Aloft (Petronaut Tales) by Ben Rovik Read Free Book Online

birds flew by, the little brown-haired girl flapped along with them with her arms perpendicular to her chest.  The wind blew past her cheeks, and she vowed that one day the wind wouldn’t just pass her by.  It would keep her aloft.
    Ensie wiped her eyes, not knowing why they were full of tears.  She put a hand on Cooper’s knee and felt his body against her side as they sat and breathed together for a long time.
     
     

 
    Iggy bit her lower lip as she wrenched at the port-side propeller.  She adjusted the bucket-shaped canister, tilting it perpendicular to the ground, and then slapped a level on its domed top.  The oily bubble went sleepwalking back and forth between the lines.  She manhandled the propeller with her leathery hands repeatedly until, finally, the level stayed put in the center of the glass vial.
    “Calibrated,” she called out.  She wiped a finger along the Flicker’s brushed silver fuselage.  The morning sun caught the machine nicely, and even without its final trim and polish, it was a good-looking craft.  (Much easier on the eyes than those bizarre sketches of floating platforms that were circulating elsewhere in the Aerial squad.)
    The Flicker was five meters long, with a body like a cigar and two tubular wings curving up and back from near the nose.  The wings didn’t stick out perpendicular from the body but curved back along it, like a prawn’s antennae, so seen from above the craft looked more like a forward-pointing arrow than a cross.  The pilot sat up front, with two handlebars at shoulder height on either side of his or her body.  The handlebars changed the pitch of the propellers when pushed forward or back, and changed their tilt when twisted beneath the pilot’s palm, for steering during the ascent and descent of each jump.  Footpedals controlled the jumping action of the ranine box.  The small pedal on the left was for single jumps.  A wider pedal, covering much of the floorspace in the tiny sitting area, controlled the force of the box for continuous travel mode. 
    They’d decided that asking a pilot to reliably time each jump to the precise moment of impact—the end of the last jump—would be asking for trouble over a long trip.  Instead, by turning a dial, the pilot could switch the Flicker into continuous travel mode after the first jump.  That way, each time the Flicker descended from a jump, as soon as the suspension felt the impact with the ground, the ranine box would automatically respond by launching the machine upwards again at the low point of the jump, so as to make travel as efficient and foolproof as possible.  The flatter the angle of the pedal, the greater the force of each jump, while keeping it just barely depressed would allow for lighter, shallower hops.
    From across the testing grounds, Sir Tomas gave Iggy a nod.  She inserted the ignition pin into the socket and gave it a twist.  The two propellers buzzed into life, creating modest downdrafts that sent dust and flakes of grass swirling through the air.  Iggy shielded her eyes and ignored the dirt and petrolatum fumes that wafted into her nose.  She hustled away from the machine.  This inaugural test wouldn’t be a manned one; they were going to stay nice and far from the concept vehicle as they sent it skyward for the first time. 
    A length of wire traced a shining line from the jump pedal all the way to where Ensie and Tomas were standing.  Ensie unspooled the last half-meter of wire from the long steel reel and snipped the end off.  She wet her lips as she wrapped the thin length of metal thread securely around the base of a wooden handle.  They needed a way to depress the jump pedal from a distance, without having a person physically in the pilot’s seat, so Ensie had rigged up a temporary pulley system behind the thin pedal.  A loop of wire was draped over the pedal and fed through the pulleys back to their vantage point on the ground.  Yanking the wire would pull once on