I waited about twenty minutes, and then went up myself to the hangar area, which was located underground at the summit. The temperature had plummeted, and the rings, which had brightened the sky a half hour earlier, were now only a pale smear against a heavy overcast. Outside the hangar, I tried the service desk again. Still busy. Any time now, though.
"Can you tell me where my skimmer’s located?"
A pause, then: "Sir, guests aren’t allowed in the hangar area."
"Of course," I said.
A warning was posted on the door: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I pushed through it into a sprawling cave that would probably not have looked so big if I could have seen some walls. It was illuminated only by a string of yellow lamps burning morosely out in the gloom somewhere. While I tried to get my bearings, a set of overhead doors opened, and a vehicle descended through a shaft into the hangar. Its navigation lamps sliced across rows of parked vehicles. I got only a glimpse before the lights went out. But the skimmer’s magnetics continued to whine, and its black bulk glided to floor level and accelerated. I felt the wave of cold air as it passed at high speed.
My own aircraft was green and yellow. A bilious combination, but one that would be easy to see if I could get reasonably close to it. I waited for my eyes to adjust, and then stepped cautiously through the door onto a permearth floor, and turned to my left, on the ground that there was a little more illumination in that direction.
Another skimmer dropped out of the shaft, lights blazing. I tried to get a good look around, but the lamps blinked off almost immediately. Then it accelerated down one of the corridors formed by the parked aircraft. I groped past a small airbus, and penetrated deeper into the hangar.
There appeared to be three shafts, and vehicles were coming in at an alarming rate. Maddeningly, there was never quite enough time to organize my search during the few seconds of illumination that each provided. I became an expert on the placement of running lights that evening, and formulated Benedict’s Law: no two sets on any consecutive vehicles will point in the same direction. In the end, they only added to the confusion.
In addition, once they reached ground level, the skimmers, now lost in the dark, moved at high speed. I had a bad time of it: I stumbled past wing struts and tail assemblies, banged a knee, and fell on my face.
At one point, I was kneeling immediately in front of a skimmer rubbing a knee when I heard the magnets energize. I scrambled to one side as the thing rolled forward, but a wing caught me anyway and knocked me flat.
I was by then having a few misgivings, but I’d lost my fix on the door, so I couldn’t retreat. I considered calling the service desk again to ask for help, and was about to do so—reluctantly—when I spotted a green and yellow fuselage.
Gratefully, I hurried over, climbed into the cockpit, and called Chase to tell her the aircraft would be a few minutes late.
"Okay," she said. "Anything wrong?"
"No," I grumbled. "I’m doing fine. Just a minor problem with the skimmer. Stay with me a second until I make sure it works."
"Make sure it works?" She sounded skeptical. "Listen, maybe I better take the taxi."
I’ve thought since, many times, yes, there was my chance to head it all off. It’s what I should have done in the first place. And I never even considered it. Now, of course, I’d gone to too much trouble to take the obvious solution.
You have to work at it to shut down a skimmer response system inadvertently. On the bilious special I had, it was necessary to take off a plastic cover and push a presspad. Simple enough, but you had to make a conscious decision to do it.
How had it happened?
Careless attendant, presumably. Odd, since the attendants don’t enter the aircraft unless there’s a problem. Still, there it was. I promised myself there’d be no tip. My God.
I turned the systems back on, enjoyed the swirl of warm air in the compartment, tapped instructions in for the topside pads, and listened to the magnets engage. The vehicle lifted off the floor, paused while something sailed past, and entered the corridor. Then the skimmer accelerated, stopped (throwing me against the harness), and rose almost vertically into an exit shaft.
I rode it up, out over the summit, and down again into the landing area. I got out and reset the guidance system for the roof of the Point Edward hotel. "On its way," I told Chase, over the commlink. It lifted again, and accelerated seaward.
"Good thing," she said. "I’m getting hungry."
I watched it climb, its running lights blurring against the underside of a low cloud cover. It circled toward the south, and was swallowed in the night.
"Storm building," I told Chase a half-hour later from the hotel bar. "You’ll want to dress for it."
"You’re not going to be walking me through a lot of snow, are you?"
"No. But the Perch itself is outside. Unprotected."
"Okay."
I was seated in a padded armchair. Thick carpets cushioned a stone floor, and the wall-length window which faced the ocean was circumscribed by dark gray drapes. Resistance Era patriotic art decorated the walls, world seals and frigates framed against lunar surfaces and Valkyrie mothers juxtaposed with portraits of their sons. "It’s lovely out here."
"Good." Pause. "Alex?"
"Yes?"
"I’ve spent the day thinking about antimatter and Armstrong units and whatnot. We’ve assumed that Kindrel’s story might be true because maybe a sun weapon could have been built. But there’s another possibility: maybe the story is true, but Olander was a liar."
I considered it. There was no reason I could find to dismiss the idea. Still it didn’t feel right.
"You know what Kindrel Lee looked like," Chase continued. "Olander’s sitting in that bar, probably half-tanked, and suddenly she’s there with him. What more typical of a man than that he should begin immediately to exaggerate his importance?"
"That’s a side of you I haven’t seen before," I observed.
"Sorry," she said. "No slur intended. It’s more or less the nature of things. Well, you know what I mean."
"Of course."
"The skimmer just came in. See you in a bit." She signed off.
The wind was rising, whipping flakes against the window.
The storm arrived and began to build in intensity. I called the desk and reserved two rooms for the night. Not that the weather presented any serious danger to travelers: the skimmers were inordinately sturdy vehicles and, as long as the pilot stayed with the automatics, there was really nothing to fear. But I was drawn by the prospect of spending a stormy night on Sim’s Perch.
I was enjoying a dark Ilyandan wine, lost in thought, when a hand pressed on my shoulder, and a voice that I knew cried, "My God, Alex. Where’ve you been?" The voice was Quinda Arm’s, and she held on tight. "I’ve been looking everywhere for you." There was snow in her hair and on the shoulders of her jacket. She was trembling, and her voice shook.
I stared at her in mild shock. "Quinda," I said, "what the hell are you doing here?"
Her face was pale. "Where’s your skimmer?"
"Why?" I stood up intending to help her into a chair, but she waved me impatiently away.
"Where’s the skimmer?" she demanded, in a tone that I could only characterize as threatening.
"Somewhere out over the ocean, I guess. It’s bringing Chase Kolpath in from Point Edward."
She swore. "That the woman you brought with you?" Her eyes locked on mine: she looked wild, frightened. "You need to get in touch with her. Tell her to get off the skimmer. Keep everybody else away from it too." She was having trouble speaking and breathing. Her eyes lost their focus, and she wiped a damp brow with the back of her hand.