The armored clear-plast dropped down over them, and a hiss signified the pressure seal locking up. Kennick nodded to the deck crew out beyond the flyer, looping his hand around in the air a couple times. They nodded and strapped themselves in as the big doors at the back of the Andros slowly lifted on its hydraulics.
“Drop in three,” Kennick said.
The lights outside changed from red to yellow as the flyer shook a little and began to roll backward.
Brennan shifted, twisting in his seat as he tried to see what was happening.
“Settle down. Focus on the controls,” Kennick told him. “We’ll drop in two.”
The yellow lights went out, and green ones lit up as the hold was filled with natural light.
“One,” Kennick said in an almost bored monotone.
Brennan stiffened as the back of the Naga lurched, and suddenly he was pitched up and over as the flyer fell clear of the Andros. They were in free fall but flying backward. Well, more like falling backward, really. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.
Brennan automatically began to work the instruments, getting the rear control surfaces open to put resistance on the tail. They wobbled a bit, and then the Naga rolled forward and put its nose down. Brennan breathed a sigh of relief, now in familiar territory as he began working the controls again to bank the craft to the right and away from the Andros’s course.
Kennick checked his instruments, then eyeballed the receding vessel for good measure before nodding. “We are clear of the Andros. Deploy sails when ready.”
“Clear,” Brennan intoned. “Comply.”
The rockets flared, sending up the filament cable with the projectors attached. He’d set them to hook the second-layer winds and didn’t have long to wait. As the aquamarine sails snapped into place, the wind jerked at them, and the Naga was pulled aloft under wind power once more. Brennan’s heart slowed as he grinned. “Controlled.”
“Clear,” Kennick confirmed. “Watch for eddies. Get us some altitude.”
Brennan started looping the cable back in, drawing the stubby fighter up into the air. They passed the first wind layer with only a little turbulence, something Kennick appreciated. It wasn’t always easy to slip between layers without getting rocked around like a toy in a hurricane, since the different layers moved in different prevailing directions.
The boy is as good as his reputation. That sort of slick handling isn’t something you learn in classes.
“All right, kid,” he said. “I want you to bring us up to the third-level winds, smoothly if you can.”
“We’ll lose the Andros up there,” Brennan warned, even as his hands worked to angle the sails up.
“No worries,” Kennick said. “I know where they’re going to be, and we can catch them in this heap.”
He didn’t have to see Brennan’s scowl to know it was there. The boy clearly considered the Naga to be his own personal flyer—and, Kennick supposed, it really was. Not many people got to claim a fully armed Fire Naga as their own. In days past, such a thing would have fulfilled his own dreams too.
Brennan angled the sails back, losing forward velocity with the wind angling down off the projected surface and gaining altitude slowly as he checked the air currents.
There were two basic ways to transition between wind layers: The first was to redeploy your sails to the new layer, then pull the fight along with them. It made for a rough ride but was relatively fast. The second was to slowly transition by riding the shifting winds that existed between each of the layers. Those winds could be tricky; they didn’t follow the same prevailing directions as the primary layers, and an inexperienced pilot could have his sails blow in on him and easily get the lines tangled.
The Fire Naga made a steady climb, twisting with the winds as Brennan kept the sails full with an instinct that Kennick had rarely seen before. The boy was almost anticipating the wind as it shifted.
“Very nice,” Kennick said. “All right, bring us tight to the wind and let’s head up spin. The old seabeds are spectacular to fly over.”
Brennan confirmed the direction and then wound in the sails until the Naga was almost tucked right into the aquamarine projections, with just enough space below to let them see ahead and to give the Naga’s control surfaces something to bite into.
They quickly accelerated to just over nine hundred and fifty miles per hour, well above the speed of sound in the lower atmosphere but just under it where they were flying.
Above the sails, the skies were more spectacular than Brennan could describe. He’d rarely been up this high; his own skimmer wasn’t rated above the first layer. The blues and greens that made up the mottled patchwork of the sky were incredible without the atmospheric haze to distort them.
Kennick looked back over his shoulder and noted the direction of the kid’s gaze.
“You ever see them through a steady scope?” he asked.
“What?” Brennan looked down.
“A steady scope,” Kennick repeated. “You ever see the sky through a steady scope?”
“No, I don’t think I have.”
“Lakes, forests, and deserts,” Kennick told him. “That’s what makes up the colors you see. It’s unimaginably huge, but the whole sky is full of lands we’ve never been to.”
“Really? But, why not tell everyone?”
“Most people don’t care, and the few who do … they tend to try and get there,” Kennick said. “I’ve seen dozens of expeditions go out. Most never come back. We’ve measured off the size of our world, you know. It’s a little over half a billion square miles … almost perfectly square, at that.”
Brennan’s eyes rose up again and he looked closer at the sky, this time not at the blues and greens, but at the dark-gray-and-black lines that marked them off in a square grid.
“Exactly.” Kennick knew what the boy was looking at. The same thing he’d looked at when he’d learned the size and shape of the world.
“How many are there?” Brennan asked, mouth dry.
“Worlds like ours?” Kennick shrugged. “I think the calculation was somewhere around three hundred million. All bounded by the same God Walls the empire and surrounding territories are surrounded by.”
Brennan almost couldn’t comprehend it. Hell, he couldn’t comprehend it. He’d learned so much more since fleeing the palace than he’d ever been taught inside it.
“The empire discouraged exploration a few generations ago,” Kennick said, “mostly due to the loss of people and resources, but also because no one has figured out yet how to cross the God Walls, so there’s little point. Small groups still try, usually funded by private concerns, eccentric backers, and so on. Most of those are looking for pockets of resources they can return to the empire with, though, and don’t tend to stray more than a few weeks’ travel from our borders.”
“It seems like such a waste,” Brennan said finally.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Kennick chuckled softly, but a glimpse of the ground below them caused him to shift. “All right, we’re over the flats. Let’s tuck and stow the sails and glide in.”
Brennan glanced down. “Clear. Confirm. Comply.”
He dropped the sails and wound in the lines, getting the projectors ready for the next time he needed them. At their current altitude there wasn’t much atmosphere for the stubby wings and control surfaces of the Naga to really bite into, but they were moving fast enough that speed partially made up for that. They held for a while, then slowly began to descend through the layers into thicker atmo.