Mission Hindenburg

by C. Alexander London

  “So Ham rots in a Greek jail waiting for us?” Jonah confronted Ian.

  “Don’t be daft. He will not rot in jail,” Ian explained. “He might even enjoy his time there. Modern correctional institutions have wonderful exercise facilities. He can lift weights all day if he chooses.”

  “You’re one cold dude.” Jonah shook his head and started to walk toward the Greek police car where Hamilton was being stuffed inside. “I’m going to get Ham out.”

  Amy ran after Jonah.

  “This ain’t right,” he said as the two made their way back to the group. “Ham’s my bro. I can’t let him go to jail like that.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Amy. “We will get him out. But first, we have to save the lives of all these people. It’s what Ham would want us to do.”

  “Ham would want me to make RoboGangsta 2,” Jonah muttered.

  “So you’ve seen reason?” Ian said as they returned. Jonah nodded but didn’t say anything else, so Ian continued. “We have only so far eliminated one of the airships as a possible target, thanks to Hamilton’s rather unorthodox methods.”

  “It’s not mine, either,” said Cara. “Nothing on that wrestling billionaire’s blimp but oil paintings, supermodels, and uninspired engineering. They didn’t even make thirty thousand feet.”

  “Same with mine,” Jonah said. “They’re more interested in staying low to the ground where all of Athens can see their giant toy ad than they are in actually winning the prize.”

  “What about Dan’s?” Amy asked. “Dan?”

  She looked around, but her brother still wasn’t back. Just then her phone buzzed. It was a text message from Aunt Beatrice’s phone number again.

  … and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

  Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  “Another poem,” said Ian.

  Below the text, there was an emoji of a clock ticking.

  “ ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ ” Jonah said. “A poem by W. H. Auden. And yeah, it’s about that same painting as the other poem, ‘The Fall of Icarus.’ ”

  “Where’s Dan?” asked Amy. The familiar taste of dread rose in her throat.

  They all swiveled their heads to the Gas Flight Xtreme’s landing dock by the stately crumbling pillar of the ruined temple of Erechtheion. The dock was still empty. Amy looked down at the text message again.

  a boy falling out of the sky,

  “Oh, no, Dan!” cried Amy. She squinted up at the sky, her heart pounding against her rib cage.

  The sun was shining over Greece, just at it had been on the day that Icarus fell.

  The Stratosphere (134,000 feet over Athens)

  Dan stepped back from the door as Melinda Toth began to kick it. He grabbed the red space suit, the helmet, and the pack from the locker and threw them through the door marked AIRLOCK. He stepped in after them and closed the door, turning the latch to lock it, just as Melinda Toth burst into the locker room.

  Suddenly, her face filled the tiny porthole window in the door, her breath steaming against it. She was shouting, but Dan couldn’t hear a word. He clutched the space suit in his hands.

  He couldn’t believe it was real. He’d spent hours on the Internet reading about this experimental suit. He’d secretly studied the website of its manufacturer, Orbital Outfitters, to see how they planned to make a space suit so thin and flexible. He’d always cleared his web history afterward. He didn’t want anyone knowing how very cool he thought the whole space industry was. Amy was the one who knew stuff. Dan liked being the impulsive one. If she’d known he actually enjoyed geeking out on stuff, she might’ve tried to learn about it, too. Amy sometimes liked bonding with him. Somehow, space was cooler when it was just his secret hobby.

  The secret was out now, though. And if he ever wanted to see Amy again, he had to hope the suit actually worked the way the website bragged it would.

  The material felt too thin to withstand the heat generated by a body in free fall. He knew that space shuttles had big heat shields on them, and meteors tended to burn up on entry to the atmosphere. He couldn’t imagine how a boy would survive wearing a flimsy red space suit. The logo on the arm of this suit called it the Secondskin, which was comforting and unsettling at the same time.

