Flight of the Outcast (12 page)

   She did, heard a hiss, and felt the misting spray of the first coating. Then a circle rose from the floor, up over her feet. It looked like a bubble wand—she peeked—with a white translucent liquid trapped in it. The liquid coated her body, drying instantly with a strange cooling effect. She spread her fingers and felt the stuff flow on like gloves, then up to her neck. It stopped at her chin. The circle sank back down into the pad. The seal hissed, and the cylinder lifted away.

   A frosted Asteria stepped off the pad, wearing her pressure suit. It fit tightly, like a second skin. "The helmet has neural transceivers built in," the tech said, handing it to her. "Put it on and let me bond it. You'll think you can't breathe, but don't worry—the suit is oxygenating your blood. And you don't have to talk. Just subvocalize—"

   "I know," she said, slipping the helmet on. She held her breath—easier if she opened her mouth—and waited as the tech went round her neck with a spray and then did it again to make sure the suit was really airtight.

   "Test it," the tech said. "What's your name?"

   She let her vocal cords form the words "Aster Locke," and heard a depersonalized voice that came from the helmet repeat the words aloud.

   "Right, you're set. Through there." The tech touched a control pad, and two doors dissolved. Asteria went through the one that he pointed toward as another cadet, stripped to his underwear, entered the suiting chamber.

   Twenty flight cadets waited, milling around, speaking to one another in those flat, identical-sounding suit voices. They all looked as if their bodies had been wrapped in plastic. She couldn't recognize them—the helmets all had a gold faceplate, opaque from the outside. The names of the cadets were displayed on the foreheads, though. Mastral was there. Asteria looked for Dai but couldn't spot him. He might have been one of the last five, though.

   The door dissolved again, and everyone looked around as the twenty-first suited cadet entered—Kayser's friend Broyden, Asteria saw from his name display. Beyond him, she caught a glimpse of red hair and relaxed. Dai would be the next in line. Broyden walked past her, craning his head, as if he had an urgent need to find Kayser. "Mastral?" his strange machine voice said.

   "Here."

   The others were talking, but Asteria had no one to talk to. She heard a contemptuous "Disaster," though, and knew it had to be Kayser. Though he had not dropped the nickname, he had at least kept his word about not harassing her—so far. True, he had crowed at the beginning of the term that he had beaten her out—and it was also true that she had earned a 3.11 grade average, while he had a 3.12, thanks either to his greater skill at chemistry or to favoritism. Still, he had stopped trying to taunt her into striking him—although he had never again faced her in defense training. And she was determined that he was not going to best her in flight training.

   Dai came in and immediately saw her. "Feels weird not breathing," he said, his voice flat as the suit picked up his subvocalization and turned it into mechanical speech.

   "Yeah, it does," she agreed. "You sound like a Cybot."

   "So do you."

   Asteria had to keep conscious control of her lungs, because the moment she forgot about them, she felt herself clenching and gasping to breathe—no need, because the suit was infiltrating her blood with oxygen, the amount automatically determined by her level of exertion. "This is it," she said.

   "Yeah," Dai agreed. "You don't have to worry, though. You're great on the sims."

   She didn't respond, though it was true—she was the best in her class on the simulators, her reflexes like lightning. The final three cadets came in. As soon as the last one had stepped into the ready room, the opposite door dissolved, and a flight sergeant said, "To your ships."

   The trainers looked impossibly small, not even as large as—well, as a coffin. They were all jet-black and shining, symmetrical flattened tubes, open at the moment, waiting for their pilots. Twelve on each side of the hangar, one at the far end of the row. The sergeant sent the cadets in: first Kayser, who went to the end ship, and then two at a time. Dai and Asteria walked down the row together, not quite to the middle, and he turned to take the left ship as Asteria turned to the right. "Good luck," he said.

   "You too."

