Fallen Angel
An event is dangerous in direct proportion to how unexpected it is.
A civilization that cannot envision its own demise has already begun to die.
A month after his outburst at his father’s wake, Flynn shot his flier out over the forests of Salmagundi. Despite his worries, Robert Sheldon hadn’t seen fit to fire him, or even mention the incident. Things had since settled back into a routine, with him spending long days surveying the dense forests east of Ashley, cataloging stands of trees mature enough to be harvested. If people were slightly less likely to engage him in conversation, that was fine with him; most people didn’t have much to talk about anyway.
He flew on manual—which, technically, was a breach of regulations. Allowing a human being to pilot an aircraft was supposedly only an emergency procedure. However, not only did he feel better with the craft under his direct control, it also meant the computer couldn’t override him and turn it around if someone back at Ashley decided he should come back. It never happened, but he still didn’t like the idea that someone could make that kind of remote control decision.
As long as he did his job, no one should have reason to complain how he did it. He shot over the trees at three hundred meters, the sensor batteries underneath the craft picking up moisture and chlorophyll levels in the foliage, filling in the topographic map on his display with bands of reds, yellows, and blues, showing which areas of the forest had matured the fastest from the last dry season—
“Huh, what?”
Tetsami’s voice in his head drew his attention to something that was just visible out of the canopy, on the fringes of his peripheral vision. He turned his head to look at it.
Something moved, high and fast, leaving a glowing contrail. Oddly, the object itself didn’t reflect any light. It was a black smudge at the head of the turbulent atmosphere.
Flynn whispered, “A meteor?”
The object closed on the horizon in front of him, following a downward path. “The way that thing’s moving, it’s going to make one hell of a—”
The object hit the forest in front of the flier. The world outside the windscreen went white with the impact, then immediately black as the light levels caused the windows to tint themselves. Less than a second later, turbulence hit the small flier, tumbling the nose up and to the left. All the control surfaces stopped responding, and Flynn’s stomach lurched as the vector jets started throwing the craft in an uncontrolled spin.
He cut the vectors a little over three seconds after the computer would have done, allowing the flier to coast on neutral buoyancy contragravs. In a few moments air resistance and inertia brought the craft to a standstill.
The windscreen became transparent again. Outside, he saw an inverted horizon tilted at a fifteen-degree angle. The flier was about a hundred meters closer to the forest canopy and pointed about two hundred degrees off course—in addition to floating upside down.
“We’re fine, Gram,” Flynn muttered. “No damage.”
He gingerly opened the vectors to right the flier, waiting until it was upright before spinning the nose around to look at the impact.
“Look at that.”
They were about fifty kilometers out from Ashley, but Flynn wouldn’t be surprised if the rolling pillar of smoke might be visible from town. The edges of the burn zone formed a ragged ellipse about two or three klicks long and about half a klick wide. The trees inside the burn zone were shattered and charred black, and the ones still standing at the edges were smoldering.
Fortunately, despite the clear sky at the moment, they were in the wet season. The trees were already too
