***Wings…it’s…have you ever felt like there’s just something you’ve got to do…compelled to do?***
“Sure. That doesn’t mean I always do it….ugggghhh!” He’d cut that pass a little close, his boots snagging the top of a boulder half hidden in the depths of a crater. He yawed sideways until his suit gyros stabilized him and put him back on course. Clad in a hypersuit, boosting with each leap, Winger was making giant strides toward his target, literally fifty-meter leaps across the rubbly terrain, a land of churned-up regolith, rolling hills that looked like sand dunes at the Outer Banks and black shadows. The sun was low on the horizon and most ground detail was washed out. He knew the edge of Copernicus was somewhere ahead—he could see the far crater walls in the distance, terraced and slumped with eons of landslides, but judging distance was nearly impossible on this slagheap of a world. He could see the central mountains on the crater floor, looking for all the world like gigantic boils and he didn’t want to go careening over the edge with no warning.
Just to the left of the mountain tops, a rectilinear gridwork of lights identified the Tian Jia base.
Plus he had a bad headache to boot.
“Dana, my vision’s becoming blurred. And my skin’s crawling. Could you please back off whatever it is you’re doing and be still for a while? I can’t control these boosts with you jiggering my neurons like some kind of water faucet. Enough, already!”
But the shakes wouldn’t stop and his skin seemed to be burning and his eyes were watering and it was like when he had the flu as a child, with his whole body burning up with fever and every nerve end seemed to be on fire and his head seemed about to explode. He saw the ground racing up as this leap came to an end and it was all he could do to avoid faceplanting himself right into the dirt.
He skidded sideways and stabbed his wristpad to shut off the next boost. But his own forward momentum threw him sideways into a car-sized crater, which he hit dead on with his right shoulder-- Jeez, that hurts!-- and rolled like a limp doll until his momentum was finally spent and he lay on his side crumpled and dazed and shaking like a dog getting a bath.
He lay still for a moment, systematically testing each limb.
“Well, nothing’s broken, no thanks to you—“
Now, the shakes grew even worse.
“Dana, stop it…shut down already. Can’t you just exit and form up loose inside my helmet?”