SKYRIDER

By William King

1. After the crash he was finished. One night he went over the wall and fare-jumped the first mag-lev out of Paris. He sat with a group of Workfree headed south to find a place in the state Pensions. In a seat across from him sat a small dark-haired girl. Her name was Rosa. She had failed to find work in the theatre and was returning to Marseilles. She did most of the talking. There was little he could tell her. He was on the run and wired for combat in an aircraft he would never fly again. He had just turned twenty-three. 2. The Wing carried him out over the bay towards Chateau d'If. Below he could see the tourist hovercraft. All around a flock of flyers banked and wheeled, crucified on the skeletal struts of their harnesses. He pulled himself into a shallow bank, watching the digital readouts on the inside of his visor climb into the danger zones., feeling the cold tug of the wind on his body. It was a clumsy way to fly, a pale shadow of being integrated into an aircraft, but it was the only thing he had. The government provided a complement of recreational Wings to all Pensions. On the roof of the arcology he could see Rosa. She was talking with someone. She seemed to be pointing at him. He was at the wrong angle to use the normal approach to the Pension's landing ramp. Rather than try for a long, slow arc around the building he decided on the more direct method of descent. He came in at a steep angle, bringing the Wing into stall configuration. The memory plastic of the harness whipped around until the Wing was almost a parachute. He absorbed the impact of landing with a flex of his knees, feeling the shock through the cushioned soles of his boots. A quick glance showed Rosa and another woman approaching. The woman was tall and thin; taut muscles rippled under her tiger-stripe skinpaint. The only thing she wore was a Braun wrist-tag. Her name was Monica. She was Rosa's supplier on the odd days that Rosa supplemented her government money with a little dealing. Rosa said she was an old friend, moving up in the world. She didn't seem to like her very much. "Rosa said you were a pilot." said Monica. "I can believe it." He shot Rosa an angry glance. She looked away guiltily. Her movements had an electric energy, her pupils were the size of pin points. "What's it matter to you?" he said. She stared at him. Their glances locked. "Do you really want to discuss it out here?" she asked. He looked into her cold, blue eyes and then shook his head. "Let's go downstairs." Discreetly, Rosa stayed on the roof. She was staring in fascination at the empty sky overhead. 3. The apartment was small but it had the basic amenities. The Tube clicked on as they entered, showing scenes from a Front National rally. The right wing alliance were getting a lot of media coverage. They were expected to hold the balance of power in Euro-Parliament after the elections. He hit the off switch on the console and the wall went blank. He pulled the duvet over the futon then began to empty the ashtrays. After years of barracks living, Rosa's untidiness made him uncomfortable.  Monica swept the room with her tag. She was checking for bugs. "My, aren't we the paranoid one?" he said. She continued to sweep as if she hadn't heard. With a quick jerk she yanked out the fibre-optic cable connecting the tube console to the wall. "Fibre-optics are virtually untappable," he said. "Can't be too careful." "Get to the point." "Right. You don't officially exist, yet you're living in state housing reserved for the Workfree." "So what? I live with Rosa. I've dropped out of the social security network. I'm not unusual. There must be thousands of invisible people in Marseilles." "But you're a pilot." His sockets were like Rosa's scars. They could not be hidden in the intimacy of the bedroom. She kept asking about them and one drunken night he had told her. He had never asked about the scars. "It's strange that a man who can fly lives in a Pension. You have a skill. You could have a well-paid job if you wanted." "Maybe I can't fly. Maybe I only told Rosa that to impress her." "No. You can fly. We checked." She told him his real name, his squadron, the name of the hospital where the motor and perceptual centres of his brain had been modified. While she spoke, he gazed past her. "What do you want?" he asked, still not meeting her eyes. "We want to give you a job. Pay you for what you were trained to do." He could see her striped back reflected in the wallscreen. She was offering him a chance to fly again in a proper aircraft. He had been remade by the military into a human component for a flying machine. He could only ever function fully in the air. "You were trained to fly helicopters." said Monica. "Anything I can be hooked into." 4. "You didn't get this in an army surplus store." he told Monica, running his hands along the cool carbon-fibre flank of the Mitsubishi Skyrider. She laughed and turned to look up at the green slopes of the Atlas mountains.  