Micro

Chapter 43

Ko‘olau Mountains 31 October, 11:10 p.m.

At an altitude of 2,200 feet, Danny Minot pointed the nose of his micro-plane upward, gaining height in order to be sure he would clear the sides of Tantalus Crater. The crater was lined with entrapping trees, black and menacing. He looked back, wondering if any micro-planes were following him. But he couldn’t see anything. He headed upward, gaining altitude.

This was easier than a video game; the micro-planes had been designed to be almost crash-proof. Did the plane have running lights? He found a switch, and the running lights came on, red and green on the wingtips, white pointing forward. He turned them off so that the others couldn’t follow him, but after a little while he switched the lights on again. It made him feel better, somehow, to see the familiar winking lights on the wings.

And he saw the city of Honolulu spread out below him. The hotels of Waikiki towered and seemed impossibly huge. Red-and-white lines of cars moved along the boulevards, and he saw a cruise ship docked in the harbor. The ocean was an inky expanse beyond the city. The moon floated over the ocean, casting a sparkling highway of light on the water. To the left of Waikiki Beach a dark mass spread out. It was Diamond Head, and he was looking down on it. Seen from above, Diamond Head was a crater, a ring. A few lights burned in the center of the crater. He could make out the shape of Diamond Head itself, a mountainous headland at the highest lip of the crater. But he did not see any blinking light. Just the dark shape of Diamond Head. Where was the lighthouse?

He increased the power and began to fly toward Diamond Head.

His plane suddenly flipped over and blew sideways, rolling over and over, and he yelled with fright. He had entered the trade wind as it burbled over the mountains. He swore and fought the stick while the plane tumbled in wind eddies. But then the plane stabilized, and began flying straight and steady in the wind, moving really fast. He had gotten into laminar flow. It was like getting into the main current of a river. He looked down. The forest was moving down there. Or rather he was moving over it. The altimeter showed he had gotten up to three thousand feet. In the moonlight he saw a magnificent view.

Behind him, upwind, the hollow of Tantalus Crater spread out. The crater was dark like a cave; no lights in the crater, no sign of Rourke’s Redoubt or Tantalus Base. Directly below him, roads snaked up the flanks of the ridge. Lights burned along the roads. Ahead of him the towers of the city were coming perceptibly closer, until they seemed to burn with energy and rise to impossible heights. For a moment he felt as if he was flying into the capital city of an alien galactic empire. But it was only Honolulu. He still couldn’t see Diamond Head Lighthouse.

The wind was carrying him toward the hotels that stood along Waikiki Beach. He wanted to go more to the left, more toward Diamond Head. He experimented with the control stick and with the throttle. He banked left and kept the power on high. He looked around.

He did not want to be blown into the city; that would be certain death. He would be crushed by traffic or sucked into the air-conditioning of a building. So he increased the power to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM, and kept his course toward Diamond Head. A screen flashed a warning: EXCESSIVE BATTERY DRAIN. Remaining flight time: 20:25 min…18:05 min…17:22 min…the remaining flight time was dropping like a stone. He would run out of power in minutes.

He checked his airspeed. The readout showed 7.1 MPH / 11.4 KPH. He found the radio panel and switched it on. “Mayday. Mayday. This is Daniel Minot. I’m in a small plane. A very small plane. Does anybody hear me? Mr. Drake, are you there? I can’t reach Diamond Head…I’m being blown into the city…oh my God!”

A hotel loomed up like a first-order battleship from outer space. He saw two giants standing on a balcony, a man and a woman, holding drinks in their hands. His plane rushed toward them uncontrollably, carried in the wind. Their heads were bigger than Mount Rushmore. The man put his drink down and reached toward the woman, and pulled down the shoulder strap of her dress, exposing a colossal breast with an erect nipple standing out six feet. The man fondled it with a hand of horrifying size, and their faces closed in for a kiss…As his plane rushed toward a collision, he screamed and fought the controls, and passed between their noses under emergency power, propeller churning, and the plane was caught in an eddy of wind and swept around the corner of the building and out of sight.

