Getting on the road, you take the opportunity to play some music a friend sent you on your PDA the other night. You worry it's rude that you're only getting to it now, but as the
chill tones start, you forget about that. Huh. You have no idea where this comes from, but you can kinda dig it as the morning air streams through the car's open frame. Ahhhhh.
Everything's still so sleepy. No one out of their houses, no one else on the road aside from a single street-cleaner drone. Before long you reach the pointy tip of the loop, where a battery station sits next to the junction out onto the freeway. You're good on charge, though, so you pass it, cranking the velociter up to 80 kph freeway speed. At this rate, the drive'll take a little over an hour. Doesn't look like there's anyone else on the freeway right now, so you might go even faster...
[] ...but best to play it safe.
[] ...and have some real fun.
The playlist continues, and the road curves gently out and around the Eastern arm of the mountains, rising up a few meters onto metal struts. It's mostly empty salt plains stretching around, dotted occasionally with colorful hot-spring pools and thickets of brineflutes. On the mountain-facing side of the road, though, there are occasional stands of coopers
1, which thicken into clumps of red forest on the foothills. You see an occasional supply truck coming the other way, and one or two other vehicles on your side as you begin passing places that feed onto the road. Nothing much, just a handful of of hamlets and communes with pit stops. You think there's a scientific outpost of some kind around here, but you've never really looked into it.
Once you've come around the mountain, the road points dead North, the hills on one side and the open plains on the other. Some of the towers of Urzek start poking over the horizon before long, though there's still most of the drive to go. Looks like the playlist will last for a bunch of it. At about the halfway point, you see a big, grey octagon sitting on the landscape way off to the right. The regional Defense Force base. There's a huge fenced-off tract of land around it, though not nearly so huge as the Aerospace port that comes up on the left in a dozen kilometers.
Even now you see an aircraft coming down on the descent. Doesn't look like an orbiter though. There's always talk about building a space elevator somewhere, but nothing ever materializes. There's good progress on the magnetic launch at this port, though. Apparently it might finally start running sometime this year.
The ASP runs all the way up to the city, and the road starts rising up higher to accommodate the access ways below. As you come up by the terminal, you pass under a big legged tram astride the highway, parked at an elevated station. The buildings rise high into the sky up ahead; great tiered towers of slender profile, most with greenery festooning their intermediate shelves. There's a fair amount of other vehicles now as the highway joins the other arterial roads curving up above the ground, but you head for an exit, needing to go down to street level. You can see the aquatic transport pipes hanging on the underside of the freeway as you descend, their transparent tubes branching off and running in amongst the buildings and above the pedestrian paths.
[] You begin looking for a place to park, after which you can make your way on foot.
[] You start heading directly for your destination.
1. A genus of native flora. Similar to trees, but growing in arcing hoops with two ends planted in the ground. Along the spine of their arches, big blades fan out for photosynthesis and respiration, which range from red to burgundy in color.
Author
Topic: Operand [Quest] (Read 5008 times)