His respect for Monica's connections had increased greatly. In its day, the Skyrider had been very near state-of-the-art. Probably some Third World dictator had boosted his coffers by selling this one. "It's fucking beautiful." He felt exultation well up in him as he gazed at his idea of perfection: the sleek propfan jet with reinforced rotors for near supersonic flight, streamlined as a shark, ominous bulges of weapons pods under each wing and a turret on it's underbelly. "It's radar invisible. We have the latest electronic counter measures systems on board. It's fuelled and ready to go." He looked back at the white painted mansion. Men in Bedouin robes and heavy, insulated gauntlets were carrying crates out from the house. They held them at arms length. The metal boxes glistened with moisture, condensation from the cool of their cryogenic interiors. Men with sub-machine guns watched from the roof. "What are they?" he asked. "Spare parts." She studied him closely. "Do you have a problem with that?" He shivered a little.  "No," he said, at last. "No. They've got to come from somewhere." 5. Overhead, the fixed stars of the orbital factory halo gleamed in the night sky. He climbed into the cockpit. Monica clambered in beside him. He noticed the bulge of a holster under her cutaway jacket. She was wearing the baroque multi-layered skirts and jackets fashionable with the Nova Rich this season. She pulled on a mike and headset. "Ready?" He spooled out the fibre-optic cable, felt the click as he connected it's jack-plug with his spinal socket. He leaned back and closed his eyes, feeling awareness of the onboard systems sweep over him in a familiar rush. The Skyrider became his body, he became it's brain. The engine throb was his heartbeat, complex detection systems were his senses. After long abstinence, the sudden flow of information was almost too much, an ecstatic experience more intense than any drug. He could perceive a new and larger universe through senses better and faster than human. His body was no longer a weak, pulpy envelope of flesh but a sleek, hard thing, knowing neither weakness nor desire. In that moment, he felt like a god, ready to leap into the sky and hurtle through the vast African night. With an effort, he regained control, forced himself to monitor the incoming dataflow and begin the pre-flight checks. There came a thrill of recognition as he spotted what he had missed in the initial confusion of jacking in. "New systems." he said. "Very new. But you should be used to them." The hardware was highly classified, cutting edge military gear, the kind he'd been trained to use. He reached out with radar fingers to probe the distant mountains. He took a deep breath. The readouts for fuel, airflow and temperature were superimposed on his sight. They all looked correct. "You love this, don't you? she said. "Flying is better than anything." "You'll have to teach me sometime." He swivelled a microwave antenna, bringing it to bear on a comsat, unobtrusively patching himself into the air traffic control net. Reality melted into computer simulation, pumped directly into his brain through his modified nervous system. The land became a gunmetal grey sculpture in filled 3-D graphics. He became a small point on a vast grid. Overhead passed the blue pulses of incoming planes, the white images of outgoing aircraft from Marrakech airport. Somewhere over Gibraltar, the flashing red arc of an emergency descent hurtled towards an ice-blue sea. He added weather patterns and watched the dark lines of depressions sweep across the infinite plain of his awareness. I'm adding the co-ordinates of our destination. Over the intercom circuit, Monica's voice sounded as though it came from light years away. The white tower representing their destination rose in the distance. He asked the computer for the flight plan. Lines of light flashed out, weaving across the grid linking him to the distant tower. He merged into the systems until the Skyrider once more became an extension of his own body. He fed fuel to the engines, feeling power build within his body. He rose over the simulated landscape as the Skyrider rose into the air. He jacked into the weapons system and wheeled the belly turret through 360 degrees. Through its camera, he saw the mansion retreat and watched the fields scroll by below him. If anyone looked up, they would only see a dark shadow against the black and hear the whisper of muted engines. Carrying a cargo of stolen eyes, he arced towards the Mediterranean. 