Wind Spindle Chapter 3

  

Kallo squeezed her eyes shut in reaction but the vicious brightness wasn't dimmed-her eyes throbbed with red and white and then her vision simply went black.  Suddenly she was weak and nauseous.

Now the familiar sensation of her internal organs shoving up and back told her that she was losing altitude.

Falling! she yelled at herself, Falling, idiot! Check instruments!

Even blinking rapidly she couldn't see the readout in her mask, although her vision seemed to be on its way back. She was seeing sparks in the black. She went to audio with a tick of her head. Nothing. Radio silence. Had she gone deaf, too?  

She tweaked her head, again attempting to wake up her comm. Nothing.  

Her brain seemed full of wool, and her eyes weren't focusing.  She cussed, putting all her concentration on her trajectory. She was tumbling, gaining velocity with no visual.  She corrected, stretching into layout position. At least with her wings extended she might buy altitude.

She triggered her chute manually.  It didn't deploy. She tried her second chute, her ballute, nothing.

"Daddy?  Kallo heard the quaver in her own shriek as she tried again to wake her instruments.  Had she knocked them out with the altitude? A pounding ache stabbed behind her eyes. Her stomach revolted, but she pushed the sensation down.  She could see light now, but everything was cloudy.  She blinked several times in case her third eyelids were spasming.

She could be 3 kilometers up, or 3 meters.  By now she had hit terminal velocity. She arched her back, trying to climb, hoping desperately not to smash into the cliff side of the Overlook, or a dance blimp, or even the ground.

She drew rapidly on the air in the mask, trying to catch a scent of anything, any clue that could give her an altitude but her mouth was full of panic-a taste like copper and bile. Vomiting would be the worst thing right now; she kept swallowing.  Her own panting was deafening, pounding in her ears.  No choice. She would have to brake and risk spinning out.

Kallo stalled with every bit of her strength, bringing her wings into a bowl shape, her legs forward.  But she had decelerated too quickly. She slipped into a tumble. She was cartwheeling down.

Then she was slammed from behind.

Del pulled her to his chest and wrapped his auxiliary harness around her, clicking it tight. The overhead thump of his deployed chute jerked them up, up.  Now she could make out, through the blur, rock and sand rushing away beneath them only about 100 meters down. Kallo gasped to see how close she had come.

Del caught a downdraft and made a turn back toward the Overlook.  Relaxing in the harness, Kallo laughed with relief. Of course Del would come and save her.  She should have known that. He had always taken care of her. He always would. Kallo laughed, too, at how long it took Del to make the turn.  Even without the addition of her own weight he was much bigger and therefore more ponderous in flight. He could go faster, but she would always be better at maneuvers. She would always be more graceful.

They landed in a run, harder than Kallo was used to.  Her ankles complained. Del popped the harness, releasing her, and made for the Overlook. Kallo minced along behind him, stopping to finally empty her stomach onto the sand.

Anso ran out of the tower and through the crowd on the Overlook, herding them into the viewing lounge as he shouted for medics. He'd left his helmet off and his shock of spiky black hair was buffeted in the winds as he ran. The crowd were crouching and leaning on each other, holding their masks, and moved as slowly as sheep into the base level room.

Finally Anso jumped and slid down the handrails of the long stairway to ground level.

“Everything's down!” he yelled to Kallo and Del.  

“What in all hells do you mean?” said Del, still charging toward him.

"It's all down.  The grid, all our instruments, everything.  Holy hells, I went blind for a minute!" Anso caught up to them and was looking them up and down. “Are you alright?”

"I felt something," said Kallo.

"For once, huh?" said Del, leaving her puzzling.  Why was he angry at her? But he was shouting at Anso again.  "What happened?"

Anso's lips thinned over his teeth.  "How would I know that?"

"You're the producer!"said Del , "You're the Overlook operator! You ought to know something!"

"Gamma event!" Anso's twin, Tassy, had followed him down from the Overlook, her glass book in one hand.  She raced across the sand to them, her sparkling silver pigtails bouncing. "It's on my shielded backup!"

They gathered, looking at Tassy's glassbook. Though it had gone to blackscreen, the last readouts before shutdown had been recorded. The reads were in a different numerical zone than Del had ever seen.

"Only gamma rays could blow it like this," said Tassy.

"Then we should all be dead," said Del.

"Or blind," said Kallo, looking up at Del wonderingly. Her own vision was still patchy, and Ian and Tassy's tarnished pewter eyes both had the blurred-over look as well. "But your eyes are fine!"  Del darted a glance at her, then away.

"There are many kinds of gamma emissions," Tassy reminded Del, sidling up to him. "Look," she urged softly, pointing, "We just got stupid lucky." Now they all stared at her.  "It couldn't have been anything else," she said. "Everybody needs to go and have a good sluff and a nap.  We got quazed."

Anso let loose a colorful run of Dine’ profanity.

"Daddy." said Kallo.

 

Del ran up the Overlook steps, glancing behind him to make sure they were all keeping up.  They would have to get to the central grid tower through the tunnels; circuits must be fried on all the above ground trans units.

