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Save Point: Swan Dive

Somewhere In Peru, 1983

...as she sprints around the corner into a hanger, almost completely undamaged except for a few fractures in the roof, she is almost bought to a halt by the sight of an entire row of Jump Bikes lined up next to one another in pristine condition. This must have been the location for the transport pool, where the generally available vehicles were held to be swiped out and commissioned as necessary. What few leaves and pieces of debris have gotten in are crispy-crunchy, lying high and dry, and a sinuous line of watermark shows where the little rain that has made its way in has flowed along low points in the floor and out of similar fractures underneath.

One of the Jump Bikes has been extensively modded, the outer shells and layered plates of one of the Jaguar autonomous attack drones laid down around over the original mechanics so the wheels are held under its front and back paws, the muzzle streamed out flat and low with the teeth just over the front sphere. The wing-like knee guards have been removed entirely. A picture still on the wall nearby shows a heavily body-sculpted and modified female officer with close-napped body-fur like a tigress and short, dark-red hair leaning against her baby and caressing one of the handlebars that stick out of its neck.

She admires the custom design and shaping for almost three seconds before she remembers what the hell is happening and ultimately, with the greatest of regret, goes for the stock bikes with the least damage and scratching. The first two won't start when she waves her fingers in a not-so subtle twisting motion over the compulsory override, the one that lets you pull rank and set all systems to permanent on, and she's starting to think that she may be letting valuable moments slip through her hands when the third one comes online and the control panel lights up. The values are low but all of them are there, and once again she blesses the unknown designer of the Swan Jump Bike Mark II with the shorter chassis.

All the old memories have finished unlocking themselves by now and so she hauls herself into the seat. Which is not so good, because the built-in seats are made of the same indestructible plastic and ceramic stuff as the bikes themselves, and it was customary to overlay them with a sort of saddle arrangement packed with lighter and more damage-absorbent foam if you were going to actually do something serious. Nonetheless, she yips with delighted excitement as the bike, admittedly with a few shudders and starts at first, backs up out of the queue. It's like riding a Jump Bike, you never forget!

Inside her visual field, the timer is still spinning down, the ancient system of numerics with its symmetrically patterned numbers starting to run out of figures. Ironically it'd probably be legible to a modern westerner, the current system of decimal numerals having been derived from this same original symbol set in which the numbers are rotationally identical about the gap between five and six.

The numbers start to blink and flicker red as she forces herself to exercise the patience required to line up for her run. She hits the front wheel-brake and spins up the back one using all the available power left, then takes off, leaving a ground-clean streak polished into the panels of the floor.

Since this is the vehicle pool, it stands to reason that the direction of out is the way the vehicles have all been parked facing, at a sort of half angle. The hanger itself is plenty large, but there are no White Crows or other large transporters still here, and the overall geometry doesn't stack up - there's simply no room for an exit at this level. She spins maps through her head as she gains ever more acceleration down between the rows of parked vehicles......

There. The cliff face is in the way on the outside, with the overflowing river diverting all the water away from this part of the complex, which is why so much of it is in such good condition. But if you were flying a White Crow, you could hover forward and then go straight up, using one or more closable overhead flight decks, like the sort on an aircraft carrier. Of course, then you'd need a ramp of some sort for the ground vehicles to get up to the surface...

Some of lights overhead become too bright and others go out or flicker as the main reactors in the depths begin to overload. She ignores the play of shadows and tries to concentrate on driving fast and not fucking up. Soon every second is going to count.

Outside the hangar there is a pattern not painted but extruded in coloured plastic onto the floor, a sort of cross within a circle target that seems oddly familiar from somewhere else, despite the fact that she clearly recalls it as a standard landing marker for pilots. Rows of small lights in the corners of the improbably tall room ascend into the darkness above, where the growth of vegetation, vines and roots and earth, has sealed shut for all eternity the original hangar entrance.

What she's looking for is off to the left as she slides to a halt up against the polymer markings, a smaller ascending ramp like a spiral staircase or the access to a multi-story parking garage. She guns the bikes engine again and hurtles into it, a frantic ongoing compromise of caution against speed as she tries to go as fast as she can without losing control of the bike and sliding out against the outer walls. There are railings a couple of feet high on the edges but they're worryingly thin, and the transparent panels that seem to have been intended both as a fallback and to allow an impressive view into the inside of the hangar have mostly fallen from their place and shattered long ago, a consequence of being vertically and rigidly mounted. The spiral ramp, being a self-supporting structure like a spring, seems to have weathered the ages better and of course she has no choice but to trust it, but still!

