Greg thought she looked like Tinkerbell in camouflage gear. He waved to her, and she waved back. Then she reached up and laid her arms against the insides of the wings’ cupped leading edges. Straps that were almost transparent curled out and around her wrists and elbows in response. The tail surfaces snapped out from the cylinders on the sides of her boots like Japanese fans.
She pulled the wings down slowly, and they unfolded from one-way hinges to their full nine-meter span. She raised and lowered them twice, as if doing a strange form of tai chi, testing them, becoming one with them again. Then she bent her legs, arched her back, and leapt from the balcony, snapping the wings down with enough force that she actually gained a little altitude before gliding into the windward updraft.
Good flight, Kanti, Greg thought, conserve your energy.
He looked around the office, saw Kanti’s discarded “Penelope” outfit on the floor and stuffed it in the recycler. He restored the partition of his private nook to its normally slick chitinous appearance, took one last look around for anything that would reveal that Kanti had been there, and said “Reactivate 43895,” to his wrist comp.
“Back again,” Penelope announced, “after an hour! What did Anna want to talk about?”
“Her daughter, Kanti, flew off, and Anna thinks it has something to do with some Eponan politics that you shouldn’t be burdened with. I’m going off to find the young lady and persuade her to come back and talk to her mother. In the meantime, why don’t you see what the chances are of scheduling another starbase shuttle in time to catch the Vulpetti?”
“Eponan or Human?”
Greg allowed himself a grim smile at the thought of Anna on an Eponan shuttle.
“Either. I’ll assume Anna will go on the human one and wait for her daughter at the starbase.” He pulled his own kit out of its locker, and gulped. Kanti had left the locker door open—but anyone seeing that when Penelope’s record resumed would think that he’d opened it to get his own gear. “I’d better get going.”
“There’s a tropical storm approaching from the west.”
Greg grimaced. The weather. When everything else on Epona was going right, there was always the weather. The low sunken continent was no barrier at all to late season hurricanes. “How soon?”
“Three hours.”
“I’m just going to Fingal’s cave on the mainland. It should take sixty minutes max—might even make it back with Kanti.” If all went right, he might not be back for days, but play the role, yes. “Oh, and send Knute what the Fay Feedyflat-gee did with Bach’s Fugue in G. It’s in the rack.”
“Message sent. Good luck, Greg.” The office wall turned into a real hologram this time, and the classical Greek beauty in it waved farewell. She did look somewhat like a more rounded, softer Kanti, he thought, except the face. That came from a memory burnt too deep to forget—so he had decided, at least, to remember it accurately.
Three hours? By the time he had his own wings and boot-fans on, it was already so gusty that he simply rotated his wings to a positive angle of attack, and rode the draft up like a blown leaf. The computer in his back unit adjusted all the angles and twists of his wings for maximum efficiency as his hands and body language supplied the basic sense of direction.
He sheared off to the right over the city until he found a back eddy that took him out over the strait between the island of Fay Seeffay’s metaflock and the Fay Geecee part of the mainland. The storm circulation brought the freshening winds in from the southwest, more or less along the strait.
Trading altitude for distance, he glided for the nearest shore, crabbing to his left across the moving air mass until he was over the shallows of the mainland. The low plateau to his right was all that was left of a mountain range piled up in the last throes of continental drift on ancient Epona. A few hills still approached a thousand meters in altitude, but most of it was worn down to two or three hundred. Still, that was huge on a human scale, and its storm and current-undercut cliffs had enough of a wind shadow beneath its turbulent edge for Greg to make progress south under the wind.
Warm air from over the vast continental sea drifted into the sunken continent here and rose in occasional updrafts against chalk and sandstone cliffs to meet the west storm wind in a layer of turbulence. Greg used the updrafts to gain altitude until it became rough, then glided southward below the cliffs, aided by occasional sweeping strokes of his wings. He descended until he skimmed the shore like a gull, then rose on the next updraft. He felt exhilarated, not only by the sensation of flight, but from the sense of expectation that this particular flight brought.
Storm reports were still ominous, but it was moving slower than expected. Greg thought he easily had another hour or two before the weakening depression crossed the continental mass. Not only that, but he seemed to have picked up a tail wind. A tail wind? But the storm was blowing in from the west. Greg triggered his comset. “Met Local, I’ve got winds from 0-3-0. What gives?”
“Roger, Konstantis, be advised that the storm we’ve been watching has started tracking south, and an anticyclonic instability has been drawn down from the northeast. It’s a minor cold front, not regionally significant, but it could be nasty locally. You might want to put down and let it blow over.”
“Roger, Met Local, copy.” Greg had no intention of putting down as long as the new storm was blowing him where he wanted to go. He’d put down when he got to Fingal’s cave and let it blow over there—while he got up to speed with Kanti and her Uther friend Bach.
Getting an Uther to make a covert appointment was a minor miracle in itself, and for the Uther to be there and the Human not would be an ironic disaster. Greg invested some more of his own energy, driving himself south. Minutes went by in the fog of steady effort.
Out of boredom, he glanced behind himself and saw the cold front. Minor? Its cumulonimbus stretched way up; even allowing for a 25 percent increase in vertical scale due to Epona’s 25 percent lower gravity, that was an awesome pile of clouds, coal black on their undersides. Ten kilometers away? No, the clouds seemed to roil up out of thin air, forming a front that was much closer than that.
Greg looked down. Rocks and bub-bleweed marsh reached in right up to the edge of the cliffs. He looked up. The plateau seemed devoid of any usable shelter, but he knew it was full of gullies with occasional caves and littered with enough dormant “vegetation” to thatch a crude roof.
He glided closer to the cliff where air pressing upward from the surface should form an updraft. He found one and soared up over the edge—and then it really hit him. Before he knew what was happening, his wrist comp told him he was a kilometer above the plateau. Big mistake—the oncoming front had sucked him in.
Clouds sprang up all around him and it was numbingly cold. A brief hole below him revealed clouds scudding by at an incredible rate—his heads up display showed a ground speed of forty meters a second—westward. He was already twenty kilometers inland.
To get back, he would have to land and wait for the normal seasonal winds to assert themselves, then ride them back to the coast. Of course that would make a mess of his schedule—and since he was doing everything secretly, there was no way he could simply call Kanti and tell her he would be late.
Or could he? “Voice mail.”
“Voice mail ready to receive from Greg Konstantis. Who is the message for?”