Rule #3: Never let noise, heat, or moisture reveal the location of the sling. The filament force field was like a porous wall. Just about anything small could penetrate through the gaps in the force field and into the sling. Oxygen, obviously. A sharp-tipped arrow. A bullet, for sure. The wall was porous both ways – from outside to inside, or from inside to outside. That meant that with a small amount of pressure, we could push a finger or an elbow through the filament force field. That meant that we had to be careful not to make wild movements that would result in an elbow suddenly appearing all by itself in the sky. Also, eating food in the sling was a bad idea in a crowd. Crumbs could fall out. The porous wall didn’t stop sound either. We could hear what people were saying around us; similarly, they’d hear us if we made a noise. A sudden cough could be disastrous.
In order to fly comfortably, I had created some force-field baffles that would deflect the outside air. Otherwise, it would become extremely breezy and cold in the sling. When hovering, or at low speed, we left the baffles open and air flowed through the sling. Sound, water, and dust could also get in. As we built up speed, we closed the baffles tighter and tighter until only a small amount of air could enter. Otherwise, the interior of the sling would become very cold. It was impossible to poke a finger through the sling with the baffles closed. Sound could not get in or out either.
Whenever anyone was around that might be able to see us, we had to be very careful not to let the outside weather reveal us. If it were raining or snowing, for example, we couldn’t be a bubble of dryness hovering in the air with raindrops bouncing off us.
Bottom line: it was very dangerous operating the sky-sling anywhere people might be around to see or hear us. We always flew it with extreme caution in those situations. We even extended that caution to operating in the wilderness. Izzy would have put the baffles on maximum when we were diving so that the sound of our screams could not escape. That made our screams sound even louder inside the sling though, which was half of the fun.
Our headfirst dive ended and I noticed that we were rising again but in a gradual arc this time. As we reached the top and started to descend, my stomach tried to float out of my body. Fortunately, my body kept pace with it or the inside of the sling could have become very yucky.
# # # # # # # #
Weightless. Izzy had made us weightless! I couldn’t believe it! We were still clutching each other in our death grip, so I pulled my cheek away from hers and stared at her.
“Surprise,” she smiled.
“How'd you do it?”
“Later. Here comes another.”
The sling was reaching the top of another large vertical arc and I could feel the gravity decreasing. I shut up, pulled her tight, and we were floating again.
We did two more weightless arcs and then the sling leveled off. Both of us relaxed our grips and we pulled back a bit from our embrace. “Again?” she asked.
Izzy had this great big grin on her face, her eyes were shining, and I knew an infectious giggle was waiting to erupt. “Oh yes, again!” I said.
I felt the sling accelerate into a steep incline, but I couldn’t help staring at her, and she giggled at what must have been on my face, and then she ducked her head against my chest just as I was about to kiss her. I grabbed her around her waist instead and lifted her off her feet and squeezed and squeezed. I felt her kiss the top of my head. Then it became difficult to breathe so I put her down so that we’d be ready.
“It’s not necessary to do the death-plunge to become weightless, but I think it’s more fun this way,” she said.
Then, we were screaming again.
# # # # # # # #
We did four more dives, each with four arcs of weightlessness afterwards and then thought it best to stop. Both of us were beginning to feel queasy, either from the plunges or perhaps from the weightlessness. Izzy explained how she had read somewhere that it was possible to generate short periods of weightlessness, but couldn’t remember how. So, she had experimented with different types of movements until she found the right ones. Since the IOF had kept me away from any knowledge remotely related to space travel, she knew that it would be a surprise for me. I thanked her, gave her a hug, and got to kiss the top of her head again.
“I know you’re bursting with ideas, so I’ll fly us slowly and gently to Doc’s camp and you can disappear inside your brain.”
So, I did.