  It was made out of a high-tech material lined with tiny metal coils that connected to a battery pack. Dan slid it on, zipping it up to the high collar on his neck, then switched on the pack. As soon as he did, the coils tightened around Dan, fitting the suit against his skin with a feeling of even pressure from the tips of his toes all the way to his neck. He looked at Toth on the other side of the window. She gave him a stare that could’ve cut steel.

  Luckily, it couldn’t cut through the airlock door.

  He was feeling confident. He gave her a wink.

  Her face disappeared from the little window. Had she given up? Maybe he wouldn’t have to do this after all. Maybe he could just wait out the flight in this safe little room.

  Suddenly, a buzzer sounded and the light in the room turned red. A display lit up with their current altitude and below it a timer clock.

  The timer was counting down from five minutes.

  Five minutes until the airlock opened into space.

  Dan glanced at the window in the door. Melinda Toth was back. She grinned, pointed toward the window at the end of the room, the one on the door that opened into the atmosphere, then made a falling motion with her hand.

  Four minutes and forty seconds left.

  There was another, looser outer jumpsuit to wear. He picked it off the floor and stepped into it, pulling it up over the Secondskin. This one showed the logo of Gas Flight Xtreme on its sleeve and also of the suit’s manufacturer, Orbital Outfitters. On top of all this, he set the helmet on his head, which locked in place. Inside, there were digital displays showing altitude, speed, battery power, and direction.

  He hoisted the pack onto his back and began hooking the hoses from it up to the suit, strapping them into place exactly as the pictures on the website had shown. He had never been more happy about having a photographic memory.

  He caught his reflection in the window at the end of the locker room and he looked the part of an astronaut, at least. He felt, however, like a condemned criminal walking to the gallows.

  Melinda Toth stared at him through the window. She tapped the face of her watch with the glistening tip of her needle.

  Three minutes left.

  His breathing systems and digital displays inside the helmet were powered up and active.

  A quick check of the display on the wall showed the current altitude of the Gas Flight Xtreme:

  130,000 feet above sea level.

  The airship shuddered, nearly knocking him off his feet. The gas mixture was changing to adapt to the thinner air. Dan had to hold on to the wall to keep from falling over until the shuddering stopped and the smooth ride resumed.

  When they reached 134,000 feet, they stopped rising.

  One minute left.

  He pressed a button on his sleeve to activate the auto-deploy on his chute.

  He knew how to skydive and he’d read all about subspace skydiving, but reading and doing were very different things. No ever died from reading the wrong way. Jumping from space the wrong way, however, was definitely fatal.

  With a loud hissing sound, vents over the door at the far end of the room opened and the room depressurized.

  Melinda Toth waved at him through the window as the light on the wall turned from red to green and the outer door on the far wall of the room opened.

  Dan’s hand fell back to his side. His feet felt numb. The Great Falconi had had years of training and even he was too scared to do this jump. Dan had had a few extreme sports adventures in the Alps, just enough skydiving experience to know that this was a terrible idea.

  He doubted himself. He doubted that he could save the Cahill family when he hadn’t been ab
le to save even harmless old Aunt Beatrice, and he doubted that he could stop more disasters, doubted that he could jump into the void to escape Melinda Toth.

  But his doubt vanished when he stepped to the edge of the airlock.

  The sight beyond took Dan’s breath away.

  There was nothing between him and the orb of the earth below. If he looked up and around he saw only the black of space, speckled with stars. If he looked down, he saw swirling clouds and a vast continent reduced to the size of model on a 3-D map. He could practically see the different layers of the atmosphere stacked on top of one another like layers on a sandwich. He felt tiny against the vastness of space and an almost cozy feeling looking at the earth.

  It would’ve been hard to explain, but taking it all in, his doubts vanished and he felt like he and every other resident of that tiny blue marble drifting below him were on the same team, united in their smallness, all of them neighbors when considered against the size of the universe. He’d never tell anyone, but he felt a surge of what he could only call love for all of humanity. The Outcast was not going to hurt anyone else ever again, not if Dan could help it.

