by Ginger Booth
“I can work with that,” Clay murmured, and turned right, where the sea came closer.
They passed over a final shoulder of mountain, and a downdraft grabbed them. Sass’s stomach lurched as they suddenly dropped 30 meters. Not losing his cool for an instant, Clay pulled back on the yoke to halt their fall. “Pterry,” he noted.
Swallowing, Sass aimed and assigned the new menace as her new bogey 1. She cleared the other presets, now behind the mountain. “You are very, very good at this, Clay Rocha.”
He chuckled, and shot her a boyish grin, nearly heart-stopping in itself. Sass didn’t normally see him lose all of his masks except when sound asleep. His brown eyes flashed joy, more beautiful than ever, as he battled one-on-one with the wind.
“Was that a prayer, Collier?” he quipped. “Is that a pterry?”
Sass sighted in bogey 2, not at all convinced that shape was a pterry. “Let’s call it a blimp.”
Zan volunteered, “They explode into a fireball when you shoot them. How did you know we call them blimps?”
“Lucky guess,” Sass replied. “Like the Hindenburg,” she added to Clay.
“I could use an extra few meters to angels,” Clay mused, meaning upward. “Let’s try it.” He slowly banked the gliding shuttle, steadily losing altitude now, to aim at the blimp. “Should pass, oh, 40 meters above it?”
“You’re crazy,” Sass muttered. “Alright. Tell me when.”
Now it was Wilder’s turn to lean forward, peering at their instruments. “What the hell are you –”
“Now,” Clay ordered.
Sass torched the blimp below with a minimum-power laser shot. The shuttle leapt upward like an express elevator, but rocking like a dinghy crossing a power boat’s wake in the Hudson. She laughed at the long-forgotten sensation. “Hot damn. You’re up 35 meters. And the shot cost us…about half a kilometer of powered flight.”
“Worth it for the fun alone,” Clay claimed. “But I hope we’re not that tight on power. I can’t glide to a landing. How close do I need to get?”
“With the wind behind you?”
“Nose to the wind to stop,” he reminded her.
“Right, I knew that!” Sass checked the battery charges and figured in her head, then checked her numbers on her pocket comm. “You’ve got maximum 2000 meters vertical or 30 klicks horizontal on pure gravity flight. Meaning no wing assist.” They were already below 1000 meters and gradually falling. As a bird flew, they were within 50 klicks of Neptune, as well.
“I can live with that. I hope.”
“Please instill more confidence.”
He smirked, and tweaked their heading a bit more toward the sea. At which point they hit the onshore winds a touch earlier than he expected. “Oops.” The shuttle bucked and waggled as he struggled to find a smoother altitude.
Sass blew out, watching the altimeter. He’d lost 200 meters, and she bet he hadn’t planned on that just yet. On the bright side, they’d left the mountains and pterries behind. Below was ‘mangrove.’ Based on her Denali experience to date, she imagined that described an ecological niche, not particularly what the plants looked like. Flat marsh with impenetrable jungle cover. They were nowhere near the armor road.
All of which Clay could see for himself, so she kept her mouth shut and prayed. He was good at the glider game. They played it together on vacation just before leaving Mahina. They rented hang-gliders, got bored with the tallest escarpment on the moon, then took turns jumping out of his flyer to glide at altitude. Sass tried to forget she was nearly immortal. Clay favored danger sports for the adrenaline rush.
“Any more blimps?” Clay broke the intense silence.
“Not worth it,” Sass judged after a moment. “They’re not in position.”
“OK.” He didn’t say anything further, just battled the wind for lift and any forward progress he could win toward Neptune. Sass kept other flyers dialed in on her auto-shoot buttons, but none met her mandatory-kill criteria. A few blimps took an interest and tailed them, but soon dropped behind, not as fast as the gliding shuttle.
“Now at 30 klicks horizontal,” she offered. “You’re doing great. Can you get us to 25?”
“I’d sure like power while trying to land on a wharf,” Clay differed. “Too narrow a perch, with waves on either side. Max 20 klicks.”
