“Tris, try hold-out seventeen,” she said. “It’s in use. Might be close enough to relay our signal.”
“On it. Nyle Patera and Osker Rella. Just the two of them?”
“Training mission.”
“Right.”
Brice envied Nyle and Osker. The hold-outs were little more than concrete blocks, but they beat being stuck in a Proteus in a storm.
The Proteus shuddered and dropped, and Brice’s stomach lurched.
“That trees we’re hitting, Keelin?” Tris said.
“Only the tops. This baby can take it.”
“You sure?”
As if a tech could do better than a pilot, Brice thought.
“I know what I’m doing. Just need to find somewhere to drop into the basin.”
“Thought we were running the rim. That was the plan, right?”
“Storm’s changed that.”
“Anywhere to drop?” Cathal asked. Brice wondered why he didn’t pull up the maps himself. But why should he do any work when he had a crew to do it for him?
“Closest possibility’s the Tumbler.”
Of all the waterfalls cascading into the basin, the Tumbler was the biggest. And the most powerful. Brice had read of the drone, the one that crashed last year. A sudden down-draft slammed it into the vertical water, and it disappeared. They said parts of it were still churning round in the plunge-pool’s maelstrom.
But something about air pressure made waterfalls ideal drop-points. Or was it thermals? Some technical garbage, anyway. The kind of stuff Tris would get all excited by.
“Your call, Keelin,” Cathal said, and it annoyed Brice that he was off-loading the decision. “And take a break if you need it.”
“Prefer to get back as soon as.”
“And I’d prefer to get back in one piece.”
The Proteus tilted gently to starboard, and the engines whined. Brice sighed, and linked to the external sensors.
His lenses flared up as lightning streaked across the sky, and he felt more than heard the deep boom of the thunder. The heavy clouds were dark, and rain lashed down onto the forest canopy. The wind roared through the trees, and to Brice the forest looked like an angry sea, waiting to devour them.
Ahead, he saw a line snaking through the trees, and he knew this was the Tumbler’s feeder river. The line grew as they approached.
He tuned in to the haptic sensors, and his skin prickled with the cold harshness of the air, and the rain stung like a thousand angry insects. But there was also warmth in the friction of the air rushing over the Proteus’ hull.
The craft clipped the tree-tops, and raked across his belly. He winced, but then he thought how much more intense this would be for Keelin. She was locked in to every sensor, truly at one with her craft. In some senses, she was the Proteus. To move it, she merely had to think.
The craft jerked, and Brice’s head was tossed to one side, his body held in place by the seat restraints. It was enough to pull him from the sensors.
“You okay, green?” There was a hint of a smile on Cathal’s stubbled face.
“Fine,” Brice said. He hated it when Cathal called him green. He never used that term for Tris or Keelin, even though they’d only joined the crew a week before he’d signed up.
<Don’t mind him, Brice,> Ryann sussed, her lattice reaching for his and placing her words directly into his mind. <Get to his age, and everyone’s green>
“Taking us down,” Keelin said.
Brice locked on to the outside sensors again as the Proteus dropped towards the water. The river flowed so fast and steadily that it appeared to be a solid thing, and he almost imagined Keelin would land on that surface. But she stopped a couple of metres above it, setting the craft to hover, facing a line where the river stopped and the sky began.
To either side of them, the river tore through the trees, ripping branches free, dragging trunks from their roots. It dragged the debris to the lip of the waterfall, and then threw it down, to be reduced to splinters by the churning waters below.
Brice pulled out. Hovering over the water made him feel queasy.
“Tris, any joy with the hold-out?” Cathal asked.
Tris shook his head. “Can’t pull enough power into the boosters.”
“That’s me,” Keelin said. “Need to keep the Proteus steady. Just give me a moment.”
Tris didn’t respond, and Brice knew he was annoyed. But Keelin outranked him. Everyone outranked Tris, apart from Brice.
He was the crew’s grunt. That wasn’t the official role, obviously, but that was what they called him, often to his face. His lattice was tweaked for physical enhancements, and so he did the heavy lifting. He did all the donkey work.
“Take as long as you need, Keelin,” Cathal said. “Prefer to get back late than not at all.”
And then the lights flickered. They turned off for a second, and when they came back on, they cast a dim glow.
“Great!” muttered Keelin. “They were supposed to have fixed this.”
“Glich?” asked Tris.
“More like a screw-up. Odd times, we stay stationary for more than a minute, the Proteus thinks we’re parked and cuts to minimal power.”
“Can’t you over-ride it?”
Keelin turned her head to Tris. “Right,” she drawled. “Never thought of that.”
“I’ll speak to Arela again,” Ryann said, before Tris formed a come-back.
“Can’t see that helping, but thanks anyway,” said Keelin.
Arela Angelis. Brice had only met Haven’s chief commander a couple of times. The woman was fierce, and acted like she was independent, but they all knew she was under the thumb of the company. Kaiahive—so big it controlled governments, so big it dealt in everything from food processing to mining to high-tech development. So important it was the only company that offered superior lattice tweaking, unless you went black-market and risked a total melt-down.
And so self-important that it only spent the bare minimum. It was no wonder the name was rarely mentioned. They
