“I’m glad you trust him,” Djuro retorted.
“He has been flying us for the past hour,” Nkosi answered. “Do you have any complaints?”
“Not me,” Djuro answered, and bent his head over the controls. Nkosi nodded, and started for the toilet at the back of the compartment, walking straight through the image in the tank. It was a startling effect, as though he’d stepped through an empty space. Even Heikki, who’d seen the illusion more than once, caught her breath as he stepped into apparent nothingness, walking through and over the image of the beacon and the verdant hills as though they weren’t there. And of course they’re not, Heikki thought, not really, but she could not help holding her breath until he was safely on the other side. At the map console, Alexieva shook her head slowly, but said nothing.
Heikki cleared her throat as Nkosi emerged from the little compartment, made herself not watch as the pilot waded back through the image. “We’re coming up on our first marker,” she said, on the general frequency, and Alexieva nodded in hasty agreement.
“Yes, the falls, where the Asilas comes off the massif.”
Nkosi paused at Heikki’s console, staring over the woman’s shoulder at the shifting image. “We do not actually make a course change here, do we?”
Heikki shook her head. “No, this is just to calibrate my instruments and Alexieva’s maps. We follow the river another three hundred kilometers or so—” She touched keys again. “Three hundred seven point five, actually, and then turn onto the new heading. We’ll cross the latac’s verified course about an hour after that.”
Nkosi nodded, still watching the tank, and then turned away. “I will let Jan fly us for a while, then,” he said, over his shoulder, and disappeared into the bubble.
Heikki nodded back, and bent her attention to her console. So far, at least, Alexieva’s maps and the terrain below seemed to match with better than average precision. She checked the last set of numbers, then leaned back in her chair. “It looks good, Alexieva. Everything checks out perfectly.”
Unexpectedly, Alexieva smiled, the expression transforming her rather grim features. “Thanks. I spent about three years in the massif, mapping.” Her face clouded again. “I didn’t get very far, though.”
“Grant money run out?” Heikki asked, not quite idly, and Alexieva shook her head.
“No, Lo-Moth ended the project. They were really only interested in mapping the edges of the massif— still are, for that matter. God knows, I’ve tried to get them to sponsor a trip to the center! But they say their flights don’t cross the core, so there’s no point in spending money on a really detailed survey.”
“That sounds damn shortsighted of them,” Djuro said.
Alexieva shrugged. “They’ve been pretty reluctant to spend money, ever since the home office changed management.”
“Home office?” Heikki said. “Do you mean Tremoth, or the higher-ups at Lo-Moth?”
Alexieva looked down at her console as though she regretted having said even that much. “Tremoth, I guess. I don’t really know—I only worked for them the once.”
Heikki did not pursue the point, saying instead, “You’d think somebody would put up the money.”
Alexieva shrugged again, the same sullen, one-shouldered movement Heikki had seen before. “Who’s got it to spend?” She fingered her keyboard. “I’m switching maps.”
Which was an effective end to the conversation, Heikki thought. She said nothing, however, merely noting the shift in her own records, and settled back in her chair to wait for the next course correction. The Asilas, a silver band almost two fingers wide, wound past in the tank, seeming to curve in time to the rhythmic drone of the engines. There was a flurry of movement on her board as they passed the Falls, looking from the air like a plume of smoke, and the jumper banked slightly, following the river’s northeasterly curve. Heikki checked her calculations again, matching her course with the latac’s last three position readings. They would intercept the first of those in a little more than two hours.
She sighed then, stretching, and pushed herself up out of her chair.
“Keep an eye on things, Sten,” she said, and Djuro nodded. Satisfied, Heikki turned forward, pulling herself up the short ladder into the pilot’s bubble.
