Chapter 22

I summoned my old motorcycle helmet, and set it on my head, strapping it on. I set my navigation for the center of Little Diomede Island, and lifted at 5x, or 40kph, spending 187.5 neutral points a second. Once I was above the fog it got much brighter, I was dry thanks to my frictionless skill, and I followed the route that my navigation skill provided, it gave me a total distance of 5005 kilometers after I asked it to optimize for avoiding detection, and high speed travel.

I started kicking up the speed, finding that the air seemed to slide over me, I wasn’t even getting chilled from the wind. The surge from 9x to 10x took me over the sound barrier, and I immediately dropped back to 9x to see if I could hear the bang. Even after several seconds I heard nothing, so I guessed that my frictionless skill was keeping air from building up in front of me, creating the shockwave of a sonic boom.

I got up to 12x, which was costing me 450 points a second, and would get me there in just under an hour. My big turn came up, and I had to spend points quickly to increase my strength, as the G forces involved in changing direction were severe. I didn’t have wings or other surfaces to help change my direction, just a change in orientation and direction of thrust. But, as my strength doubled, so did my body’s resilience. Once I got back on course, my arrival timer showed I had 20 minutes of flight left. I bumped up my strength again, and hit 13x, or 10240 kph, or a bit over 6300 mph. The acceleration wasn’t a strain on my body at all, as it seemed my flight skill accelerated all of me equally.

When I hit 30 seconds from my destination, I dropped to a sedate 6x, 80 kph. I followed the curve downward to the center of a vast snowy space. I had nothing but my timer telling me how far I was from the surface. I stopped before touching down, hovering at 1x. If I stopped then the points used would not all be for the same expense, so I had to stay flying.

I zipped up to my guided height, as I changed my destination back to the beach I left from. This time, I asked for not only the route that avoided detection, but also the one that had the most gentle turns for a 13x return to a spot 2000 feet above my beach take off point.

It took about 30 minutes to get back, as I reached my destination, I cut the skill off. All my momentum disappeared, and I started falling, straight down. I turned it back on at 1x, and my momentum changed without discomfort. I landed back into the same footprints I had left in the sand.

I had learned several valuable lessons, if I wasn’t spending points to just spend points, I would best be served by turning the skill off and on, as I could negate momentum, and G forces when making sharp turns. The frictionless skill, which I had kept running to keep the cold fog off me, stopped me from sizzling like a marshmallow in a fire at high speed, and kept me from getting cold from the environment as well. I wondered if it affected my visibility to radar. Would it make me more reflective, or less reflective? I knew that radar was specifically tuned to a frequency that could see things like airplanes, and missiles. It was not an ideal frequency for detecting people.