer. I was starting to feel real green around the gills when Alana Kono came to my rescue. At first I thought she was just massaging the base of my skull behind my ear, but then she removed her finger and I realized she'd slapped one of those neoscopolamine narco-patches onto my scalp over a major artery. I turned to thank her… and the neoscope in the patch had already kicked in enough to turn my grateful smile into a bedroom leer. The female gillette had the courtesy to blush and turn away.

  I was really glad for the narco-patch as the Merlin pivoted its wings to shift from VTOL to forward flight. The turbulence was bad enough; even worse, though, was the knowledge that tilt-wings like Merlins are very vulnerable to engine cutout during the pivot process. If the engines stall out men, there's nothing to save you. Not gliding-there's no lift from the wing in the transition aspect-and not autorotation-ditto for the rotors/airscrews. Apparently, though, my narco-patch was dosed up with so much don't-worry juice that I could observe the tilt-transition as "just one of those things."

  Suddenly I realized something and turned to Alana Kono. "You know," I said somewhat sheepishly, "I don't have a fragging clue where Haleakala is."

  That earned me a sneer from Pohaku-no fragging surprise there-and another grin from Kono. From inside her armored jacket she pulled out a palmtop, flipped open the screen, and worked for a moment with the stylus. Then she handed it over to me. "Here," she said, pointing to the map.

  Okay, there was the Hawai'ian island chain, traced out in plasma-red on the flatscreen. Not that it helped me much. "And Honolulu is…?" I mumbled.

  "Here." She touched the map, and one of the islands-the second major island from the northwest end of the chain- burned brighter. "That's Oahu. And this"-another touch with the stylus, and an island that looked something like an asymmetrical dumbbell glowed in double intensity-"is Maui, see? Haleakala's here." She stabbed at me center of the larger, lower "lobe" of the island.

  "And that's… about how far?"

  She shrugged. 'Two hundred klicks, maybe?" She nudged me gently with an elbow. "Not long."

  I nodded glumly. Neoscope or not, my guts would be glad to get out of this bird, but my mind would have been a lot happier to know what was waiting for us when we got there.

  Through the thin skin of the fuselage, I could hear the Merlin's twin engines straining. We still seemed to be climbing-at least, my inner ears were convinced we still had a slight nose-up pitch-but the engines didn't seem to like it in the slightest. Why? I wondered grimly. Headwinds? There'd been clouds building up to the southeast when I'd last looked out the window at New Foster Tower, hadn't there? And according to Kono's map, that was the direction we were heading. Into the teeth of a storm? I closed my eyes and tried to hear if there was rain hitting the airframe, but the tortured howling of the engines made it impossible.

  Just fragging great, I thought. Couldn't King Kam have gotten us a bird with two good engines? Then I remembered something I'd scanned on the flight over to the islands, oh so long ago now. Haleakala was a big fragger of a mountain, wasn't it? Three thousand meters or something like that. No wonder the Merlin didn't sound too happy. It was intended for low-altitude short hops, or so somebody had told me once. It must be a cast-iron bitch for the little bird to claw its way up to this kind of altitude. No wonder the engines sounded like souls in torment. I sat back and sighed. I wasn't really sure whether that made me feel any better or not.

  I tried to disconnect my brain, then, to give it something else to think about, anything, so it couldn't worry about the engines and the storm. Haleakala, I thought. "House of the Sun." I remembered that's what the name meant from my database scan during the flight to Hawai'i. Hale-"house." A-"of." Ka-"the." La-"sun." Simple, neh?

  Interesting, too. It had stuck in my mind, like so many little bits of irrelevant trivia, because it had prompted a question when I'd first noted it. The Hawai'ian word for sun was La. And wasn't the ancient Egyptian word for sun Ral La-Ra. Pretty fragging similar, particularly if you included the possibility of "phonetic drift." Was it just coincidence?

  After all, there weren't that many fragging single-syllable words that the human throat could pronounce, were there? Or was there more to it than that?