6. "It's immoral," said Rosa. her speech was slightly slurred, her pupils were contracted. She had become her own best customer for Haze, the latest designer drug. "How can you do it?" "It's money and a new ID." "Do you know how they get those parts?" she said. "No. And I don't care." "Harvesting, they call it. They find parents who are too poor to feed their children. they pay them for spare parts. An eye, a kidney. You know what the going rate was for a kidney, when I was a kid here in Marseilles?" His eyes wandered to the wallscreen. On it was an advertisement for Oui, a new perfume. An idealized Rosa strolled on a beach with a handsome man. It was tailored advertising, personalized for each tube subscriber from their data-files, a blend of computer generated graphics and real footage. Rosa failed to notice his lack of interest. "Three hundred Euromarks. They sell them to private clinics because there's always a shortage of voluntary donors. Police came down on it here, so now they import." "I didn't make the world," he said "I've got to live in it." "Sometimes they don't bother to bring the kids back, just break them for spare parts. Who's going to complain?" "What's that to you?" She ran her finger over the scar on her back. It was a deep trench in the sea of blue bodypaint. "I used to have a sister. She wasn't as lucky as I was. They let me go." She stared at him expectantly. He touched the tube console, began cycling through the channels. "You can't do this thing, you just can't." She was almost crying. behind her, images flickered: a soccer match, a soft drink, Charlie Chaplin. "Who says I can't?" "When they altered your brain to let you fly those copters, I think you lost something. Some part that lets you feel." She said it slowly, as if she were piecing together as she spoke, as if she were seeing him truly for the first time. "I don't think you're human any more" Her voice was chill and a little afraid. "That's not true," he said, moving towards her. "Keep away from me," she said, the edge of drug induced hysteria clear in her voice. "I don't want you near me." Fifteen minutes later he was carrying his bag through the foyer of the Pension. He was surprised to see Monica waiting for him. How had she known? The he remembered her sweeping the room for bugs during the first meeting. She had reconnected the tube cable afterwards. "Bitch," he said, as she moved to greet him. The tiger mask formed a smile. "Now who's the paranoid one," she said. "You've passed, by the way. You're into the big time.  Next trip you fly solo, carry real weight." 7. From the balcony of Monica's flat he could see the crowds on the promenade, a current of waxed paper umbrellas. Rosa had hated those parasols. She said skinpaint provided all the shielding needed from the ultraviolet rays flooding through the trashed ozone layer. She wasn't answering his calls. A filter program blocked out all his attempts to contact her. Restlessly, he prowled back into the living room. The angular Nova-Modernist furniture, grown from self replicating crystal, contrasted starkly with the uniform fixtures of the Pension. It was a badge of wealth, like the private Intelligence who monitored the building, or the uniformed guards at the doors. Monica lay on a cushioned couch that resembled a block of onyx, an inhaler on the table in front of her. She offered it to him. He shook his head. She took a hit and turned her attention back to the tube. He closed the glass doors to the balcony. The huge head of Juan Delgado, leader of the Spanish Socialist movement, filled the wall. He was talking about law and order; a linguistic Intelligence provided simultaneous translation. He referred to the growing drug problem among the Workfree on the south coast. He called for more action by the police. Monica seemed to find it all amusing. "What will I be carrying?" he asked her. "Haze. Several million tabs of it. We have the local concession. You'll bring it in from our Moroccan labs." "Who are we?" "Local business. Marseilles has always been good for smuggling." "Organized crime, as Delgado calls it." She laughed. "More like disorganized crime. This is the age of decentralization. There are lots of different gangs. Most of the time we're at war. Why do you think you're flying a gunship?" "You're worried about being ripped." "It's dog eat dog. The big ones eat the little ones. So-called friends will sell you out to the law just to be rid of the competition." Behind Delgado, computer graphics displayed the drug routes out of Marseilles to the Riviera and the north. That night he made the first of many trips. That summer, he became a regular visitor to Monica's. 8. Outside, the streets of Vieux-Port were hot. In Giraud's, everything was cool. Huge rotating fans swirled the air. People danced to Eurobeat synthesized by House Intelligence. Giant images of patrons were projected on wall and ceiling screens. Giraud's computers distorted the images, mixed them against hallucinatory backgrounds, fragmented them and edited the pieces into new patterns. The dancers watched hypnotized, locked in the high energy promise of Haze. On the floor a girl collapsed. Two bouncers went over to her. One had a