“No . . . I don’t think so. I don’t know. As for the why, now that I’ve met you I would guess that it has something to do with your identity.” He turned to look at her over his shoulder. “Your holos didn’t give you away, but as soon as I saw you yesterday, Linda . . .”
For a moment she said nothing. She remembered that Blake too had recognized her easily, that day in Manhattan–from a city block away. Had SPARTA formed a bond among its members that neither Sparta’s cosmetic surgery nor her acting could disguise?
“Are you transmitting now?”
“Yes, and I’ll help you. I’ll use side channels to fill the hole with background–the wind on the wings, cockpit noises. Chances are, nobody will listen to the black box anyway, and if they do they won’t notice, unless they already know what they’re looking for.”
Again his surprise seemed genuine. If he had not really recognized her, though, if instead he had known all along who she was, then there was no mystical SPARTA bond, and he was one of the
prophetae
and an accomplished liar.
“I have evidence that he’s one of them. No proof, only suggestive evidence. The group that sponsored you, the Tappers, has ties to the
prophetae
of the Free Spirit. And I do know that it’s because of SPARTA that the Free Spirit wanted my parents out of the way.”
–and then she screamed. The pain that went through her head originated in the middle of her spine and shot upward. Suddenly her torso was on fire from her belly up, and the fire was spreading to her rigid, trembling arms, which thrust themselves outward of their own accord. Her hands curved into hooks as if to seize the ether.
A skinny black shadow tumbled pellmell from the sky. Contending winds, invisible in the clear pink sky, tossed the stricken plane first one way and then another across the wrinkled desert that rapidly rose to swallow it. The marsplane’s slender wings fluttered and twisted and bent back on themselves so far it seemed they would crumple and snap.
Radar, satellite radiolink, holo projection, onboard computers, even the commlink–everything had failed at once. Without computers to continuously warp and trim its control surfaces, the marsplane flew no better than a torn scrap of paper.
In the lurching cockpit Khalid tapped switches and tweaked potentiometers as calmly as he could while being tossed from side to side in his harness. What had been thick colored air all around him, the construction of the holo projector, was now a view of real sky and sand and rock swirling sickeningly across the plastic arc of the canopy.
Auxiliary power from shielded batteries came back online. The control computers had lost the flight destination program and many of their other functions; Khalid had to remind the amnesiac electronics that their primary job was to keep the plane upright and aloft. Another minute passed as he worked at the programs.
The plane was seeking an updraft. Finally it found one, a dozen meters from the vertical rise of rock. As swiftly as it had fallen the plane mounted, but its long wings brushed the cliff twice before it reached the rim and won through to free air. Khalid took control of the craft then and flew it by joystick.
Auxiliary power had failed to salvage the guidance instrumentation. The radar altimeter remained out of commission, and Khalid had no communication with satellites in space or with any ground station. From the displays, he judged that the onboard inertial systems were fried. He switched off the snowy screens. He eased back on the stick and headed the low-flying glider back in what he judged was the direction of Labyrinth City. It was the only plan he had, the only sensible thing to do. He was hundreds of kilometers from his target, but tiny as the city was it had a wider cross-section than any other inhabited place on Mars.
Each time the plane climbed too high, it would lose ground-measured distance; it was essential to stay out of the opposing winds aloft. The jetstream had already blown them so far in an hour that they would need a day of jibing around buttes and mesas, across canyons and dune fields, to regain the Labyrinth.
With the plane under his control, Khalid took the time to peer around his seatback. Sparta lolled in her harness, her head thrown back from the last violent swoop of the plane. Her face was ashen; her forehead was dewed with perspiration. Yet her breath came evenly, and the pulsing vein in her throat showed that her heartbeat was strong and steady.
For two hours the plane flew on without incident, entering the huge plain of Tharsis. Khalid had memorized the map of Mars; from thousands of hours aloft he could match much of it to the territory. He could read the windsign in the sand below, spot dust devils spinning like dervishes twenty kilometers away; he could find the updrafts he needed to stay airborne.
