From the east came a thunderhead: a great dark castle of a cloud, lumbering hard up the Wyoming plains, blackening the rising sun, scattering herds of buffalo under its gray, rumbling, unnatural twilight. Cheyenne hunting parties galloped home to their stake at the base of the mountains where in their teepees they hunkered down against the oncoming fury. At speed the storm crashed into the immovable spears of Trout Peak, around which it billowed and sparked, and boiled up into a fearsome anvil of lightning what flashed and quaked the territory for fifty miles.
From the west came a jockey: a girl of fifteen years, waking her mother and brother with joyful hops as she pulled up her boots and flung on her terncoat and burst out the front door, meeting with a gasp the beautiful terror crowning the eastern mountains.
She hurtled the porch railing and sprinted across the ranch to the barn, from which momentarily she emerged wearing the jolt engine on her back. With her shoulders she hoisted the great brass contraption while with thin, trembling fingers she buckled its straps across her chest, thighs, waist, cinching with breathless exertion the leather web what conjoined she and the engine as one.
Straining under this added weight, she scrambled up on to the launch: a shoulder-height wooden structure standing like a stage between the barn and the house. It was ten feet wide by fifty feet long, and surfaced with smooth pine boards polished to a shine. The girl stood at one end and carefully aligned herself with the center of the length. She tightened her leather hood, lowered her goggles, and crouched with her toes precisely shoulder-width apart, heels up, one hand laid forward on the launch for support. With her free hand she grasped the ring at the end of the engine's pull cord and hooked it over the toe of her boot.
"Jackalope!" hollered Ma from the porch. "You just wait a goldarned minute!"
"Ain't no time for no waiting," muttered the girl, and with an Indian whoop she kicked out her leg. At the pull cord's command the engine's igniter sparked and with a white crack of electric light the contraption exploded to life. In Jackalope's peripheral Ma advanced through the grass, shouting something what could not be heard over the pulsating whine of the engine. Without giving her mother so much as a rearward glance, Jack pressed the throttle.
From the engine's exhaust port a white crackling tail of ionized air shot back, and opposing it Jack shot violently forward. On waxed soles she skated down the launch, reaching a speed of forty knots in one second. Surrounded by rushing wind, she held her arms straight out to the sides, stretching taut her terncoat's canvas wings what spanned from her wrists to her ankles. The wind thickened into a torrential river and flowed over and under the canvas and gripped it, and lifted her off her toes, and at that she accelerated and cleared the end of the launch and soared free into the open air.
She circled low over the grass, increasing her throttle, gaining altitude, until within a minute she was a thousand feet over the ranch. At her final pass she spotted Ma's tiny figure, pacing the porch, tugging at her suspenders. Ma was cross now, but she would only remain so if Jackalope returned from the thunderhead empty-handed. Jack brought herself round to an eastward trajectory and with the whole of her little frame trembling with excitement rocketed off toward Trout Peak.
She passed over the lake and reached the pine forest beyond. Here she was assailed by a headwind what threatened to slow her to a speed sufficient to stall her: the first measure deployed by a thunderhead to prevent a jockey raiding its treasures. In response, Jackalope dropped as low as possible - to little more than a hundred feet - so that she skimmed the tops of the pines, close enough to smell the green fragrance of their thrashing branches.
Less than a mile from the mountain's base the headwind found her again. This time she accelerated into it, throttling up to three quarters of the engine's maximum power, nearly to the limit beyond which Ma had forbidden her to go. The contraption sang, its exhaust tail turning from white to orange, its brass chassis rattling the girl enough to click her teeth.
"Where is it?" said Jack into the wind. She swayed up and down, searching the atmosphere with her cheeks. The mountain now filled her field of vision, rocky and treeless, its steep base standing like an infinite wall before her. She would be upon it in seconds, and flying too slow to clear it. "Where is it?" she demanded.
Then she found it: the updraft! It was just where it should be, flowing like an invisible river down the rocky slopes from the storm above. It filled her wings with such a punch it nearly sprained her shoulders. She let it take her, pulling up from the tree line, riding the current over the curve of the mountain and into the base of the thunderhead.
