The man jerked reflexively, curling his limbs and sending them into a corkscrew dive. Dodge could barely make out the river looming below; the details were lost in a blur of motion. He tore his gaze away from the spinning landscape and focused on the next part of his desperate plan.
Following the knockout punch, the raider had gone limp in the flying rig. Dodge on the other hand felt as though someone had replaced the blood in his veins with liquid lead; the uncontrolled spiral made every movement seem like the labors of Hercules.
With his legs locked around the man’s waist, he struggled against centripetal force and managed to straighten the man’s arms. The spin immediately ceased, and when he levered his foe’s arms to shoulder height, the headlong dive began to level out.
Dodge heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s better.”
Although his body had stopped turning, it took a few moments for his head to catch up. Only when the waves of nausea subsided did he attempt to take stock of his situation.
He was still over the river and easily located the Washington Monument. The white obelisk was the highest landmark on his horizon and an easy reference point to judge both elevation and distance. The mid-air struggle had brought him nearly back to the point from which his journey had begun. It would take a little gentle experimentation, but he felt reasonably certain he could make his way back to the White House with his captive.
He turned his head to see if the airship carrying the President was still there. He found it, a barely visible speck winging south above the Potomac, but his eyes barely registered the fact. His attention was fixed on the four other flying shapes racing toward him.
If he had any doubts about their intentions, they were put to rest when a bolt of lightning suddenly lit up the clear blue sky. The searing arc crackled dangerously close; close enough that Dodge felt his hair stand on end. Another followed, and another, in rapid-fire succession from the approaching swarm.
Dodge’s understanding of the rudimentary controls was sufficient to turn his slow crawl across the sky into a steep climb that wove back and forth in front of the sun — the best strategy he could devise on the spur of the moment — but every action was made doubly difficult because he wasn’t simply steering the flying rig but also manipulating the unconscious villain who wore it. As a lattice of electrical bolts scorched the air near his feet, he realized he was going to have to address that liability.
He knew what he had to do, yet the implications of that course of action stopped him in his tracks. If he unbuckled the belt and let the scarred raider fall, the man would most certainly perish. Dodge had never faced a situation where someone’s fate rested in his hands; he had never even sat for jury duty. He didn’t doubt what the other man would do if their roles were reversed, but that thought brought him no comfort. A host of rationales clamored against his equivocating conscience. These men were killers, death was what they deserved. Worse, they had abducted the President of the United States. Whether they were agents of a hostile foreign power, or simply audacious criminals, their actions were tantamount to a declaration of war, and bad things happened in wars; ordinary men had to make hard decisions that no civilized person should have to make.
Dodge had learned this lesson well during the time spent chronicling the adventures of Captain Falcon. Falcon was always walking that fine line between acting decisively and keeping his humanity intact. When Dodge wrote those stories, he always found a way for his pulp hero to resolve that dilemma. That was the great thing about fiction.
His fingers found the belt clasp. I guess I’m going to find out what it’s really like to kill someone.
As Dodge opened the buckle, there was a strange audible disturbance. It wasn’t a sound, but rather the end of it; the abrupt termination of a pervasive humming noise he had been unaware of during his struggles. It reminded him of a high voltage electrical light being switched off.
He realized his mistake in the same instant that his upward motion ceased. Whether it was dread at his fatal error or simply the sudden free fall, Dodge’s stomach rolled over. The earlier moral struggle was swept away by the cold wind blasting against his face as he and his still unconscious opponent plummeted uncontrollably. Almost without thinking, he relaxed the grip of his legs and gave the man a hard shove. Rather than dropping away however, the man simply drifted at arm’s length, tumbling in the updraft at exactly the same rate of fall.
Dodge now found himself holding the impossibly light exoskeleton. His left hand was curled tenaciously around the upright shaft that connected the hump-like back piece to the arm branches. It was difficult to make out any details about the device through eyes squinted into slits, the only defense against the rush of air as he fell, but it seemed simple enough; if opening the belt clasp turned the thing off, then logically, closing it would turn it back on.
He clumsily twisted the flying rig around and plunged his right hand into the corresponding gauntlet. The metallic shell wasn’t articulated like a glove, but rather resembled the basket hilt of a dueling epee. Dodge’s fingers briefly explored the handgrip inside, but found nothing resembling a trigger for the lightning weapon. He decided to worry about figuring that out if he survived.
It had taken only a few seconds for him to reach terminal velocity, almost two hundred miles per hour straight down, and he knew it would take only a few more seconds before he came to a very sudden, and very permanent, stop. He hastily wriggled into the exoskeleton, found the stirrups on the footpads and hooked his shoes under the bar, then secured the left-hand gauntlet. Still, he fell.
The belt!
He was reluctant — terrified, really — to let go of both his handholds, but he knew the ferocity of his grip would count for little on impact. He flexed his ankles against the footpad stays, and cautiously let go with his hands, one at a time, transferring his fingers to the belt. As he slid the halves of the catch together, he sneaked a glance at the approaching landscape, an action he instantly regretted. It was so close….
The belt clasped together with a satisfying click and Dodge both felt and heard the comforting hum of an electrical current. The rush of wind immediately abated allowing him to open his eyes.
The scarred raider still tumbled through the air a few yards away. Panic obliterated any sense of triumph as Dodge realized he was still falling. He tried moving the arms, but there was no change in his descent. The force field was functioning; why wasn’t he flying? I turned it on, he thought angrily. What else do I have to do?
His mind flashed back to the moment when the invaders had retreated from their attack in the Rose Garden. They had bent their legs as if preparing to jump…It’s worth a shot.
Extending his arms fully as he had seen the raiders do, he did his best to simulate a jump in freefall, coiling his legs, then unleashing like a spring with his toes pointed straight out. It worked… sort of.
Instead of falling uncontrollably through the air, he was now shooting toward the river at breakaway speed. There was no time to think, not even time to say a quick prayer that the exoskeleton’s force field would cushion the impact. All he could do was curl into a fetal ball and wait for the inevitable.
For what seemed an eternity, all he could hear was the roar of blood in his ears, syncopated to the allegro tempo of his pounding pulse. Finally, when his heart had hammered a few hundred beats, he risked opening his eyes.
His vision was filled with brown — the murky, polluted water of the Potomac River. Still curled up like a frightened hedgehog, Dodge hung in midair only a few feet above the surface. Had he been so inclined, he could have reached out and dipped his hand in the water.