Free War Surf by M. M. Buckner Page B

it?”
    “But your lamebrain arrest doesn’t leave us any choice.”
    “Katherine, that’s absurd.”
    Kat and I circled each other practically nose to nose in the center of my observatory. The key to her heart bounced on its silver chain and caught the light every time she moved.
    “We have to surf Heaven,” she ranted.
    “No. We can surf the Lorelei . It’s a major Class Nine, and it’ll earn us more than enough points to take back first rank.”
    The others watched from the sidelines, probably hoping for action. In our long, eventful relationship, Kat and I had more than once come to blows.
    “They’re calling us dinosaurs.” Kat’s front teeth protruded dangerously over her lower lip. “They say we’re obsolete. Nasir, they’re laughing at us.”
    As I cower here in this airless fluorescent room waiting for my future to unreel, how well I recollect our grim mood after the seafarm fiasco. My ego was rubbed raw. When a surf goes right, it’s transcendent, but if you get cocky and let details slide, you can make a royal botch of things. Kat swore we would not let that happen again. We would prepare with utmost exactitude. We would focus, pay attention, itemize.
    “But that won’t be enough to get us through Heaven!” I roared.
    Kat and I had been wrangling for days. She called me a mouse. I called her a redheaded fascist. I spouted breathtaking lies to scare my friends away from Heaven. My excuses ranged from limp to fairly ingenious, but I never gave the real reason. That was too shady and convoluted to explain.
    Just as I was about to sputter one more annihilating insult, Verinne interrupted. “Nasir, please. I need this.”
    Cara Verinne. Her chalky brows rose in two hopeful arcs toward her widow’s peak, and her dry gray eyes urged me to yield. Verinne wanted Heaven to be her swan song, her grand finale. Quietly, she coughed into her handkerchief with a hacking sound that cut through my resolve. It killed me to disappoint Verinne.
    “We’ll vote,” Kat said. “Verinne and me, that’s two for Heaven. Who else?”
    Grunze nibbed his bald head and gave me a sheepish grin. “I’m with the girls on this.”
    “Grunzie!” Betrayed by my best friend.
    “Ha, three votes. Majority rules.” Kat sashayed around my futon, gloating.
    “Screw voting. We WILL NOT do this surf.” I went bonzo and started throwing cheese snacks. I threatened to lock up the tequila and cancel the Web site. I was desperate. For a fleeting instant, I actually considered telling them the truth about Heaven.
    Thank the idol gods, events tend to arrange themselves by laws other man human will. That very day, an enormous CME occurred. For the uninitiated, that’s “Coronal Mass Ejection.” Basically, it’s an aneurysm on the sun. Picture shock waves of solar wind spewing out from the sun’s corona and colliding with the Earth’s magnetic field. Intense X rays blast the ionosphere, and gigatons of solar protons auger in to zap communications. Lethal radiation builds up, threatening even the most spaceworthy passenger cars and disturbing the peace of war-surfing parties. This timely CME put Heaven beyond the pale.
    But the canceled trip left Verinne devastated. She tried not to show it, although even Winston noticed her long silences. By that time, Verinne was spending half her waking hours in acute bioNEM therapy, and she admitted to me privately one night that it wasn’t helping. I was the only one who knew how fast her time was running out.
    To comfort Verinne and placate my crew, I offered to underwrite the full cost of surfing the Lorelei , a mega-challenging Class Nine rain-harvesting ship owned by Greenland.Com. Like Heaven, the Lorelei would be a “first assault,” meaning no other crew had tried it yet. If we performed well, the Lorelei would put us back on top.
    Let me be frank though. My main objective was to restore Sheeba’s faith in me. That seafarm episode had left her quiet and gloomy, but if anything,