You live to make my life difficult, don't you?
Diver - Part I
Ken hurtled towards his foe, wings outspread and roaring with flame as the heat from the lava set the fabric alight. No diver should fly this close to the stream and he knew it, but in this narrow tunnel he had no choice. He blotted out the screaming of alarms through his earpiece as the cooling systems began to fail and gritted his teeth against the searing pain on his skin. Bullets screamed through the air around him and he gripped his blade tightly.
He would only get one shot.
"Ken, don't you dare dive into that volcano!"
Ken Ghorus ignored the protests of his ever-fretting girlfriend, running his hands down the belts of equipment strapped to his chest. Super-lightweight fabric wings? Check. Full-body coolant system? Check. Full-body camera for hypernet coverage? Definitely check. Ken turned around and gave a cheeky grin to the crowds of bikini-clad spectators cheering him on, his irate beau and even the stoic faces of the native lizard men resort staff who had seen it all before. Ken turned, ran to the edge of the caldera and leapt.
Oblivion. A scant moment of nothingness, empty of experience save the rushing of the wind. Then Ken spread open his arms and the mechanical wings unfolded like a flower from his back. Hooking his fingers into the handholds he swept down towards the seething lava below, gracefully navigating the updrafts as the microscopic cameras networked throughout his suit captured and transmitted the experience in nearly a hundred and thirty thousand degrees, real-time, all across the Convocation.
A soft chiming in his ear signalled Ken that he was descending too close to the molten rock for his suit to handle, so he swept towards one of the updrafts and triggered manual flight. Some divers made use of a suit's infra-red detection kit to find the drafts, but Ken had learnt the trick of feeling the rising currents. You could catch an updraft and slow your descent with it and if you were really sharp stay gliding for half an hour over the fire. There were legends of divers who had caught updrafts strong enough to fly out of the basin without engaging manual, but these were rare enough to be the stuff of legend and more than a few divers had lost their lives in the search of the perfect draft.
With a soft hiss, manual flight engaged and Ken pulled back on the wings, beating them with raw arm strength augmented by the hydraulic engines of the suit, powerful enough to draw back the massive wings and capture the rising air. It took less than two minutes for him to fly to the top, skillfully flitting from updraft to updraft, a mere three times the length of the descent. Ken landed lightly on the hotel's front porch, the wings folding seamlessly into the suit as the crowds of adoring partygoers rushed forward to raise him on their shoulders. He grinned and shrugged sheepishly to his thin-lipped lover, who shook her head but rushed ahead to join the party anyway.
It was a life of thrills, of danger, of passion. It was a diver's life. Ken thought it would last forever.
He was wrong.
More in the next couple of days. This one's the selected story until it reaches completion, then I'll pick the next one from the assorted suggestions.
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Topic: Short Request Stories (Closed) (Read 1096 times)