Then it was time. The winds along the ground of Stakeout Canyon were over a hundred miles an hour. Her radar showed the storm’s leading edge was now boiling up Mount Herculaneum ahead of her, and that was the critical factor. Those winds had to be there to carry her a long, long way. Without them, this was going to be a short trip with one very abrupt ending.
She put her hands down on the console’s i-spots, fingers curling round the grip bars; plyplastic flowed round them, securing them for what promised to be a turbulent flight. The OCtattoos on her wrists completed the link between the i-spots and her main nerve cords, interfacing her directly with the on-board array. Virtual hands appeared inside her virtual vision. Her customization had given them long slender fingers with green nails and glowing blue neon rings on every finger. A joystick materialized amid the icons, and she moved her virtual hand to grasp it. Her other hand started tapping icons, initiating one final systems check. With everything coming up green, she ordered the on-board array to deploy the wings.
The plyplastic buds swelled out, elongating to become small thick delta shapes. The thrumming increased dramatically as they caught the wind. Tethers were being strained close to their tolerance limits. Justine prayed the carbon-reinforced titanium anchor struts, driven fifty metres into the naked rock by the support team, would survive the next few minutes.
Some little demon inside said, Last chance to stay put, and live.
Justine moved her virtual hand and flipped the forward tether icon. The locks disengaged, and she was immediately shaken violently from side to side as the hyperglider fishtailed. An instinctive response from the implanted training memory came to her aid. She twisted the joystick, and the wings bent downwards several degrees. A touch on the rear tether icon, and the two strands extended. The hyperglider lifted twenty metres into the air, still shaking frantically, as if it was desperate to be rid of its final restraints. Justine halted the tether extension, and began to test her control surfaces. The rear of the hyperglider was quickly shifted into a vertical stabilizer fin. Wings expanded a little further, angling to produce more lift. Finally, once she cleared the ground, the dreadful thrumming vibration faded away – although never cutting out altogether. Now all she had to contend with was the awesome roar of the wind as it accelerated towards a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
At this point, the hyperglider was nothing more than a giant kite. Very carefully, she began to extend the rear tethers still further. They played out behind her, and the hyperglider rose eagerly away from the ground. After two minutes of careful extension, she was a hundred metres high. The ground wasn’t visible, for which she was obscurely thankful. Tatters of mist were scudding past so fast they prevented her from seeing anything beyond twenty or thirty metres. Raindrops which hit the cockpit transparency immediately hurtled off, scoured clean by the tremendous air velocity. Constantly flexing the wings to compensate for turbulence, she began extending the tethers again.
Twenty-five minutes after leaving the ground, she was fourteen hundred metres high. It was a cautious ascent, but the two tether cables were shaking with a harmonic that set her teeth on edge. Justine configured the plyplastic hyperglider for freeflight. The wings flowed outwards, reaching a hundred and ten metres at full span whilst curving round into a crescent shape; from above it made the hyperglider look like a giant scimitar blade, with the cockpit bullet jutting out of the apex. Behind her, the rear fuselage performed a vertical stretch, becoming a deep triangular stabilizer, its tips twitching with near-subliminal motion to keep the craft lined up accurately in the windstream.
She reached fifteen hundred metres in altitude. The wings curled fractionally along their length, presenting the most efficient lift capture profile to the wind. Looking at the figures on the console screen, she couldn’t believe the strain on the tether cables, almost all the safety margin was used up.
Justine sucked down a deep breath as the raw elements screamed around her. If she had the courage, this ought to be the ride of a lifetime. If . . . She thought back to all those years she’d lived through, from this strange viewpoint they all seemed so achingly identical, and boring.
A virtual finger reached forward, almost reluctantly touching the disengage icon.
The g-force slammed her back into the seat as the hyper-glider cut free, bringing back the weight she hadn’t felt since she arrived on Far Away. The craft hurtled towards the blunt end of Stakeout Canyon at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Immediately, it lurched to starboard and began to descend. She twisted the joystick to compensate – not fast, smooth and positive – shifting the wings to alter the airflow. The response was astonishingly quick, sending her swooping upwards. Then a near-spin started, and she flipped the stabilizer tips to counter it.