bionic arm, long and skeletal, from which the carapace had been removed. He watched as the exposed motors and cables moved silkily, lifting the girl with ease. At a nearby table, a man muttered about a bad batch of Haze, said people were going down across the city. He looked across at Monica. She was back in skinpaint, local colour, camouflage. The paint contained some luminescent micro-organism which highlighted her bone structure, made her look skeletal. She sipped the drink. "It's been a long and profitable summer. You've done well. " she said. The House Intelligence picked the image of the girl as the most interesting thing on the dance floor. A splintered pattern of images showed beads of sweat glisten on her crimson face-paint. One wall displayed only her eyes with their shrunken pupils. He watched the twitching girl. She was back on her feet but starting to fall again. She couldn't seem to balance. Monica noticed his interest. "It sometimes happens. Haze affects the motor and speech sectors of the brain, produces a condition like Parkinson's disease. Long term exposure can do it, but a bad batch is the worst." "Our last batch was bad?" She shrugged., looking meaningfully at the girl on the dance floor then turned back to him. "This offends you?" she asked. He sensed the subtle challenge in her voice. He stared at her for a long time. He could not match the vacuum coldness of her gaze. Eventually, he shook his head. "Good boy," she said. She fell silent for a time. "You know, you and I are very alike," she said. "I'm beginning to see that." he said. On the floor, the girl continued to try and rise, limbs twitching uncoordinatedly, like a spider sprayed with insecticide. Her image filled the walls, sculpted in zoom and slo-mo. 9. That night, he returned to the Pension for the first time in months. Many of the people he used to know looked ill. He made his way to the flat he had shared with Rosa.  An Arab answered. He could hear the blare of the tube from within. "Where is Rosa?" he asked. "Who?" "Rosa. She used to live here. Small dark girl." The Arab turned and shouted something into the room, and the noise from the tube descended. He turned back and said, "She's gone." "Where?" He shrugged and closed the door. 10. "I must warn you," said the tired looking doctor, "she is one of the worst cases. Her motor functions are so impaired that we had to operate, wire her into her wheel chair." "It's OK, I'd like to see her." "Very well." They moved through over-warm corridors. They had the empty, understaffed look of most Federal hospitals. "Rosa," said the doctor, ushering him in. "We have a visitor for you." At first, he thought she was ignoring him, then he made out the tiny movements as she tried to turn her head. She was shockingly wasted and her hair had thinned. Fibre-optic cable ran from the chair to the top of her spine. Her face was lined. She looked like a woman of sixty. There was a whine of servo motors as the chair swivelled to face him. "Hello," she said, in a voice that was barely a whisper. He looked round the room. It was utterly neat. "Hello, Rosa. How are you doing?" "Gettin' betta." The words were slurred. Her hands were twitching slightly in her lap as if she were struggling to move them. He reached out and took one. She looked at him gratefully. It was disorientating to see the intelligence in those eyes, trapped in that shrivelled body. "Not fair," she whispered. "Not this. Wanted fun. Not this." "Christ, Rosa," he said. "I'm sorry." The silence in the room was like an accusation. He began to talk simply to fill it. He told her that she would soon be better and then they could get out of Marseilles, now that he had money. He could tell by her eyes that she didn't believe him. The quiet seemed to swallow his words, reduce them to meaningless babble. "I have to go," he said, finally. "Come back?" she asked with a hint of desperation. "No visitors." "Yes," he lied. "I'll be back." At the door, he turned for a last look. Her right hand was twitching. He thought she was trying to wave. 11. He lay in bed and watched the desert sky. The stars gleamed frostily overhead; the air was cold. He could see dunes rolling away into the distance. The illusion was spoiled by Monica's entrance. Light from the open door flooded into the room. She seemed to step out of a dune. Behind her he could see the hall. Warm air hit him. She was naked. Without paint, her flesh gleamed whitely. She strolled across and climbed into the bed. Her skin was still warm from the hot-air dryer in the shower. "This is the last job," she said. "We're moving out of Haze. Since the Parkinson's scare, it's not selling." Political pressure over the casualties was making the police hungry for arrests. Monica probably wanted the money from this last consignment to make a run for it. "What about me?" She smiled, revealing small sharp teeth. She reached over to the