Justine’s radio picked up a few scattered words, heavy with blasts of static, from the expeditions trekking over the airless surface. Hiking trips to the top of Herculaneum were another of Far Away’s principal tourist attractions. It wasn’t difficult, the slopes weren’t particularly steep, and the low gravity gave offworld visitors an easy time of it. But the last half had to be covered in pressure suits; and the only real view, sensational though it was, came from Aphrodite’s Seat, the clifftops just below the caldera plateau. Anyone wanting to walk to the actual highest point, an unimpressive mound on the wall of the northern crater, faced a long dreary slog across a lunar-style landscape to reach it.
With the hyperglider’s nose now dipping slightly, Far Away filled most of the universe to the east of the volcano. From her supreme vantage point, Justine could see the Dessault Mountains stretching away ahead and southward. Small sharp pinnacles stabbed up through the gentle whirl of clouds. They guarded the high desert south of the equator, a cold land almost devoid of cloud. Over to the east she could see a smear of deep greens, where the steppes began their long roll toward the North Sea and Armstrong City.
The horizon’s pronounced curve presented the illusion that she was seeing an entire hemisphere of the planet, like some ancient god of myth gazing down on Earth. Although Far Away lacked the softer textures granted to the old gods of Mount Olympus. The white clouds covered a graded spectrum of miserable browns and grays. Despite close to two centuries of human endeavor, the planet’s land surface was nowhere near recovered from the mammoth, and utterly lethal, solar flare that had called people here. Tough, independent-minded settlers had pushed out from Armstrong City, planting their seeds and spraying energetic, wholesome soil bacteria across the empty miles of dusty sand, but the biosphere remained tenuous, its progress toward full planetary enrichment slow. So much was still desert or blasted earth; very, very little of the planet’s original flora and fauna had survived the radiation. The greenery she could see was alien to this place, invaders colonizing a near-dead world.
She soared silently and smoothly over the towering cliffs of Aphrodite’s Seat that guarded the eastern approach to Herculaneum’s summit. Many kilometers below them was the glacier ring that encircled the entire volcano, extending hundreds of meters across the bare rock. Sunlight glinted from the gritty fractured ice, producing a halolike aura at the upper limit of the atmosphere. Sheltering beneath the glare were the alpine forests, gene-modified Earth pines that had been introduced here as a beacon of life and color that could be seen for hundreds of kilometers. She smiled down on them, as she would any old friend, grateful for the comfort of familiarity that they brought.
Ghostly waves of blue and green began to shimmer across the weather radar screen as the hyperglider sank back into the upper atmosphere, showing her the pressure building outside the fuselage. Justine extended the wings again, shaping them into a broad delta. After a while, the cockpit began to tremble as the leading edges bit deeper and deeper into the air. Aerodynamic forces started to take over from the ballistic impetus.
Justine slowly shook off the dreamy lethargy that had captured her during the flight over the volcano. Practical decisions had to be made; from this altitude she could easily coast along for four or five hundred kilometers, putting her well clear of the volcano. But ahead, that would put her into the Dessault Mountains; while north and south would take her back into the divided wings of the storm. There was also distance to consider, the farther she flew now, the longer it would take the caravan to recover her. She altered the hyperglider’s pitch, putting the nose up so the air would start to brake her speed. Her rate of descent increased, which she balanced against the slope below, maintaining the same height above the ground. Clouds flashed around her, ablaze with bright monochrome light, as she passed through the level of the glacier ring. When the hyperglider fell out of their base she was above the pine forests. She could see grasslands stretching out beyond them. Easy enough to land on, but they were still high. It would be cold.
The grasslands grew more lush and verdant as she flew on. Swirls of wind from the lower slopes began to affect the hyperglider, shaking it with growing strength. Bushes and trees speckled the grasses, building swiftly to a dense tropical rainforest that formed an unbroken skirt around the eastern base of the volcano. Looking down, she could see the small black dots of birds flitting amid the treetops. She was already eight hundred kilometers from where she’d started, and that was in a direct line. The caravan would have to go all the way around Mount Zeus before it even reached Herculaneum. Justine sighed, and pushed the hyperglider down toward the rainforest canopy.
This close, it wasn’t as dense as she’d thought. There were clear swaths, shallow valleys with fast silver streams that had hardly any trees at all, lines of dangerous crags. Several times she saw animals racing across open spaces. The Commonwealth Council’s biosphere revitalization project had certainly been successful here.
The radar switched to ground-mapping mode. Justine was searching for a reasonable patch of ground to land on. Although, in extremis, the hyperglider could come down in a patch barely a hundred meters long, she didn’t fancy trying that. Fortunately, the scans revealed a straightish stretch three kilometers ahead and to the north. She brought the hyperglider’s nose around, lining it up. The clear ground was easily visible amid the trees. It looked like there was a clump of rock a third of the way along. Nothing too serious. When she switched the radar to a higher resolution, it showed a narrow, shallow gully running across one end of the clear ground. She started her prelanding flare, shrinking the wings in again, enhancing the camber. The edge of the long clearing rushed toward her. Three of her console display screens distorted into a hash of random color.
“Shit!”
Her e-butler was slow to respond, reporting several processors dropping out of the onboard array, even her inserts were degraded.
“What’s happening?” she demanded. Her virtual hands flickered and vanished.
A gust of wind slewed the hyperglider to starboard. She groaned in dismay as the cockpit tilted. The console screen displays were making no sense.
“Multiple electronic system failure,” the e-butler said. “Compensating to restore core function.” Hands wavered back into her virtual vision. “You have control.”
Justine automatically countered the dangerous roll with a simple wing twist. The little craft responded sluggishly, forcing her to accentuate the maneuver. When she glanced up from the console she cursed. She was already over the clear ground, and losing altitude fast. All her display screens had righted themselves. Control surface responses were instantaneous again.
She initiated the landing sequence. The wings rotated through almost ninety degrees, braking the last of the hyperglider’s speed. It began to sink as if it were made from lead. Twenty meters from the ground, and with almost no forward motion at all, she altered the wings again. They shot out into huge, thin concave triangles, generating as much lift as possible from her stall speed. The landing strut wheels touched and rebounded. Then she was bouncing over the rough terrain for forty meters before the wheels finally halted. The wings and stabilizer shrank back into their buds.
Justine let out a huge breath of relief. The cockpit canopy hissed as the seal disengaged, and it hinged upward. Plyplastic flowed away from her hands, and she let go of the grip bars. She released her helmet catches, and took it off. A somewhat nervous laugh escaped her lips as she shook her sweaty hair out. All the hyperglider’s electronic systems were back on-line.