Nkosi had the controls, and sat slumped in his chair, hands loose on the steering yoke, his eyes seemingly fixed on nothing at all. Sebasten-Januarias, in the left-hand seat, had his head turned toward the side of the bubble, but the direction of his gaze was hidden by his dark goggles. Iadara’s sky curved overhead, its brassy blue darkened by altitude, touched here and there by thin wisps of cloud. The trees of the massif formed a dense and dark green floor beyond the jumper’s nose, looking from the air like a coarsely knotted carpet. A lake flashed like a beacon as the sun caught it, and then disappeared again as the jumper slid forward. Heikki blinked, blinded as much by the lush beauty of the scene as by the brilliant sun, then cleared her throat.
“How’s it going?” she asked, as much to let the pilots know she was there as to hear an answer to her question.
Sebasten-Januarias turned toward her quickly, then looked away again without answering. Nkosi said, without turning his head, “Not badly at all. I do not like the look of those, however.”
He nodded toward the southeast, where a line of clouds showed like mountains on the horizon. Heikki leaned forward against the back of his chair, squinting past his shoulder at the distant shapes.
“What do you think, Jan?” she asked, after a moment.
The younger man shrugged, the goggles effectively hiding any changes of expression. “It’s hard to tell. We don’t usually get rain in the afternoon in the massif, not like you get around Lowlands.”
“Is Station Green saying anything?” Heikki asked, and was not surprised when Sebasten-Januarias shook his head.
“Not yet.”
“If we have to fly through them,” Nkosi said, delicately stressing the word “if,” “it will make it hard to hold a low altitude search. Of course, we can always work through the clouds.”
I know that, Heikki thought, scowling. She realized she was tapping the back of Nkosi’s chair, and stilled her fingers with an effort. “Sten,” she said, on the general frequency, “I know you’re tapping into Weather Station Green, but I want you to see if you can pick up Station Red Six as well. There’s bit of cloud in the southeast I want to keep an eye on.”
“No problem,” Djuro answered promptly.
Heikki stayed in the bubble for a few moments longer, lulled by the sunlight and the steady drone of the engines. The ground, darker and less defined than its image in the tank, slid past almost imperceptibly, without many breaks in the vegetation by which she could gauge their progress. To the southeast, the clouds hung steady on the horizon, while the occasional thread of cloud whipped past overhead, borne on the high air currents.
“Heikki?” Djuro’s voice in the headpiece woke her from her daze. “I’m monitoring Station Red Six like you asked. They’re showing a line of rain, all right, which they predict will pass us to the south.”
“Good enough,” Heikki said, and was aware of Sebasten-Januarias’s slow stare. He would have the right to say he told me so, she conceded silently, but to her surprise, the younger man said instead, “About how much longer till we turn onto the latac’s course?”
Heikki glanced at the chronometer set into the control board. “About another hour,” she said, and pushed herself away from Nkosi’s chair. “We’ll let you know, don’t worry. Yell if you need anything, Jock.”
“I will do that,” Nkosi said, tranquilly, not taking his eyes from the distant horizon. Heikki, satisfied, slid back down the ladder into the bay, and reseated herself behind her console.
The last hour passed excruciatingly slowly, until Heikki found herself rerunning tests that had been redundant the first time. At last the flashing light that marked their position steadied into an amber circle, and a warning tone sounded in her ear. She touche
d the frequency selector, tuning her microphone to the general channel, and said, “Time, Jock.”
“I see it,” Nkosi answered. “Coming up on it—now.” The jumper banked lazily, the image in the tank flickering briefly before the machinery adjusted to the new angle. “We are now on the new heading, flying by your wire, Heikki.”
“You can start the descent to the search altitude whenever you’re ready,” Heikki said, and felt the jumper tilt forward slightly even before Nkosi acknowledged her order. She bent over her console, slaving the sensor array directly to her console, following the craft’s progress on her line map as well as in the tank.
“We’re coming up on the last reported position,” Alexieva announced, and an instant later, Nkosi said, “We are steady at optimum search, Heikki. Cross winds are minimal.”
“I confirm that,” Djuro said.
His instruments were more sophisticated than the pilot’s. Heikki nodded to herself, and took a last look at the array of lights covering her board. “Start scanning,” she said aloud. “Full array. Alexieva, let me know if we deviate from the projected course. Take visual, Sten.”