The sky-sling had been too confining for us to really experience weightlessness. I could feel that we were floating, but we weren’t actually floating free. But, if I could make a much bigger sky-sling, there’d be enough interior space that we could float from bottom to top and from side to side. That prompted the idea that Izzy and I could not only have our individual sky-slings, but I could make a much bigger version of the sky-sling that had enough room for three people. Doc could travel with us. In fact, each of us could wear individual sky-slings inside a larger sky-sling. I wondered what effect the smaller force fields would have on the larger force field. Would they cancel each other out? Reinforce? Would we have to worry about sound escaping? Would it be necessary to have different sky-slings, or could we each have one that was expandable? Would…
I had to stop in mid-thought. Something was pressing my nostrils together and I opened my mouth to breathe, half choking, half-gasping. The pressure on my nostrils disappeared.
“Will, I need you.”
Izzy’s voice didn't sound normal.
Back to the Table of Contents
Chapter 2
From Will's journals: November 5, 2081 continued.
“Will, I need you,” Izzy repeated.
“What?” I said as soon as I got my breath back.
“Trouble,” she said. “Tell me when you’re focused. Be quick.”
I tried shaking my head several times, as though I could just shake all my ideas out of my brain. I sensed her impatience and forgot about the filaments and what I could do with them. We were hovering over some spot in the foothills with a small, stringy turquoise lake directly in front of us. It was surrounded on three sides by steeply falling, forested hillsides. I checked behind me. Make that surrounded on four sides. The lake was a little pocket of shiny water at the bottom of a hole in a mountain range. “Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re about one klick south of where Doc said he would be. Can you see the stream entering the lake at the northern edge?” and she pointed.
“Got it.”
“Doc said that's where he'd be.”
“Where the little wisps of smoke are? Surely he wouldn’t do that?”
“No, he wouldn’t. What colour is the smoke?”
“Pink?”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Izzy put the sling into a crawl towards the smoke. We were several hundred meters in the air. “Doc is the best woodsman I’ve ever seen,” she continued. “I knew everything he knew, but I still couldn’t find him if he didn’t want to be found. Doc gave me a special kit in case the DPS caught me – I’ll show you in a minute. He kept a second kit for himself; said that if I ever approached his camp and there was pink smoke in the air, I should run away. It meant that the DPS had found him.”
We both scanned the terrain below us. The lake was at a reasonably high altitude but not high enough for there to be snow. It hardly ever snowed enough to cover the ground in Alberta nowadays except at very high altitudes. That meant that even though it was winter, the ground was bare and dry. “Doc wouldn’t have left any tracks on that ground for anyone to follow,” Izzy said. “They couldn’t have caught him with normal woodcraft.”
“How’s the smoke work?” I asked.
“From a chemical plug that Doc inserts into a dry log. The chemical burns clear near the fire, but the smoke gradually turns pink as it rises. People at the camp wouldn’t notice it but you’d see the pink from a distance. It lasts only as long as the log.”
“Half an hour to an hour?”
“Probably. No way of
knowing what size log he used. I’m being very careful approaching the camp because the DPS may have left a watcher behind. We don’t dare get out of the sling.” Izzy started us on a slow facedown crawl around the circumference of a smallish-size circle of level ground that would have been his campsite. “If they took him overland, he’d put up some sort of struggle and leave a trail of some kind.”
Neither of us could see any trail leading out of the campsite other than the creek to the lake.
I spotted the spike marks on the tree first. “Doc’s hammock would have been at least halfway up,” and I pointed to the likely spot.
“Doc doesn’t use spikes. He wears only moccasins when he’s in the woods. Those gouges were made by the DPS agents cleaning up the camp.”
We had completed our circle and Izzy hovered over the creek. This was the easiest way in and out of the camp.
“Follow the creek to the lake?” I suggested and she did.
We both saw the wet boot mark on the boulder by the creek edge at the same time. “They probably immobilized him and carried his body down the creek bed. They had to step out of the water at some point.”
"Canoe?”
“They’re too lazy. Look for rotor wash instead.”
