When Carter chose, she could be the fastest thing in the sky—which was to say faster than the few birds that lived here, the bugs, and the clouds shushing icily above him, which were the only competition. Only now, he did not want her to be fast. Now, they—Roadrunner and he—were moving as slowly as any unnatural creature of the air might while still remaining a creature of the air and not suddenly choking out, stalling, and becoming a creature as one with the cold, hard, and distant ground. He could feel her moving from good air to bad, could feel the slide of lift along her control surfaces. He could feel her bucking and struggling as they chugged along because she was a machine that wanted to fly, to climb; that wanted never to descend into the drab oppression of gravity. And on that one point, Roadrunner and her pilot were in absolute agreement. Neither had ever done so well with their gear on the ground as they did in the air.
Roadrunner’s instrumentation was archaic. There was a compass (oriented for a different polar environment), dial altimeter, pitch-and-roll bubble, fuel stick, airspeed indicator, engine RPM and pressure and temperature gauges. Here, on this world, it was high-line voodoo. And the onboard computers were both more and less impressive for being less simple, more contained, and worlds stupider.
The computers were never in complete agreement with the plane’s more elemental mechanisms. Always a difference of opinion. The digital gauges showed a redundant, simplified, and three-color view of the world; a child’s vision, all bright triangles and wavy lines and bold numbers. Between Carter’s legs, the idiot lights showed green: fuel, oil pressure, engine temp, hydraulics, prop speed. In the center of his panel, a computerized map showed hieroglyph landmarks, blinking navigational aids, distances from this and to that. But it spoke to something in the distance between the world Carter had known and the world in which he now found himself that he understood less about how Roadrunner’s analog altimeter knew his distance from the ground or the wet compass knew the way home than he did about the workings of the FTL drive on the container ship that’d brought him to the Carpenter system or the hydrazine thrust belts on the dropship that’d deposited him on Iaxo.
Because the company and its men couldn’t use satellite positioning (what they were doing on Iaxo was clandestine at its most polite, but mostly just plain criminal, so the satellites themselves—even the very small ones—were too conspicuous in orbit around a planet full of natives who still thought God made the lightning), and because radar was right out, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning, surface track, and radio triangulation against preset navigational markers. All of which was for shit when the difference between flying and crashing was measured in feet and inches, not miles.
So Carter, like his mates, carried a programmable stopwatch instead, accurate to one-hundredth of a second, a handheld UV/thermal spotting scope with a pulse range finder, and a map—pen on paper—made by Billy Stitches from first squadron. Carter had his flash-taped to his thigh and, at night, flew the way a submariner once piloted: trusting his life to the inarguable tick of the clock. Billy, he trusted. The watch, the scope and the map were all he truly believed in—his trinity. For lack of any more solid theological footing, he put his faith in Billy Stitches and, thus far, Billy had never let him down.
It didn’t mean he felt any safer, flying blind into the endless dark. And it certainly didn’t mean he didn’t pilot with a horrible, sick feeling that, at any moment, he was going to crash prop-first into an odd copse of hard alien trees, stick there like a dart, and burn. Night missions, he would always fly with the sour taste of anxious vomit in the back of his throat, squeezing and straining the eyes right out of his head looking for death oncoming at a hundred miles an hour, and then land again, hours and hours later, with a relief like waking alive from a bad dream of falling and a headache that only drink, sleep, or decapitation would cure.
He hated flying at night.
It surprised Carter when he found Billy Stitches and Morris Ross up in the middle of the night. Billy was out night-flying for fun in a two-seat spotter (a rebuilt Bristol fighter, actually, with a jumped-up rotary V-8 turboprop salvaged from one of the two wrecks the company had so far suffered). Billy was sitting in the gunner’s chair, peeking downward, backward, and sideward through UV light amps while Morris flew, sketching terrain details and shouting directions in Morris’s ear. Carter had Billy on the radio periodically, making jokes, keeping him amused while he zigged and zagged his way along a broken, preset course to the ford. Carter asked Billy how he could work on his maps at night. Billy told him to shut up before Carter jinxed him. Even with night vision and a moon and a half playing tag through breaks in the clotted clouds, the world below was nothing more than the suggestion of a world to Carter. Touches of silver here and there, gilt flourishes, a sense of undulating life, and somewhere off his left wing, the river catching reflections and shattering them against its banks. They had names, those moons. Carter didn’t know them.