ME 0255 had lifted off from Arcadia, heading for Calvert, 4,400 kilometers away.
He was only woken by the thump of the landing gear locking down as the big Boeing maneuvered on its final approach, the two wing-mounted water-fed mass drivers barely audible as they powered up for landing. Through the window, Michael could see the early dawn flushing a mauve-black eastern sky a golden pink, but the ground below was still dark, with only pools of light thrown by the carefully shaded streetlights of Calvert to give him any sense of terrain. For some reason and even though he had slept only a bit under six hours and that in seats whose design, he swore, dated from the dark ages of air travel, Michael felt different. He was still very tired but no longer felt half-drugged.
Twenty minutes later, Michael was outside breathing the fresh air of his home world for the first time in almost twelve months. He struggled for a moment to remember whether it was autumn or spring; autumn, he thought after considering it for a while, not that Ashakiran’s seasons were much different from one another: The planet had only a four-month year and a 19.5-degree axial tilt, after all. He stood there, heedless of the steady trickle of early-morning passengers coming and going. It was easy to let the southeast trade winds wash over him and enjoy the sounds of the breeze as it moved through the trees, palms, and bushes-a disorganized unruly riot of whites, blues, reds, golds, yellow, lilacs, and purples, all with the luscious, heady aromas of geneered plants and set against a leafy backdrop of every conceivable shade of green with the odd purple or red for variety-that framed the approach to Calvert airport.
With renewed energy, Michael headed for the Avis office.
With his identity checked with the usual excruciating care, his credit established, and pilot’s license painstakingly verified to give him the privilege of hand flying the machine, Michael took temporary loan of a two-seat Honda flier. It was a new model he hadn’t seen before, and very neat-looking it was. A single piece of molded plasglass screen flowed back and over the passenger compartment before turning down to blend seamlessly into stubby variable-profile plasfiber wings. A FusionIndustries commercial microfusion plant driving a single-vectored water-fed mass driver, a noise reduction shroud, a retractable tricycle under-carriage, eight reaction control nozzles, and a simple tail assembly completed the machine. Inside the cabin, there were two big brightscreen multifunction displays, both rendered totally redundant by neuronics, thought Michael. Why did Honda and every other flier manufacturer insist on installing them? A two-axis sidestick controller, yaw pedals, throttle lever, and radio selector completed the pilot’s station.
With the flight plan completed and uploaded to Calvert Control, Calvert airport’s airspace and traffic management AI, Michael took care to establish good relations with the flier’s AI, called Mother, naturally, and blessed with an engagingly firm tone of voice as if to say she had seen quite enough hire flier pilots in her time, hadn’t been impressed by any of them, and would Michael please behave himself. That done, Michael rapidly completed the prelaunch checks, got the OK for his flight plan from Calvert Control, and uploaded the approved flight pipe to Mother.
Calvert airport’s house rules allowed noncommercial flier operations only under the joint control of Mother and Calvert Control until clear of restricted airspace around the airport. So it was Mother and not Michael who taxied the flier out to the small satellite strip south of the main runway complex. She held the flier on the brakes while the mass driver ran up to full power, the jet efflux ripping and howling, the steam plume driving down the runway behind them before Mother let the brakes go, slamming Michael back into his seat before lifting the flier sharply up off the ground and into a steep climb.
Michael was happy to sit back and gaze out at the Coral Bight as it slowly came into view below the plasglass nose of the flier, the deep blue ocean stunningly pretty under the blush pink of an early-morning sky. His daydream was interrupted by Mother’s no-nonsense tones.
“Mr. Helfort. We shall shortly be levelling off at 10,250 meters. Calvert Control authorizes you to take control at that time. Any departure outside approved flight pipe Purple 24 Alfa will result in my taking control for the remainder of the flight. Please acknowledge.”
“Roger, Mother,” Michael sighed resignedly. “Acknowledged.”
“Thank you, Mr. Helfort.” Mother’s voice was firm.
As he took control, the flier was alive under Michael’s hands as he reveled in the crisp responsiveness of the Honda machine, turning off the machine’s AI-controlled ride-smoothing system so that he could fly through the occasional bump as the flier hit small patches of low-grade clear air turbulence.
