I clambered to my feet, grabbing at whatever came to hand to keep from pitching onto my hoop-the back of my chair, the helmet of a green-gilled trooper… I managed to keep my feet somehow, and-getting a good two-handed grip on an overhead rack-I dragged myself forward. A light sliding door was all that separated the troop compartment from the flight deck, so I slid it back.
The flight deck was in total darkness. (I guess I should have expected it, but it still jolted me. Didn't you need some kind of instruments to do that pilot drek?) For an instant I couldn't make out squat, then my eyes adapted and I could see two silhouettes-deeper black against the black outside the cockpit-in front of me. "What the frag's going on?" I demanded.
The silhouette in the right-hand seat turned its head, and I saw two faint pinpoints of red light where there should be eyes.
Okay, that freaked me for a moment, too, before I realized the points of light were the copilot's cybereyes. Stray light from his active IR system, or some such technodrek. "Hele pela!" the copilot snarled at me. "Get the frag out of here, ule!"
I ignored him and grabbed me shoulder of the figure in the left seat. (That had to be the pilot, right?) "What the hell's going on?" I demanded. And, as an afterthought, "How about lighting this crap up?"
For a moment I thought the pilot was going to tell me frag off, too, but then he nodded once. The control consoles came alive with lights, data displays, radar images, and all the other junk that (meta)humans need to play bird. In the bright plasma light I saw the fiber-optic lines connecting pilot and copilot to the panels.
"So what the hell's going on?" I asked again.
"Ino," the pilot snapped. "Storm. Big fragging storm. What the hell you think?"
As if to emphasize what the pilot was saying, the Merlin did another one of those roller coaster plunges, fragging near bounding me off the overhead. Neither pilot nor copilot moved; they kept their arms loosely crossed over their chests. But, from the sudden tightening of their muscles in their jaws and around their eyes, I knew they were working as hard mentally as if they were hauling back on physical control yokes.
"Do you usually get storms this bad?" I asked as soon as my heart had cleared my airway again.
"No way, brah." It was the copilot who answered me this time. "Never bad as this, yah?"
"So what the frag's happening, then?" I pressed even though I was afraid I knew the answer.
"Something fragged," the pilot responded. "Up ahead."
"Where are we, anyway?"
"Passing over Kihei, altitude twenty-nine-fifty meters. Airspeed two hundred, ground speed closer to fifty."
That little gem of information didn't make my gut feel any better. Airspeed 200, ground speed 50-mat meant the little Merlin was fighting a headwind of 150 kilometers per hour.
I tried a quick glance out through the canopy. Nothing-quite literally squat. Rain was hitting the windscreen faster than the wipers could clear it, almost as if it was being flung from buckets or sprayed from a fire hose. Beyond that was just blackness. No ground, no horizon, no stars. Nothing.
I gestured to the canopy. "Have you got some instrument that can see through this drek?" I asked.
Nobody answered aloud, but the display on one of the console's screens changed. In computer-enhanced false color, I could see the towering slopes of a huge mountain. Haleakala, it had to be, rearing up ahead of us.
The colors on the display were wrong, but the contrast and contours were off, too. It took me a moment to understand. I wasn't looking at the mountain via visible light. This display had to be generated by some kind of FLIR pod- Forward-Looking InfraRed-slung under the Merlin's belly. I was seeing by heat, basically.
Which added a threatening significance to the glow that seemed to be emanating from the top of the mountain. On the FLIR screen, an amorphous plume of pale light sprouted from the top of Haleakala, silhouetted against the blackness of the sky. It shifted and shimmered like Global Geographic trideos of the aurora borealis.
"What the frag's that?' I demanded, stabbing a finger at the display. "I thought Haleakala was a dormant volcano."
"It is, brah," the copilot said shortly, "since twenty eighteen. Don't know what that is." He turned to me, his cybereyes glowing like sullen embers. "Mo' bettah we head back, yah?" he asked hopefully.
Good fragging idea. But, "You've got your orders," I told him.
He turned away, muttering something in Hawai'ian under his breath. I didn't need a translator to get the drift: Mo'bettah the haole have himself a brain aneurysm… right fragging nowl
The Merlin jolted again, seeming to stagger in the air. I grabbed onto the backs of the crew's seats, bracing myself with legs widespread. Either the neoscope in the narco-patch was wearing off, or the fear was really starting to cut through the chemical well-being. I didn't like where I was, chummer, not one little bit.
Again the tilt-wing staggered, left wingtip dipping sickeningly before the pilot could recover. In that instant something slapped against the canopy-a solid sheet of water, it sounded like, not discrete drops anymore. The engines wailed.
And I saw something that shouldn't-couldn't-have been there. A face, chummer. A face, pressed against the transpex canopy. There for an instant, and then gone, staring into the flight-deck with eyes that weren't quite human, grinning with a kind of unholy glee.
"And just what the frag was that?' I yelped.
For an instant I thought-I hoped-the crew hadn't seen anything, that my imagination was running away with me. But then that hope died as the copilot turned to me, his face suddenly ashen in the plasma-light. "Uhane, hoa," he gasped. "Spirit. Storm spirit."
Oh, just fragging peachy. I turned-almost pitching to the deck as the Merlin jolted yet again-and bellowed back through the door into the passenger compartment. "Akaku'akanene! Get your feathered hoop up here, nowl"
It didn't take the goose shaman more than fifteen seconds to join me on the flight deck, but that was still enough time for the Merlin to jolt and jar another couple of dozen times. In the plasma-light of the displays, her eyes glinted coldly like glass beads. She didn't speak, but her body language perfectly communicated the peevish question, "What?"
I grabbed the copilot's shoulder. "Tell her," I instructed.
The man gabbled quickly in Hawai'ian. I picked out a couple of words here and there-uhane, haole, and lolo among them-but that was it. When he was done, the bird-boned kahuna nodded.
"Nene signs of danger," she said to me. "Much power ahead."
Well, no drek, Sherlock, I managed not to say. "What about the spirits?" I demanded.
"I feel their presence." Her voice was calm, fragging near conversational.
"Well, bully for you!" I snapped. "Can you feel a way of getting rid of them?"
She shrugged her scrawny shoulders. "They stand guard," she pointed out
"I'd kinda guessed that," I said dryly. "Can you persuade them to go guard somewhere else?"
'They guard the fabric," the kahuna shot back, her voice suddenly sharp. "They guard the pattern."
I blinked at that. What the frag was she talking about? Unless… "They think we're part of that drek?" I pointed again at the ghostly plume of light on the FLIR display. "Is that it? Christ, then tell 'em we want to stop it, for frag's sake!"
Akaku'akanene shrugged again. "They don't believe me."
I ground my teeth together so hard that pain shot through my jaw muscle. "Then be more persuasive," I grated.