Croatoan, Earth : Church of Echoes : Part 170

Cursing their luck, the knights and Daniel looked toward the facility, a facility located smack dab in the middle of one of Jolliox's largest military base. The base was over seventy miles wide, and with it being on the coast, the city surrounding it was easily five times that size. What's more, a naval base abutted it, located right at the city's edge. That base occupied most of Badwater Bay, the sheltered inlet Gaushauk relied upon to protect them from the violent storms that seasonally raked the coast and caused giant waves to crash down on the less protected coastal cities.

To reach the facility, they were going to have to traverse forty miles of city, a large part of which was populated by the families of the soldiers and naval personnel stationed there. And if they somehow managed to cross that stretch of city without alerting the Peacekeepers who also called the city home, they would have to breach the perimeter of the base and somehow survive a thirty mile trek through military-controlled real estate to reach the facility. Daunting as that task seemed, it wasn't even their last hurdle. The facility would have its own security to deal with. As powerful as Daniel was, all it would take is for him to lose focus once. To those who knew him, this was worrisome. Daniel had the attention span of a caged canary.

These thoughts and worries filled the heads of those around Daniel, and he listened in on all save those who shielded their minds from him. In a situation where everything needed to go right like the one they faced, the traitor in their midst could do real damage and get them all killed. That's the only thing that worried Daniel, that and the prospect of being hit again during the infiltration while that spy was passing by overhead again.

"It's impressive, no?" Weird asked. Daniel revved his leafcutter's engine for no particular reason.

"No." Weird frowned. It wasn't the response he was hoping for. Gausshauk was one of the two largest cities on the planet, the other being Rapture, the city that surrounds the beached end of the Iastar Vodduv. It was located down on the Shag, the shell-like depression that was eighty mile wide edge of the crater created by the saucer when it crashed to the ground. That city was located thirty miles to the west and could only be reached by sea or by gravity craft since the walls of the Shag were nearly vertical. So it being thirty miles away didn't mean a thing. Due to the edges of the crater extending out into the ocean that one would have to circumvent, the trip was easily sixty miles by boat. That was only ten miles shy of the distance they'd just traveled from Tollymakko village.

Gaushauk was also on a plateau, but one that had been elevated to around three hundred feet the fall of the saucer. The hill they were on was another sixty above and was the last wrinkle of land the Iastar Vodduv created when it crashed.

To reach the naval base, one had to travel a long winding coastal road with precipitous drops that zigzagged back and forth from the top of the plateau to the shore down below. From Daniel's perspective, the city was beautiful and clearly thriving. There was lots of traffic, people were out walking and enjoying their day. Cars with rubber tires like the ones on Earth filled the streets. Dax told him they were called wheelers. Daniel told him they were sedans, since most of them looked like a Toyota Corolla with a bulldog's snout.

That was the traffic on the ground. There was a whole other street level above those on the ground, occupied entirely by gravity craft. Some of them were sedans like the ones on the ground. Others looked like leafcutters with an enclosed cab for two. But most of the aerial traffic was comprised by leafcutters.

Daniel found this level of traffic fascinating. They had multilayer traffic like this aboard the saucers, but discipline exhibited before him was truly impressive. Everyone of the aerial crafts flew at the exact same height. It was like there was an invisible surface along which they glided. Traffic aboard the saucers was never this coordinated. That could be due to the control difference of the gravity craft here on Jolliox. He'd noticed that the leafcutters handled with almost the exact same precision as the truck he used to drive back in Kansas. The leafcutters stopped on a dime, turned on a pin, and banked like a bird. There was no free gliding or bobbing involved. When you dialed the height up to a certain distance, it stayed exactly that distance from the ground except on hard drops where the ground disappeared suddenly from under it. Aboard the saucers, the gravity craft bobbed and drifted when you turned. A certain amount of space was required to bring one to a full stop, and when you changed height, there was always a period of lag as it responded. He had to give it to the people of Jolliox, they had developed a far superior version of the craft they had undoubtedly copied.