Branches of purple bolts reached out for Jackalope as she passed the summit and soared headfirst into the roaring black tendrils with not a thought in her mind but this: that the thing what she at this moment most dearly desired lay deep in the pounding heart of the storm.
She passed quickly through the wispy shelf cloud and hit the thunderhead's forward flank, where the downdraft dropped on to her hard enough to knock thirty feet off her altitude and the hail went to tenderizing her skull. Even through the thickness of her cured buffalo-leather hood, each jagged hail ball made itself known so that the neighboring thunder was but a murmur under the frightful rattling in her ears.
To ease the hail's angle of attack she dove forty degrees and rode the downdraft to a dizzying speed of two hundred knots, until a pulsing blue glow told her she was nearing the central funnel and she pulled up just in time to meet the warm, swirling updraft. Here the hail turned to glittering snowflakes and the air smelt of tilled earth, its essence having been wrenched from the prairie to be shot up into the frozen sky.
Jackalope cut the throttle and starfished, the canvas wings of her terncoat stretched taut betwixt her outstretched limbs, and the updraft enveloped and lifted her, higher, darker, colder, until her chest felt prickly and breathing became a chore: now she collapsed her limbs and hit the throttle and blasted out of the central updraft and settled into a wide orbit round the thunderhead's churning blue heart.
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Now was the time to wait. She circled like a buzzard, spreading or folding her winged limbs to catch or cut the rolling drafts, holding her altitude, swiveling her gaze, watching and listening. On her hip hung her brother's electrostatic detector, and from it a copper wire ran up her torso and neck, ending at a cotton nugget stuck tight in her ear. If the positives & negatives of the cloud above & below her should decide to reunite themselves, then an invisible bond would seal them and this wire would buzz like a bee, foretelling the explosive birth of a lightning bolt a few seconds hence somewhere within the detector's radius of thirteen feet.
Her brother Chickenhawk had chalked out the math many times: that a jockey flying at sixty knots, upon hearing the electrostatic buzz, would need to throttle to one hundred knots within a space of two seconds if she was to get clear of the bolt's heat perimeter. Anything less and she'd be fried like a fritter.
But it wasn't just avoiding death what kept a jockey on the lookout for lightning; it was the purple crystal made of condensed remnants of shattered atoms, forged in the sun-hot plasma of a bolt, what fused and glowed in the air for but a hummingbird's heartbeat before evaporating into a glittering mist.
Science had christened this elusive material jovinium, and while its nature remained a mystery its use was well resolved: the explosive power contained in even an ounce of the stuff was sufficient to kick-start a locomotive, or drive a steam drill into a marble rock face, or propel a light-weighted jockey into the sky.
The jolt engine now donned by Jackalope had been tinkered by she and her brother in their family workshop back at the ranch. It was an improvement on the engine tinkered by their mother, who likewise had improved on one tinkered by her own pa. Tinkering was a condition what passed strongly from parent to kin, Ma had said. The Dunns bore a narrow family tree, but even going back as far as the founding of the Union, a tinker or two turned up in every generation.
In Jackalope's ear a faraway buzzing now crept up. Static was a-building in the air. She throttled up another twenty knots; the brass contraption whirred higher and lunged forward, tugging along with it the girl. At this speed the canvas between her boots alone gave sufficient lift so that she was free to use her arms without stalling. She unholstered the boltgun from her thigh and swung it up to eye level; clutching its wooden stock in one hand she flicked open its action and with her other hand retrieved a jovinium cartridge from her coat and slid it tenderly into the breech.
She snapped closed the action but stopped herself from latching the hammer, which she had been told many times not to do before being absolutely ready to fire. Thumb off the hammer, Ma had said. Finger off the trigger. This ain't gunpowder to be wasted on stray shots; it's a whole ounce of jovinium, bought with daring and sweat. I ain't got to tell you what it's worth. Pay attention, Ma had said.
