~~~
Rolling again, the CCV had started heading north and westward up as close as it could get to the shore and still maintain speeds along the edge of what was labeled on the screens around him as King William Island. After a short while Peter pulled to a stop at the edge of a cliff overlooking an extensive, and very cold looking mess of ocean and ice.
“Well, crew…” Peter hesitated. He looked around at the two kids in the backseat and Hattie sat forward anticipating something exciting. “It’s time we take this crawler up in the air.”
The agent turned and started throwing a couple switches and then tapped in a very quick set of commands on the touch screens. Hattie turned at the same moment Josh did to look at each other in amazement. The very low rumble of the CCV’s engine came to a halt for once in a very long couple of days. Then half a second later the beginnings of a giant fan noise started roaring to life. A couple clunks, like the final parts of a commercial plane were being sealed up and secured for travel beneath waiting nervous passengers resounded through the cabin. Chunk! A grind, and then: Ker-clunk! The fan noise was turning more into the chassis-shaking rumble of a jet engine like a plane as well.
Josh leaned forward and raised his voice some against the growing noise of the engine. “Are you saying we’re going to fly?!”
Agent Bartholomew turned around and got his eye and flashed a grin. “Yes, sir! This is my favorite part!”
He’d turned around smiling ear to ear and folded his arms before him, apparently in an effort to relax and enjoy the sensation, before Josh could get any more questions in. The young boy turned with wide-eyed amazement to Hattie as he felt the vehicle wobble a bit as it lifted off the ground. She did not look well.
“I hate flying,” Hattie grumbled and folder her arms, attempting to squeeze as far into her large seat as possible. “They made me go in a helicopter one time when they first contacted me about the Yeti. …I threw up.”
Josh slid towards his side of the vehicle as far as he could, not wanting to be in splatter range in case the urge returned to the girl beside him. The CCV displayed the hills and snow around them dropping below their view on the LCD screens and slowly turned such that the truck faced northward, according to the over-lay compass. Then it pitched slightly forward and began to move.
The vehicle never did rise far off the ground, perhaps only a couple or a few thousand feet but from that elevation the displays showed a beautiful display of ocean, ice and snow-covered islands ahead of them. As they moved the view accelerated and did so quickly. Josh looked for a speed on the screens in front of Peter but the closest thing he could find to numbers like miles-per-hour was one that flickered between the upper 600’s and lower 700’s and had lettering below it that said “knots”. Another smaller display just below that had numbers that would swing up and down a little more aggressively and it said “calculated knots” under it. Ultimately, Joshua gave up trying to figure out how fast they were going compared to a car but he knew it was very, very fast based on how quickly islands were floating past them outside the displays. He decided to not interfere with questions to relax and enjoy the scenery, though he did wonder if his mother would ever forgive him for agreeing to the trip if she were ever to find out.