She sweeps around and around, gaining height with every turn. More lights burn out or fail, and she starts to think about what the hell she's going to do when she reaches the top. If the retractable roof is covered by that much growth, getting out is going to be a challenge.

She pulls out the launch tube that she scavenged earlier from the final destroyed Jaguar autonomous drone. Rocket launcher for the win. Admittedly she didn't find anything to actually use it on down in the depths, or at least nothing she had the chance to fire it at, but weapons tempt you to use them and she's been itching for the excuse.

The ramp completes its spiral and then continues its upward run out straight for a short distance along the left side of the hangar wall, ahead of which she can see the mouth of a sophisticated, rotationally locking door mechanism futilely opening and shutting over and over again as automatic commands trigger it for the first time in millennia. It's too choked on crawling roots, stones, and dirt to go anywhere, but she could swear she sees a hint of moonlight beyond. There's probably another identical door at the end of the right hanger wall, one spiral ramp for in and another for out, but she really doesn't have the time to go inspect it.

She brings the Jump Bike to a concise halt that almost becomes a stoppie as the back wheel briefly leaves the ground (shame on you, she thinks to herself, pulling stunts at a time like this, but this is really so damn cool!) and lines up the launch tube over her shoulder with both hands, then lets go with her right to short two of the trailing wires that drape from the end, torn to different lengths and hooked through the torn metal of the break point to keep them separate until now.

She knows, because she once saw the schematics for something similar, that a launcher of this sort has its own tiny power cell inside, because it would really suck to find yourself unable to fire it just because there was no handy power supply. The back of the tube holds three small compact rockets with penetrating heads and high explosive cores, arranged off-centre from the central axis in such as manner that everything comes into line as the various internal components rotate.

She tries not to think about how many of these things today have been duds and flickers the wires repeatedly together to try and launch all three.

The recoil isn't that great but it pushes her back into her seat. Shot one makes it to the door but ignites feebly, cutting through the metal it's lying on like a thermite blade. Shot two doesn't launch correctly and bounces sideways off a wall. Shot three is good and slides neatly between the halves of the door as they close, hits something unseen beyond and detonates cleanly in a ball of flame.

The doors are riven back, successfully opened but not in the way they were designed. She drops the launcher and covers her eyes, feeling the sweet wash of heat bathing her skin as the over-pressure wave propagates inward. She wishes she had cool sunglasses to lower or a leather jacket collar to pull up, because this is an awesomely action movie sort of moment. Tiny bits of stone and dirt make a pattering sound as they fall and bounce along the length of the ramp.

Beyond, the full moon is rising. It's still raining, but not in the vicious sleet it was before. This is a more rational, more considered kind of rain. The clouds that skirt past the moon have been thinned down, torn back to size by all the water wrung from them.

The numbers are down to single digits and are positively shimmering.

Once again she racks the power up to max and aims for the moonlight. The spherical, adaptive wheels of the jump bike are perfectly designed to handle variable terrain, including slews of rock and earth that would defeat any ordinary motorbike. She bursts out into a small down-slope gradient that opens out onto the river, the swollen edges at their height falling just short of their geologically long-awaited access to erode the ancient base, but blessedly free of any jagged or protruding stones due to the additional depth granted by the flooding.

There's no time, so she's going to have to risk her life on one of the jump bikes more little-known features, and one she has no personal experience of. Supposedly (because urban myth can always be completely trusted) this model is waterproof and has hydrodynamic design features intended to throw off water and dirt. Which means that it is possible, supposedly, that you can to use it as a sort of underwater drogue, by free-spinning the wheels and then breaking up the resulting flow-vortex by adjusting the position of the wing-like knee-guards.

The only person she ever knew who actually believed this had driven one off a wharf one evening while drunk and swore blind that it was possible after they'd fished him out.

Nonetheless, she ploughs forward, trying to get as much speed as possible on the small downhill. That you can drive a jump bike quite considerable distances across the surface of the water if you're going fast enough is something she knows as an absolute fact. As an afterthought, she turns the lights on, so she can see what the hell is happening when she finally sinks.

She makes it almost all the way out into the center of the current before they finally start to sink. Hydrodynamic or not, she intends to keep the bike with her as long as possible, if only to use it as a shield in front of her to hold off jagged rocks and the stabbing fractured ends of rotten logs.

