In one of those “easy for machines, inconceivable for humans” operations, a coupler on the glider’s nose ended up being snapped to the tail end of a flynk chain that presently got concatenated onto the up leg. Rapidly brought up to speed while still in the confines of the flynk barn, the glider pitched upward sharply as it emerged into the light. It began to rise vertically, drawn behind the chain. Nothing was connected to the glider’s tail—the loop had been deliberately severed—and so the system had ceased being an Aitken loop. It was now a vertical bullwhip, accelerating the glider to higher and higher velocity as the Knickstelle at its apex propagated skyward. Lying now on his back, staring straight up over Kath Two’s shoulders, Ty could see small aerodynamic vanes that had deployed from the fuselage of the flynk ahead of them. These, like all the other vanes on all the other thousands of flynks in the chain, effected tiny adjustments to keep the whip trimmed in just the right configuration. The result, a few moments later, was that the glider came snapping over the top just as its connection to the last flynk was severed. In a few seconds it had been hauled two thousand meters straight up and let go with a velocity of a few hundred kilometers per hour. Meanwhile, every other flynk in the chain had decoupled itself fore and aft, causing the entire chain to disintegrate into a linear cloud of identical fragments, each headed in a different direction. Each flynk, sensing that it was aloft and alone, automatically deployed large tail vanes that turned it from a bullet into a badminton shuttlecock. The flynks rapidly slowed down to their terminal velocity, turned nose down, and began to fall toward the ground. A slight canting of the vanes caused them to begin spinning like maple seeds, further slowing their descent, and in this manner the entire swarm began to descend in the direction of an empty lot adjacent to the flynk barn.
All of which had to be pictured in Ty’s mind’s eye, since they already had left it far behind. But he had seen it many times, as it was one of the basic operations carried out many times a day at any aitrain port. The same flynks, organized in a different way, might just as easily have effected a high-altitude rendezvous with an orbiting bolo, or collected an aircraft and drawn it back downward to safe haven in the barn.
The first half hour of the flight was a little unsettling to Ty’s stomach as Kath Two made a few sudden maneuvers, perhaps because she had sensed good air in one direction or bad in another. People who were accustomed to flight in powered aircraft frequently had trouble adjusting to the unpredictability of gliders, but Ty, who had done it before, understood that Kath Two was just hunting for the right way to inject them into the mountain wave hovering invisibly in the upper atmosphere above the Andes crest. He knew she had found it when the juking and jiving stopped and the back of the seat pressed him forward with palpable acceleration. They were in level, steady flight now, proceeding north at something like three hundred kilometers per hour. Kath Two’s task henceforth would be to look far into their future with her lidar-enhanced sensorium and make small adjustments needed to dodge pockets of rough air.
Everyone became somewhat listless and fell to reading books or napping. Sitting a couple of rows behind Ty, occupying most of a pair of seats, was Beled Tomov. He was in an attitude of repose, whitish-blue eyes half closed and unfocused, but aimed generally out the window. He was probably trying to maintain a visual fix on the horizon as a way to stave off motion sickness. In any case he did not look to be in a social mood.
Over a series of meals and drinks since the initial meeting of the Seven, Ty had been able to piece together a vague picture of the mission that Kath Two and Beled had recently completed in Beringia. Apparently, Beled had been trying to maintain some kind of threadbare cover story about being Survey. Fortunately, this had now been dispensed with and Doc was openly addressing him as Lieutenant Tomov.