Every moment demanded her total concentration merely to hold the hyperglider roughly level. It wasn’t just the featureless wrap of cloud which cut her off from the outside world. Her attention was focused solely on the attitude display and the radar. As Stakeout Canyon narrowed, she had to hold her course directly down the centre. All the time the rock walls closed in towards each other, growing steeper in the process, the furious buffeting increased proportionally. Wild turbulence was constantly trying to swirl the craft round into a spin, or pull it down to oblivion.
She wasn’t even aware of time passing, only the frantic, exhausting fight to keep the hyperglider on track. If she let it ascend too high, the massive upper windstreams would carry it away over the sides of the canyon as they gushed up and away, expanding in release from the escalating pressure at the base of the walls. She would wind up somewhere on the weather-blasted and boulder-strewn midslopes of Zeus or Titan, hundreds of kilometres from the recovery vehicles of the caravan.
Without any warning, the radar picked up the end of the canyon, twenty-five kilometres away. At this point, where the three volcanoes intersected, Mount Herculaneum was a simple vertical cliff, six kilometres high. Her own altitude was three and a half kilometres. Outside, the wind speed was still increasing within the constriction. The weather radar screen flared lurid scarlet around the edges as it tracked the lethal currents and shockwaves reverberating off the rock. Darkness deepened around her as the shredded clouds were crushed back together.
Justine retracted the wings slightly, sacrificing the propulsive push they generated for a little more manoeuvrability. It had begun to rain steadily outside the cockpit now, thick droplets slashing along beside her. Paradoxically, visibility began to lift. The clouds were recondensing under the pressure. Droplets began to merge together for an instant before the raging winds tore them apart. Then they would reform a second later, larger this time as the pressure continued to build relentlessly. Semi-cohesive horizontal streams of water churned and foamed around the hyperglider fuselage.
The cliff was twelve kilometres away, and she was down to three kilometres from the canyon floor. Water had become so dense, it was as if the hyperglider was surfing along inside the crest of some crazy airborne wave. The sun had risen above the volcano’s slopes, shining down into the top of the canyon. Suddenly, it struck the chaotic foam whipping round the hyperglider, and the world flared into a thousand tattered sparkling rainbows, birthing and dying, clashing and colliding. Justine laughed in dazed appreciation at the astounding sight.
Three kilometres ahead of her, the gushing rivulets merged into a single writhing torrent two kilometres above the floor of Stakeout Canyon. That was a couple of kilometres from the cliff. The rocky constriction was at its narrowest, the pressure at its highest. There was only one way the churning river could escape.
Justine slid the hyperglider above the water, staring down on it in utter disbelief. The rainbows fizzled out abruptly. Rock slammed up into her vision to replace them, terrifyingly huge walls of it, stretching up halfway to heaven. Right in front of her, the flying river curved upwards and began the long, impossible powerclimb to freedom as the entire storm went vertical. Blasting out an eternal thunderclap, the wind reached two
hundred miles an hour. She knew she was yelling wordlessly, but couldn’t hear herself above the cacophony bombarding the cockpit.
The hyperglider was wrenched upwards. G-force slammed Justine down into the seat again. Her knuckles grew white as she clenched the grip bars, fearful she’d lose contact with the i-spots. She wrestled the wing surfaces to obey in a desperate bid to maintain stability within the geysering air. Water rose with her, defying gravity to shoot up parallel to the cliff. Even with the hyperglider demanding her full devotion simply to survive the demented air currents, she spared the time, a couple of precious seconds, to stare at the incredible phenomenon. A waterfall going straight up.
At five kilometres altitude, the foaming sheet of water began to break apart again. The immense upright storm was beginning to spread wide as it reached the top of the canyon. Pressure and wind velocity were weakening. Throughout it all, Justine steered the hyperglider directly up the central track. Water and cloud cascaded away on either side as she burst out above the rock, two immense waves of vapour falling back down in swan-wing curves to crash onto the volcano’s lower slopes. Only in the centre of the maelstrom did the wind keep howling, thrusting her forwards and upwards.