She'd finally gotten dry, before, and so the water again comes as something of a shock. It's not warm anymore, it's decidedly tepid verging on cold, and where the pool below was wide and still but for the rain, this is a river in full spate. The preceding storm has cleared away most of the debris and the water is still relatively clear but keeps splashing and spraying in her face.

Wait. In her face? Shouldn't she have started to sink by now? She realizes that she still has the speed set to full, and the wheels are still going, just like in the myth. As long as she leans back slightly and keeps the knee-guards out, the water being displaced seems to be holding her and the bike just slightly below the surface. She chokes and coughs as the water gets into her mouth, then lines herself up more carefully, trying to keep her face behind the diamond-glass windshield.

There's no way of knowing just how long the waterproofing effect will last. It might fail the instant she stops moving. She hangs on and starts gasping down deep breaths.

The display has stopped blinking and gone blank. There will now be a five to ten second delay until all hell breaks loose.

Ahead, the moonlight reflects off the precision-interlocked black basalt of the 'ceremonial' stone-lined canal and open jaguar-maw that floods into the deep cenote far beneath. The lights of the jump bike glow feebly from beneath the water, giving her just enough light to clearly see her immediate surroundings as the geometric patterns on the stone shoot past.

Suddenly, everything weighs nothing and she is flying.

As she and the jump bike hurtle over the falls together, she frantically tries to get the angle right by gunning the back wheel and then braking on it so the torque will push her into alignment. The water falls leisurely alongside her, an instructive statement in physics that although everything accelerates at the same speed under gravity, a large heavy jump bike has more momentum and less resistance to friction than its equivalent volume in water. As a result, she's fallen further outward from the open mouth above than the majority of the flow, but the fact that she's plummeting towards the ground much faster more or less makes up the difference.

This educational moment (you should definitely not drive a jump bike over a waterfall!) is then completely disrupted as the cliff face suddenly bulges, and then an almost invisible shock wave washes past as the explosion begins, starting at the top. An extraordinary upward rolling pillar of fire annihilates the jungle, tears apart the jaguar-maw, and lights up the entire valley for a moment with that terrible x-ray clarity she remembers from so long ago at Kalikshutra. Huge pieces of rock, broken fragments of carved stone, and (she imagines) stray bits of autonomous Jaguar drone rain down all around, but she has the lead and is falling faster than any of them.

Then she hits the water, trying to keep all of the bubble of air she has hyperventilated inside her as the impact tries to smash it out, leading with the front wheel and letting the front shocks take the hit so badly they redline and then fail, the windshield bowing slightly under the pressure as it slows the inward flow. Somehow she gets turned around as she sinks, drawn down by the vast weight of onrushing water, and so she sees the fire blossom murkily through the water above as she descends, and then, as she keeps turning, finds herself falling in the correct direction again. She clutches herself tightly to the bike, knowing that if she loses her grip on it she'll never escape out of these depths alive.

As the fire above fades out, over the course of a surprising number of seconds, everything slowly goes dark until all she can see around her is in a short ovoid of visibility created by the front lights on the jump bike (the brake lights would probably work too, but she has no intention of hitting the brakes, not now, not when slowing or stopping could bring an end to her precariously waterproof momentum). The pressure of the water increases steadily around her, but now that she's running with the current, it does not resist her drift.

The lights reveal occasional tantalizing hints all around. The underground waterway seems to be just as thoroughly engineered as the main cenote, a circular pipe of enormous gauge that carries the runoff, and although the silt and debris of ages has choked the lower part of the pipe and dark algal mats have grown all over it, the force of the flow during the recent storm has torn away many of the more obtrusive projections, revealing the clean black detailing of the original stonework.

The ends of broken logs suddenly loom out of the darkness at random intervals, and she does her best to avoid hitting them, less out of fear of the collision than from fear that she will lose her grip on the handlebars. Smaller branches bend aside or shatter as she tries her best to keep out of the way and mostly succeeds.

The water hurls her past some sort of structure that she realizes only after it has passed is a huge turbine blade, stilled in its rotation by some long-ago obstruction. This would have been the back-up power source for the facility, completely concealed beneath the ground in the hidden waterway. The black blade of the turbine must have been treated somehow with something, because nothing whatsoever is growing on it, even after it has come to rest.

She has a brief moment of extreme terror when she sees that the next turbine is still spinning, and nearly huffs out some of her precious air in panic until she instinctively assesses the situation and times her movement so she'll tumble through the space between the blades. Something that large and that heavy would have so much momentum it would smash her at a touch. Any timber that gets this far must be chewed up by the blades. No wonder the lake up ahead is so clear.

