Lone Wolf (34 page)

Argent smiles in response—the perfect image of some high corp suit accepting respect that’s only his due from a subordinate—and rolls on. I wonder what ID the ’puter came back with when it scanned Argent’s image, but I’m not going to humble myself enough to ask. I figure I’ve been humbled enough for one day.

Earlier, when the runner was telling me he'd arranged for a plane, I imagined some thrashed beater of a single-engine prop plane about as old as I am, if not older. A Piper Club, maybe, or a fragging Comanche dating back to the turn of the century. (When I was a kid, I used to read everything I could about planes, old and new. Not really as a hobby, but trying to eradicate the irrational fear I’ve always had of flying. Didn’t work worth a frag.) As we cruise past the aircraft parking area, I see enough of those ancient planes, deathtraps looking like they’re held together with chewing gum, baling wire, gaffer tape, and positive thinking.

But Argent doesn’t stop here. Instead, he keeps driving, and we start to pass planes that are clawing their way up the socioeconomic, chronological, and reliability ranks. Cessnas and Fiat-Fokkers from only a decade or two ago begin to replace defunct De Havillands, and I start to feel a little better about the whole thing.

And still he’s not stopping. Instead he takes a right, and now the planes that we’re cruising by are a year or two old, if that. Lear-Cessna executive turboprops and Agusta-Cierva “Plutocrat” rotorcraft sit cheek-to-jowl with drek I’ve never seen before, most of the birds sporting corporate livery of some kind. The runner hasn’t cut some kind of deal for this kind of transport, has he?

But no, ahead of us I can see what we’ll be using, and my anxiety’s back in the pit of my stomach. Not that it’s an old beater of a plane. Not at all. It’s a brand spanking new McDonnell-Douglas Merlin, a small, slick cousin to the Federated-Boeing Commuter. It’s a tilt-wing with two long-bladed turboprops, apparently based on a nineteen-eighties’ design called the Osprey, a V/STOL that switches from horizontal flight to vertical by pivoting its wings, effectively turning props into helicopter-style rotors.

Frag, everybody in any city in North America has seen the F-B Commuters do their thing. And, similarly, everybody knows how unreliable they are—manufacturers’ claims to the contrary, of course—and how vulnerable to loss of power during the transition from horizontal to vertical or vice versa. I promised myself a long time back I’d never fly in a Commuter, and now here I am faced with riding in the smaller—and even more unreliable—Merlin. Just fragging wonderful, and I really want to thank you for that Argent, from the bottom of my heart.

Again, of course, I try to hide my discomfort. I focus my eyes on the blue and white craft, trying to pay close attention to two jumpsuited techs or mechanics or whatever they are dicking around inside open access covers. To get my mind off crash and fatality statistics, I try to recognize the livery and the angular logo on the fuselage.

“Don’t worry about the corp affiliation,” Argent pipes up, going back to his old mind-reading routine. “Yamatetsu sold it to a chummer a while back, and she never got around to repainting it.”

Uh-huh. And I wonder if she ever got around to changing the radar transponder to read civilian instead of corp?

Argent pulls up next to the Merlin, and we climb out. I see movement in the open hatchway, then a figure emerges. An elf, but shorter and broader than the typical metatype. At first I scan her as fat, but I quickly revise that as she comes down the ladder to the apron. “Comfortably well-upholstered” might be a better description. Her face, too, is broader than the elf standard, and her eyes and buzz-cut hair are dark instead of light. But she’s got the elf ears, and there’s something I can’t quite label about her smile at the sight of Argent that confirms her metatype as far as I’m concerned. She’s wearing a shapeless black jumpsuit with altogether too many pockets and stuff apparently crammed into every one of them.

“Hoi, Argent!” she calls, and her voice and broad smile remind me of a kid with a new toy.

“Hoi, Raven.” He takes her offered hand, and they shake like old chummers.

Seeing her close up now, I try to guess at this Raven’s age. Judging by her voice and the way she moved, at first I had her chipped at about twenty. Now, though, I kick that up by ten years, maybe fifteen. Her face is weather-tanned, with networks of deep crinkles around her eyes. I hadn’t spotted her mods before, but now I see three datajacks, one in each temple, and a third that looks relatively new because of the faintly pink and tender-looking skin just above the joint of her jaw on the right side. Presumably, she’s jacked for a vehicle control rig. You don’t find many deckers buying and flying cast-off corp planes.

