House of the Sun (42 page)

Interesting, too. It had stuck in my mind, like so many little bits of irrelevant trivia, because it had prompted a question when I'd first noted it. The Hawai'ian word for sun was
La
. And wasn't the ancient Egyptian word for sun
Ral
La
—
Ra
. Pretty fragging similar, particularly if you included the possibility of "phonetic drift." Was it just coincidence?

After all, there weren't that many fragging single-syllable words that the human throat could pronounce, were there? Or was there more to it than that?

I wondered suddenly if Chantal Monot could answer that one. Chantal, with her whacked-out ideas about Lemuria and sunken continents, and her Andrew Annen-something paintings. (Now that I thought about it, didn't some of them have pyramids in them? Pyramids on the floor of a tropical ocean ...)

With a snort I shook my head and forced away all those flaky imaginings. Sometimes letting your mind wander is worse than obsessing about what's scaring the drek out of you.

* * *

We'd been underway for nearly an hour when the turbulence began in earnest, and I started to appreciate anew the limitations of neoscopolamine. The Merlin started surging up and down in hundred-meter bounds like some kind of chipped-up roller coaster, and if I'd thought the engines had been straining before, I hadn't heard anything yet. Over the mechanical screaming, now I
could
hear the rattle of the rain against the airframe, driven by mighty gusts of wind. (Or frag, maybe it was hail. Whatever, it sounded like rock salt shot from a Roomsweeper.)

The troopers in their military gear weren't enjoying themselves. They wouldn't admit it to a civilian
haole
puke like me, of course—frag, they probably wouldn't admit it to each other—but I could see the way the muscles of their jaws were standing out. They were biting back on complaints, or maybe doing the iron-jaw trip to stop themselves from spewing their midnight snacks. Even Pohaku was starting to look a mite queasy. My own discomfort was almost a reasonable price to pay to see proof that he was actually as human as the rest of us. Beside me, Alana Kono was looking decidedly pale. In my peripheral vision, I saw her pull out another neoscope patch and slap it onto her own neck. I shot her what I intended to be a reassuring grin, but judging by the look in her eyes, I didn't quite make it.

And that's when the bottom dropped out. For a second or two we seemed to be in free fall. Kono yelped, and one of the troopers grunted in alarm. The only reason I didn't yell out loud was that I was too busy biting my tongue hard enough to taste salty blood. The engines wailed like banshees as the Merlin's dive bottomed out. We jolted hard a couple of times, almost as though we were taking fire from somewhere ahead of us.

Frag it, I couldn't just sit there. I reached down to unbuckle my four-point. Kono grabbed my hand and shook her head—apparently she didn't trust herself to speak—but I gently pushed her hand away and gave another try at the reassuring grin. This time I apparently did a better job, because she nodded and closed her eyes again.

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 the 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—that 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
now
!

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,
now!
"

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 birdboned
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.

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 camival-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, I'd much rather he knew what was going on than me.