Mount Herculaneum’s gigantic bulk became visible below her, a desolate ground of shattered stone and saturated gravel extending for tens of kilometres around the top of the canyon. Gradually, the harshness began to give way to the more welcome stains of ochre and avocado-green as the plants reasserted themselves. Tiny grasses rooted hard in crinkled fissures, hardy tropical moss welded to boulders. The storm continued to rage above them, seeking its escape to the quieter skies in the east by sliding round the slopes to the north and the south.
Justine modified the wing camber again, maintaining her speed, but rising ever higher. She was tracking a straight line between the canyon and the summit, never deviating to either side. Grassy meadows with sturdy scrub bushes passed below her now. Temperate lands, the plants lashed and cowed by the unremitting storms, but always flourishing. The twin cataracts of erupting water from the canyon were fifteen kilometres behind her, and the clouds were parting, peeling off right and left to find their own route round the volcano. Justine sought another path through the clear sunny sky ahead and above. Her speed was still colossal, sufficient to carry her well clear of the storm, but not quite enough for her ultimate goal. She began scanning the weather radar.
As if the volcano’s western midsection didn’t have enough to contend with, twisters were skittering over the rumpled slopes, a legacy of clear air turbulence from the storm. She could see them through the canopy, spindly strands of beige ephemera, whipping violently back and forth across the land. They came in all sizes, from mild spirals of dust to brutal, dense, vortices reaching kilometres in height. The on-board array plotted their courses, eliminating those too weak or too distant for her purpose. Not that any of them were truly predictable. This was where human intuition came in – and luck.
There was one, twenty kilometres ahead, and slightly more southward than she would have preferred. But it stood nearly five kilometres high, siphoning up car-sized boulders as it wove its erratic course. Justine banked round, lining the hyperglider’s nose on it. She acquired yet more speed as the craft sank closer to the ground. The wings and vertical stabilizer shrank inwards, thickening as they went. Her eyes were mesmerized by the wild pirouettes of the twister’s base, leaving her hungry for a pattern, any sort of clue to which way it would swerve next.
The hyperglider’s descent became a fearsome dive. She swayed it in time with the base of the twister – judging, anticipating. Wings and stabilizer were down to nothing more than stubs, giving her minimal control. The ground was barely five hundred metres away. Ahead of her, the twister altered course again. She knew it would hold steady for perhaps a couple of seconds, and pushed the joystick forwards, arrowing the craft straight at it. At the last moment she pulled up, watching the nose trace a sharp curve. The horizon fell away, leaving her with a sky that faded from glaring turquoise to fabulous deep indigo.
Then the hyperglider penetrated the twister. Enraged dust and whirling grit surrounded the fuselage, holding it tight. The wings and rear stabilizers bowed round, forming a stumpy propeller as the nose finished its arc to point straight up along the wavering unstable core of whirling air. Wing blades bit deep, spinning the fuselage and thrusting it up in one potent motion. Particles, from sand up to alarmingly large stones, hammered away on the fuselage. The multiple impacts sounded as if she was being hit by machine-gun fire. Structural stress levels quickly went to their amber alert levels. She flinched almost continually from the stones smacking against the cockpit transparency, not a foot from her face.
Despite that, this was the moment: the reason she was here. Not everybody got to this point. Some were smeared along the floor and walls of Stakeout Canyon. Others who’d actually managed to fly up the waterfall never found a twister, or messed up the entry. But her foreign memories had played true, giving her the skill. All she had to provide was the determination to back it up. That was what she’d come to this place for, finding out if she was still the same impetuous carefree person she remembered from her first life.
Motors whined loudly below her back, providing a counterspin to the forward fuselage. It helped enormously with stability, as well as holding the cockpit steady. That was the theory, anyway. She still felt dizzy and queasy, not that there was any visual reference to check if she was spinning. Virtual vision graphics showed a modest rotation for which the on-board array was trying to compensate. Acceleration was pushing her painfully deep into the seat.
