What Ted didn’t have, however, was speed and agility like hers, on the ground or in the air. She just hoped he could hold the dive all the way to the surface. If he hit turbulence and spun out of control, there wasn’t much they could do unless they caught up to him fast.
Lightning raked the clouds in the distance, and her HUD flickered from the disturbance. She checked the digital map and reached down to her wrist computer to switch from Team Wolf to Team Angel.
Four other beacons blinked, representing the heartbeats of the three team leads above her, and Ted, a thousand feet below.
They crossed the twenty-two-thousand-feet mark—a third of the dive already behind them. Magnolia was almost to terminal velocity, her arms tucked back against her sides, body straight as a Cazador spear.
Thunder cracked like a rifle shot in her ear, distracting her for a moment. Her eyes flitted to a dazzling display of lightning to the east. Here on the edge of the storm, the new boots could get a sense of what a real dive was like, without getting zapped. But Les had maneuvered them close enough to test their nerve.
Another skein of flashes lit up the sky. Magnolia searched the black anvil below, hunting for the glowing blue dot of Ted’s battery pack.
“I don’t got eyes,” she reported.
Michael came up alongside her in a nosedive. Alexander and Edgar spread out, flanking them. Static broke over the comms, then a scream.
Magnolia felt the first jolt of turbulence tugging her sideways. Biting down on her mouth guard, she pulled the falling dart that was her body into a horizontal position.
She finally saw the erratic blue strobe of a battery unit—Ted, cartwheeling through the sky. Catching up to him would require serious skills and extreme caution.
She had to maneuver carefully, or the turbulence would throw her off course too, and send her crashing like a fish on a cresting wave.
“I’ve lost it!” Alexander shouted over the comms.
Magnolia could see in her mind’s eye what was happening. The turbulence had knocked him out of his dive. Edgar was next, tumbling out of control, but Magnolia managed to keep her orientation through the shear.
Michael shot past on her right, his armor glowing red from his battery unit.
A hundred feet out, another red light caught her attention. Cricket was tracking the tumbling bodies, but there was nothing the two-armed robot could do now. Maybe if Michael had been able to replace the other two missing arms… Without them, the bot could only monitor, not assist.
The blue light of Ted’s unit vanished as the cloud cover thickened and, with it, the turbulence. Magnolia tried to maintain her core tension but finally succumbed to the forces lashing and tugging on her body.
She held in a scream as she pitchpoled sideways, end over end.
The lightning seemed to come from all directions.
Perhaps it was a good thing, Ted doing what he did. If the other greenhorns had hit this pocket, it could have resulted in crashes and potential deaths.
She fought her way back into stable position, belly down with knees and elbows bent at ninety degrees. Her suit rippled violently in the wind.
“Ted!” she shouted into the comms. “Ted, where are you?”
The blip representing Ted on her HUD was blinking sporadically, which told her he was still spinning. Worse, he was over two thousand feet wide of the DZ. No way in hell would he make it to within a quarter mile of the target ship.
Ted was going to land in the black ocean, and even if he managed to get his chute open, he could easily drown, entangled in the shroud lines, or be easy pickings for all sorts of voracious sea creatures, while waiting for a boat to pick him up.
She resisted the urge just to give up on the rescue and let fate take its course. And the Magnolia of twenty years ago might have done that—maybe even the Magnolia of ten years ago.
But diving was in her blood now, and despite Ted’s flagrant insubordination, she couldn’t just let him die if there was a chance of saving him.
Straightening her legs and pulling her hands in to her thighs, she became an arrow again, angled to meet his runaway trajectory. Another glance at her HUD told her she didn’t have much time.
“Ted, listen to me!” she shouted. “Put your arms and legs out and arch your back, just like we taught you!”
The muffled reply was indecipherable.
She checked her HUD again. Six thousand feet to the surface, but she had closed the gap between herself and Ted. The glow of Michael’s battery unit confirmed that he, too, was gaining on the out-of-control greenhorn.
“Alexander and Edgar, continue to the DZ,” Michael ordered.
“Copy,” Alexander said.
After a slight delay, Edgar acknowledged.
“Mags, stay back,” Michael said. “I’ve got this.”
“But…”
“That’s an order.”
“Roger that,” she replied through gritted teeth.
A moment later, she got a visual on Ted’s battery unit. He was tumbling and not responding to Michael’s hails.
Holy wastes, is he unconscious?
Another wind shear sent both her and Michael spinning out of control.
At three thousand feet, it occurred to her that the rookie diver may have doomed them all.
“Mags, pull your chute as soon as you’re in stable position,” Michael ordered.
“You pull yours!”
She could see that they would never get to Ted in time now. The best they could do was to save themselves by deploying their chutes as soon as they could.
Michael was the first to recover, and Magnolia managed to get steady a few seconds later. At two thousand feet, they broke through the cloud cover and had their first view of rough seas.
Lights blinked on the surface where the ship and motorboats waited. One of them seemed to be moving toward their location.
“Pull your chute now!” Michael yelled.
She pulled the pilot chute from the pocket along her right thigh, held it out, and let it go. It caught air and dragged out the main chute, yanking her out of free fall.
Michael went next, and as their parachutes seemed to pull them skyward, they could only look on as Ted tumbled toward the endless expanse of whitecaps below.
“TED!” Michael shouted.
It was no use. The diver was out, insensible to his impending doom.
At just over a thousand feet, Magnolia closed her eyes, unable to watch him slam into the ocean.
“What the…!” Michael gasped.
Her eyelids popped open to see a green light shooting diagonally through the dark skies. She nearly spat out her mouth guard when she realized it was X.
He had somehow managed to suit up and catch up to them. But how was that possible unless he had somehow held the nosedive through the turbulence?
Cricket swooped down to document the miracle.
Moments later, X pulled his legs in and extended his arms, slowing his approach speed toward the unconscious diver. At eight hundred feet, he wrapped his body around Ted, clipped his carabiner to Ted’s harness, and pulled his own pilot chute.
Magnolia let out the breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
“Got ’im,” X said over the comms.
She looked over at Michael, who was steering his canopy toward the ship below. X was trying to do the same thing, with his left hand on the steering toggle, and the other arm wrapped around Ted.
The ship’s deck rose up to meet Magnolia’s boots. She performed a two-stage flare over the rusted old Cazador ship. Right before touching down, she glimpsed X and Ted in the distance.
They splashed into the water as she stepped out of the sky and onto the deck.
She spilled the air from her chute, released it, and handed the wad of bright-yellow nylon to a crewman. Then she hurried over to the edge of the boat, where someone had already tossed a buoy into the water.