Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

“We’ll get there,” Oscar said. “After all, there’s not that much she can do.”

“You think?”

Oscar was very close to turning his radio off and just keeping the hyperglider on the ground while the storm raged. The universe can survive without me, surely? Just this once. If he could just do what Wilson did and turn off his emotions.

The hyperglider shook as the wind strengthened around it. Overhead, the gray clouds had merged into an unbroken rumpled ceiling above the stark canyon. “Whatever you want to do, I’m with you,” he told Wilson. It was a cop-out and he knew it, transfer responsibility to someone else. But then that’s what he’d been doing ever since Abadan.

He checked the weather radar with its false-color mating jellyfish patterns. The whole cockpit was juddering now, wobbling the images on the little screen. It showed him a salmon-pink tide of wind channeled by the overbearing walls of Stakeout Canyon and reaching close to a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere in the invisible distance ahead of the hyperglider’s nose, the stormfront had reached the base of Mount Herculaneum.

“Confirmed go status,” Wilson responded with toneless dispassion.

Oscar smiled tenderly at the absolute professionalism; in his own fashion Wilson was showing him the way. Okay, if that’s what it takes to do this, I’m game. “Roger that. I’m beginning ascent phase.”

He brought his hands down on the console’s i-spots, gripping the concave handholds. Plyplastic flowed over his wrists, mooring them into place for the flight. His e-butler reported a perfect interface with the hyperglider’s onboard array.

Oscar put Anna aside and allowed the memories to come to the fore. Not his memories, but the skill belonged to him now, merging him with the hyperglider. A red and violet virtual hand gripped the joystick that had materialized in front of him. His other hand skipped across the glowing icons.

The plyplastic wing buds began to flow, extending out from the fuselage into a simple delta configuration. Oscar was rattled from side to side in the cockpit as they caught the wind. He disengaged the forward tether lock, and the hyperglider leaped about wildly. His own sparse piloting knowledge buoyed by the recent skill implants helped him counter the movement with relative ease, keeping the craft as level as possible.

He allowed the front and rear tether strands to unwind, and adjusted the wings to provide some lift. The hyperglider began to rise away from the floor of the canyon, tugging hard at the cables as the wind tore at the fuselage. Once he was fifty meters high he adjusted the tail fin into a long vertical stabilizer. The shaking began to lose its urgency, though the howl of the wind outside was still growing. Oscar expanded the wings farther, deepening the camber to generate more direct lift. With the tether cables reporting a huge strain, he began spooling them out at a measured rate, scrupulously keeping his ascent at the recommended pace. This was not the time, he decided, for cutting corners, no matter what the stakes.

Tatters of mist shot past the cockpit, twined into a sheath that restricted his visual range to little more than twenty meters. Rain was battering aggressively into the fuselage with loud drumbeat reverberations. As he climbed higher the cables began shaking with unlikely harmonics. He was constantly adjusting the wings to try to keep the hyperglider stable.

“If this storm isn’t enough for Samantha to work with, I don’t know what is,” Wilson said. The radio link wasn’t good, but the static-creased words contained a formidable determination.

Oscar clung to his friend’s voice, the contact with another human was suddenly tremendously important. When he scrutinized the weather radar again he could see the scarlet and cerise flow waves of the storm rushing down Stakeout Canyon, overlapping and twisting at a giddy velocity. The speed around the fuselage had now exceeded a hundred sixty kilometers an hour. Indigo stars marked the other two hypergliders; both were in the air, about the same height as he was. So she is alive and kicking, then. It had been a foolish fantasy that her silence meant she was somehow inactive.

“Yeah,” he said as he rose past the thousand-meter mark. “I don’t like being inside it; I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end.”

“Adam only meant for you to do this, didn’t he? That’s why he put you through the memory implant procedure. There was no moisture damage. He wasn’t going to let me and Anna fly.”

“No. He was going to explain it to the Guardians and use them to make sure the two of you stayed on the ground. Bloody idiot, as if my flying can guarantee a landing on the summit.”

“Why didn’t he tell us you were in the clear?”

“He would have to explain why to the Investigator, that we knew each other from way back, which was why he contacted me in the first place.” The hyperglider lurched alarmingly to starboard. Oscar brought it back with steady pressure on the joystick, flexing the wings. The craft rolled back to its level position. He concentrated hard on the weather radar, though even that had trouble spotting the extreme airflow turbulence inside the jetstreams.

“Is that important?” Wilson asked.

Oscar ground his teeth together. For decades he’d assumed that this moment, if it ever came, would be cathartic. It wasn’t. He hated himself for confessing, for what he had to confess. “I’m afraid so.”

“So why did he know you?”

“We both got involved with student politics at the university. It was stupid. We were young, and the radicals knew how to exploit that.”

“What happened?”

“Ultimately? Abadan station.”

“Oh, Jesus, Oscar, you’ve got to be kidding. That was you?”

“I was nineteen. Adam and I were in the group which planted the bomb. It wasn’t meant for the passenger train. We were making a gesture against the grain dumping. But there was some snarl up on StLincoln; the express was running late so traffic control gave it priority, they pushed the grain train onto a different line.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah.” Oscar watched his altitude go through the fourteen-hundred-meter mark. It was difficult to see. Tears were washing down his cheeks. He ordered the wing configuration change ready for flight. “The Intersolar Socialist Party took pity on me and paid for me to undergo an identity change on Illuminatus. I’ve been…I don’t know. Making amends? Ever since.”

“I’ll be damned. This really is a day for revelations, isn’t it. I guess we’re all strangers in the end.”

“Wilson. No matter what…if you hate me now. I’m glad I knew you.”

“I don’t hate you. So is Oscar your real name?”

“Hell no.” He checked out through the cockpit canopy, seeing the wings curving away on either side. Virtual vision showed him the tailplane morphing into a broad triangular stabilizer. Deep in his gut he was tensing himself up for the release. “I used to be a big film buff. I loved all those fabulous musicals and cowboys and romances they used to make back in the mid-twentieth century. Oscar awards, see? And the biggest star they ever had was called Marilyn Monroe.”

“Well, Mr. Star Award, you named the tactic: two on one.”

Oscar saw Wilson’s hyperglider disengage. Its indigo star went shooting off down the carmine river flooding the length of Stakeout Canyon.

He could almost hear the calculation that Anna must be making. Out of all of them Wilson stood the best chance of reaching the summit. The longer she left it the more difficult it would be for her to catch him and presumably force some kind of collision; but if she disengaged before Oscar he could pick his own moment anytime in the next hour or so, and make his flight completely unimpeded. It all depended on how much faith everyone had in his ability to fly the foreshortened parabola.