Sass fervently wished she could see, instead of the pitch-black arctic night and the inscrutable green infrared display. Experimentally, she tried switching that off to see the sky, just for a second.
“Good idea. Turn that back off,” Clay requested.
The lights of their displays frustrated her night vision. Even so, Sass could soon spot the subtle variations in black Clay had glimpsed. Yes, she could tell where mangrove met ocean.
And that’s exactly what Clay needed to know. His battle with the wind grew slightly less tenuous, more assured, as they backed off the wind over the jungle.
Sass pounced. “Clay, 20 klicks!”
“I did see that,” he scolded mildly. “But I don’t need power just yet.”
Zan warned, “Sass, watch your 3.”
Chagrined, she checked her sonics. She took two shots to kill something climbing toward them on her right. Neither pterry nor blimp, it didn’t greatly matter. Zan had drummed into her head that there were no benign animals on Denali. “Sorry. Uh, that lost us a klick of our remaining power. Or whatever fraction of altitude.”
“Ow,” Clay acknowledged calmly. “Don’t do that again. Final approach.” He still didn’t power the engines just yet though, banking on glide to line up with the wharf, as best he could guess.
Sass lurched to click the comms. “Neptune, Thrive arriving. Request landing lights.”
“Thrive, welcome.”
And to her delight, a line of lights woke stretching into the sea. Stretching surprisingly far into the sea, actually, maybe a couple kilometers. And the base of that wharf was a full 3 kilometers from the end of the armor road, the spot they were shooting for.
“Dammit,” Clay muttered. And he said no more, as he battled the wind to find just one more klick of forward gain without battery drain, and to line up with a wharf that wasn’t where he expected. They were down to 150 meters now, and even the unflappably suave Clay was sweating, the muscles in his face rigid.
“Anywhere on the wharf, Clay,” Sass encouraged. “Even the causeway leading to the wharf has got to be better than the mangrove or the waves.”
He nodded curtly, and swallowed. His hand reached out to hover a finger over the engine switch, but still he waited another 10 agonizing seconds or so. His head nodded as though he was calculating something.
Abruptly he committed. The engine roared back to life. As though he’d pre-planned every single step of this landing, he jogged left, lifted for 60 meters of altitude, and clipped over just a bit of waves to finish lining himself up over the causeway. He kept his speed frighteningly high to eke every last meter of lift out of the headwind, until at last he jogged right to get above the wharf itself. At that point the batteries had a maximum of two kilometers left. He invested it all into stopping in a controlled landing as soon as possible.
Which was good, because the engines cut out dead with them still three meters above the wharf. The wind knocked them sideways two meters, as they landed with a painful jolt. Fortunately the seats had terrific suspension. A three meter fall at 1.1 g was no joke.
The shuttle was down, softly rocking in the wind.
“You’re my hero,” Sass assured him, and leaned over for a kiss.
“I like being your hero,” he agreed. “Can I pass out and puke now? Wait. Wrong order.”
She laughed. “Zan, where’s the charging station?”
“Maybe 3 kilometers back. Another at the end of the wharf.”
“Because of course it is,” she agreed with a sigh. “Good thing the extra battery is removable.”
Clay groaned. “How much does it weigh?”
12
Sass and
her Neptune party didn’t wait for the shuttle to recharge, of course. Once they lugged the extra battery to the end of the wharf, with the also-rechargeable grav lifter, she could confidently leave the rest of the problem to Wilder.
She refrained from giving the sergeant a final stern lecture on conserving power to get back to Waterfalls. She’d rather he dwell on Clay’s most excellent demonstration of why running low was a very bad idea. Wilder already volunteered that he’d never flown without power.
So the four of them – Sass, Clay, Aurora, and Kassidy – loaded themselves and their gear into Neptune’s front door, a diving chamber, and settled in to get bored. She couldn’t blame the undersea city for failing to send up a representative to greet them. With first-time visitors, they preferred to let the guests compress slowly over the course of 10 hours to reach full depth pressure before the chamber descended. That way, if any of the passengers reacted too badly, they could simply switch to decompression mode and spit them back out at the surface.