“Long time,” Raven tells Argent, her smile not fading in the slightest. “You gotta come see me sometime when it’s not biz, okay?”

Argent smiles back, and his eyes are more relaxed than I’ve ever seen them. Old chummers for sure. “Okay, I promise.” He remembers me, and gestures me over. “Raven, this is Wolf.”

The elf sticks her hand out, and I take it. Firm grip, cool, and the texture of the skin—not quite right—tells me the datajacks aren’t her only mods.

“You've picked a good day,” she announces, glancing at the sky. “High overcast, good viz.” She grins at me. “Ready to do some flying?”

* * *

Raven’s a slick pilot, I’ll give her that much. Every maneuver the Merlin makes is smooth as synthsilk, perfectly controlled, without any sense that she’s fighting the machine or forcing it to do anything. On the contrary, it feels more like the plane’s doing everything naturally because that’s what planes do, and we’re just along for the ride. Even the transition between vertical and horizontal flight—when the wings pivot to turn overhead rotors into turboprop air screws—was so smooth and steady I didn't notice the event until a few seconds later when I realized our flight regime had changed. For the first time since I spotted the Merlin, my anxiety level has begun to shade down a bit.

Not that watching Raven at work was all that reassuring. Oh sure, I’ve flown on planes piloted by riggers—everyone who’s ever hopped a commercial suborbital, semiballistic, or HSCT has—but that doesn’t mean I’ve been on the flight deck to watch them at it. And now I’m glad I wasn’t. I tell you there’s something disturbing, something just fragging wrong about watching the pilot—the person who’s got your life in her hands—jack into the control board of the plane and then promptly fall asleep!

No drek, that’s just what it looks like. Raven looks totally boneless, slumped there in her flight couch. Only the four-point safety harness and the special headrest with forehead strap keep her upright, stop her from sliding like a corpse down into the well under the panel. Her eyes are shut, and her mouth is hanging slightly open. And she’s fragging drooling. Just a little, but it’s enough.

Argent looks over at me and grins. He’s sitting in the copilot’s chair, to Raven’s right, while I’m squatted down on a jump seat just back of the gap between the two front seats. I’ve never liked being relegated to the back of the bus, and this time’s no different. The Merlin’s got incredible visibility, though. From where I’m sitting, it looks like maybe seventy-five percent of the small plane’s nose is transplast, which means I’ve got a better than one-eighty-degree field of view in the horizontal plane, and more than ninety in the vertical. It feels like being in a fragging bubble hanging eighteen hundred meters in the air.

To take my mind off the mild case of agoraphobia I didn’t know I had, I concentrate on the jump seat I’m strapped
into, and the tech-drek around it. First
I
notice a tiny swing
-out console that shows a set of repeater displays matching most of the sensors controlled from the main panel. They’re not labeled worth a drek, of course, but they’re interesting nonetheless. I think I’ve scoped out a few of them—ECM and ECCM tell-tales here, threat display over here, and a display of consumables carried over there. (I note with grim interest that the Merlin’s got a full load of chaff and flares on board. Why, I wonder? Because Raven just doesn’t take any chances, ever? Or because she’s expecting to have to use them in the near future?)

“Don’t like flying, Wolf?” the runner asks mildly.

Frag. I thought I was hiding it better than that. I shrug in response.

“I used to hate it.” He chuckles. “Of course, that was back when going up in a plane usually meant I was going to jump out of it at some point.” I file that fact away for future reference—paratrooper training and experience. Just what is Argent’s background, anyway?

“Then I figured, why not just sit back and enjoy the view?” he goes on. “Why worry? We all have to go when our number’s up, and it doesn’t matter where we are—in a plane, in a firefight, or in a nice warm bath—when the time comes.”

“Yeah,” I grumble, hooking a thumb toward Raven. “But what if it’s her number that comes up?”

* * *

The Merlin’s a fast plane, a blessing because it means we’ll be back on the ground all that much sooner. Within minutes after dust-off, we’re at eighteen hundred meters and cruising south. The demarcation where the sprawl ends and the Salish-Shidhe nation begins is obvious, even though we're too high to see the walls and fences and guard posts. On one side of the demarcator there’s city; on the other, countryside. It’s like God took a hand razor and sculpted a sharp edge along the urban area that would otherwise be spreading south toward Portland.