   It was just like the sim, except that there they had not worn the strange suits, just the helmet. Asteria stepped into the trainer and then lay back. The ship clamshell shut over her, and she felt the pressure as the contacts expanded, locking her into place. At first, everything was dark. Then, suddenly, she could see more than she had ever seen in her life. The faceplate had interlocked with the ship sensors.

   She saw in visible light, infrared, and ultraviolet. She could, just by thinking about it, see everything surrounding the ship simultaneously, 360-degree vision. The ship introduced itself. "Trainer Seven."

   "This is neat," said a voice in her ear—Dai's voice, sounding more like himself now that it was transmitted through the ship instead of just through the suit.

   "Silence, Trainer Eight," came the voice of the flight sergeant. "No ship-to-ship conversation until you're in flight."

   "Give him a demerit." Kayser's voice, of course.

   "Then you'd get one as well, Trainer One. Last warning. Silence."

   Asteria closed her eyes and felt the ship. The connections were pulsing through her skin and directly into her nervous system. Ages ago, pilots had controlled flight mechanically—how, she had no idea. It seemed impossibly complex to think about. Now they
felt
the ship. No need for dials and readouts, because the information came directly into the pilot's mind, the way a pulsebook transmitted information directly to the cortex.

   These were suborbital, little more than skimmers, but they had the most sophisticated flight controls that Asteria had ever dealt with. Equipped with grav drives—no rockets, no ion exhaust, just a high-pitched shriek—they used gravity waves to take to the air and streak along at supersonic speeds. Each one was powered for two hours of flight, and if a student was so unlucky as to be at top altitude—one hundred kilometers— when the power reached 2 percent, then the ship's AI would take over and bring them down for a soft landing. Maybe not on the actual campus, but somewhere.

   Or so the theory went. Everyone knew stories of cadets who had miscalculated, lost control, and crashed. A few of them were buried on campus.

   "Right," the flight sergeant's voice boomed. "Your solos today are to Grayhorn Mountain, then to the Bight of Westfall, and then back here. Only five hundred kilometers. You have two hours, so keep your speed reasonable. This is not a race. Make sure you register with the detectors at Grayhorn and the Bight. Lay in your courses."

   Thinking
Grayhorn
did nothing. Asteria smiled to herself. This must be one of the little tricks they liked to pull on first-timers. But she had prepared. She thought
Latitude 30.102, Longitude
1.348
, and before her she saw a map of the island shimmering in midair. She willed the ship to calculate the most direct flight path to the coordinates she had given it—to Grayhorn, then to the Bight, seventy-five odd kilometers to the south, and then a direct route back to the hangar. It was, she saw, a total of 147.812 kilometers. Close enough to the FS's estimate of one-fifty.

   From there, she calculated the speeds, the turns required, and the time involved. Gave herself half an hour buffer. Before she knew it, she heard the FS say, "Trainer One, clear. Go! Trainer Two, clear. Go!"

   Right down the line. When the DS called for Trainer Seven, she had already engaged the grav drive. At the go command, the ship sprang five meters into the air, swiveled, and shot down the length of the hangar, through the arched exit, and soared in a high climbing starboard curve. For the first time in months, Asteria felt like laughing. She could see
everything!
The ship rolled so the landscape of the campus shot by below her. Behind her, the blue sky went up forever. She could hear, very faintly, ship-to-ship chatter now that seven ships were airborne. No, eight—there was Dai's voice: "Where are you?"

   "Ten klicks south of you already. I can see you, barely."

   "Got you now. Wanna race?"

   "No way I'm slowing! Catch me if you can!"

   "Cut the chatter," said the voice of Command. "Remember we can hear you. Communicate only when necessary."

   "Aye," said Dai and Asteria in unison.

   Away from the campus the unbroken canopy of island jungle flashed past two kilometers below, a deep green tinged with blue. Flickers of discharge sheeted around the ship, pale violets and reds. Asteria couldn't hear it, but she knew the ship was shrieking, as if it felt the joy of flight just as she did.

   Then the vision feed failed.

   "Dai!"

   "Malfunction?"