We found a semi-circle of wet vegetation by the lakeside that shouldn’t have been wet. The landing spot. Izzy said that the copter would be at least a four-seater. I added that solar power couldn’t fly a copter that size. “South to Calgary?” I asked.
“It’s closer than Edmonton,” Izzy confirmed. She opened up the baffles and took us gradually southward, changing the elevation, and smelling the air. Nothing.
She returned to the campsite and took us north. Both of us smelled a faint odor of something. I didn’t know what it was but Izzy said that it was the smell of copter fuel. She had smelled it often enough as a child when the DPS was still actively hunting them. Izzy took us well away from the campsite before maxing the sky-sling into a steep climb north. We needed to see over the horizon.
“Clean the gum out of your pinky-ring,” she told me once we leveled off.
I had forgotten about that. I removed the big gob easily enough but the computer still wouldn’t respond. She pulled a very thin screwdriver out of the cuff of her sleeve and handed it to me. “I’m sorry I fouled up your ring. You can use this to scrape off the residue.”
“Where’d that come from?”
“Part of a kit that Doc gave me. Take over flying the sling as soon as your ring is working properly.” She pulled her collapsible scope out of her jacket pocket and began searching for a glint of reflected sunlight ahead of us.
# # # # # # # #
We both reached the same conclusions. They’d probably fly north and stay over the mountains for as long as possible to avoid being seen by people on the ground. The DPS tries to keep their military helicopters secret because, supposedly, the IOF doesn’t have an army. If they stayed on a northerly heading, we’d catch them easily enough because Edmonton was a long way off and we could fly much faster than they could. But, if they had a different destination, we needed as much time as the sling could give us to check the alternate routes. I took us as close to the speed of sound as I dared.
We found them without difficulty soon afterwards. The copter was a four seat military version. Green and black camouflage, large top rotor, machine gun sticking out the front fuselage, another two machine guns positioned at each side. The pilot and co-pilot had doors but there was open space beside the passenger seats. I brought us to within three hundred meters below and behind them, and turned to Izzy. “Now what?”
“Can you bring us close enough so that we can see inside?”
I eased into a course parallel to them on their right side that turned out to be Doc’s side. He was in the rear passenger seat, obviously awake and alert. He was gazing around him – even looked right at us at one point. I could see his big black bushy eyebrows clear as day - the black contrasting with his shock of white hair. The left passenger seat was empty. Izzy reported that she could see no visible marks on Doc’s face and he didn’t appear to be in pain. We both knew that would come later. She saw a glint of something by Doc’s feet and asked me to get as close as I could without risking discovery.
I took us within twenty-meters of the copter before the air turbulence made the sling shake and buck. I was making mental adjustments in course and altitude almost every other second and told Izzy that. “This should be close enough,” she said and leaned across my body to get a better view with her scope. The glint turned out to be chains. A metal chain encircled one of Doc's ankles, threaded through a bracket of some kind that was attached to the floor of the helicopter, and then looped onto the other ankle. Doc’s hands were fastened behind him. Possibly plastic restraints, possibly not. Possibly looped through another bracket behind Doc’s back, possibly not. I took a quick peek to my left and saw Doc tilt his head back against the seat and close his eyes.
Izzy continued her status report. The co-pilot was sitting in a high backed seat that gave him no view whatsoever of the passenger behind him. He’d have to unfasten his seat belt and swivel in his seat before he’d know what was going on behind him. The pilot was another matter. All he had to do was turn his head to the right to see Doc. Right now, both pilots were staring straight ahead. Possibly talking together through the headphones. On this kind of flight, boredom would set in quickly. Would that mean they’d be continually looking around trying to stay alert? Or, would they just daydream?
Izzy asked if we should stay in the prop wash so that I could learn how to control the sling better, or was it dangerous to stay there too long? I said that the sling wouldn’t rattle apart and I needed all the practice that I could get in the prop wash. I knew that at some point, Izzy would want us even closer. Izzy said that she was going to think now, which was a polite way of asking me not to disturb her, so I didn’t say anything when I got my bright idea. I eased us away from the DPS copter so that she could think without being jolted all over the sky.