“We’re right on the line,” the surveyor answered.
“Scanners are on,” Djuro announced. “And we’re recording. I have the sight display.”
Heikki did not bother to answer, watching her board flip from the array of green to the spectrum of brighter colors that displayed the sensors’ readings of the terrain below. From this height, they could cover about a kilometer of ground with better than eighty-five percent accuracy; readings on the fringes of the web could extend almost three kilometers from the source, and occasionally as far as five, but with sharply decreasing accuracy. She frowned a little, studying the familiar pattern, spikes of blues and greens and almost-invisible purples, and adjusted her controls to sharpen the focus. It was a typical pattern, changed only slightly by local conditions, the fleshy leaves and trunks and the loam-covered forest floor providing a good contrast for any metal readings. And metal there would be, if—when— they found the latac: even if the craft had landed deliberately, retracting its enormous envelope, there was still the metal-ribbed gondola to betray the site to the probing beams. And if it had not, if it really had crashed, there would be strips of reflecting foil from the envelope to guide them in. Delicately, she played her controls, hunting along the narrow bandwidth that would show metal, fine tuning the machines so that even the fringes of the web would work at optimum resolution. In the tank, the forest floor crept by undisturbed.
“Jock, we’re sliding off course, half a degree, now one degree to the south southeast,” Alexieva said.
“Correcting,” Nkosi answered, and the jumper tipped slightly. “Sorry about that, Heikki.”
“No problem.” Heikki’s eyes were still on her console, flicking from the main readout, with its spiked lines of blue and green, to the course display and the tank and then to the spot analysis as it flashed its next string of symbols.
“How’s it going?” Sebasten-Januarias’s voice in her headpiece sounded rather lost.
“Nothing so far,” Heikki answered, and was surprised to see how far they’d come along the latac’s projected course. Even as she thought that, Alexieva cleared her throat.
“We’re coming up on the projected crash site.”
That was an elipse perhaps four kilometers long and three wide, the computers’ best estimate of the latac’s position when the full force of the storm hit it. Without waiting for orders, Nkosi swung the jumper into a slow search pattern, spiralling out from one focus of the elipse. Heikki frowned, and adjusted her sensors again, sending the fine-scan ghosting ahead of the jumper to probe the forest.
“I don’t see anything,” Djuro said. “What about you, Jock? Jan?”
“Not a thing,” Nkosi said. “There is not a break in the canopy for kilometers.”
“Same here,” Sebasten-Januarias said.
Heikki glanced at her chronometer. The warning light had just begun to flash above the current time: two hours to sunset. “I’m not inclined to waste the time going back to Lowlands and then flying back out tomorrow,” she said aloud. “Alexieva, is there any place nearby that we could set down for the night?”
There was a momentary silence while Alexieva worked her console, and then the surveyor answered, “There’s a storm clearing about a hundred-twenty-five kilometers to the north. The last flyby was three months ago, and it was clear then. You’ll have to land on rotors, though.”
“Jock?” Heikki asked.
“I would prefer to land in daylight, if possible. Since we have to go to the rotors, that is.”
“Right.” Heikki adjusted her controls. “Flip me the coordinates, Alexieva.”
The surveyor complied without speaking, and Heikki stared for a moment at the numbers flashing on her screen. It would take them about an hour to reach the storm clearing, a patch of land deliberately deforested to provide a safe harbor for any craft caught by bad weather while crossing the massif. That left them perhaps half an hour’s further search, allowing for a safety cushion…. She sighed, and keyed a new course into her machines. It would take them to the clearing in a series of arcs, covering as much territory as possible before they were forced to set down for the night.
“Jock, I’ve got the new course for you.” Without waiting for an answer, she flipped the numbers to his navigation computer.
“Very good, Heikki,” Nkosi answered.