The man jerked away from the woman. “What the hell—?”

She had seen something weird. A tiny man flying a tiny plane. Lights blinking on the wings. The tiny man had been screaming. She had distinctly heard his insect-like whine over the sound of a buzzing motor, and she had seen the open mouth, the staring eyes…it was impossible. One of those waking dreams. “The bugs are awful out here, Jimmy.”

“It’s these flying cockroaches they got in Hawaii. They got wings.”

“Let’s go inside.”

Danny regained control of his aircraft as the wind seemed to decrease. He flew across Kalakaua Avenue, where he looked down on the nighttime crowds. He noticed that he had stopped being blown sideways. His plane was flying faster than the wind was blowing; he was making headway now. He banked and headed northeast, and flew along the length of Waikiki Beach, straight toward Diamond Head.

Now, as he peered at the famous shape of the headland in the moonlight, he saw a blink of light. On, off. Darkness. On, off. It was the lighthouse.

“I’m saved!”

He backed down the power a little, and left it at FULL CRUISE, because it would be a disaster if the battery ran out now. He was getting the hang of this. It was a matter of technique.

He gained altitude. He wanted to stay above the buildings, keep plenty of distance above them. It was funny how life could turn around so fast. One moment you think you’re ruined and dead, the next you’re on your way to the best hospital and admiring Waikiki Beach in the moonlight. Life was good, Danny thought.

A shape came out of the night. He saw a flash of wings—he threw the stick over, and just missed the thing.

“Stupid moth! Watch where you’re going.” That had been close. “Absolutely no brain,” he muttered. A collision with a moth could drop him in the sea, and he could see breakers below him.

Then a peculiar noise reached his ears. Sort of an echoing whish-whing… He heard it again… whish-whing. Whoom… Whoooemm… eee… eee… What was that? Something was making freaky noises in the dark. Then a drumming noise started up: pom-pom-pompompom. He saw another moth, and the drumming sound came from the moth… and then the moth suddenly wasn’t there.

Something had swept the moth out of the sky.

“Oh, fuck,” Danny said.

Bats.

They were painting the moths with sonar. He had gotten himself into the middle of some kind of a bat situation. This was not good.

He advanced the throttle to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM.

He could hear the sonar pulses ringing in the darkness, left, right, above, below, nearby, far away…but he couldn’t see the bats. That was the worst thing. Above, below, on all sides, the predators were moving in three dimensions around him. It was like treading water at midnight surrounded by feeding sharks. He couldn’t see anything at all, but he could hear them snatching prey. Whoo… whoom… whooom… eee… eee… eee/ee/ee… that had been a kill.

And then he saw it. A bat killed a moth right in front of him. He got a glimpse of a spiky shape as it swept by, and the plane shuddered and jumped in the turbulence of the bat’s wake. Holy God. The bat had been far bigger than he thought it would be.

He had to get to ground. Just land, anywhere, even on top of a hotel. He pointed the plane into a dive, and went straight down, engines shirring at full power, aiming for the nearest hotel…but he was headed for the beach… oh, shit… too far away from the building, too close to the water…

The bat-sounds got louder. Then a sonar beam raked over him, and went away. There was a pause…then the beam hit him full-force, making his chest flutter—WHOOM… EEEP… EEEP… EEE-EEE-EEE… The bat was painting him with a beam of ultrasound. The pings shortened and became focused. A chaos of sound enveloped him.

“I’m not a moth!” he cried. He threw the stick hard over and pulled sideways in a screaming dive-turn. With his good hand he began pounding on the outside of the cockpit, trying to imitate the drumming of the moths, thumping his hand on the plane. Maybe it would jam the bat’s radar…

Too late he realized that by banging on his plane, he had told the bat exactly where he was.

He saw a flash of brown fur gleaming with silver-tipped guard hairs, a pair of wings flaring impossibly wide, blocking out the moon, and a wide-open mouth filled with a set of canines like chisels…

The micro-plane spiraled down, its wing broken, its cockpit empty, and landed in foam slick near the beach, where it vanished.