Judas Unchained

“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.

Anna disengaged.

She was twenty-five seconds behind Wilson.

Oscar’s virtual hand punched the disengage icon. G-force shoved him down hard in the seat. The hyperglider streaked away at over a hundred ninety kilometers an hour. Roiling air buffeted the wings mercilessly. He’d envisaged keeping the craft steady while watching the movements of the other two, waiting for whatever moment presented itself. Instead he was thrust into an immediate battle for simple survival. All he cared about was maintaining altitude. The two terrifying canyon walls jumped out of the radar screen at him as the winds impelled him from side to side. He countered each floundering swerve movement the screaming storm flung at him, tilting the joystick with a fear-burned calmness. The wings shifted obediently, tips twisting and flexing to produce a response so quick he had trouble registering it before it became overcompensation.

For a split second he searched out the two indigo stars. His e-butler projected their course trajectories. The slender topaz lines it sketched intersected before the end of Stakeout Canyon. Then the vast rock walls were closing in again, and the instabilities clawing at the fuselage intensified. It grew darker outside as the shreds of clouds threaded within the storm were wrenched back into a single wild braid high above the ground. Big raindrops smashed against the cockpit in a sudden wave. The hyperglider yawed under the assault. Oscar struggled to right the craft again. He had to reduce the wing size, increasing control at the cost of the acceleration that the previous wide curve had given him. There was no noticeable loss of speed, and it was easier to force his way back into the center of the canyon, keeping above that writhing arterial cloud. The radar found the end of the canyon wall twenty kilometers ahead, a vertical cliff that stretched up off the screen.

He checked the other two hypergliders again. Anna was flying with mechanical exactitude. Her wings hadn’t been trimmed down, yet somehow she was maintaining her vector, closing fast on Wilson. She didn’t have to worry about maneuvering into the right position to go vertical at the end of the canyon. She didn’t have human concerns to distract her anymore. Her hyperglider streaked on like a missile. Wilson couldn’t move away; if he was to soar up the incredible waterfall that flowed out of the canyon he had to hold his course perfectly steady.

The skills of some long-departed pilot had settled calmly into Oscar’s mind now, allowing him to manipulate the joystick in kinesic synergy with the hyperglider, bestowing a flawless control over the aerodynamics at some animal-instinct level. Amid the darkening sky and belligerent uproar of the storm he watched the express train from StLincoln leave the tracks in a cloying oily fireball, saw the carriages jackknife and crumple, caught sight of the broken charred bodies sprawled along the side of the tracks. He knew them all now, every night for forty years their faces had filled his one and only dream.