There are several more turbines, but she is steadily getting colder and running out of air, and the pressure is wearing on her with a ringing in her ears and pain in her eyes. There's plenty of space between the blades, they are narrow compared to the entire cross-section of the tunnel, but they seem to be designed to spin alternately in opposite directions. Underwater sounds echo deeply and propagate strangely all around her.

Just as she is starting to think that maybe this will be the time she doesn't make it, the direction of the current starts to change and curve upward. She has to pull up in order to avoid being scraped along the underside of the tunnel, but they're heading upward and things get gradually less dark in way she cannot precisely define. The last of the air finally dribbles from her lips and she follows the bubbles upward, pushing the engine for all its worth. Just a little bit further, she thinks. Just a little bit further.

The front lights flicker but then go out, even as the pressure starts to ease around her. The wheels of the jump bike keep spinning, pulling her through the water, but she can no longer see the bubbles. She finally starts to panic, then gets a grip on herself and finally lets go of the handlebars, but only with one hand, stretching outward and upward toward where she thinks the surface is. Against the terrible weight and cold of the water, she is only able to light up a tiny flame in the palm of her hand. It burns much whiter than the usual shade, and sort of sparkles, like the light of an underwater welding torch.

The light flickers off the underside of the transition between water and air, and she bursts into the moonlit night. As she hungrily gasps down air, the flame finally explodes into life and the rain runs down the shuddering length of her muzzle like tears.

~*~

Dawn sees the upper part of the valley completely destroyed, all the stray technology and its evidence completely eradicated. Normally she'd worry about forest fires, but after a soaking like that, almost nothing has actually managed to burn. The entire valley floor is covered in miscellaneous debris, mostly rocks and various bits of trees and plants, but she thoughtfully chucks a few of the more civilized pieces into the deepest part of the lake. No reason to take chances, after all.

The jaguar-maw is gone, sheared clean away along with parts of the upper cliff, all of which have fallen into the cenote and, after a little while, completely blocked it. The river is now taking a new course, down and over the destroyed cliff in a whole series of mini-falls, then across the top of the valley like it should and down into the lake. Hopefully it will also work its way down into any underground remnants that may still exist and destroy them comprehensively as only erosion can.

It's actually kind of pretty, she decides. The small waterfalls throw up rainbows and spray and make the whole valley much nicer, sort of less intimidating. The storm clouds have cleared and it's a brand new day.

After she made it to the surface again last night, she has vague memories of coaxing the jump bike to shore next to the jetty and its small wooden hut, hoping every second that the main power wouldn't cut out and cause it to sink like a stone. Since it was still running, sort of, she was able to walk it along the irregular wooden boards of the pier and into the shed, hoping that getting it out of the rain and under a roof might be enough to prevent any further damage. Then she'd stripped off all her clothes, evoked flames all around herself for a few seconds to dry herself off, and fallen asleep on the splintery timbers of the floor from sheer exhaustion.

There is a slight possibility of irradiation. The blast will have had that peculiar flat seismic waveform that nuclear detonations do, but this was the smallest possible yield and relatively clean. All the rain will have helped with that too, laying down the heavy particles in a thin layer of black rain mostly lost amongst the wider sedimentation of the storm. By the time they manage to send in someone to look at it she'll be long gone, and the jungle will have started to swallow any evidence that may still remain.

The Jaguar autonomous drones will present a pretty puzzle for anyone who stumbles across one, but outside of their hermetic storage cylinders and abandoned in the jungle, she doesn't think they'll last very long. Too many complicated pieces and moving parts, unlike the jump bike and all the other things she found that were still working. Without their guiding intelligence they are relatively stupid and will probably default to automatic behaviours, such as wandering around mapping the area until they fall over, trying to engage in automated resource scavenging for materials that no longer exist, and concealing themselves from the enemy as best they can and then shutting down to conserve energy until such time as they receive orders that never come.

Thoughtfully, she starts to pull on her jungle gear again. Some people would have thought twice about just standing out in the middle of an open valley completely naked and enjoying the view, but Cleo is not one of those people. So when she saw how beautiful the post-storm sunrise was, all tangled and orange-gold with distant sunlit clouds, she walked straight out into the middle of it, took a deep breath at how stunning and emotive it all was, and then stood there frigging herself for all the birds and animals to see until all her tension was gone and she happily roared out loud.

~*~