He saw a light in her eyes, a calmness and confidence that hadn’t been there when they first met. It had come later, evolving after surviving death, after beating back forces far more insidious than this. After giving life to two new individuals.
“We’re not leaving them,” she said in a lower voice, then yelled louder. “Hey! Asshole in there! You’re crashing this plane for nothing. You forgot about one thing.”
Silence. Out the windows: a blur of peaks and snow, of jagged rocks and a patch of blue back up there somewhere.
Then: “What?”
Phoebe smiled, and to Orlando’s questioning look, whispered: “Fourth-down bluff play.”
She yelled again, “Parachutes, asshole. Sayonara, we’re busting out, and we may be delayed after landing, but our team will find us. We’ll get to the nearest airport and have one of our own piloting this time, and we’ll find you. We’ll end you. And if, by God, we find even one bruise on our kids, so help me…”
The plane trembled, then started to level off. Orlando’s stomach did a couple backflips as he dropped and stumbled back to his feet. Now they were climbing slightly, then veering about level. Out the windows, still high up, but in the midst of the Andean range.
A rattle at the door.
Phoebe, catching her breath, motioned to the pilot’s door, to the side of it, where…
Orlando didn’t need it spelled out. He was there in a second, just as the door opened and the pilot emerged, eyes scouring, narrowed and somewhat dazed, Orlando brought both hands around in dual fists, swinging in a great arc with all his might against the pilot’s temple.
He spun and went down hard. Down but not out.
“Uhnnn. Liars…”
“Yeah, suck it up,” Phoebe kicked hard, breaking the man’s nose, by the sound of it. Then she grabbed Orlando and pushed him into the cockpit with her.
“What are you doing? Let’s tie him up and get the chutes and…”
“No chutes on this plane.” She shoved him into the left chair, then quickly — as the pilot shook off the pain, roused himself and stumbled toward them — slammed the door and activated the reinforced locks.
“Sorry,” she said, sitting beside Orlando now. “I checked that first thing. No longer mandatory, and these guys didn’t give a shit, apparently.”
“Great, so…” Orlando looked out the window, with alarm. “…we’re just going to crash into that range right there.”
Phoebe was listening, but not completely. Between the pounding on the cockpit door, and the voice ranting about them only delaying their deaths, she was all over the panel, looking for the radio controls.
“Just grab the stick, lover boy. Pretend you’re in one of your video games. Keep us from hitting anything and let me think.”
Orlando did as he was told. He quickly found the sensitivity range after a few jumpy motions and turbulence that felt like he was in a car running over a herd of turtles. The range ahead of him, coming up fast, was now edging away to their right. He ascended slightly, to fifteen thousand feet, and only after the plane steadied did he realize how hard his heart was thudding.
“I can’t believe I didn’t puke back there,” he said, not sure why he said it, but figured it might lighten the sense of impending doom.
“Thanks for that,” Phoebe said, and gave his arm a reassuring touch before she went back to the controls. Clicked on the audio mic and leaned in. “Mayday. Flight… 244, if I remember right, bound for Buenos Aires. Off-course, and pilot incapacitated. Request urgent assistance.”
Orlando risked a glance and met her eyes: still scared, but oddly confident.
“We’re not going to die today,” she said, without a trace of doubt.
“I wish you had your uncle’s gift, so I would believe that for sure.”
“Believe it. And trust me. No, trust yourself. You’re going to land this plane, and we’re going to walk out and—”
“Get on another one?” He shook his head. “Oh no, not trusting anyone ever again. The entire world could be whammied at this point.”
“Don’t have another choice.”
“What about now? Maybe we could zap that other presence out of our pilot and get him back up here.”
“How? With an exorcism? You already smacked him upside the head, and it didn’t work.”
“Yeah, well we—”
“Flight 255, this is Manco Opano Airport, Peru, outside of Cuzco. You are one-hundred and fifty miles due northeast of us, and we’ve been alerted to your arrival. We’ll talk you through it.”
“What?” Phoebe and Orlando both said it, incredulous. “Who alerted you?”
“Had a call through secure channels from Washington DC. That’s all we know, other than that they said if you didn’t trust us, we were to tell you the name, Morpheus.”
“Well, anyone could…”
“And that someone you taught recently to trust herself is now asking that you trust her. And her visions.”
Phoebe’s eyes widened, and she breathed out a great sigh. “Victoria.”
Orlando nodded and took the headset she gave him. Adjusted the microphone to his lips. “Okay, then.”
He looked over the dizzying array of controls and dials. “Damn bit more complicated than my Xbox controller.”
“You’ve got this,” Phoebe said, now squeezing his shoulder.
“I’ve got this,” Orlando repeated, into the microphone. “Okay, ground control. Take me down.”
“Will do, first adjust your heading to these coordinates. You’ll see on your left…”
Orlando followed the instructions. And his mind was open, and it was almost as if he sensed what had to be done, the sequence and the steps, before he even heard them.
In ten minutes, as they descended toward the highest lake in the world, then arced a few degrees east to Cuzco and its landing strip, they saw nearby what looked like a war zone from Iraq: pummeled buildings, smoke rising from decimated craters, warehouses in flames.
Cloud streaks from F-18s arced off and out of sight.
Ground control broke in, oddly non-committal about the scene of destruction off to the east, but with a different element to make he and Phoebe glance at each other in wonder.
“One more thing this Morpheus contact told us to relay to you. Apparently other members of your team have been airborne a few hours, coming in fast from Micronesia. They’ll land in three hours and have requested a plane fueled and ready to take all of you.”
“Let me guess,” Orlando said, meeting Phoebe’s cold, determined and impatient stare. “We’re going to Antarctica.”
27
Raiden snapped back to himself.
That didn’t go as planned, but again, it didn’t really matter. Maybe if he’d had the complete disassociation that was achievable in the water tank, he might have been sharper and had full control of the host, but it wasn’t to be. These efforts — the pill production and disbursement, the admittedly petty attempt to crash the plane — side quests only, immaterial to the main storyline of this game he and his brethren had been playing for ages.
At this late stage, no one could deny him a little detour to exact some satisfaction.
Taking over that host in Alaska had been fun. A well-conditioned soldier with skills and reflexes to fit the job… it had been an exhilarating, but short-lived excitement.
However, that was twice now he’d been thwarted. He didn’t like it, especially not from the likes of the un-inspired. True, they had other gifts, tracing back to a lineage of powerful mystics; they had the benefit of expanded consciousness and remote viewing, some clairvoyance as well. But he had something far greater in addition to some of those skills.
He had never really explored the psychic side of things. He could have had lifetimes to perfect those gifts, but that was the problem. He knew the brevity and frailty of lifetimes, and the inability to pass on that knowledge, those skills. No, he had always had his priorities.