It was only moments later when the hyperglider shot out of the top of the twister like a missile from its launch tube. Even though she’d only been inside for a few moments, her velocity had almost doubled. Fuselage motors strained again, halting the counter-rotation. The hyperglider’s wings and rear stabilizer lengthened, this time taking on a more normal planform; straight narrow wings and a cruciform tail. There was very little atmosphere to affect them now, the hyperglider was sliding quickly and smoothly through the stratosphere. However, she did angle them so the trajectory bent slightly. The craft was chasing a simple ballistic curve, the apex of which would be nine kilometres above Mount Herculaneum’s summit.
She watched the pressure display digits wind down until it was registering an effective vacuum outside the fuselage. The sky had changed from blue to midnight black. Stars shone strongly all around, while dazzlingly bright sunlight poured into the cockpit.
The contrast was astounding. From the pummelling terror of the storm to utter silent serenity of space in a few seconds. Even though this environment was every bit as lethal to a human as the storm, she felt strangely secure up here. Her yammering heart began to subside. She eased the seat straps away from her shoulders, and craned to get a good look outside.
She was almost level with the summit of Mount Herculaneum, and still rising. The volcano spread out below her, its lower slopes lost below the clouds. Far behind the hyperglider’s tail, the storm emerged from Stakeout Canyon to boil away furiously around the immense rock barrier. Twisting her head to starboard she could look down into Mount Titan’s crater. Right at the bottom of it was a demonic scarlet glow from the lava lake, partially obscured by webs of thick black smoke. Broad tendrils waved upwards, thinning out as they reached the lip to disperse into a haze that drizzled flaky grey ash across the upper slopes. She was mildly disappointed it wasn’t in full eruption; locals working as crew for the caravan had enthused about Mount Doom (as they called it, only half jokingly) in full flow.
Eight and a half kilometres above the summit of Mount Herculaneum, the hyperglider had reached the top of its arc. Its trajectory was flattening out as Far Away’s low gravity slowly began to reassert itself. The planet’s horizon rose into view beyond the nose. A crisp white curve against the black of space. Directly below her were the twin caldera, two vast indentations in a drab russet plain of solidified lava wav
es and broken clinker.
Justine’s radio picked up a few scattered words, heavy with blasts of static, from the expeditions trekking over the airless surface. Walking to the top of Herculaneum was another of Far Away’s principal tourist attractions. It wasn’t difficult, the slopes weren’t particularly steep, and the low gravity gave offworld visitors an easy time of it. But the last half had to be covered in pressure suits; and the only real view, sensational though it was, came from Aphrodite’s Seat, the clifftops just below the caldera plateau. Anyone wanting to walk to the actual highest point, an unimpressive mound on the wall of the northern crater, faced a long dreary slog across a lunar-style landscape to reach it.
With the hyperglider’s nose now dipping slightly, Far Away filled most of the universe to the east of the volcano. From her supreme vantage point, Justine could see the Dessault Mountain range stretching away ahead and southward. Small sharp pinnacles stabbing up through the gentle whirl of clouds. They guarded the high desert south of the equator, a cold land almost devoid of cloud. Over to the east she could see a smear of deep greens, where the steppes began their long roll towards the North Sea and Armstrong City.
The horizon’s pronounced curve presented the illusion that she was seeing an entire hemisphere of the planet; like some ancient god of myth gazing down on Earth. Although Far Away was actually larger than Mars, the size, whilst limiting her real field of view, certainly didn’t detract from the apparent omnipotent perspective. And Far Away lacked the softer textures granted to the old gods of Mount Olympus. The white clouds covered a graded spectrum of miserable browns and greys. Despite close to two centuries of human endeavour, the planet’s land surface was nowhere near recovered from the mammoth, and utterly lethal, solar flare that had called people here. Tough, independent-minded settlers had pushed out from Armstrong City, planting their seeds and spraying energetic, wholesome soil bacteria across the empty miles of dusty sand, but the biosphere remained tenuous, its progress towards full planetary enrichment slow. So much was still desert or blasted earth; very, very little of the planet’s original flora and fauna had survived the radiation. The greenery she could see was alien to this place, invaders colonizing a near-dead world.