side of the bed to touch the console. The walls returned to normal, the ceiling went dark. He felt the warm weight of her body press down as she moved to straddle him. "Don't worry," she said "You'll be taken care of." 12. They were waiting for him at the rendezvous point. In the clearing were two men and a Hyundai 4x4. They stood outside the circle of bio-luminescent tubing that marked the landing site. He hovered overhead, surveying the scene through the starlight scope of the turret camera, looking for Monica. He could see no sign of her. Everything appeared normal, but somehow the pattern was wrong. One of the men beckoned for him to come down. He trained the guns of the belly turret on them. He monitored the radio bands closely. "He suspects something," he heard someone say. "Take him." There was a crackle of static and then a message came at him over the radio. "This is the police! We have you covered with ground-to-air missiles. Land now or we open fire!" He tensed. He had been set up. With several hundred kilos of Haze in the back, they would have enough evidence to mindwipe him. Information from the combat systems of the Skyrider pulsed through his mind. He hovered over the grey plain, suspended under the falling stars of civil airflights. He had already pinpointed the source of the radio call. In the distance, he could make out three insect-like shapes moving towards him. They skimmed over the radar map of the local terrain. He fed the engine fuel and lifted off, drifted sideways into an evasive pattern and released a mix of chaff and incendiary flares from the tailgate of the Skyrider. He aimed the cannon of the belly turret at the source of the radio call and sent heavy slugs ripping through the trees towards it. Bright diamonds of Nightowl missiles rose towards him from below. They flew into the glowing particles of chaff. One detonated, another arced away pursuing the red glow of the flares. He arched himself back into the sky, ignited the afterburners. He watched the fuel readouts sink as he pulled into a high G turn. More missile-diamonds leapt at him. He released more chaff, set his ECM systems for maximum coverage. The warning dots were resolving into three Firedrake gunships. The police must have known about the armament of the Skyrider. They were taking no chances. "Surrender now!" came the command from a nearby gunship. He sensed the command programs from the radio link attempt to over-ride his controls. Protective software countered that. He rocketed towards them. The perfect, crystal calm of being integrated in the ship's systems swept over him. Hi swift mental impulse released two missiles at the leading enemy chopper. He felt the Skyrider shudder as they were unleashed. The target peeled off upwards, blanketing the area with chaff and flares and broadband static. One Firedrake swept by below him, while the other veered above and to the right. He altered the pitch of the blades and swung leftward and downward on his rotor axis. He willed a stream of bullets towards his victim. Tracer crackled through the night. The pilot realised what was happening and tried to turn. His flightpath intersected with the cannon shells. For a second, the armoured hull of the craft reflected the heavy slugs, until they sought out the weak joint where rotor protruded from cowling. Sparks flew, then the Firedrake yawed wildly and began wobbling earthwards. He became aware of the impact of shells on his own body and moved to avoid the irritation, pulling the nose up until he was flying backwards towards a long valley yawning darkly on his display. Diamonds erupted from a pursuer. He swung the helicopter and sprayed chaff. A warning bleep reminded him that his supply was running low. He power-dived into the radar shadow of the valley. The Firedrake blips vanished, replaced by ghost  images of their projected flight paths. He swept over the corrugated grey of the valley. He was below line of sight and radar, flying using nape-of-the-Earth tactics. He tried to calculate where they would do an overfly, fed the details into the computer. It was most likely that one would enter from each end of the valley. He moved towards the left and hovered there just above the trees. He heard someone break the radio silence to request back-up. This gave away their position, but lent knew urgency to his situation. He was wired faster than the police pilots, but could not cope with the reinforcements they could command. For a long tense moment he waited, then the monstrous insect image of the Firedrake moved over the edge of the valley. He let fly with his last two rockets. The distance was too short for evasive action or chaff release. The chopper disintegrated in a ball of flame. Too late, he became aware of the other enemy moving across the edge of the valley. It had not come from the far end, but raced in at an angle from where the other one had been. Slugs