The land beneath the jumper changed slightly as they made their way slowly north, the giant-jades that dominated the massifs rim giving way to taller, needle-leaved blackwoods. Their trunks were more solid, the scalelike bark impregnated with minerals leached from the soil. Heikki scowled as her readings shifted, little peaks of red flashing up from the background, and adjusted the sensitivity of the analysands until the red no longer showed. It was necessary, she knew, but it cut her effective range back to three kilometers from the source. Frowning still, she began to swing her most sensitive instrument slowly through three hundred sixty degrees, trying to compensate for the loss of the general scan. Her display screen copied the movement faithfully, a wedge bright with detail sweeping steadily over the cooler general readings.
For what seemed an eternity, nothing changed. The chronometer ticked slowly forward, the warning light pulsing more strongly as sunset approached. In the tank, the visual display took on an odd, distorted quality as the ground shadows lengthened, and Djuro adjusted his instruments to compensate. The wedge of the fine-scan swept around the screen, bringing momentary detail to the picture. Then, at the far edge of the screen, metal flashed. For all that she had been anticipating just that, Heikki’s reflexes were slowed by the afternoon of waiting. The red peak, almost off the scale in that single pulse, vanished. She swore, and worked her controls until she got it back. The intensity had already faded, as though the object were already out of range. She swore again, but managed to fix the coordinates precisely before the signal failed.
“Got something?” Djuro asked, and did not bother to keep his tone casual.
“I think so,” Heikki answered, busy feeding coordinates to her navigation program. “Something, anyway. Jock, can we reach this spot before nightfall?”
It had been a forlorn hope at best, and she was not surprised when Nkosi answered, “No, Heikki, not a chance.”
“We’ll hit it in the morning, then,” Heikki said, and kept an iron control over her voice.
“Do you think it’s the latac?” Sebasten-Januarias asked.
“I didn’t get much of a reading on it,” Heikki answered. “I can’t tell.” But it was metal, and a lot of it, concentrated in one small area. Unless it’s another wreck, I don’t know what else it could be. She curbed her enthusiasm sternly, forcing herself to pay attention to the console in front of her. Already, she had missed the chance to fine-scan a dozen kilometers. She made a face, and applied herself to the work.
As predicted, the jumper came in sight of the s
torm clearing with the sun still a few degrees above the horizon. It was not an especially inviting place, just a break in the trees barely large enough to land a latac. As Nkosi circled slowly, assessing the difficulties, the tank in the main bay showed thin shoots of new trees already breaking through the dark ground.
“How’s it look?” Heikki asked, after what seemed an interminable silence.
“We can land,” Nkosi answered. “On rotors, of course, as you said, Alexieva, but we can land.”
“Go ahead,” Heikki said, and heard the engine note change as Nkosi began the switchover. The servos whined shrilly as the outboard nacelles tilted to their new positions, and the jumper shuddered under the new drag. There was a heartstopping moment when everything seemed to go silent, and the jumper seemed to hang suspended, held up only by momentum, and then the harsher sound of the rotors cut in. Slowly Nkosi increased their power, until forward motion stopped and the jumper was hovering a hundred meters above the floor of the clearing.
“Anything on the sensors, Sten?” Heikki asked.
Djuro shook his head. “Nothing of interest. Very small, mobile life—”
“Gerriks, probably,” Alexieva said.
“—but nothing any bigger.”
“You can take her down, Jock,” Heikki said.
To her surprise, it was Sebasten-Januarias who answered, “Going down.”
There was no reason Sebasten-Januarias shouldn’t land the craft, Heikki knew—he had almost certainly made this kind of landing a hundred times, and it was for just that reason that she had hired him—but she found herself holding her breath anyway, until at last the jumper came to rest with a gentle thump. Sebasten-Januarias cut the engines, and announced, over the descending whine of the rotors, “Well, here we are.”
After the steady noise of the engines, the silence was almost oppressive. Heikki pushed herself up from her console and stood stretching, trying to shake off the irrational sense of unease. She heard footsteps on the ladder behind her, and then Nkosi slipped past her into the bay. A moment later, Sebasten-Januarias followed, still smiling with the pleasure of having completed a tricky maneuver. Heikki smiled back in spite of herself, and looked at Alexieva.
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