The Nene shaman nodded and closed her eyes. The Merlin still jolted and jostled, but somehow she kept her balance perfectly-almost as if she could anticipate every movement of the small craft and adapt to it.
I didn't know if it was my imagination, or whether the kahuna had somehow gotten her message through, but after a few moments it felt as though the buffeting had diminished. The airframe still vibrated, the engines still complained, but at least the carnival-ride whoop-de-doos seemed to be under control. "Better?" I asked the pilot.
He nodded. "Altitude thirty-one hundred. Airspeed, two-ten. Ground speed one hundred. Ten klicks out." He glanced back at me over his shoulder. "Any instructions for the approach?"
I gave him my best pirate's smile. "Whatever'll get us there in one piece."
"Echo that, bruddah. Nine klicks."
On the FLIR display the volcano was looming large. The periphery of the giant heat plume was still amorphous, fuzzy. But for the first time I thought I could make out some kind of internal structure to it. There seemed to be semicircular wave-fronts propagating through it, like ripples spreading across a smooth pond from a dropped stone. Something bizarre was going on down in the crater, that was for fragging sure.
I turned back to the door into the passenger compartment. "We're about eight klicks out," I told "my" fireteam. For an instant I felt like I was in the middle of some ancient flatfilm about Vietnam. "I think this is going to be what they call a 'hot LZ'," I added dryly.
The plane echoed with metallic castanet-clatter as the squad locked and loaded. I thought about my own weapon, that ever-so-wiz assault rifle, on the floor under my vacant seat. Having something lethal to cling to like a security blanket would have made me feel a touch better about the whole thing, but it would have meant sacrificing one of the two hand-holds that was keeping me from measuring my length on the cabin floor. All in all, on balance, I figured I'd pick up my playtoy later.
When I turned back to the control console, the pilot had killed the FLIR display to replace it with a complex hash-work of approach vectors, wind axes, and all that other pilot drek. I didn't begrudge it to him. On reflection, Fd much rather he knew what was going on than me.
Beside me Akaku'akanene was still doing her balancing act, maintaining her equilibrium better than I was despite me fact she wasn't holding onto anything. Her eyes were still closed, and in the instrument lights I could see a bead of sweat tracing its way down her temple. God, suddenly I wished I knew what she was doing… so I could understand, of course, but also so 1 could help. Judging by the motions of the Merlin, she'd persuaded at least some of the storm spirits-or whatever the frag they were-than we weren't a threat to the "fabric" or "pattern." If the addition of my concentration could help her convince the rest-or stop the ones she'd already convinced from changing their insubstantial minds-then I'd gladly give it my all.
The blackness was still unbroken outside the rain-blasted canopy. We were still in the middle of the stormclouds I'd seen gathering a few hours earlier. Mentally, I thanked whatever gods mere be that there wasn't any lightning.
I almost pitched backward as the Merlin took on a steep nose-up pitch. From behind and to both sides I heard the scream of the engines change pitch. A computer schematic on the control console confirmed what I'd already guessed: The wings were pivoting again, from forward flight to V/STOL mode. We were on our way in. I drew breath to yell word back to the troopers…
And fragging near swallowed my own tongue. Without warning the Merlin cleared the clouds, popping down out of a ceiling of roiling blackness. For the first time I could see the peak and crater of Haleakala volcano with my own eyes, without the need for FLIR intermediaries.
First impression: Spirits, what a blasted hellhole of a wasteland. Nothing grew; nothing lived-nothing seemed to ever have lived here. Just barren rock-rough, scattered scree slopes. Cinder cones. Outwellings of solidified magma. Precipitous slopes, vertical cliffs… klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape. For an instant I didn't know where the image of the lunar surface had come from, but then I remembered. Back almost a century ago, when NASA was trying out their Lunar Rover designs, they'd picked the Haleakala crater for the tests, because it was the closest to the rugged emptiness of the moon mat could be found on this planet.
Second impression: Holy fragging drek, I could see those klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape… and I shouldn't have been able to. We were on top of a fragging mountain, three thousand meters up, and the cloud deck was so solid mere was no chance for a single photon of moonlight to make it through. Yet the whole blasted prospect was illuminated-not as bright as day, by any means, but about like twilight.
It was a strange illumination, too: cold, sourceless, shifting, ebbing and flowing. I could see the source, roughly ahead of us-an area of what looked like absolute chaos. Light bubbled and roiled in the depths of the crater as though it were a physical fluid. Spreading up into the sky, in an ethereal fan-shape, the air itself seemed to glow with a pearly radiance. This had to be the visual equivalent of me heat-plume the FLIR had shown me, I realized instantly.
In the midst of the rolling, churning light were motionless points of brilliance, much brighter than the shifting illumination surrounding them… but somehow sterile, dead. It took me a moment to understand those points were artificial lights, arc lamps set out by the kahunas of Project Sunfire so they could prepare the process that now seemed well advanced.
Something flashed by the Merlin's canopy, going like a bat out of hell. A well-chosen simile, since it seemed to be a mass of pure liquid fire about the size of a man's head. It was past and gone before I could make out any details, leaving a blue-green streak of afterimage across my visual field. As if my vision had suddenly become attuned, I saw there were many… things… flitting and hurtling around the central mass of light. Balls of fire, sheets of heat lightning, unidentifiable shapes moving so fast my mind couldn't make sense of them. They seemed to be orbiting that central light, like chipped-up moths dancing around a porch light. And that, too, seemed to be a well-chosen simile. I couldn't be sure, but neither could I shake the feeling I was seeing a kind of approach-avoidance behavior going on. The things- whatever they were-were both repelled and attracted by the drek going down in the center of the crater.
The magic drek going down. Deep in my gut where the truth lives, I knew it was magic, seconds before my intellect caught up and figured it out logically. I could feel the magic, deep in what I laughingly call my soul-like I'd felt it when Scott's fetish had cut loose, the instant before he blew Tokudaiji-san's skull to fragments. It was like vertigo, like that flip-flop your stomach does when a super-express elevator momentarily goes into free fall. It was like that, except it wasn't my stomach doing flip-flops but… something else. It was like I'd suddenly, momentarily discovered new senses, and the information those senses were feeding me prompted a reaction from a part of my body I previously didn't know existed.
It was over in an instant as if it had never happened, as if I'd never recapture that sudden broadening of perspective…
For me, it was over in an instant. Not so for Akaku'akanene.
Which made sense if you think about it. If the level of magical activity down in the crater was enough to twist the guts of a mundane like me, what would it do to somebody who actually savvied that mana drek? Beside me, Akaku'akanene's eyes snapped open in a face suddenly pasty white. She opened her mouth to groan, and then she was lurching across the flight deck, her extraordinary stability suddenly gone. I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her upright an instant before she would have pitched over into the pilot's lap. (Vehicle control rig or no, I couldn't help but think an unannounced visitation to his groin by a little old lady would have messed up his control of the plane, at least a little.)