  It took a trip to the edge of the world for Dan to realize it, but this was his duty as a Cahill. The Cahill family wasn’t just a brilliant collection of feuding clans forging history as it suited their whims. The Cahills were meant to be the guardians of civilization, caretakers of the world.

  And they’d still get to do cool stuff.

  He glanced back at Melinda Toth, whose eyes burned in her gaunt face. He returned her wave and gave her a look that he hoped showed a touch of devil-may-care confidence.

  It would’ve been a lot cooler if his legs weren’t shaking uncontrollably with fear.

  “Okay, world, get ready,” he said to himself. “I’m coming home.”

  Then he stepped from the airship door and fell into the stratosphere.

  The Stratosphere (134,000 feet over Europe and falling)

  The first seconds of free fall felt like swimming without water. There was no great rush, no sensation of falling. The air was too thin up at that altitude, and his pressurized Orbital Outfitters space suit protected him from the extreme temperatures. As he fell, he forgot all about Melinda Toth, the Outcast, and the threat of disaster. He forgot all about danger and fear. He forgot all about gravity itself. All he felt was calm.

  He moved his arms like he would in a normal sky dive to steer and level his body.

  Nothing happened, so he moved his arms again.

  After about three seconds, he began to turn, then to turn faster. He realized that steering himself in the thin air this high was like steering a big boat. There wouldn’t be an instant reaction to his movements. He’d move and then count to three and the movement’s effect would happen. The problem was, he’d already moved a lot to try to steer and now he was feeling the effect.

  Suddenly, he was no longer looking at the curve of the earth but at endless space, then the bright flash of the sun almost close enough to touch, then the bottom of the airship above him, then at the earth again, then space, then sun, then the ship, faster and faster. He couldn’t feel the movement of air around him, but the dizzying vision told him what he dreaded.

  He’d gone into a spin.

  He tried to move his body another way but couldn’t get any control of himself. There was no resistance in the thin atmosphere. The calm he’d felt moments ago turned to hot panic.

  The speed reading inside his helmet told him how fast he was falling. 700 miles per hour, which was 1,026 feet per second, which was rapidly approaching the speed of sound.

  It would have been thrilling if he weren’t spinning out of control.

  He knew from what he’d read about NASA astronaut training that the g forces generated in a high-speed spin make the blood in a person’s body flow away from its center through centrifugal force. Unfortunately, that included making the blood flow away from the heart and brain, things Dan figured he kind of needed to stay alive. In a worst-case scenario, spinning out of control at this speed, the blood would get going so fast away from the center of his body that it would need to escape, and the only way out would be through his eyes. That’d certainly kill him, but he wouldn’t feel it because he’d probably black out before it happened. The same thing had nearly happened to the previous record holder for the highest free fall, and he’d had years of training before his subspace jump.

  Dan felt short of breath. He gasped for air, and even as he breathed, it felt like he couldn’t get enough. His chest felt tight, his heartbeat fluttery, and he had no idea which way was up or down anymore.

  As he spun and spun, his vision no longer filled with the earth then space then the earth then space. Instead, he was somewhere else entirely, in the living room of their old apartment in Boston, and he was on the Internet and he was watching videos, videos of someone else falling from the sky.

  He’d seen videos of the last subspace jumper and now, with every second of that jump clear as daylight in his mind, he mimicked what he remembered.

  He pulled his arms back toward his body to stabilize them, groaning with the effort of moving them just a few inches. He struggled to untangle his legs. Sweat erupted on his forehead and his helmet fogged. His vision narrowed to a pinpoint of blue light in the middle of a black circle. He clung to consciousness.

  If he passed out now, he was dead. He’d hit the earth as a bloody corpse in a parachute. He had to stay awake to stay alive.

  “Stay awake, stay alive, stay awake, stay alive!” he muttered to himself. He imagined Melinda Toth in the airship, smirking as gravity did her dirty work for her.