hammered into the body of the Skyrider. He felt searing pain as systems crashed. The grey graphics blurred and faded, the data-flow through the system diminished from a flood to a trickle. A shell had smashed through the scanners. He writhed to avoid a hail of bullets, not caring how dangerous a maneuver this was so close to the ground. Without the data provided by the Skyrider's external sensors, he was like a blind man. He cut in the backup systems and dropped back into his human body. He was momentarily disorientated by the blazing night sky seen through his visor. Twin lines of tracer fire arced towards him. He knew that the Skyrider's armour was being chipped away. He brought his own guns to bear, willing them to fire. There was no response. The fire control systems were down. He was going to die, but he intended to take the other craft with him. He opened up the engines and raced forward into the tracer. He watched his enemy loom larger in the darkness as he rocketed towards it. This was the way he wanted to die, hurtling like a meteor through the sky. The Firedrake began to veer off, ducking sideways and down out of reach. Howling with frustrated rage, he turned around ready for another mad race towards collision. Then he noticed the inferno below. The Firedrake had been too close to the ground. It had hit a tree and gone tumbling down the side of the valley. He could see its blazing carapace. He turned the helicopter towards Marseilles, struggling to control a craft now barely airworthy. Nursing the crippled Skyrider home was a constant battle, the integration between human mind and airframe no longer complete. Parts of his extended awareness winked out as the systems went down. Soon he was reduced to flying on manual, by sight. Losing control of the helicopter was worse than losing control of his own body, it was a descent from Godhood. Monica would have to pay for this betrayal, even if he had to crash the Skyrider into her apartment block. 13. He could see the distant glow of light from Monica's apartment window. He made final adjustments to the Wing harness, pulling the straps tight, testing the hand controls for responsiveness. He launched himself from the roof of the Pension, catching the updraft it created. He flew in low under the arc of the rooftop security cameras. His reflection loomed raptor-like in the darkened windows. He was buffeted by the turbulent air close to the building. He fought to keep control, balancing finely on currents that threatened to send him tumbling into the street, thirty storeys below. He brought the Wing to a stall directly over Monica's balcony. He fell, watching his visor readouts race into the red zones. The balcony grew rapidly in his field of vision. Waiting till the last possible moment, he snapped open the wings to break his descent. Impact jarred through his legs and he began to fall away from the balcony. Frantically, he fought to regain his balance, clutching at the railing with his gloved hands. Heart pounding, he righted himself, removed the Wing and slipped over to the window. He peered inside. The walls were covered in soothing kaleidoscopic patterns of light. Monica lay slumped on the couch, On the table near her sat a drug inhaler. He tried the handle of the sliding glass door. It was unlocked. With a savage motion, he jerked it open and leapt into the room. "What?" she said, staring at him uncomprehendingly. He caught her body by the hair and raised her to her feet, grabbed her arm and forced it up behind her back. He began to push her towards the window. She struggled weakly. "What are you doing? Let me go!" He levered her arm further up her back until she moaned. On the balcony, he twisted her head around. She looked up at him. One side of her face was still illuminated by the lights from within. "You shouldn't have set me up," he said. "Did they give you immunity for turning me and the others in?" She shook her head. "I don't know what you're talking about." He jerked her arm viciously. "Don't lie." She took a deep breath, seemed to relax. Her eyes were bright and cold. "It was business. Nothing personal." He laughed. "It was very personal for me." "What do you want? Money? Negotiables? I could make you wealthy." She fixed him with a hard stare. He thought about his loss as the Skyrider crashed. He held her gaze then slowly shook his head. "What are you going to do?" "Teach you to fly," he said. He lifted her up. She screamed and kicked wildly as he threw her over the balcony. He watched her tumble down into the lighted street. He stood there until a crowd gathered and he could hear the distant wail of sirens. He strapped himself back into the Wing and flung himself out into the sky. As he drifted upwards, he watched the tiny people below, his eyes as wild and predatory as a hawk's.   [ Top ]     [ Fiction ]

This story first appeared in Zenith Anthology published June 1989.