All of a sudden the weight of the last few months dropped off his shoulders as he enjoyed the simple pleasure of flying.
Above him, the sky, broken only by a light scattering of high altocumulus clouds, and the occasional contrails of a high-flying jet, had turned a deep blue as they cleared the salt haze pulled off the Equatorial Sea by the nearly constant southeast trades. Out to the left, the early-morning sun had cleared the horizon and was beginning to make its presence felt; Michael had to have Mother darken the plasglass to compensate.
Three hundred kilometers south of Calvert, the flier crossed the southern coast of the Calvert Peninsula. Ahead of him, Michael could see nothing but the endless blue of the Coral Bight, broken by atolls of fast-growing geneered coral; immense irregular patches of white shaded down through every tint of blue imaginable until blending into the cobalt of the deep ocean, their windward edges fringed with brilliant white necklaces of broken surf. Beyond the bight lay the Atalantan Mountains, with six peaks over 15,000 meters, but they were more than 1,000 kilometers ahead of him; Michael doubted he would see them before the turn to the southwest.
The minutes passed as Michael flew onward, happy and content for the first time in months, the journey interrupted only by a steady stream of traffic information as the flier wove its way through the mass of flight pipes funneling early-morning traffic into Calvert from Manaar, York, and the Petrov spaceport to the east.
Five hundred kilometers southeast of Calvert, Michael banked the flier onto a course that would see him across the Tien Shan Mountains and on his final approach to the Palisades, the mountain retreat of the Helfort family and the perfect place, he thought, to recover both physically and spiritually.
The flier whispered on; Michael was immersed in the simple routines of flying until finally the peaks of the Tien Shan began to take shape in front of him. They were emerging slowly from the surface haze, as awe-inspiring and spectacular as the first time he remembered seeing them as a little boy.
From the broad, mangrove-fringed coastal plain that ran across the foot of the Coral Bight from New Beijing in the north to Harbin in the south, thickly wooded slopes of geneered hardwoods rose up into the foothills before giving way to conifers and then scrubby bushes, mosses, and lichens. Finally, at almost 7,000 meters, even the geneered vegetation introduced to Ashakiran centuries earlier had to admit defeat. Above that point, only broken rock and snow covered the steep slopes running up to the awesome granite cliffs of Mount Izbecki to the left-all 15,690 meters of it and to this day conquered only by cliffbot-assisted climbers-and its equally imposing sisters to the right. As Michael flew across the coast and into the foothills, steadily lifting the flier to the 12,500 meters needed to cross the Tien Shan, Mount Izbecki and its companions came into sight, Mount Clarke and Mount Christof at 14,990 and 14,450 meters, respectively, the jet stream ripping long tails of cloud thick with ice and snow off their rocky summits.
And then, finally, between mountain peaks to the left and right and framed by sheer granite cliffs rising impossibly sheer for more than 2,000 meters, the High Pass appeared, visible at first as little more than a thin dark streak down the face of the huge cliffs between the Izbecki and the Clarke-Christof massifs. Slowly the streak opened up as the flier closed in to reveal a narrow gorge. Not for the first time Michael wondered at the arrogance of pushing a tiny flier into a narrow pass more than 12,000 meters above sea level with no place to go but straight ahead.
“Mother, positive nav check, please.” Michael wanted to make absolutely sure that the 800-meter-wide gap he was heading for at 1,000 kph was the right 800-meter-wide gap and not some dead end.
“Confirmed. In pipe Purple 24 Alfa for transit of the High Pass en route to the Palisades,” Mother responded confidently.
Good, Michael thought as he eased the flier back to a more sedate 500 kph. He would hate to have to do a screaming high-g turn in front of a cliff that the flier couldn’t climb over.
And then Michael was into the High Pass itself, the walls suddenly closing in on him at a truly frightening rate. The granite cliffs rushed past, an impossible blur, and all of a sudden he was seized with an outrageous sense of joy. Thumping and crashing through the turbulence of jet stream winds howling through the gash in the Tien Shan, the Honda was firm and true under his hands as Michael followed the twists and turns of the High Pass, the huge canyon weaving its way between the two giants of the Tien Shan. At times less than 300 meters above the
