Sefu looked sceptical. ‘For real?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Saul replied, doing his best to maintain eye contact while the sub-orbital bucked and shuddered with profound violence.
‘Just in case we have to evacuate.’ Sefu barely suppressed a grin. ‘I mean, we’re a long way up and, with all those storms scattered around, we could get ripped to shreds before we reach the ground. It happens.’
‘Shit, yes,’ said the man next to Sefu. Saul registered that his name was Charlie Foster. ‘Did you ever see the UP footage from that guy who fell out of a sub-orbital? The one that came apart just fifteen minutes after take-off?’
‘I did,’ Sefu replied, turning to Foster with a snap of his fingers. ‘His ’chute failed, right? And his contacts kept recording, the whole way down.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Saul.
Foster nodded enthusiastically, gazing at Saul with an innocent expression. ‘No lie. Bastard screamed like a banshee right up until the end.’
Sefu noisily sucked air through his teeth.
‘Hit the ground so hard his skull wound up lodged in his ass,’ Foster added, shaking his head sadly.
Saul considered a variety of responses, most of them anatomically impossible.
The sub-orbital hit a fresh patch of turbulence, lurching like a truck dropping one of its wheels into a deep pothole. Saul drew in a sharp breath and wished he had something to cling on to, as the turbojets grumbled and whined in preparation for the last stage of their descent.
‘And there’s a reason you’re sharing this with me?’ Saul managed to say.
‘Well,’ Sefu replied, ‘I got the impression you weren’t enjoying the flight, for some reason.’
‘Me, I love turbulence,’ said Foster, his eyes wide and happy. ‘It’s like being rocked to sleep by Mother Nature.’
Text, rendered in silver, floated on the lower right of Saul’s vision, telling him that the sub-orbital was now only seven kilometres above the ground, having already dropped nearly fifteen kilometres in the last few minutes. The external temperature was minus seventy, and the air still thin enough to qualify as vacuum.
‘Now Mitchell,’ Sefu continued, twisting around in his restraints to catch the attention of the rest of Hanover’s task force, ‘that son of a bitch was in fucking love with jumping out of things.’
‘Fuck yeah,’ confirmed a woman further down the two rows of seats facing each other on either side the craft’s interior. Her tag read Helena Bryant. ‘I trained with him this one time, when we had to jump from about twelve kilometres up. He got to within maybe a half-klick of the ground before he even started to pull back up. Scared the shit out of me then, but the man was fucking fearless.’
‘Wing-suit, right?’ Saul guessed.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’
‘Sure,’ Saul replied, assuming an air of false bravado. ‘I even went on a jump with him once, years ago. He’d been daring me for months.’
‘You knew him?’ interrupted another voice over to his right.
‘We worked together way back when,’ Saul replied. ‘Somehow he . . . talked me into it.’
‘Why’d he have to talk you into it?’ asked Sefu. He was still grinning, but there was a shade more respect in his tone. ‘Because you were too chickenshit?’
‘Too sane, I think,’ Saul replied. ‘The dive was made from low orbit.’
That shut them up.
‘Real orbit, or sub-orbital?’ asked Helena.
Saul grinned. ‘Sub-orbital. I’m not that crazy.’
‘That’s pretty dangerous shit nonetheless,’ someone else said.
‘Sure.’ Saul made a point of shrugging, as if to say no big deal. ‘Maybe one in a thousand orbital divers wind up dead, but Mitch and me did it together, from more than twenty kilometres up. We used foam and Kevlar heat shields for the first five kilometres down, then wing-suits the rest of the way.’
Saul recalled the wide wings embellishing the one-piece flying suit. Rigid stabilizers built into each suit kept them from going into a deadly spin as they dropped down through the thickening atmosphere. At the time, he’d thought the experience might cure him of what had then been nothing more than a mild fear of flying, but instead it had made it much, much worse. He’d never even have agreed to it if Mitchell hadn’t been having such a hard time back then, coping with the death of his brother Danny.
Sefu waved a hand in mock dismissal, and several of the task force laughed. Saul felt himself grinning back.
‘So why the fuck do you look like you’re about to crap yourself?’ prodded Sefu.
‘When you jump, you’re in control,’ Saul explained. ‘Being on a plane isn’t the same, though, since your life’s in someone else’s hands. And anyway, it’s been a long while since I rode in a sub-orbital.’
‘Told you,’ said Sefu, looking around at the rest of them. ‘Chickenshit.’ They all laughed, but when Sefu gave him a grin, Saul could see it was much more friendly than before.
Confirmation of Saul’s temporary transfer had come through a few days after his interrogation by Donohue and Sanders.
Almost a week after his meeting with Donohue and Sanders, he’d made his way back through the Copernicus–Florida gate, reacquainting himself with the tug of full gravity and working at rebuilding his muscle strength in a government gym close by his apartment in Orlando. He scored himself some Bad Puppy – a milder derivative of loup-garou – and used it to steady his nerves and kill some of the pain still seeping through despite the medication he’d been given for his injuries. After that, he had hitched a ride aboard a military cargo hopper to an ASI facility near Berlin, where he’d then undergone a brief interview with Hanover in his office.
‘I realize that you knew Mitchell,’ Hanover had said, an operations room clearly visible through a glass pane behind him. ‘It’s too bad what happened to him. You should remember, however, that there’s a reason this is just a temporary assignment for you. Men like Stone are not easily replaced.’
‘I appreciate how that would be the case, sir,’ Saul had replied. ‘Can I ask just what happened to him? All I was told was that he’d been under some kind of secondment when he—’
Saul nodded perfunctorily. There was something distinctly glacial about Hanover’s manner.
‘Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,’ Hanover continued, ‘but you weren’t actually the first name I had in mind. In fact, why my original request was turned down remains something of a mystery to me.’
‘I can only do my best, sir.’
‘It’s more complicated than that. The members of this task force have a level of clearance that you don’t. They’re often engaged in highly classified work which you don’t need to know the details of.’
Saul guessed Hanover was digging for something. ‘It wasn’t my idea, sir. I was reassigned, and that’s all I can tell you.’
Hanover regarded him in silence for a moment before standing up and pulling open the door leading to the outer office. ‘You should know it’s my intention to file a complaint with your superiors. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because I’m concerned at the lack of explanation.’
‘Sir,’ Saul replied, standing too.
‘You’ll report for a final briefing at 0800 tomorrow morning,’ said Hanover. ‘I believe you’ve already been briefed on the essential details of our mission. We’re to recover ASI cargo hijacked from Florida.’
‘I was briefed, sir. Thank you.’