Nigel Findley - House of the Sun

Okay, there was the Hawai'ian island chain, traced out in plasma-red on the flatscreen. Not that it helped me much. "And Honolulu is…?" I mumbled.

"Here." She touched the map, and one of the islands-the second major island from the northwest end of the chain- burned brighter. "That's Oahu. And this"-another touch with the stylus, and an island that looked something like an asymmetrical dumbbell glowed in double intensity-"is Maui, see? Haleakala's here." She stabbed at me center of the larger, lower "lobe" of the island.

"And that's… about how far?"

She shrugged. 'Two hundred klicks, maybe?" She nudged me gently with an elbow. "Not long."

I nodded glumly. Neoscope or not, my guts would be glad to get out of this bird, but my mind would have been a lot happier to know what was waiting for us when we got there.

Through the thin skin of the fuselage, I could hear the Merlin's twin engines straining. We still seemed to be climbing-at least, my inner ears were convinced we still had a slight nose-up pitch-but the engines didn't seem to like it in the slightest. Why? I wondered grimly. Headwinds? There'd been clouds building up to the southeast when I'd last looked out the window at New Foster Tower, hadn't there? And according to Kono's map, that was the direction we were heading. Into the teeth of a storm? I closed my eyes and tried to hear if there was rain hitting the airframe, but the tortured howling of the engines made it impossible.

Just fragging great, I thought. Couldn't King Kam have gotten us a bird with two good engines? Then I remembered something I'd scanned on the flight over to the islands, oh so long ago now. Haleakala was a big fragger of a mountain, wasn't it? Three thousand meters or something like that. No wonder the Merlin didn't sound too happy. It was intended for low-altitude short hops, or so somebody had told me once. It must be a cast-iron bitch for the little bird to claw its way up to this kind of altitude. No wonder the engines sounded like souls in torment. I sat back and sighed. I wasn't really sure whether that made me feel any better or not.

I tried to disconnect my brain, then, to give it something else to think about, anything, so it couldn't worry about the engines and the storm. Haleakala, I thought. "House of the Sun." I remembered that's what the name meant from my database scan during the flight to Hawai'i. Hale-"house." A-"of." Ka-"the." La-"sun." Simple, neh?

Interesting, too. It had stuck in my mind, like so many little bits of irrelevant trivia, because it had prompted a question when I'd first noted it. The Hawai'ian word for sun was La. And wasn't the ancient Egyptian word for sun Ral La-Ra. Pretty fragging similar, particularly if you included the possibility of "phonetic drift." Was it just coincidence?

After all, there weren't that many fragging single-syllable words that the human throat could pronounce, were there? Or was there more to it than that?

I wondered suddenly if Chantal Monot could answer that one. Chantal, with her whacked-out ideas about Lemuria and sunken continents, and her Andrew Annen-something paintings. (Now that I thought about it, didn't some of them have pyramids in them? Pyramids on the floor of a tropical ocean…)

With a snort I shook my head and forced away all those flaky imaginings. Sometimes letting your mind wander is worse than obsessing about what's scaring the drek out of you.

We'd been underway for nearly an hour when the turbulence began in earnest, and I started to appreciate anew the limitations of neoscopolamine. The Merlin started surging up and down in hundred-meter bounds like some kind of chipped-up roller coaster, and if I'd thought the engines had been straining before, I hadn't heard anything yet. Over the mechanical screaming, now I could hear the rattle of the rain against the airframe, driven by mighty gusts of wind. (Or frag, maybe it was hail. Whatever, it sounded like rock salt shot from a Roomsweeper.)

The troopers in their military gear weren't enjoying themselves. They wouldn't admit it to a civilian haole puke like me, of course-frag, they probably wouldn't admit it to each other-but I could see the way the muscles of their jaws were standing out. They were biting back on complaints, or maybe doing the iron-jaw trip to stop themselves from spewing their midnight snacks. Even Pohaku was starting to look a mite queasy. My own discomfort was almost a reasonable price to pay to see proof that he was actually as human as the rest of us. Beside me, Alana Kono was looking decidedly pale. In my peripheral vision, I saw her pull out another neoscope patch and slap it onto her own neck. I shot her what I intended to be a reassuring grin, but judging by the look in her eyes, I didn't quite make it.

And that's when the bottom dropped out. For a second or two we seemed to be in free fall. Kono yelped, and one of the troopers grunted in alarm. The only reason I didn't yell out loud was that I was too busy biting my tongue hard enough to taste salty blood. The engines wailed like banshees as the Merlin's dive bottomed out. We jolted hard a couple of times, almost as though we were taking fire from somewhere ahead of us.

Frag it, I couldn't just sit there. I reached down to unbuckle my four-point. Kono grabbed my hand and shook her head-apparently she didn't trust herself to speak-but I gently pushed her hand away and gave another try at the reassuring grin. This time I apparently did a better job, because she nodded and closed her eyes again.

I clambered to my feet, grabbing at whatever came to hand to keep from pitching onto my hoop-the back of my chair, the helmet of a green-gilled trooper… I managed to keep my feet somehow, and-getting a good two-handed grip on an overhead rack-I dragged myself forward. A light sliding door was all that separated the troop compartment from the flight deck, so I slid it back.

The flight deck was in total darkness. (I guess I should have expected it, but it still jolted me. Didn't you need some kind of instruments to do that pilot drek?) For an instant I couldn't make out squat, then my eyes adapted and I could see two silhouettes-deeper black against the black outside the cockpit-in front of me. "What the frag's going on?" I demanded.

The silhouette in the right-hand seat turned its head, and I saw two faint pinpoints of red light where there should be eyes.

Okay, that freaked me for a moment, too, before I realized the points of light were the copilot's cybereyes. Stray light from his active IR system, or some such technodrek. "Hele pela!" the copilot snarled at me. "Get the frag out of here, ule!"

I ignored him and grabbed me shoulder of the figure in the left seat. (That had to be the pilot, right?) "What the hell's going on?" I demanded. And, as an afterthought, "How about lighting this crap up?"

For a moment I thought the pilot was going to tell me frag off, too, but then he nodded once. The control consoles came alive with lights, data displays, radar images, and all the other junk that (meta)humans need to play bird. In the bright plasma light I saw the fiber-optic lines connecting pilot and copilot to the panels.

"So what the hell's going on?" I asked again.

"Ino," the pilot snapped. "Storm. Big fragging storm. What the hell you think?"

As if to emphasize what the pilot was saying, the Merlin did another one of those roller coaster plunges, fragging near bounding me off the overhead. Neither pilot nor copilot moved; they kept their arms loosely crossed over their chests. But, from the sudden tightening of their muscles in their jaws and around their eyes, I knew they were working as hard mentally as if they were hauling back on physical control yokes.

"Do you usually get storms this bad?" I asked as soon as my heart had cleared my airway again.

"No way, brah." It was the copilot who answered me this time. "Never bad as this, yah?"