   "No viz," she said. "Command? I've—"

   "Don't," Dai said quickly. "It's a test. The ships are programmed to do that. I've lost some rear stabilizer control. The turns are gonna be wide."

   
Give me virtual plotting
, Asteria thought. Instantly, she saw the world in a kind of sketch: the scarlet horizon line ringed her, moving green dots showed her the trainers ahead of her and behind her. Her speed had faltered with the surprise, and Dai had closed to within five kilometers of her.
Superimpose map.
Now in yellow she saw the physical features of the course: a river wound through the jungle below. In the far distance, Grayhorn showed up as an inverted yellow V. She adjusted course and speed and headed for it flat-out.

   "What's your hurry?" asked Dai.

   "I've decided it is a race after all," Asteria told him.

   "Watch your communications," Command warned again, but the voice sounded faintly amused.

   She passed Trainer Six.

   "What are you doing?" the cadet pilot asked.

   She didn't bother to respond. Now her altitude readout was behaving weirdly. It indicated she was within ten meters of the jungle canopy, though she knew she had maintained a twokilometer altitude and that number had to be wrong.

   Time zipped by as she fought with blindness. She caught up with Trainer Five, and then without warning, visual came back. She saw the ancient bare black rock of Grayhorn's conical volcano and, beyond that, the silver glint of the sea. Now she was abreast of Trainer Four, Broyden. "Who's that?" he asked. "I'm reporting you for violating approach distances!"

   She checked the readout. She was more than the required kilometer away from him, so she ignored the threat. Now Grayhorn loomed before her, and she was calculating turn vectors. She whipped the trainer around in so tight an arc that she felt the G forces build up even though the grav drive was supposed to muffle them. She was aware of a ping from the transceiver on Grayhorn, and she downloaded a pulse to it, verifying her arrival—but already the mountain lay behind her, and she was streaking for the seacoast and the Bight, an enormous round crater now filled with water, former home to an ancient volcano that must have rivaled Grayhorn.

   Ahead of her, Trainer Three looked as if it were in trouble. Instead of level flight, it rolled, turning over and over. As she caught up to it, she transmitted advice: "Don't fight it. Bank to port and ascend at ten meters per second. That'll straighten it out."

   No response, so she could only hope the struggling cadet had registered what she had sent. The waters of the Bight lay ahead now, turquoise, streaked with white waves. A ping, and she downloaded the proof of her passing, took a hard climbing bank, and set course for the campus and the hangar.

   "Elapsed time?" she asked.

   The ship told her that she had been in flight for fiftyseven minutes and forty-one seconds. Incredible. It had felt like ten minutes.

   And it also felt…
hot.
Great, now the enviros were malfunctioning. She took a suit temp reading and found it was up to thirty-four, nearly body temperature. Sweat could interfere with the suit's transpiration, leaving her short of oxygen. She wondered if she had pushed the ship too hard. Or was it another test of how she would react? Best not to obsess over it. There was Trainer Two, not far ahead. She overtook and passed it. Now Kayser was out there somewhere…there! She urged the trainer to a higher speed.

   "Who's that?" Kayser asked in an annoyed voice.

   "My name is Aster," she told him. "You don't seem to have the brains to remember it."

   "You're not supposed to be racing!"

   "Who said I was? I just like the feeling of speed." Asteria waited for Command to reprimand her, but evidently, whoever was monitoring the transmissions didn't feel called upon to scold.

   Kayser's trainer shot forward, accelerating at close to its top limit. Asteria grinned and let her own vessel go, pushing it to full speed. "Move over, Kayser. I'm coming through."

   "That's a demerit!" he snapped. "You can't call me that!"

   She chose not to answer. They had to turn now—their speed was taking them off course. Though they were moving at the same rate, Asteria had the inside of the turn, unless Kayser had the courage to strain the trainer past its design tolerances. That meant she could pass him. Keeping to the razor edge of thrust failure, Asteria kept the craft in a tight turn. She came abreast of Kayser's craft. She was pulling ahead—