“You’ll be fine. I’ll be right there.” She spoke into her microphone, and he heard her voice right in his ear. “I mean it. You’ll do fine.”
She moved about thirty feet away from him. “Now remember that if we get close to each other, our gravity fields will interact. You’re a physicist, so you can probably estimate the interactions better than I can, but just don’t forget it.”
“No. I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
Alexa held up her hand. “Equilibrium.”
Grady made adjustments. “Check.”
“Power up.”
He activated his gravis. “Powered up.” He was suddenly floating in microgravity.
“Push off the roof with your legs. We don’t want those rafters in your gravity well when you fall up.”
Grady bent his legs and pushed off into space. He laughed nervously as he rose ten, twenty, and thirty feet above the roof, seeing more and more of the surrounding city blocks as he did so. He gazed around. “This is beautiful!”
Alexa was quickly up to his height, putting a finger against her lips. “Not until we’re higher. Voices carry in open air.” She pointed upward. “One quarter gravity, twelve o’clock high, please. I’ll meet you at one thousand feet.”
With that Alexa began to fall upward.
Grady nodded to himself and activated his controls. Instantaneously he was falling upward as well. As he did, his view of the surrounding city streets increased. He felt an instinctive fear, but it was counterbalanced by his brain’s full belief that “down” was actually just above him—not below. So when he looked at the cityscape, he felt as though he were examining the sky overhead. He laughed nervously as the view kept expanding.
“Jon!”
Grady looked up to see that he was rising past Alexa. He brought himself back into equilibrium, and she rose to meet him. They were now at eleven hundred feet above the meatpacking district. The view of the Chicago skyline was breathtaking.
“This is really something.”
“Keep an eye out for helicopters. If you get seen, go fast—anywhere but the safe house until you lose them. A typical helicopter can do about a hundred and fifty miles an hour—which is faster than terminal velocity. So your best bet is evasive maneuvers. You’ll find that with the gravis you can change directions much faster than normal aircraft.”
Grady was still gazing all around, a grin on his face. “I can’t believe this. It’s like a dream.”
Alexa nodded. “It is pretty amazing. And I’ve seen some amazing things in my day. Back when I was a field operator in the ’80s…” Her voice trailed off. “Never mind. You ready?”
He nodded.
“Follow me. If we get separated, I’ll find you with my thermals.” She pointed ahead and to the left. “See that tall building over there? John Hancock Center. Let’s head toward it.” She tapped her ear. “Keep in touch by q-link.” She shot him a quick grin as she lowered her visor. “And try to keep up.”
With that she twisted around and fell forward, back first, twisting like a high diver as she disappeared into the night.
Grady felt a thrill unlike anything he’d ever known as he jammed the controller forward and suddenly felt the universe draw him toward the horizon. The wind buffeted him at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. He glanced below, and it was as if this was the BASE jump to end all BASE jumps—with the city of Chicago serving as a jagged cliff-face down which they were both falling. Grady moved his hands as airfoils and adjusted his position with increasing ease. He screamed in joy as he fell across the sky.
“Try to keep the screaming to a minimum. We don’t want to attract attention.”
“Right. Couldn’t help it. Sorry.”
Forty-story condo buildings were gliding by below him—or to the side of him in the current gravitational context. He was passing by a narrow river crisscrossed with bridges. Up ahead he could see Alexa falling with her arms tucked against her sides—aiming like a bird of prey toward her target.
Grady did likewise and instantly felt a speed increase. He could also see below more easily that way. The wind roared past his ears.
In under a minute they starting closing in on the hundred-story Hancock building. Grady eased up on the gravity along with Alexa, and they coasted to a near stop as the wind buffeted them.
She pointed. “See that building there with the four small towers just to the left of Hancock Center?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“Let’s see if you can land on top of a tower.”
Grady sucked in a breath. Falling in the open air was fantastic, but he remembered his close shaves in Cotton’s workshop.
Alexa came up within twenty feet of him and spoke directly, instead of over q-link. “You need to be able to do this without hesitation, even in wind.”
“Yes, of course you’re right. I’m on it.”
Grady eased his “down” in the direction of the tower, keeping it to barely any gravity at all. The roof of the building slowly approached him. At first glance he’d thought this was an older, art deco sixty-story building, but now that he was getting up close, he could see it was newer than that—paying homage perhaps. The art deco look here had an ’80s blockiness to it. The roof of the building was capped by four identical purely ornamental towers—square boxes of metal with small pyramids atop them. He focused on the nearest one, and as he glided closer, he modulated his pitch, adjusting the angle of his foot as necessary.
“Remember to reduce your gravity after you land. It will prevent damage to the structure.”
Grady gave her a thumbs-up sign and turned back toward the approaching tower. It was barely ten feet away now, capped by a large square point made of steel, about three feet wide. A lightning rod stood above that. He glanced down to see the roof of the building some forty feet below. The other towers nearby. And the Chicago streets hundreds of feet below them all.
A wind blew him slightly to the right, but he corrected, and in a moment he grabbed onto the cap of the metal pyramid with his gauntleted hand. Moments later he wrapped his arms around the spire, and lowered his gravity to almost nothing, but pointed in the direction of actual gravity—just enough to keep him in place. He clung to the top of the spire and looked back up at Alexa floating in space a hundred or so feet away.
“How was that?”
“Excellent. Did you feel how the structure started taking on your gravity field?”
“Yeah. I dialed down the intensity just as I got in close. Seems to work all right.” Grady looked out across the city, and then down. Whoa. He was up in a place where he’d normally be frightened out of his wits, but changing the direction of gravity seemed to chase off vertigo. Looking around he felt a little like King Kong atop the Empire State Building.
“Now remember, when you push off, don’t just hit full gravity upward, or you might rip the top off the tower.”
Grady nodded and pushed away from the building at nearly zero g before increasing it moments later to gain altitude. “How’s that?”
She came nearly alongside—just far enough away so their gravity fields weren’t tangled. “Good. Okay, how about a bit of high-speed maneuvering?”
“I don’t want to go through any skyscraper windows tonight.”
“No, we’ll head down there.” She pointed out toward the water, where long lines of stone outlined a harbor. A lighthouse blinked occasionally at its tip. “Along that quay, near Chicago Harbor. I’ll meet you down at the lighthouse. Go fast, now!”
She did a backward somersault and then kicked in full gravity—sending her soaring downward at an angle toward the lakeshore a mile away.