Evan Currie
Thermals
Foreword
Thermals is the first novel I’ve been comfortable enough to offer up for sale, and I’m really pretty proud of it. The concept came from my earlier days of writing and hanging around Baen’s Bar at Baen.com. Jim Baen created a forum specifically to challenge writers, and the first challenge he posted was to write a story about a new type of Power Generation Facility. There were actually several different versions proposed at the time, but the one used here in Thermals just caught my attention.
About four months of writing resulted in this novel, which was pretty decent time for me, and I really liked the outcome. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to impress Mr Baen, so it stayed on my hard drive until just recently.
Whether he wanted to publish it or not, I have to thank Jim Baen for challenging me to write this novel, it’s been a great experience and I’m proud of the outcome. He and I didn’t actually get along on the boards, but for all his bluntness and irascible nature, I can only hope and pray to one day add a tenth of the contribution he has to the science fiction community.
I hope you enjoy the ride, and thank you for buying Thermals.
Evan C. Currie
Author
Chapter 1
Anselm Gunnar leaned over slightly in his seat so he could stare out the side window of the two-seater Piper as the small aircraft circled around the spectacular construction that lay below, and towered above.
The Australian Tower of Power project lay both five thousand feet below them and also loomed another twenty thousand feet above. Light glistened off the thirteen square kilometers of glass and metal below, providing blinding reflections whenever the piper crossed just the right, or wrong, angle of attack over the amazing structure, one of the hazards of approaching the tower by air that kept the major airlines from servicing the city below.
When the light wasn’t blinding, there was another dazzling sight to deal with, in that the immense structure created a huge dot of green, of life itself, in the middle of the dull brown of the Australian desert. Anselm remembered from his briefing that the Tower Project generated enough food to feed the city of more than eighty thousand that had grown up around the huge greenhouse, plus a substantial export industry as well.
It was a net importer of grains, because those required more space to grow than more economically viable specialty products like strawberries and kiwis, and Canada was more than happy to ship in all the grains the fledgling city needed anyway. The project had been intended to provide power to more than two hundred thousand homes when it was begun thirteen years earlier, after over a decade of political setbacks delayed the concept, but no one had really predicted what had happened.
Almost overnight a city grew up around the tower, sucking up a lot of the juice that the massive structure could provide in short order as workers and families found that living nearby wasn’t the hardship it might otherwise have been and began buying and leasing land in the area. The fledgling community took things in hand quickly and the Tower itself proved a nice inducement to think `green’ as they said. So now the city below was probably the most ecologically minded on the planet and, surprisingly perhaps, topped the list of most desirable places to live. All that in the middle of a desert, no less.
That didn’t mean that they didn’t have problems, however, otherwise they wouldn’t need the services of Anselm Gunnar.
The Interpol Security and Counter Terrorist specialist looked up as they continued to circle, the rough air buffeting the small plane. His eyes followed the checkered spire that made up the huge central tower of the project. He knew that the idea behind the project was simplicity itself, but the execution of it still took his breath away.
The tower was probably four or five hundred feet in diameter, or maybe radius, Anselm couldn’t tell by eye and he couldn’t remember the exact number from the briefing. A number he could remember, though, was its height. The immense structure touched the sky itself at one kilometer in height, earning it a place in any history or record book you’d care to name. Thirteen square kilometers, twenty five thousand acres, of greenhouse below and around the tower provided the impetus to trap heat into the water and earth, warming the air trapped inside. As it grew warmer the air naturally had to rise, and it was guided by the design of the glass and steel inwards to the tower.
Cooler air from the surrounding desert was drawn in around the skirt, warming as it flowed in toward the center of the tower, then it too would rise up the kilometer long passage to the sky. Inside the tower, dozens of turbines were run by the rising air, generating power for the community that had grown up around it, and still leaving a substantial amount for export to a nearby city.
All in all, it was one of the foremost marvels of construction and engineering in the world, which had absolutely nothing to do with Anselm’s reason for being there, in the slightest. He was deep in thought over his mission when something at the top of the tower caught his eye and he frowned.
“What’s that” He asked.
“What!” The pilot yelled, looking over.
Anselm checked his headset and turned on the microphone. “What’s that Up over the tower!”
The pilot leaned forward and pitched the plane up so he could see the top of the tower as they flitted along past it.
“Oh, them,” he shrugged, leveling out again. “Thermies.”
“What!” Anselm looked at him in total confusion.
“Thrill seekers!” The pilot yelled over the engine. “They get in a glider, or a para-pack, and get a lift up over the tower. Day or night, you get into the thermals there, its one hell of a ride, man!”
Anselm leaned back over, staring up at the dots in the blue sky over the tower and shuddered.
“How high do they go”
“Huh Oh hell, way the hell above what this thing is rated for!” The pilot laughed, “Some of them carry freaking space suits for the ride!”
“You’re kidding”
“Naw, man, those guys.they’re extreme. One guy caught the Jetstream a while back. He was wearing a Vac-suit like they use on the space station, you know Says it whipped him eight ways to Sunday before he dropped out of it. Coast guard picked him up, heading out to sea near New Zealand!”
“Jesus,” Anselm muttered under his breath.
The Jetstream was ten kilometers up and that was a long way to fall if your gear screwed up. From what Anselm knew, if the story was true, than that crazy bastard was lucky he hadn’t dropped through some poor sucker’s roof in America.
“What was he using”
“What!”
Anselm growled over the roar of the old piper’s engine, “That guy! What was he using!”
“Oh! A Para-Pack!” The guy yelled back, “he got it all tangled to hell too. Came down hard in the water, broke both legs! Good thing he had his GPS unit, or he’d a been shark bait for sure!”
No kidding.
Anselm shook his head, and turned back to the amazing piece of engineering. Some people were completely insane. This was why he did what he did, of course. Though it was a different kind of insanity that brought him to the Tower Project.
Abdallah Amir, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, had been spotted in the area by an Interpol agent on vacation. The news came as something of a shock, since the man was supposed to have been dead for the past five years, after an aborted bombing attempt at the Japanese Embassy in London.
The man had been responsible for nearly thirty bombings and biological attacks in the previous two decades, beginning when he’d publically renounced his American citizenship and changed his name in Oh Eight. Abdallah, or `Slave of God’, as the name meant, was of mixed nationality and had joined the fundamentalist movement when his father was killed in a bombing of a bunker during the American siege of Kandahar, Afghanistan.