Faridah ended any further discussion by patching into the general aviation channel and contacting Hengsha Air Control. “H-A-C, this is ArcAir Zero-Niner-Niner. Maintenance flight is complete, we’re coming back to the pattern. Request clearance for return to Alpha Alpha One Four, over.”
A synthetic voice crackled in her ear. “ArcAir Zero-Niner-Niner, H-A-C confirms. Clear to RTB, over.”
“I got this,” said Evelyn, as she gripped the control yoke. The loose, easy mood in the cockpit had evaporated.
“Sure,” offered Faridah, looking away. Her eyes became glassy as her gaze turned inward. “I guess I’ll check my footage…”
Suddenly she was falling again, this time giddy inside the confines of her own head. Faridah’s skin tingled with the ghostly sense memory of the jump.
She wasn’t the kind of person to be ostentatious about her augmentations. Maybe it was some lingering effect of the conservative family she had been brought up in, but Faridah was circumspect about how people outside her circle of friends perceived her. She never felt the desire to change herself radically by replacing limbs or other obvious elective surgery. What implants she did possess were relatively small pieces of tech – neural augs that gave her better reaction times and sharper optical acuity. There was also the ‘black box’, but that she tended to use more for her own amusement.
The device was essentially a human-scale version of the flight recorder fitted to the V-22; the unit’s wetdrive captured a digitized feed of the impulses from Faridah’s visual and aural senses, a few hours of images and sounds that could be played back, or downloaded through an induction connector placed on her temple. It was a common enough aug for a flyer, designed to be hardy enough that it, like the flight recorder of an aircraft, could be recovered after a fatal crash to determine the root cause. The Chinese aviation authority made them mandatory for all civil pilots operating in their airspace.
Faridah dismissed the need for it, though. She was confident enough in her own abilities to believe that she
could walk away from any hard landing. Instead, she used the playback to store her wilder experiences whenever she could, saving the footage to a hard drive back in her apartment. To anyone else, they would have just seemed like random sensory clips bereft of context and meaning, but to Faridah they were bottled memories. Like looking through someone’s home vids, they really didn’t have any resonance unless you had actually been there.
Still, the playback pulled her in deep enough that when the Osprey started to descend toward Hengsha, it was almost a shock to disengage and snap back to the real world. The great raised platform of upper metropolis, the gargantuan city-atop-a-city, filled the view through the canopy. It reminded Faridah of a giant’s table, the surface dotted with elegant bottles and ornate crockery, each piece made of perfect cut glass or decorated porcelain. Grassy, green arcologies turned toward the sky, like vases full of cut flowers.
These were the domains of the Hengsha’s rich and powerful, those who lived in the rarified air of high company management and great wealth; alongside them, the intellectual elite who staffed the exclusive universities and research centers. The sculpted monolith of the Tai Yong Medical corporation’s tower dominated the artificial landscape, the surface of it smooth and sleek like the skin of the cybernetic limbs that made the company its colossal fortune.
Evelyn guided them downward, past the thick strata of the pangu – the massive deck that separated the upper district from the one beneath – and they descended toward the old town. Below the upper city, the lower quadrant lay in an endless half-night of eternal shadows. Neon-drenched streets shone around the feet of massive anthill apartment towers and smoky industrial complexes. Drones and other flyers crossed back and forth, the sky becoming busy as the two Hengshas awoke with the new day.
Not that Lower Hengsha ever really slept, Faridah reflected. It was the dark mirror image of the upper city’s opulence and luxury, a bestial and dangerous likeness of its dazzling twin. In the lower city, life was cheaper and times were harder; and up above, while things might have shone a little more brightly, they were just a different kind of dangerous.
***
Evelyn brought the Osprey around in a spiraling descent, and with Faridah’s assistance, she rotated the spinning props on the end of the wings to a vertical mode. The VTOL made a careful touchdown on ArcAir’s south pad. The airfield was part of an artificial reef that had been one of the first things built during the founding of Hengsha, and it extended out into the bay.
Faridah couldn’t help but glance out over the landing apron to where the company’s more modern aircraft were parked. Jai Cheng’s other private planes were sleek models with windowless virtual cockpits and swept-back wings. While they were similar in structural configuration to the tilt-rotor V-22, that was where the resemblance ended. The other VTOLs had advanced axial flow engines at their wingtips, making them highly agile and capable of near-supersonic speeds. It was no secret that Faridah Malik coveted the chance to fly one of them. So far Cheng hadn’t been willing to give her the job.
As if thinking about him summoned the man, Faridah caught sight of Cheng crossing the apron toward them as Evelyn ran through the Osprey’s shutdown checklist. His normally smiling face was set in a grimace, and he had a purposeful manner to his gait that made Faridah worry that he was coming to chew them out about turning the check flight into a joyride. But then she saw the low shape of a six-wheeled robot fuel bowser nosing into place under the Osprey’s wing and guessed that something else was up.
Evelyn saw the fuel truck too. “What’s this? We barely touch down and we’re tanking up again?”
Faridah unstrapped and climbed out of the hatch behind the cockpit to meet her employer as he stepped up. Getting a closer look at him, she had the sense that Cheng was under stress, but she knew that he would never admit that to her.
“Hey, Malik,” he began. “Listen, you need to top off and head back out.” He jerked a thumb at the control hut
across the short runway. “There’s a new flight plan for you.”
She nodded at the sleeker jet VTOLs. “Can’t one of them take it? Maybe Fynn or one of the other pilots? The replacement engine, it ought to have one of the techs give it a look over-”
He cut her off with a shake of the head. “No can do. A timetable has been moved up, and we have a job to do.” Cheng straightened and self-consciously adjusted the floral lapels of his jacket. “It’s a special request from one of our, ah, elite clients,” he added.
Faridah said nothing. It was an open secret among the ArcAir crews that Cheng’s company had an ongoing relationship with the Red Arrow triad, one of many Chinese organized crime groups that operated in dozens of cities around the world. It wasn’t a shocking truth – in Hengsha it was just a fact of life, the price of doing business in a city where criminal gangs kept the peace better than the corporate rent-a-cops ever could. His so-called ‘elite clients’ were usually senior Red Arrow members, who paid him back in influence for no-questions-asked trips that never got logged by city flight control. Faridah and Evelyn had steered clear of such things, though; if she dwelled on it too long, Malik became uncomfortable with the questions such thoughts raised, and she preferred to stay out of Cheng’s shady dealings as much as she could. If ArcAir was a Red Arrow shell company, she didn’t want to know about it, and she damn well wasn’t going to voice such suspicions openly.
“What’s the op?” Evelyn stood in the open hatch, having heard Cheng’s words. “You want us to go pick up some rich kid’s Benz from the mainland?”
Cheng didn’t respond because his attention had been drawn away by a trio of men crossing the landing pad toward the Osprey. The first drops of rain were starting to fall as they came into the glare of the VTOL’s navigation lights, and the first thing Faridah saw were the guns.