Finally, the boarding call came-delivered in person by a shapely, and decidedly mammalian, flight attendant-and we started to make our way through the priority boarding tube. This was a transpex cylinder-scrubbed so clean you could see the walls only by the way they diffracted lights outside-which extended from the terminal building to the first-class passenger door of the suborbital. Twenty meters away was another, similar tube-which suddenly reminded me of those "HabiTrail" things kids use to incarcerate gerbils-used by the declasse from the economy-class holding pen.
I took a couple of steps into the HabiTrail, and then stopped dead, earning a bad look from the shaikujin-still jacked into his portacomp-who tripped on my heel and collided into my back. I couldn't help it; I'd never had a chance to look at a suborbital from this close up before, and I certainly wasn't going to pass it up so he could get to his complimentary pretakeoff gin and tonic a couple of seconds sooner.
The thing was huge, much larger than I'd expected. Hell, suborbitals only carry about 150 people. How much space do you need for that? But of course, there's a lot more to a suborbital than the passenger compartment. There's all the stuff that goes into any standard civilian transport: turbojets, fuel, landing gear, navigation drek, baggage bays, and that place up front where the crew and the flight attendants have their parties. And then there's the extra stuff needed when you're flying at altitudes of 23 klicks (75,000 feet, for the metrically challenged) and speeds of Mach 20+. SCRAMjets to get you to cruising altitude and speed. Fuel for those SCRAMjets… and lots of it (SCRAMjets aren't known for their fuel economy). Cooling systems to keep your hull from melting under the air friction. And on and on. All in all, the suborbital was longer than a football field, a big integral lifting-body with tiny stub wings bolted on apparently as an afterthought. The body lines followed some complex-and very beautiful-multiple-recurve pattern, making the thing broad and high at the nose, but narrower and thinner toward the taiclass="underline" something like an asymmetrical teardrop, maybe.
Finally, the pressure of shaikujin behind me got too much to ignore any longer, and I had to move along. Once I was inside, I could just as well have been in any plane-row upon row of seats in a three aisle three arrangement-except for one detaiclass="underline" no windows. The entertainment suite mounted in the seatback ahead of me made up for that lack, I decided quickly once I'd found my spot. As well as the usual selection of mindless movies, and even more mindless "classic tri-V" reruns, several of the program selections offered views from various microcams mounted on the hull. While the cabin attendants handed out free drinks and flavorless snacks-to the first-class passengers only, not to the great unwashed flying cattle-class, which started one row behind my own seat-I thoroughly enjoyed watching the baggage handlers conduct torture tests on people's suitcases as they threw them aboard.
Then we got the standard safety lecture-what to do in an emergency, like if the galley runs out of Bloody Mary mix- then we were rolling, and then we were climbing out. On my seatback screen I saw the ground drop away behind us, becoming a detailed scale model, then a contour map. Speed and angle of climb seemed-in my limited experience, at least-pretty extreme. But then the SCRAMjets kicked in- the pilot actually warned us before he lit them off-and I got a taste of what "fast" and "steep" really mean. Some ridiculously short time later, a voice came over the intercom, telling us we were at cruising altitude-23,000 meters, give or take-and flying at a mind-buggering 29,000 klicks per hour.
"We're on course and on schedule," the friendly voice announced, "and we should have you on the ground at Awalani a couple of minutes shy of four-fifty A.M. local rime. Have a good flight." I checked my watch, which I'd already adjusted for Hawai'i time: a couple of minutes past four in the morning. That put total flight time at something under one hour, gate to gate, Casper to Honolulu. Ain't progress wonderful?
With some regret, I wiped the external view-a distant horizon, showing some definite curvature-from the seatback screen, and tried to concentrate on biz. I'd never been to the Kingdom of Hawai'i before and knew next to squat about it (apart from what I'd seen on trid pabulum actioners like Tropical Heat). Sure, some of the runner wannabes who hang out in low-life bars copping a 'tude will tell you that the shadows are all the same, no matter where in the world you are. But I've never bought into that. Hell, from my own experience, not extensive, I know it's not true.
The shadows of Cheyenne are very different from the grungy underbelly of the Seattle sprawl. Maybe not if you take a big enough, abstract enough view, I suppose. If you think in terms of dynamics, there's much that's similar. The sex trade, the chip/drug industry. Organized crime and iconoclastic freelancers. Gangs of various stripes and flavors. Grifters and abusers, stalking the grifted and abused.
But when you get down to the personal scale-where it matters from a practical, rather than academic, point of view-There's a world of difference. In terms of dynamics, the threats are the same: the cops, the corps, the competition. In personal terms they wear different and unfamiliar faces. In the shadows sometimes the only way to win the game-whatever it happens to be at the moment-is to cheat. That's much harder when you don't know all the rules, and when to bend or break them.
Leaving Seattle for Cheyenne, I left familiar territory behind. I left behind my support network and many of my resources. I left behind my personal knowledge of the way the underbelly of the city worked-where to go to buy a piece of cold iron, what alleys not to flop in at night, what bartenders will swear up and down that they haven't seen you for weeks while you hide behind the beer fridge. Now I was doing it again, and it made me very uncomfortable.
I folded out the membrane keypad from the seatback entertainment unit and started checking out the system's data retrieval function. Not bad for a mobile unit. Somewhere deep in the plane's electronic guts an optical chip contained the latest editions of the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia, plus the World Almanac and Book of Facts, plus some fairly funky search algorithms. All for the convenience of Global Airways' cherished passengers (and to keep them occupied so they wouldn't drink too much and hit on the stewardesses). As the suborbital hurtled on, five times as fast as a rifle bullet, I started working out some search strings.
We were well along on the glidepath by the time I'd done what I could, and the stewardess had already warned me three times to return my seat to its upright and most uncomfortable position. I had a lot to think over as I folded up the seatback system's keyboard, and tried to keep my stomach out of my mouth as the suborbital pitched over even steeper for final approach.
The on-board data retrieval system had given me some' background, but I'd soon come to the conclusion that the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia seemed to be targeted at elementary-school kids who were considerably less streetwise than I'd been at that age. Sure, it was a great source for data on the kingdom's population (four million and change), its capital (Honolulu, natch), its average per-capita income (20,000?), and the other superficial drek a kid would want to plagiarize for an essay. But for the real meat, I soon realized I'd have to access sources with a slightly more mature worldview.
Fortunately, the seatback system offered a gateway to the plane's communication systems, and from mere an uplink to the Amethyste system of low-Earth orbit comm satellites. Through the Amethyste grid, I could sidelink to Renraku's DataPATH system, and then downlink to the public databases with which I'd been familiar in Seattle. Hell, returning to my old electronic stomping grounds was easier from 23,000 meters over the Pacific-once I'd figured out the gateway protocol-than it was to navigate the Sioux RTG system to get to the same nodes. (Of course, it was also a hell of a lot more expensive. When I finally logged off and the system reported my connect charges, I went pale for a moment, then thanked the fine folks at Yamatetsu-in absentia-for picking up the tab.) The only thing I'd wanted that the system couldn't give me was access to a Shadow-land server. (Well, I suppose it probably could have, but the audit trail stored in the guts of the big suborbital would have been like garish flags reading "Shadowrunner On Board.")