  I wondered suddenly if Chantal Monot could answer that one. Chantal, with her whacked-out ideas about Lemuria and sunken continents, and her Andrew Annen-something paintings. (Now that I thought about it, didn't some of them have pyramids in them? Pyramids on the floor of a tropical ocean…)

  With a snort I shook my head and forced away all those flaky imaginings. Sometimes letting your mind wander is worse than obsessing about what's scaring the drek out of you.

  We'd been underway for nearly an hour when the turbulence began in earnest, and I started to appreciate anew the limitations of neoscopolamine. The Merlin started surging up and down in hundred-meter bounds like some kind of chipped-up roller coaster, and if I'd thought the engines had been straining before, I hadn't heard anything yet. Over the mechanical screaming, now I could hear the rattle of the rain against the airframe, driven by mighty gusts of wind. (Or frag, maybe it was hail. Whatever, it sounded like rock salt shot from a Roomsweeper.)

  The troopers in their military gear weren't enjoying themselves. They wouldn't admit it to a civilian haole puke like me, of course-frag, they probably wouldn't admit it to each other-but I could see the way the muscles of their jaws were standing out. They were biting back on complaints, or maybe doing the iron-jaw trip to stop themselves from spewing their midnight snacks. Even Pohaku was starting to look a mite queasy. My own discomfort was almost a reasonable price to pay to see proof that he was actually as human as the rest of us. Beside me, Alana Kono was looking decidedly pale. In my peripheral vision, I saw her pull out another neoscope patch and slap it onto her own neck. I shot her what I intended to be a reassuring grin, but judging by the look in her eyes, I didn't quite make it.

  And that's when the bottom dropped out. For a second or two we seemed to be in free fall. Kono yelped, and one of the troopers grunted in alarm. The only reason I didn't yell out loud was that I was too busy biting my tongue hard enough to taste salty blood. The engines wailed like banshees as the Merlin's dive bottomed out. We jolted hard a couple of times, almost as though we were taking fire from somewhere ahead of us.

  Frag it, I couldn't just sit there. I reached down to unbuckle my four-point. Kono grabbed my hand and shook her head-apparently she didn't trust herself to speak-but I gently pushed her hand away and gave another try at the reassuring grin. This time I apparently did a better job, because she nodded and closed her eyes again.

  I clambered to my feet, grabbin
g at whatever came to hand to keep from pitching onto my hoop-the back of my chair, the helmet of a green-gilled trooper… I managed to keep my feet somehow, and-getting a good two-handed grip on an overhead rack-I dragged myself forward. A light sliding door was all that separated the troop compartment from the flight deck, so I slid it back.

  The flight deck was in total darkness. (I guess I should have expected it, but it still jolted me. Didn't you need some kind of instruments to do that pilot drek?) For an instant I couldn't make out squat, then my eyes adapted and I could see two silhouettes-deeper black against the black outside the cockpit-in front of me. "What the frag's going on?" I demanded.

  The silhouette in the right-hand seat turned its head, and I saw two faint pinpoints of red light where there should be eyes.

  Okay, that freaked me for a moment, too, before I realized the points of light were the copilot's cybereyes. Stray light from his active IR system, or some such technodrek. "Hele pela!" the copilot snarled at me. "Get the frag out of here, ule!"

  I ignored him and grabbed me shoulder of the figure in the left seat. (That had to be the pilot, right?) "What the hell's going on?" I demanded. And, as an afterthought, "How about lighting this crap up?"

  For a moment I thought the pilot was going to tell me frag off, too, but then he nodded once. The control consoles came alive with lights, data displays, radar images, and all the other junk that (meta)humans need to play bird. In the bright plasma light I saw the fiber-optic lines connecting pilot and copilot to the panels.

  "So what the hell's going on?" I asked again.

  "Ino," the pilot snapped. "Storm. Big fragging storm. What the hell you think?"

  As if to emphasize what the pilot was saying, the Merlin did another one of those roller coaster plunges, fragging near bounding me off the overhead. Neither pilot nor copilot moved; they kept their arms loosely crossed over their chests. But, from the sudden tightening of their muscles in their jaws and around their eyes, I knew they were working as hard mentally as if they were hauling back on physical control yokes.