“Del, wait!” Kallo shouted at him, limping along.  

“We've got to check on Mano,” Del said.  “It's going to take us at least two hours subground.  If the tubes are running,”

“Hope they aren't fried,” said Anso. “Likely the whole radiation harvesting network got cooked, so it will have gone to green power,”

"We'll be lucky to make it a week on that without shutdowns." said Tassy. “Kallo, let me look at that suit.  I’ll never build in auto overrides again.  You should have had the option to go to manual up there.“

Kallo shrugged away from Tassy, who was checking the back panel of the suit. Del opened the subentrance door.

“No,” Kallo said, “I'm going to fly it.”

“Are you wetbrained?” said Anso.

“Tassy,” said Kallo, “Do you still have my old training suits stashed down on sublevel two?”

“Nothing is maintained or up to date,” said Tassy.  “A seam could tear. You won't have any instruments.  I need to-”

“Forget it,” said Del.

Kallo put her hands on her hips. “You forget it!”

“Listen,” Del pinned her with his glare. “The prevailing winds won't get you there.  You'll have to fly a series of circuit routes to even get to the grid tower, taking off from this low elevation – if you can even gain enough at all.   And what happened to your manual overrides just a minute ago? What if you don't have chutes?”

“My old suits were all manual, Del,”  said Kallo , “No safety circuits to fry.  No overrides.”

“Don't be stupid, Kallo.” He said. “We have to go subground.  Now.”

She blinked at him, biting her lip.  Then she shrugged.

“Good.” Del said.

He opened the iron door and ran down the stone steps; they followed, descending into the tube station.  The overhead screens were all black, which made the familiar space now feel too close, stifling. The transpods were on backup lighting, just visible by thin green strips of light outlining their translucent oval shapes.  

Along the walls the greenhouse windows were still bright; it was a constant reminder of where the power was now coming from.  Mars civilization had limitless power when the radiation harvesters on the surface were working. Plant power would only supply them for a number of days before system shutdowns were unavoidable.  

Del poked the touch pad on the closest transpod; green script read:

Warning.  Backup power only available.  Enter destination.

Del punched the icon, Central Grid Tower.

The tube station went black.  Del heard the others take in a sharp breath.

The greenhouse window lights flickered on again first, then the rest of the eerie backup lighting.  They all breathed out together.

The panel scrolled:  Adequate power to complete transport.  Board for Central Grid Tower.

They climbed into the pod.  Del looked up at Ian and Tassy, then past them.

“Where the hell is she?”

He climbed out of the pod, running back up the steps to the Overlook Tower.  He ran out onto the landing platform in time to see her tiny, bird-like form swoop over the west mesa, followed by a line of dot-sized crows.  Well, there were plenty of updrafts today. She would probably make it. But his stomach was sour.

“Why do you bother?” Tassy asked him as he maneuvered his long legs around the interior of the pod.  “She just does what she wants.”

Del frowned at her.  “What else can I do?” He finally settled in his seat and tapped the Go button on inner wall.  The pod lifted, then accelerated with a jerk.

Tassy shrugged and sighed, silently watching the blur of brilliant greenhouse lights through the wall of the pod as they zipped along the underground rail. 

“They’re not brilliant like you, in every way,’Dell said, and watched Tassy blush.  It was an old game of poking her with praise and watching the predictable result; it alwas gave him satisfaction.

When Dell embarrassed her like this it always reminded Tassy of when her father had bragged on her.  As a child she had lingered in the back of her father’silversmith shop and she always knew by the way the customer’s voices changed, from buisneslike to whimsical, and her father’s from serious to bragadocious, that he had taken one of her air sculpturs from its hanger and was swooping it around from his hand so the gears spun and the mechanisms locked, causing the wings to undulate and flap.  The customers whispered “Nizoni,”  and her father would correct them,”This is more than Nizoni!”  This is not just beauty!  This is more than art.  This is beauty and function!  This is engineering!”  And Tassy would throw herself on her little wool couch and bury her face in her sheepskin pillow, trying not to giggle.  

When Tassy had drawn her first designs for the sculptures, her father had suggested using owl bones, being hollow and therefore lighter, and had shown Tassy how to stalk an owl so that she would know when it died and could harvest the bones more easily.  After watching the owl fight for her life against an enormous hawk and then raise a nest of owlets before finally dying and falling to the floor of a cave, Tassy was ready to leave her gratitude offering of tobacco, corn pollen and braided sweetgrass.  She was then ready to tenderly tug the delicate bones from the carcass while softly singing her prayers of gratitude.  But she was not prepared for the waves of grief that would crash through her for weeks afterward, nor how precious and sacred the addition of the bones would make each of her sculptures. Tassy's father had  failed to mention that Tassy would learn to love the owl as a friend and teacher, and would grieve her fiercely.  Tassy’s father always seemed to leave the most important things for her to find out for herself.  That, Tassy thought, was why she had become an engineer.She always had to discover the most important answers for herself.