The marsplane soared along a line of steep cinder cones, their fresh and iridescent black lava dusted with orange sand. The cone at the end of the line was the newest and highest; as the plane banked around its shoulder, an endless dune field opened to the southwest.
Wheeling the marsplane back toward the saddle between the two nearest cinder cones, Khalid dove for the ground. He pulled up in time for the plane to skim the steepening slope. He hit switches on the console and the wing sprouted dozens of upright spoilers. At stall angle the plane was hardly a meter above the slag; it lost forward speed and gently grounded itself.
Khalid slapped his harness release, threw up the canopy, and jumped out. Reaching up under the plane’s wingroots, he threw a series of locking bolts and pulled the left wing free of the fuselage. He ran to the left tail boom attachment and released its latches, laying the boom and its vertical fin flat against the ground.
He ran on to the wingtip. A slender fiber lanyard was coiled in a recessed pocket at the wingtip. Khalid pulled it out. He took a long piton from the thigh pocket of his pressure suit and clipped it to the lanyard. From the same pocket he took a steel tool like an ice axe and pounded the piton into firm lava.
More lanyards were concealed at intervals along the leading and trailing edges of the wing and along the tail boom. Working his way back toward the fuselage, Khalid nailed the disassembled left side of the marsplane to the ground. By the time he had repeated the process on the right side of the plane, the sky beyond the saddle was dark with smoking columns of dust.
He looked at Sparta. She was still breathing, still unconscious. The pain had eased from her sleeping face. He faced front again. Inside the rattling cockpit he watched the rolling storm loom over them like an oncoming tank tread over an ant.
And suddenly it was on them, streaking toward them like a live thing, swallowing them whole. A scurrying stream of soft dust hissed over the canopy. Seconds later the air was dark, made visible again by suspended matter that hid more than it revealed, a murky scab-colored brown through which Khalid could see no more than a meter or two.
He dug in the pocket of his pressure suit and pulled out his astrolabe. Its electronics no longer functioned. The alidade no longer pointed to Earth. Nevertheless, he had a general notion of the direction of his birth planet.
He raised the canopy and got out. It took him longer to put the plane back together than it had taken to tear it apart, especially when it came to reattaching the right wing, for with the left wing and boom in place the fuselage was canted over to the left. But a hinge and winch arrangement was built into the wing yoke, and before long the whole huge glider was reassembled and the dust shaken from its wings.
In the cockpit, Khalid set the arming switches for the takeoff-assist rockets. His preflight check was almost casual, perhaps because there weren’t any instruments left to worry about. With his left hand he yanked the hydraulic lever that released the wingtips; then, gripping the stick with his right hand, he hit the RATO trigger.
Khalid released his harness, swung the canopy up, and jumped to the ground for the third time. He checked the RATO canisters slung beneath the wings. No mechanical problems, and he hadn’t expected any. The marsplane had been crippled by a general and catastrophic electrical failure, destroying every electronic system except the multiply-redundant aerodynamic controls and their shielded batteries.
He went to an access panel in the fuselage and pried it open. There was nothing obviously wrong with the massed circuitry inside, but a foreign object was lodged in the autopilot comparator: a stainless steel ball, discolored to a strange purplish-green that suggested intense heat. He plucked the sphere out of the crevice into which it had been wedged and shoved it into the thigh pocket of his suit.
After a moment’s thought, Khalid, working more deliberately this time, took the plane apart again and again nailed it to the ground. When this was done he leaned into the cockpit, left his tools and remaining pitons on the seat, and dug into the net bags hanging against the thin walls. He scooped up a little less than half the plane’s emergency ration, of food and water and stuffed the food tubes into his pockets.
He studied Sparta’s face one last time. There were one or two things he could try, but none that seemed worth the risk. He left her there, in a coma, and after he had sealed the canopy over her he walked into the desert.