I'd ridden in Merlins and their ilk before, of course; who hasn't? So I wasn't expecting any problems with motion sickness. Of course, what I was familiar with was the civilian configuration of the tilt-wing bird, with comfortable, forward-facing seats and lots of windows. The military configuration? It sported the most uncomfortable seats I've ever gone a long way to avoid, and no windows whatsoever.
No windows. Ever think about what that means? A tilt-wing VTOL like a Federated-Boeing Commuter or a Merlin takes off and climbs like a helicopter… which means that it generally takes a serious nose-down pitch when it's climbing out. So how does the old sensorium interpret mat? The floor's horizontal, chummer-that's what the eyes and the brain say, because floors are always horizontal. But the inner ear says the floor's at least 20 degrees off horizontal. It's that mismatch between what your brain knows and what your inner ear's saying that causes serious motion sickness. Typically the cure is to look out the window and get a reality check from the horizon…
No windows in a military transport, chummer. I was starting to feel real green around the gills when Alana Kono came to my rescue. At first I thought she was just massaging the base of my skull behind my ear, but then she removed her finger and I realized she'd slapped one of those neoscopolamine narco-patches onto my scalp over a major artery. I turned to thank her… and the neoscope in the patch had already kicked in enough to turn my grateful smile into a bedroom leer. The female gillette had the courtesy to blush and turn away.
I was really glad for the narco-patch as the Merlin pivoted its wings to shift from VTOL to forward flight. The turbulence was bad enough; even worse, though, was the knowledge that tilt-wings like Merlins are very vulnerable to engine cutout during the pivot process. If the engines stall out men, there's nothing to save you. Not gliding-there's no lift from the wing in the transition aspect-and not autorotation-ditto for the rotors/airscrews. Apparently, though, my narco-patch was dosed up with so much don't-worry juice that I could observe the tilt-transition as "just one of those things."
Suddenly I realized something and turned to Alana Kono. "You know," I said somewhat sheepishly, "I don't have a fragging clue where Haleakala is."
That earned me a sneer from Pohaku-no fragging surprise there-and another grin from Kono. From inside her armored jacket she pulled out a palmtop, flipped open the screen, and worked for a moment with the stylus. Then she handed it over to me. "Here," she said, pointing to the map.
Okay, there was the Hawai'ian island chain, traced out in plasma-red on the flatscreen. Not that it helped me much. "And Honolulu is…?" I mumbled.
"Here." She touched the map, and one of the islands-the second major island from the northwest end of the chain- burned brighter. "That's Oahu. And this"-another touch with the stylus, and an island that looked something like an asymmetrical dumbbell glowed in double intensity-"is Maui, see? Haleakala's here." She stabbed at me center of the larger, lower "lobe" of the island.
"And that's… about how far?"
She shrugged. 'Two hundred klicks, maybe?" She nudged me gently with an elbow. "Not long."
I nodded glumly. Neoscope or not, my guts would be glad to get out of this bird, but my mind would have been a lot happier to know what was waiting for us when we got there.
Through the thin skin of the fuselage, I could hear the Merlin's twin engines straining. We still seemed to be climbing-at least, my inner ears were convinced we still had a slight nose-up pitch-but the engines didn't seem to like it in the slightest. Why? I wondered grimly. Headwinds? There'd been clouds building up to the southeast when I'd last looked out the window at New Foster Tower, hadn't there? And according to Kono's map, that was the direction we were heading. Into the teeth of a storm? I closed my eyes and tried to hear if there was rain hitting the airframe, but the tortured howling of the engines made it impossible.
Just fragging great, I thought. Couldn't King Kam have gotten us a bird with two good engines? Then I remembered something I'd scanned on the flight over to the islands, oh so long ago now. Haleakala was a big fragger of a mountain, wasn't it? Three thousand meters or something like that. No wonder the Merlin didn't sound too happy. It was intended for low-altitude short hops, or so somebody had told me once. It must be a cast-iron bitch for the little bird to claw its way up to this kind of altitude. No wonder the engines sounded like souls in torment. I sat back and sighed. I wasn't really sure whether that made me feel any better or not.
I tried to disconnect my brain, then, to give it something else to think about, anything, so it couldn't worry about the engines and the storm. Haleakala, I thought. "House of the Sun." I remembered that's what the name meant from my database scan during the flight to Hawai'i. Hale-"house." A-"of." Ka-"the." La-"sun." Simple, neh?
Interesting, too. It had stuck in my mind, like so many little bits of irrelevant trivia, because it had prompted a question when I'd first noted it. The Hawai'ian word for sun was La. And wasn't the ancient Egyptian word for sun Ral La-Ra. Pretty fragging similar, particularly if you included the possibility of "phonetic drift." Was it just coincidence?
After all, there weren't that many fragging single-syllable words that the human throat could pronounce, were there? Or was there more to it than that?
I wondered suddenly if Chantal Monot could answer that one. Chantal, with her whacked-out ideas about Lemuria and sunken continents, and her Andrew Annen-something paintings. (Now that I thought about it, didn't some of them have pyramids in them? Pyramids on the floor of a tropical ocean…)
With a snort I shook my head and forced away all those flaky imaginings. Sometimes letting your mind wander is worse than obsessing about what's scaring the drek out of you.
We'd been underway for nearly an hour when the turbulence began in earnest, and I started to appreciate anew the limitations of neoscopolamine. The Merlin started surging up and down in hundred-meter bounds like some kind of chipped-up roller coaster, and if I'd thought the engines had been straining before, I hadn't heard anything yet. Over the mechanical screaming, now I could hear the rattle of the rain against the airframe, driven by mighty gusts of wind. (Or frag, maybe it was hail. Whatever, it sounded like rock salt shot from a Roomsweeper.)
The troopers in their military gear weren't enjoying themselves. They wouldn't admit it to a civilian haole puke like me, of course-frag, they probably wouldn't admit it to each other-but I could see the way the muscles of their jaws were standing out. They were biting back on complaints, or maybe doing the iron-jaw trip to stop themselves from spewing their midnight snacks. Even Pohaku was starting to look a mite queasy. My own discomfort was almost a reasonable price to pay to see proof that he was actually as human as the rest of us. Beside me, Alana Kono was looking decidedly pale. In my peripheral vision, I saw her pull out another neoscope patch and slap it onto her own neck. I shot her what I intended to be a reassuring grin, but judging by the look in her eyes, I didn't quite make it.
And that's when the bottom dropped out. For a second or two we seemed to be in free fall. Kono yelped, and one of the troopers grunted in alarm. The only reason I didn't yell out loud was that I was too busy biting my tongue hard enough to taste salty blood. The engines wailed like banshees as the Merlin's dive bottomed out. We jolted hard a couple of times, almost as though we were taking fire from somewhere ahead of us.
Frag it, I couldn't just sit there. I reached down to unbuckle my four-point. Kono grabbed my hand and shook her head-apparently she didn't trust herself to speak-but I gently pushed her hand away and gave another try at the reassuring grin. This time I apparently did a better job, because she nodded and closed her eyes again.