2200 Blues © 2024 by G.R. Nanda. All rights reserved.
Steve’s brow oozed with beads of sweat that dripped through his bushy eyebrows, threatening to blur his vision even more than it already was through the window of Nickel’s hovercraft. He wrenched his hands around the pilot controls, struggling to stay aboard. His vision strained against the halo of light proliferating in multiple directions as the American Eagle hovercraft neared the edge of the rising canyon, its silhouette abrading the horizon’s sunset.
“Aaagh!” Steve wheezed, clenching his teeth. Despite having gotten the craft airborne again, its systems were heavily compromised—some outright destroyed—including the digital haptic overlay that should have provided a filtered ViewFinder, making it easier to navigate the horizon’s swaddling, obscuring light. That, along with other vital equipment and safety measures, had been lost when the Eagle crashed into the Thraíha settlement compound months ago.
To Steve, it felt like years ago—the moment he had met Nickel, the start of a beautiful, promising adventure—separated by his coma and the following period of uncertainty and deepened disillusionment. But he knew that all those weeks spent reconfiguring and cooling the fuel chambers during the final stretch of his recovery would be worth it now. Strapped together with twine-supplements tying broken pieces of the hovercraft into a barely functional whole, Steve was on a recourse, taking the American Eagle on another bender—probably for the last time.
Fizzling electronics and groaning, colliding machinery sputtered from behind, at the end of the control room, where pieces of the hovercraft’s outer shell clattered together.
“Can you fly safer?” Farrul screamed from the rear control modem, where Steve knew he was hanging on for dear life as the blasting winds slipped through the hovercraft’s fractured hull. “If I don’t fall out, my pants will!”
“Ahh! Quit yer’ jabberin’!” Steve roared, squinting as he leaned back against the pilot’s chair, swerving the hovercraft around the canyon edges, back into the space of unobstructed light. “Just like always—” Steve grunted, driving the piloting wheel to the left, jamming it hard to swing the hovercraft, accentuating pressure to the wheel of its pulmonary axis. “—it’s me doing all the work, and you yappin’ yer ass—OOOAAH!”
The entire disjointed frame of the hovercraft shuddered, violently jerking Steve in every direction. The movements jiggled the steering controls in his grip, causing the hovercraft to shake even more. The light grew even more blinding as the lifting fog layer rose off the ground, synthesizing the light-rays that hadn’t reached the canyon bottom before. Now, the fog was rising, meeting the sky in an effulgence of swarming light and vapor, threatening to overwhelm Steve’s sight.
He hadn’t attempted anything like this since before he had been stranded in these canyons—before he’d served as a cook aboard the expedition ship that brought him to Atalantia in the first place. He had once dreamed of becoming a pilot, joining the U.R. flight corps, escaping a life of destitution in a polluted city—or worse, a labor camp on that Pacific trash island. After his parents had died in prison—starved, undernourished, sentenced for failing to pay their housing—Steve had become a paranoid young man. In his grief, he had been terrified of ending up like his parents… or like his sister, whom he couldn’t save.
Hell, he had even once dreamed of joining a Space Force, if only it had still been an option. But with the Earth polluted to death and space exploration abandoned, all that remained for Steve now was a life more pleasurable than before—whether in Earth’s heavens or deep within the Atalantia Canyons.
A groaning creak reverberated through the hovercraft as a wave of vertigo tipped it sharply to the right, lurching Steve against the armrest of his chair. Screw it. He was going to bank the hovercraft this way, leaning into the capsizing motion to fully swerve around the rising canyon’s remnants.
“HOLD ONTO YOUR BUTT!” Steve roared, spinning the navigational control as the hovercraft’s hull thundered under the force of the twisting ascent. The entire craft rattled from every direction. Steve gasped, gagging against the motion sickness twisting his insides. He had only ever seen other pilots try to escape a burgeoning windstorm in the canyons once—when he was just a cook aboard a craft attempting to flee. But he had watched those pilots struggle and ultimately fall against the onrushing forces of light, air, and wind.
Steve slapped the sonar gridding map screen switch, desperate to wake it up. Nothing. His breaths were coming so fast he could barely hear them. How was he going to see enough of the canyon to maneuver around it? He screamed in exasperation and horror. The sonar map wouldn’t turn on, wouldn’t clear his surroundings of obstruction, wouldn’t—
The tips of the canyon flickered through the fog—visible, then gone, then back again.