  Dan pulled his arms in, tucked his head, bent his back to shift his center of gravity, and tried to hold that position with all the strength he had left. He ignored his narrowing tunnel vision, ignored his fear of death, and spread his body wide against the air. The lower he fell, the thicker the air became. It was like falling into a pool of cotton. The air against his body slowed him. He regained control, leveled out, and began to fall flat, facedown, in proper skydiving form. The orb of the earth raced up at him.

  He felt a wave of hot relief wash over him. His breathing mellowed and his heartbeat slowed. Calm returned. To his surprise, only thirty seconds had passed.

  It didn’t feel like he was accelerating as he fell. It felt more like he was being held up in the gentle cup of an invisible palm. He pictured his parents, as much as he could remember them, and imagined their hands cupped together, lowering him carefully to the earth.

  A chime sounded in his helmet and he realized it wasn’t so gentle after all. He’d just hit a speed of 1,142 feet per second, 778 miles per hour, which meant he’d just become the fastest free-faller in history and the youngest person ever to break the speed of sound unaided by any form of engine.

  He couldn’t help letting out a whoop.

  Time seemed to speed up again as the earth grew larger and larger, filling his field of vision. He kept his focus forward, and soon he’d cleared the highest layer of cloud cover and he could make out the shape of the continents below.

  He was glad he’d spent so much time studying world maps and satellite images. He knew exactly where he was and exactly where he was going, without anyone having to tell him the plan. He was going to land right in the Parthenon, on top of the tallest hill in Athens.

  Once his parachute opened, that is.

  He checked his altitude.

  10,000 feet. A second later 9,000 feet. Then 8,000.

  “Any time now,” he said aloud.

  Suddenly, his visor display flashed red. AUTO DEPLOY FAIL.

  “Of course,” he muttered. The parachute’s auto deploy wasn’t working.

  He took a deep breath and squeezed the manual release in his right hand.

  Nothing happened.

  That’s when the thrill wore off and he remembered the Outcast again.

  “No!” he yelled. He was not going to be the Outcast’s disaster. He felt like th
rowing up inside his helmet. He suddenly noticed he had to go to the bathroom really badly. He also had a craving for cold pizza. Strange, the thoughts one had before dying.

  “No! No! No!” he yelled.

  An oddly polite computer voice crackled in his ear: “Please deploy manual emergency chute.”

  He was at 7,500 feet, then 7,000. Then 6,000. Time had slowed once more.

  The emergency chute? Where was that?

  “Deploy emergency chute immediately, please,” the voice repeated with computer-generated urgency.

  He turned his head as slowly as he could. Too fast a move would send him back into a spin. He saw the manual switch on his wrist.

  The earth filled his vision, closer and closer to impact. He wanted to jab his arm out and hit the chute, but any sudden moves and he’d spin out of control again.

  5,000 feet. 4,500 feet.

  He moved his hand slowly across his body, shifting his legs to counter the motion and keep himself level.

  4,000 feet. 3,500 feet.

  Past the point of no return. He had about two seconds before the chute wouldn’t be able to slow him down enough and he’d break every bone in his body on impact.

  “Deploy emergency chute now!” The computer voice wasn’t being polite anymore.

  3,000 feet. He hit the button, closed his eyes.

  Still nothing happened. Dan’s stomach sank. He thought of Amy, sad that he’d be leaving her all alone when his body was smashed to paste on the ruins of ancient Greece. Then, with a sickening lurch, his stomach rose into his face. For the first time, he felt the speed he was traveling as the chute deployed and he rapidly decelerated.

  The drag slowed him, the chute grew and filled, and before he knew it, he was no longer in free fall, he was parachuting over Greece. He was in control. He was flying!

  And he felt wonderful!

  For about four minutes, he guided his parachute, flying over the deep blue water of the Mediterranean, the white beaches of the Greek Isles, and then the bustling city of Athens below him. He saw the hill of the Parthenon rising to greet him, the cleared plaza where the Gas Flight Xtreme logo had been drawn in chalk on the ground and all the other airships were docked in a circle, creating a perfect landing zone.