# # # # # # # #
I dropped us away from the copter while Izzy described her rescue plan. Step one, step two, step three, all the way to the end. It was so detailed that you would have thought that she had spent a week on it. At least, that’s how long I would have needed. The biggest problem she saw was keeping the sky-sling close enough to the copter so that she could free Doc, but without the sky-sling nudging the copter and causing the pilot to turn around to see what had happened.
I told her I could solve that, but I’d need to use her ring. She put her right hand directly in front of her mouth and said: “Master command level: Password is: Jane ***** Tarzan!!! Direct instruction: Give full access to the voice that follows.” Then, she put her hand in front of my mouth and motioned me to talk. A few seconds later, her ring was on the end of my pinky finger. Strange password, I thought. I like to include at least two numbers in my passwords. I would have asked why she used asterisks instead but she was busy looking for something by her feet.
I told Izzy what I intended to do and that brought her face back up. It was kind of red, so I realized that I had shut the baffles down too much. We needed as much oxygen as we could get right now so I opened them. When we got close to the copter, I’d have to shut them down again to keep out the noxious fumes.
Izzy ran through the plan again – changing it on the fly after I had guaranteed the prop wash would not affect us. When she paused, I thought that was it. Doc would be safe, although wet. Then, she started on the contingency plans. What to do if the pilot turned around; what to do if Doc lost control of his body; what to do if we couldn’t find the landing spot we wanted; what to do if the pilot decided to make sure that Doc was dead. Izzy wanted the DPS to think that Doc was dead so that they wouldn’t keep searching for him.
“I’m sorry if I’m being bossy” she said when she was finished.
“You’re not being bossy. You’re being amazing,” I said.
Iz
zy had to fix something with her shoe and then looked up. “Ready?”
I swallowed and nodded.
# # # # # # # #
I positioned the sling well away from the copter while I integrated Izzy's ring power into the control functions. I used my own ring to maintain the gravitational force field and navigation controls, however I pulsed those commands at 60 per minute, not the usual 120. As far as I could determine, the sling was not affected by the slower cycle – meaning we were still invisible. I opened the baffles completely and Izzy confirmed that she could get her hand through the force field. It gave her a tingling feeling but no pain, so we figured she’d be all right. I used Izzy’s ring to send an entirely different set of instructions to the sling’s filaments. Those commands were also pulsing at 60 per minute. The sling shook a bit until I got the pulses synchronized so that the Izzy’s pulses slipped in between my pulses. The shaking stopped. Once again, we tested navigation controls and the baffles. “We’re good,” I said.
“Go,” she replied.
I stationed the sling on a parallel course and on the side of the copter where Doc was sitting. Still using the gravitational force field power from my ring, I tipped the sling into a full vertical position with Izzy essentially standing to my right. I lined the sling up so that Izzy was staring directly at Doc whereas I was looking at the fuselage to Doc's right. “Increasing your ring’s power, now” I told Izzy.
The magnetic field controlled by Izzy’s computer began to draw the sling towards the copter’s metal fuselage while my ring’s gravitational field kept us hovering at the same altitude. The synchronization of the pulses meant that for a split second, the filaments were magnetic, then they were gravitational, then they were magnetic, and so on.
We slowly entered the prop wash and I fiddled with the navigational controls to stabilize us as best as I could. I had to be very cautious now. When the sling magnetized itself to the fuselage, the copter would experience a sudden increase in weight from our two bodies. The pilot would wonder why he had to suddenly increase power to maintain altitude. To avoid that, I was going to increase the power of the sling’s gravitational field to help support the copter. I had to do that the second the sling bonded with the copter and the amount of power increase had to be just about perfect. A slight drop or rise would be interpreted as a little air pocket. A lurch would not be ignored. It worked out all right. We didn’t lurch.