Nigel Findley - House of the Sun

The blackness was still unbroken outside the rain-blasted canopy. We were still in the middle of the stormclouds I'd seen gathering a few hours earlier. Mentally, I thanked whatever gods mere be that there wasn't any lightning.

I almost pitched backward as the Merlin took on a steep nose-up pitch. From behind and to both sides I heard the scream of the engines change pitch. A computer schematic on the control console confirmed what I'd already guessed: The wings were pivoting again, from forward flight to V/STOL mode. We were on our way in. I drew breath to yell word back to the troopers…

And fragging near swallowed my own tongue. Without warning the Merlin cleared the clouds, popping down out of a ceiling of roiling blackness. For the first time I could see the peak and crater of Haleakala volcano with my own eyes, without the need for FLIR intermediaries.

First impression: Spirits, what a blasted hellhole of a wasteland. Nothing grew; nothing lived-nothing seemed to ever have lived here. Just barren rock-rough, scattered scree slopes. Cinder cones. Outwellings of solidified magma. Precipitous slopes, vertical cliffs… klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape. For an instant I didn't know where the image of the lunar surface had come from, but then I remembered. Back almost a century ago, when NASA was trying out their Lunar Rover designs, they'd picked the Haleakala crater for the tests, because it was the closest to the rugged emptiness of the moon mat could be found on this planet.

Second impression: Holy fragging drek, I could see those klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape… and I shouldn't have been able to. We were on top of a fragging mountain, three thousand meters up, and the cloud deck was so solid mere was no chance for a single photon of moonlight to make it through. Yet the whole blasted prospect was illuminated-not as bright as day, by any means, but about like twilight.

It was a strange illumination, too: cold, sourceless, shifting, ebbing and flowing. I could see the source, roughly ahead of us-an area of what looked like absolute chaos. Light bubbled and roiled in the depths of the crater as though it were a physical fluid. Spreading up into the sky, in an ethereal fan-shape, the air itself seemed to glow with a pearly radiance. This had to be the visual equivalent of me heat-plume the FLIR had shown me, I realized instantly.

In the midst of the rolling, churning light were motionless points of brilliance, much brighter than the shifting illumination surrounding them… but somehow sterile, dead. It took me a moment to understand those points were artificial lights, arc lamps set out by the kahunas of Project Sunfire so they could prepare the process that now seemed well advanced.

Something flashed by the Merlin's canopy, going like a bat out of hell. A well-chosen simile, since it seemed to be a mass of pure liquid fire about the size of a man's head. It was past and gone before I could make out any details, leaving a blue-green streak of afterimage across my visual field. As if my vision had suddenly become attuned, I saw there were many… things… flitting and hurtling around the central mass of light. Balls of fire, sheets of heat lightning, unidentifiable shapes moving so fast my mind couldn't make sense of them. They seemed to be orbiting that central light, like chipped-up moths dancing around a porch light. And that, too, seemed to be a well-chosen simile. I couldn't be sure, but neither could I shake the feeling I was seeing a kind of approach-avoidance behavior going on. The things- whatever they were-were both repelled and attracted by the drek going down in the center of the crater.

The magic drek going down. Deep in my gut where the truth lives, I knew it was magic, seconds before my intellect caught up and figured it out logically. I could feel the magic, deep in what I laughingly call my soul-like I'd felt it when Scott's fetish had cut loose, the instant before he blew Tokudaiji-san's skull to fragments. It was like vertigo, like that flip-flop your stomach does when a super-express elevator momentarily goes into free fall. It was like that, except it wasn't my stomach doing flip-flops but… something else. It was like I'd suddenly, momentarily discovered new senses, and the information those senses were feeding me prompted a reaction from a part of my body I previously didn't know existed.

It was over in an instant as if it had never happened, as if I'd never recapture that sudden broadening of perspective…

For me, it was over in an instant. Not so for Akaku'akanene.

Which made sense if you think about it. If the level of magical activity down in the crater was enough to twist the guts of a mundane like me, what would it do to somebody who actually savvied that mana drek? Beside me, Akaku'akanene's eyes snapped open in a face suddenly pasty white. She opened her mouth to groan, and then she was lurching across the flight deck, her extraordinary stability suddenly gone. I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her upright an instant before she would have pitched over into the pilot's lap. (Vehicle control rig or no, I couldn't help but think an unannounced visitation to his groin by a little old lady would have messed up his control of the plane, at least a little.)

Akaku'akanene's wide eyes fixed on my face, and I could feel her fear and horror. She croaked something in Hawai'ian. I'd never heard the phrase before, but her tone of voice made the translation a no-brainer: "Oh, holy fragging crap…!"

I knew we were in even deeper drek before it happened. If Akaku'akanene was talking to me, it meant she wasn't talking to the spirits or whatever that apparently wanted to geek us. The Merlin staggered in the air as something slammed into its right wing. The right engine screamed like a speared devil rat, and then something blew up. In my peripheral vision I saw the flash of flame to my right, then shrapnel tore into the fuselage. Aft, I heard someone shriek in agony.

The right wingtip dropped instantly, and this time I couldn't hold my balance. I slammed into the right wall of the flight deck, and I howled as something went gruntch in my right shoulder. The impact was enough to defocus my vision and knot my guts with nausea. I could have let consciousness slip away right then, but somehow I clung to it, holding back the darkness. Frag, if these were going to be my last moments alive, I wanted to be awake for them.

We were in serious drek, I knew that even through the throbbing disorientation in my head. The Merlin was going down, and it was going down fast. Somehow the pilot had managed to get the right wingtip back up, but there was no way he'd be able to keep the crippled bird in the air much longer.

For the last time the copilot glared at me with his glowing eyes, and ordered, "Get back there! Strap in!"

This time I didn't feel any urge to argue with him. I struggled to my feet, dragging the almost inconsequential weight of Akaku'akanene with me. Back through the door into the passenger compartment I lurched. I pushed the old woman down into my old seat, the one beside Alana Kono. "Strap her in," I told the gillette.

The Merlin lurched, and I knew I wasn't going to make it to a seat myself, not in time. The seat Akaku'akanene had vacated was way aft toward the rear of the fuselage. With the bird pitching and rolling the way it was, there was precisely zero chance I'd be able to negotiate the legs and gear blocking the way and strap myself into the four-point before we slammed down. Instinctively, I glanced back over my shoulder. Through the flight-deck canopy, I could see the broken, rocky ground rushing up toward us. Frag, I had even less time than I thought…

Somebody else recognized it, too-one of the young, spit-and-polish troopers, the guy sitting next to Louis Pohaku. With a fist he pounded the quick-release on his four-point harness and was on his feet in an instant "Sit!" he yelled at me, then reinforced the word by literally flinging me into the canvas sling chair. My fingers fumbled with the straps and buckles, trying to lock the harness closed across my shoulders and chest. Firm hands pushed mine away and finished the procedure much faster than I could ever have done it In the dim light I looked up into the trooper's face. Just a kid, he was, maybe twenty at the outside. Keen and eager. He smiled as I tried to thank him.