snow and massive jagged rocks of the pass, the Honda slamming and bucking in the turbulent air thrown up from the broken ground, Michael could see the flier’s shadow racing ahead of him like some demented thing careless of what lay ahead as the rising sun squeezed its way down to ground between high rock walls.
Mother brought him back to reality.
“Caution. Approaching lower limit of flight pipe. Minimum permissible altitude on this pipe segment is 12,400 meters. Maintain altitude or return control to Mother.” If Mother’s voice could have sounded cranky, it would have. Michael sighed as he pulled the flier clear of the flight pipe’s lower limit, the moment gone. But still, what a moment it had been.
Minutes later, Michael reefed the flier around in a last tight turn to the left, the High Pass rushing past his window, seemingly so close that he could touch the snow. Then the sheer cliffs of Mount Izbecki dropped away in a heart-stopping fall down to the jumbled, cracked, and fissured surface of the Radski Glacier, the vast white expanse of its broken surface streaked gray and brown, long lines of rock ground off the valley walls scarring the pristine white surface of the ice below.
What a sight it was. Drawing ice from four smaller feeder glaciers high above it, the glacier cascaded in frozen disarray almost 7,000 meters down steep-walled valleys cut knife-edged into the sheer face of Mount Izbecki before melting into the pale waters of Radski’s Lake, a blue-green gem opalescent even in the morning shadows and framed by a tangled white, black, and gray confusion of snow, rock, and debris. Away from the wall of broken ice feeding into the lake, the Bachou River flowed across a broad rock lip before dropping in a plume of broken water and spray toward the valley floor a good 1,000 meters below. The plume of water shredded into a fine white spray long before it reached the bottom, tendrils of mist eddying and curling across and down the rock face as they fell.
Taking care to stay well within the approved flight pipe, Michael put the flier into a circle to lose height. The massive bulk of the glacier below the lander wheeled past the plasglass as the flier orbited slowly downward.
And then, finally, 500 meters above Radski’s Lake and with the lonely granite pillar marking the grave of Samuel Radski plainly visible on the shattered and chaotic slopes below the glacier, Michael turned the flier homeward down and across the Bachou River as it rushed from the Radski down to join the Clearwater. Ahead of and below him, plainly visible in the clear air, lay the thickly wooded hilltop on which the Palisades had been built.
Michael was almost home. He cut the power to idle, disengaged noise reduction, and, angling the flyer sharply downward, began the final approach.
The Palisades was an unremarkable house in all ways but one.
Quite small and rectangular in shape, it was made of the local fine-grained red hardwood for which the valley of the Clearwater River, cutting its way for thousands of kilometers across the heart of Van Manaan’s Land, was famous. The house was blessed with a large west-facing deck that ran across the entire front from one end to the other and from which the huge prairie that filled the basin of the upper Clearwater Valley ran away into the distance, backdropped by massive banks of clouds coming off the Karolev Ranges hundreds of kilometers to the southwest. Another southerly buster coming, he thought. Behind the house, the enormous bulk of Mount Izbecki rose impossibly tall and sheer above him, looking for all the world as if it were about to topple forward onto the house below. Just an illusion, Michael had to remind himself, so powerful was the feeling of imminent destruction.
It was an overwhelming, awesomely beautiful place and one that firmly reminded him how insignificant he and his affairs were.
A bottle of Lethbridge pilsner close at hand, Michael sat waiting for his father to clean up after coming up- valley from the little town of Bachou where his post-Fleet business-geneering and growing the glorious red- flowered, deep purple-and green-leafed Flame tree-was based.
A bang of the screen door announced his father’s arrival, his own beer securely in hand. Seconds later, Michael was engulfed in his father’s characteristic no-holds-barred hug. Finally, they broke apart. His father was the first to speak.
“I have been so worried about you. It’s good to have you home. Mom had some stuff to do. She’ll be up later, and with a bit of luck Samantha will have caught the shuttle from Manindi.” Always “Samantha” and never “Sam,” Michael noted in passing.
A long pause followed as the two looked at each other. Michael broke the silence.
“Dad…” Michael’s voice cracked; he couldn’t go on.
Andrew Helfort’s hand went up. “Michael, my boy. I’ve spoken to Admiral al-Rawahy and to Admiral Fielding, so I know all about what really happened. Let’s not talk about it anymore. The sooner you put it behind you, the better.”
Michael’s voice was thick with emotion. “I know, Dad. Fielding was great, and so was Bukenya. I know what I have to do, and I will do it. But why, Dad, why?”
“Who knows, Michael, who knows? They are a bad bunch, the men in the d’Castreaux family. As long as anyone can remember, they always have been, and it looks like they always will be. It’s a pity. Gaby d’Castreaux’s okay, though why she’d marry a pig like Jean-Luc is beyond me.” Andrew Helfort frowned. “But the one thing you have to remember is that it’s not personal. If d’Castreaux Junior is anything like his father, and I am sure he is, then you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just another easy target of opportunity.”
Andrew Helfort took another long sip of his beer. “So tell me. How did you come from Terranova?”
“Cheng Space Lines, on their new ship,
Andrew Helfort laughed. Some things never changed. “Cheng Lines are a good bunch. I know Anson Cheng; he’s a Flame tree collector, and he seems to like what we do. Though they are all good these days, even Prince Interstellar. Gaby d’Castreaux is a pretty straight shooter; her people seem to like and respect her, which is more than I’ve ever heard anyone say about Jean-Luc. Imagine being saddled with someone like him,” his father said.
Andrew Helfort took a deep breath before continuing. “You know that d’Castreaux Senior was medically discharged?”
“I did know. It was common knowledge at the college, mostly because there was a feeling that it had nothing to do with medicine at all-hard to pin down; nobody really knew anything definite. But asking questions was always a good way to upset d’Castreaux Junior, so it was just rumors. You know what Space Fleet is like.”
“I do. Suffice it to say that all I know, and God knows it’s enough, is that d’Castreaux Senior is a psychopathic killer with a taste for torture.” His father’s face was taut with distaste, eyes narrowed and mouth a thin tight line. “But a coward with it, never willing to take much risk, which slowed him up a bit, thank God.”
Michael’s shock was complete, not just at the news but at his father’s very matter-of-fact delivery. “So how was he caught?”
“That’s the problem; he never was. Well, not officially. And it was only Admiral Fielding’s persistence that got rid of the bastard. Fielding was skipper of the
As he took another sip of his beer, Andrew Helfort’s face was hard. For all that the Third Hammer War had ended almost twenty years earlier, Michael knew how bitter the fight had been and how many good friends his parents had lost.
“So how come no one dropped d’Castreaux in it? Surely someone would have spoken up.” Michael’s face betrayed his puzzlement.
“Well, d’Castreaux might be a psychopathic killer, but nobody has ever said he’s stupid. Far from it, actually. That bastard is as smart as they come. He made sure that his internal security team was involved as much as he was, God knows how. But people were very bitter at the end of the war. The massacre of the crews of the