A bored and high-pitched medic supervised their progress from a video camera mounted at the ceiling. Now and then she invited each of them to the amateur-looking diagnostic table under her face display to check their blood gases and pressure.
Soon they were squeaking on helium just like Kassidy’s dad. Sass called Wilder on speaker to give him a laugh, and Ben and Copeland back at the Thrive. She skipped telling the home team about the harrowing glider ride downslope. Wilder could tell that story once he was safe at home.
For now, she snuggled into her hero’s shoulder and took a nap.
“Daddy!” Kassidy squealed, the moment the doors opened. She winced, laughing at herself, as the helium atmosphere shifted her pitch painfully higher. Dogs would bark. Aurora standing beside her shielded her ear.
Kassidy ignored all that. She ignored her father’s pasty, flabby, older appearance, and reticence as well. She simply burst out of the diving chamber and flung her arms around him for a hug. Her trademark, of course she bussed him on the lips as well, with a freshly-applied coating of brilliant scarlet lipstick.
She grinned and dabbed around the edges of his lips to tidy up the spillage. It was only then that she fully absorbed just how ticked off the man’s glare looked. She hastily withdrew a step. “Missed you!”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” he returned in a squeak. “You acted like that when you were 4.”
With a scowl of dismissal for his firstborn, he turned to Sass with a perfunctory bow. “Welcome to Neptune. There are dignitaries. I can get you an appointment tomorrow if you want. People usually arrive here too browned off and weirded out to face the captain.”
“Did you say captain?” Sass clarified.
Michael Yang turned and strode away, leaving it to them to follow or not, as they saw fit. “Each Denali city has a different setup. Here they have no three castes, and they style themselves a naval vessel.”
“Daddy,” Kassidy attempted, scurrying to walk beside him. “I wanted to introduce Clay Rocha, Sass’s husband. And Aurora is a geisha from Waterfalls.”
Her father shook his head, and muttered in falsetto, “Here a month, and you’ve got a geisha.”
“Aurora is our guide, Daddy.” Kassidy reflected that maybe Mom had a point, divorcing this dude. She was only 7 when he was exiled from Mahina Actual. This was a harder, crueler man than the adoring dad she remembered.
“You may call me Dad. Or Father. Or Dr. Yang. You should be in med school, not acting the fool and traipsing around the solar system. I watched the videos you forwarded.” His lips pressed together in rage.
“Too bad you weren’t around to straighten me out then, wasn’t it, doc?”
Father and daughter exchanged platypus glares, pursed beaks in matching lipstick. “Not my fault,” he argued.
“You experimented on children,” Kassidy retorted. “They turned out real well, though. Two of them work on the Thrive. You get to meet your victims. Won’t that be fun?”
He wheeled on her. On a larger man, this might have been intimidating. But the Yang-Paripati family stood a fairly consistent 160-165 cm short, on a petite frame. Sheathed in muscle, Kassidy outmassed him.
“I did nothing to those babies!” he hissed. “That was Gwen’s experiment! I assumed she had the paperwork in order!”
“Ah, so your mistress led you astray. And you should have seen the signs, and –”
Yang resumed walking, nearly at a run. “You can wait in my quarters.” He halted abruptly. “That way, room Tuna 43. The door’s unlocked.”
Kassidy stood flabbergasted. “You can’t send me to my room. I’m here with them!”
“You are an unwelcome distraction to a potentially delicate conversation. I’ll deal with you later, young lady.”
Kassidy’s jaw dropped. “Sass?”
“If he’s going to be that pissy, maybe you should,” the captain suggested.
“‘Pissy’?” Yang squeaked.
Sass shrugged. “Would it kill you to say hi to your daughter? She risked a lot, and came a long way. Because she idolized you.” Sass tilted her head. “That childhood fantasy probably died at the door. Still.”
Clay backed her up. “Make an effort, man. Kassidy is a grown woman. Your behavior is churlish.”
“‘Churlish.’” Yang started striding again. Sass beckoned Kassidy to fall in behind at Aurora’s side. She exerted no effort to walk faster than a comfortable gait, so they slowly dropped behind by the time Yang turned to speak to them again. Irritated, he walked back to rejoin them.