“Fuck it!” Steve grated, screaming through his teeth. “I’m going manual!”
For the first time in decades, Steve truly let go—not just of the ship controls, but of the controls in his mind. He stopped tweaking the haptic commands and flung his entire body into the main navigational wheel, standing up from his piloting chair, his chest straps tightening around him as he moved.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH……..”
Steve swung the hovercraft completely around, fully leaning into the capsizing motion. The hovercraft turned upside down, the air outside and the entire body of the craft screaming against the maneuver. Wherever the edge of the canyon was, it was now far below, the American Eagle completely inverted over the last rise of the canyon.
Vertigo surged up Steve’s body, coursing through his stomach, chest, and throat like a stream of bile. His hair swung wildly above his head, falling over his shoulders with the motion. He continued to scream, but Steve couldn’t hear a sound over the cantankerous roar of what seemed to be the hovercraft tearing itself to shreds. He clung to the wheel for dear life, pushing against it to stay in place as the ship maintained its upside-down ascent over the canyon and through the fog.
When the hovercraft climbed high enough for the fog to dissipate into a rolling density of churning clouds below, Steve screamed again and shoved against the navigational wheel to finish his rolling flight maneuver.
The hovercraft righted itself quickly and violently, flinging Steve backward, ramming him hard against the piloting chair. He cried out, wincing as pain flared through his left arm and back, the ghostly remnants of his old injuries throbbing from the impact. He squeezed his eyes shut, panting. I’m too old for this shit. But he, Farrul, and Theren’s small group of Thraíha accomplices had dragged this broken hovercraft through scores of canyon impasses, sailing it over the Renowak River with grizard beasts swimming alongside them, pulling the Eagle by rope—just so Steve could try, one last time, to do for Farrul and Nickel what he had failed to do for his sister all those years ago: give them a better future.
He knew that if he could do that—if he could try—then he would finally be at peace, resting his weary, broken soul and body in Hedonim.
A chill swept over him, submerging him like the waters of a wintry ocean shore. Stronger gusts whipped past, tearing through the hovercraft’s cabin. Something else had been sheared off during the flight, allowing even more wind to pour inside.
“Farrul?” Steve shouted, coughing and sputtering. His body trembled with residual adrenaline. “Farrul? You still there? You okay?” More coughing. No response. Steve let out a moaning sigh, his face twisting in sorrow and fear. “Oh no, Farrul,” he groaned. “Farrul, please be there—” His voice faltered into a feeble, whispering plea. “Farrul, tell me you’re still there… Farrul—”
A shimmering glow warmed the insides of his eyelids, turning them a bright, hot red. Steve gasped, eyes snapping open. Before the hovercraft’s window, the air had become a blazing orange. Sunlight filtered through, its flickering rays sending strange tremors through the fog, coalescing from the thick bank he had just passed.
The fog swirled around the glowing center, then split apart in torrents to the left and right, leaving a luminous figure at its core.
Steve moaned feebly, his eyes widening. He pressed his back against the chair as hard as he could, fingers clutching the handholds in a grip so tight it felt as if his joints would snap.
The radiant halo of the singing sorceress manifested at the heart of the fog before the hovercraft’s window. Her body was unadorned, a luminous form of molten light, her larger-than-life figure shifting sinuously, twisting like a snake, her movements warping the fog around her. In a gust of wind, she began to sing:
“Come to me,
You will see,
The words your mother forgets.”
Tears welled in Steve’s eyes. He brushed them away with his hands, only for more to gather at his eyelids. He had never known his mother well. He felt like he had never truly known any woman well enough. Born to the Ether, destined for the Ether.
“Gather near,
You will hear,
Pleasures of the heart’s lament.”
The sorceress grew larger, her halo of hair becoming a swath of mist as she snaked around the hovercraft, gliding across its light, diving below, leaving a trail of glowing air and swirling matrices of digital configurations in her wake.
Steve closed his eyes. He knew it. He was near Hedonim. Finally.
He opened them, pushing the navigational wheel to full throttle. Nickel was near Hedonim too—he had made it to Merrix Depot before Steve did. When he’d heard the distress call signs, he couldn’t believe it. He had assumed Merrix Depot didn’t even exist anymore. He had transmitted a message to an old cowboy there to take care of Nickel before the assault took place.
Steve propelled the hovercraft through the wake of the glowing fog, searching for Nickel, knowing it would lead him to Hedonim too.
G.R. Nanda 