I’m a little anxious about crossing that line, the invisible boundary dividing UCAS airspace from S-S airspace. Even though I’ve never tried it myself, I’ve heard enough about how fragging difficult it is to slide “over the wall, out of the sprawl”—that is, slip the border into the Amerindian territory surrounding Seattle. I can’t believe the S-S Council’s going to be any more amenable to us scroffy “Seattlites” encroaching on their pristine fragging country by air.

But the grief’s not as bad as when Argent drove onto the Sea-Tac private apron. I’ve got to assume Raven is in contact with ground controllers and all the usual drek, but her meat body didn’t shift a millimeter, and she didn’t bother to patch whatever communication she had through to the cockpit speakers. Or—who knows?—maybe she didn’t have to talk to anybody. For all I know, the transponder in the Merlin might still be squawking the idee for a high-level Yamatetsu exec transport. Whatever, we just blow on through into S-S airspace without the slightest hassle. Thank Ghu for small favors, say I.

As soon as we’re clear of the sprawl, the sound of the engines changes. For a split second, I think we’re in trouble, then I realize Raven’s goosed the throttles. As the big engines spool up to full power, I scan the repeater displays in front of me for something that might be an air-speed indicator. Eventually I see numbers reading out in the right range. If I’m right, the air-speed’s fluctuating at about six hundred klicks per hour. Not bad. We could be in Portland in about half an hour. Pillar Rock—the location of the NVC facility—is on the other side of the Columbia from Portland, maybe sixty klicks to the west, toward the ocean.

Before long I can see the glitter of water ahead of us. I lean forward, craning my head between the two front seats, to see the satnav map Argent’s brought up on the co-pilot’s main display station. Yep, the water ahead is the Columbia, just like I guessed. According to the little point of light that’s the Merlin, we’re ten klicks to the east of Pillar Rock, passing over the town of Skamokawa. We buzz over the town—a small, spotless-looking community—and Raven banks the plane right, westward. Judging by what I think is a radar altimeter, we’re down to five hundred meters or so. Speed’s cut back too, down to about three hundred klicks.

“Two minutes.” The voice is Raven’s, but it doesn’t come from her mouth, which continues its drooling down the front of her jumpsuit. No, the voice sounds from the small speakers mounted over the main console.

“Got it,” Argent responds. I see him clear the satnav map from his screen and call up a new one. It takes me a moment to realize it’s a magnified real-time image of the terrain ahead, presumably picked up by some external vidcam. The image tracks and zooms in and out as the runner tests out the sensitivity of the controls. Then I notice a small cross-hairs reticule in the center of the screen, and I start to say, “Um, Argent . . .”

He turns to me, then sees the direction of my gaze and chuckles. “Null sheen, chummer,” he tells me. “It used to be a chain-gun rig, but Raven replaced it with a vid setup when she bought the bird. I just figured we might want something a little more vivid than memories.”

I nod my head, cursing myself. Yeah, pictures, that’s the fragging ticket ... I should have thought of it myself. I get the feeling I’m thinking less and less, recently.

The Columbia’s wide here near the mouth, at least a klick across, I’d guess. The Merlin’s hugging the northern shoreline, a hundred meters or so out over the water, and we’re steady at about two hundred and fifty meters. I look out the left side of the cockpit. Over there, a klick away, is Tir Tairngire. The terrain, which looks exactly like that on the north side of the river, is basically flatlands with grass and small trees, the whole area looking kind of wet and swampy. Somehow I’m disappointed—the mucho mysterioso “Land of Promise” should look different, maybe covered with faerie glamor out of kids’ stories or some such drek. From this distance, there’s nothing special at all.

Raven’s voice sounds from the speakers again, making me jump. “I’ve got the target,” she announces. “Argent, give me the camera.”

The runner hits a couple of keys on the panel—slaving the camera setup to Raven’s rigger controls, presumably—then sits back and crosses his arms. On the co-pilot’s screen, the image shifts sickeningly as the camera slews to train out to the right. It zooms in on something, a small cluster of buildings. Even at maximum magnification, we’re too far out to see anything useful.