“We have perhaps gotten off on the wrong foot,” he conceded.
“Were you trying?” Clay inquired.
Kassidy loved his cool delivery on a dig. Clay could easily pull off an attitude that claimed superiority to absolutely anyone. His buffed and gorgeous physique towered above the scientist’s, making her dad look like a grumpy toad by comparison. Why does Dad look so old? Not decrepit or anything, when the face melted into wrinkles. But typically urbs wore their faces arrested at age 25, looking no older than Kassidy for 60 years – or so they expected. Her dad was the one who designed those latest-edition nanites. No one had time yet to reach their expiration date and resume aging. Dad looked somewhere in between. Maybe the way Clay looked when he wore makeup to appear older than his current disconcerting about-20.
She glanced over as Aurora jotted notes on her tablet. Unlike their pocket comms, hers was a bulky device as wide as her forearm was long, and cased in a freckled pink wood they called strawberry bamboo. ‘Rude,’ ‘unkempt,’ and ‘harass adult relative’ were among her comments.
Kassidy shot her a grin and thumb’s up. Aurora’s brow furrowed, and she angled the tablet away.
“I am a little concerned,” Sass confessed, “because we hoped to take you back to Waterfalls to live with us on the Thrive. Until our launch window.”
Kassidy wasn’t sure whether Sass ever admitted to their Neptune contacts that they didn’t have the fuel to do that. She eyed Aurora uneasily. The Waterfalls rep practiced radical honesty. Which made sense for a people who could read each other’s lies on their skin. But here everyone was bakkra-bald. Neptune was one place the surface microbes could not survive.
“Is it necessary for me to come so far ahead of schedule?” Yang asked, in a more pleasant tone of squeak. “I have my labs here, and my work. I don’t know when your launch window is?”
“About 5 months from now is the latest you could join us,” Sass supplied. “My understanding is that summer travel is punishing. Even getting here now was quite difficult for us.”
“I see.”
“But we did hope to visit a few days, or a week or two,” Clay added smoothly. “Not in your private apartments, I trust.”
“No indeed.” Yang nodded, then frowned thoughtfully. “And my daughter would stay with you.”
“She knows us,” Sass offered apologetically. “You should have time to get to know each other again.”
“Without an audience,” C
lay specified.
“Yes. Of course. Here we are.”
He stood aside to usher them into what Kassidy supposed was his real home, his lab, where his heart lived and always had. She trailed a finger along a nanite synthesizer in benediction. She recognized it all.
She frowned and approached the auto-doc that sat at the center of his lair, the place of honor, his current passion. Daddy had an entire rack of synthesizers hooked to that. Fascinating.
“Don’t touch –” Yang began, but caught himself.
Kassidy batted her eyelashes at him, and turned her back to display the twiddling fingers held behind her. “I remember, Daddy.”
He didn’t correct her.
She resumed her study of the tubes and wiring connecting the synthesizers to the auto-doc. She’d gotten quite familiar with the standard device after her crew-mate Cortez’s unfortunate mauling by a one-tonne flying anvil during the toga day affair. She remained standing as the others settled to a small conference table.
Daddy had no acolytes in attendance today. When she was a child, he had a constant flock sucking up to him, catering to his every whim. She smiled to recall how she insisted on ‘helping’ the ones sent to fetch coffee or something, and their helpless expressions at being saddled with babysitting along with their other duties. She was quite the accomplished little brat in her day.
She tuned back into the conversation as her father fell into a high-pitched lecture mode.
“…Old model of auto-docs, delivered 40 years ago. One here, and one in Denali Prime survive. Until the volcanoes, of course. But they’d long since run out of any way to recharge them. They promised whatever I desired here, no constraints on my research. Except that each community had the right to veto anything they felt uncomfortable with. But with such varying communities, I figured…”
Kassidy snuck a glance at his face. Clearly Daddy hadn’t found the MA-style hero worship he’d thrived on back home, here no more than at Mahina Orbital, or on the sister moon of Sagamore.