Slowdive

God she was beautiful! I sat and watched her last flight in awe; well it wasn’t so much a flight as a plummet. Flaming contrails spread wide from the stubby support wings as if grabbing for support with incandescent wings. If only Shiva were here to see and not encased within the now fatally crippled craft I could see from the confines of my car.

Let me introduce myself to those who are not familiar to the world of the professional transport executive, wheelman, air jockey or whatever term you use for those who have an excess of capability with mechanised forms of transport. My name is Hyper, ok that’s not my real name but it’s what I post on my advertising BBS tags. Now I specialise in wheels, if it has them then I am a veritable Titan at using it. My current vehicle, a sleek Kalitech Sidewinder, is the cream of Grey Op Culture cool. I used to be a racing driver but the challenge just wasn’t there and I got bored. It affected my races and concentration and sure enough I got fired. All the corporate bullshit jacked me off anyway. That was when Shiva entered my life. This elfin slender woman who radiated so much confidence and eyes that danced with razor sharp thrills clothed in a battered flight suit. She said she was a fan so I told her to sling it as I wasn’t in the mood for a blow job. She handed me a card and told me that she had a job for a real good driver. I told her to hire a taxi what she said next blew me away.

That first job defined the rest of my life. Shiva’s thing was speed, hairy balls out nut tightening pulse pounding sweat inducing finger whitening speed! What was more amazing is that she flew naked. No of course she wore a flight suit, what naked means in the Grey Op Culture dictionary is she was without cybernetic enhancements. The correct term is that Shiva Cantrell was an exhibitionist. Thing was so was I back then and that’s why she came to me. Shiva needed someone who could drive a combat team out of an area of electronic and magnetic anomaly. The driver had to be lightening quick and non-enhanced. The combat team itself would likely be mainly out of it with the area being bathed in such cyber-unfriendly radiations. Once clear she was going to swoop from the above the radiation and commit to a high speed magna-latch before flying off with the ground vehicle in the same manner as an eagle would a rabbit. God she was so quick I pissed my pants at the clamp on and passed out from the rapid acceleration, I’d never had so much fun. I was in love and then I spoiled it.

I decided to get myself neural enhancements and a blood pressure equaliser. I had been embarrassed by the ease with which I had passed out and thought maybe getting my nerves jacked and reducing my susceptibility to high-gee manoeuvres would help make us a perfect team. I even got them hardened so Electro-magnetic fields wouldn’t slow me down. It was the wrong move. Shiva threw a shit-fit. I hadn’t known that way back when one of her former boyfriends had come back from an enhancement appointment, he’d changed. The metal had eroded his mind and he’d forced himself on her before throwing himself from their 20th floor habitat. Two months in hospital being put back together and turning down limb replacement after limb replacement for cell grown real meat no matter what the cost had embittered her to the chrome tinted world of cyber. She hadn’t spoken to me since I got wired.

I followed her career from there. She’d gone corporate military. They get all the best flying crackerjacks and she knew it. No exhibitionist could beat her. There was very little but a total Borg that could out fly her physically but no-one could out fly her mentally as uncluttered by wire as she was. She didn’t do combat unless she could avoid it so she got most of the evac and insert jobs. If you needed a team threaded through the eye of a needle before being dropped into a hot zone that could melt diamonds then Shiva was your pilot. That was why she was where she was. Turned out the aforementioned boyfriend had survived his fall by being full-borged. He’d gone corporate military as well but for the opposition. His Corp was at war with Shiva’s. They’d viral bombed one of her Corp’s buildings and then wrecked it by crash diving several Full- Borg piloted VTOL combat craft into key structural points and into the top of the lift shafts! Shiva had volunteered to take survivors from the roof. The job was tricky and dangerous as hell. I turned up after catching the newsflash on Citywide Today with Gervin Testudo. She had less than 4 minutes to get her craft to the roof and evac survivors huddling on the burning rooftop and then clear before the whole building collapsed. All had gone well as the waspish craft cleared the ground with a scream of fire and neatly inserted itself in less than 30 seconds at the parapet. The whole world watched as she mimicked the sway of the building keeping it steady for the survivors. The sheer joy was wiped away as a terrible figure threw wreckage from itself and emerged battered but not down from one of the suicide craft. The Ex-lover tore one of his destroyed crafts Vulcan’s from its rigging and interfaced with it as the shocked escapees gawped with horror. The symphony of metal jacketed rain tore through them as he opened fire whilst Shiva danced her crafts tail away and brought her own guns to bear. That was when the roof blew thrusting steel and Fusioncrete upwards and flipping Shiva’s craft before tearing its stabilisers off in a shower of thermite rain.

And now she fell as a Phoenix to final rest. Without warning an internal fire blew the burning wreckages tail off changing the fragile crafts trajectory. It was heading towards a residential arcology. The life loss would be terrible. All seemed lost as Shiva was surely already dead. That was when the nose lifted and the safety wing spars extended causing the craft to halt and affect a clumsy slow dive stall turn. It had to of been the ugliest manoeuvre I had ever seen Shiva pull but the flames made it transcendental. Flares took place of lead wing feathers and the nose edged gracefully towards the polluted wastage of a river before the spars finally folded and condemned Shiva’s coffin to its interminable plunge into that black cemetery.

She was pulled from that wreckage not much more than a burned shell but the medical teams knew best. They replaced her destroyed nerves and damaged body with artificials and cybernetic parts. They were top of the line provided by a grateful public. I knew she would have hated it so I intervened. She’s sat by me now as we head down the highway. The orderly was a little surprised when my Taser rendered him unconscious, the explosives weren’t easy to get and the insurance companies going to have a shit-fit over the explanation but she can’t do it for herself. They won’t let her. They’ve slo-moded all her nerves so she’d be stuck in a perpetual space walk speed movement cycle to stop her killing herself until they can get her a cyber-shrink to help her adjust. The unfinished bridge rumbles under my wheels and I turn for one last look at her delicate features now free of tubes. The chrome plate over the ravaged right side of her face glimmers in the reddening dusk and her lips slowly blow me a kiss as her hand finds mine and she smiles one last smile and mouths her thanks. As I hit the ejector mechanism I’m rocketed up and back as my beloved Sidewinder launches over the straits. As the explosives tear apart all I have ever loved tears run down my face and mercifully rain comes to hide them as the police cruisers wait for me below. God she was beautiful!

All Characters and Story “Slowdive” copyright Tony Bennett 08-11-2005