The buzz in her ear spiked, and Jackalope crushed the throttle, and the world turned white, squinting the girl's eyes even behind her dark goggles, and on her back she felt the sky shudder and explode - a crack what would've blown out her ears were not cotton & leather protecting them. And then a pulse of heat what would have boiled her skin off her were not wool, canvas, and leather covering nearly its every square inch. And lastly, the wave passed through her - a force yet undetected by science that only jockeys knew by the feel of it - trembling her guts, prickling her teeth, flashing sparks behind her eyes, and deep inside her ears - inside her head - she heard the crystal sing.
She cut the throttle and spun herself round. The bolt itself was long gone, but where it had been, above her and ten yards out, in its wavy wake of fast-cooling air, something glittered purple and white.
From her hip she aimed & fired the boltgun. But the trigger just clicked limply.
"Aw, heck!" she hollered into the wind, and she latched the hammer and fired again.
It was like the real thing only smaller: a crack what split the atmosphere and whitened her goggles, as from the barrel was loosed a miniature lightning bolt branching wildly some twenty yards forward. Near the end of its crooked tendrils something flashed. Then it vanished, and Jack holstered the gun and throttled hard into the wake, toward where she had spotted the glittering a second before.
Steam swept her cheeks and fogged her vision; she peered through it and glimpsed two quivering marbles dropping from the sky. She had been too slow: the crystal had partially disintegrated before she was able to marbleize it whole. Yet she had marbleized some of it; but could she now collect it before it hit the ground?
In vain she reached out for them but they slid through her fingers and plummeted on, spiraling out as they fell. Keeping her eyes on them, Jack swung round in a sharp curve and followed the marbles down, accelerating to match their terminal velocity, losing forty yards of altitude per second. The marbles grew closer, closer, trembling and spinning in the rushing updraft. From her coat Jackalope drew a small glass beaker and pulled its cork.
Now the swirling opaque mist around her vanished as she dropped out of the thunderhead, revealing the jagged mountaintop not six-thousand feet below. Perhaps forty seconds left. Thirty seconds, if she meant to ensure survival.
"One Mississippi," she counted. "Two Mississippi."
Falling like this, there was no sense of gravity, nor acceleration, nor of any other worldly force save the wind, and it was thus easy in such a pleasant condition to forget one's anxieties and lose track of time. Many's the jockey who, after dodging bolts like a hummingbird, had yet perished in a crater due to his mind wandering during free-fall.
With gentle bursts of thrust Jack slid up to the nearest marble. It was not quite round and so it danced in queer little orbits.
"Ten Mississippi," she counted. "Eleven Mississippi."
Even with its outer layer marbleized, jovinium was unstable. A hard tap would combust it. Many's the jockey who blew his hand off his wrist for want of gentleness. Ladies make the best jockeys, Ma had said.
Jackalope raised the beaker, centering its mouth just next to the wobbling marble. She moved her wrist in little circles to match it.
"Nineteen Mississippi," she counted.
With her other hand, still pinching the cork, she caressed the marble toward the beaker, guiding it past the mouth, and then moving the beaker so the marble slid down its tapered length and finally came to rest where the narrowing glass walls gripped it. An even pressure around a marble's circumference would reduce its want to combust. With her finger Jack pressed it a bit further, securing it enough that it ought not dislodge during her flight home.
"Twenty-eight Mississippi," she counted.
She replaced the cork and secured the beaker in a padded loop within her coat. She eyed the second marble, frolicking not a yard away. She moved toward it, fingering an empty beaker.
"Thirty Mississippi." The mountains were all around her now, but with the river below cutting through them there might yet be a thousand more feet than there seemed. About eight more seconds. Was it possible?
"Aw, heck," said Jack, and throwing out her limbs, she glided herself into an angled trajectory and accelerated. Wind gripped her wings and lifted them, and the sinking tug of gravity once more filled her chest. The jolt engine on her back whirred joyfully as she pulled up against the updraft, throwing a great glowing tail out behind her, and in an orange arc she cleared the rocks with fifty feet to spare and rocketed west over the pines.