Post by tonylavoie on Aug 29, 2009 17:55:55 GMT -5
Hi all!
Here's the fist half (2500 words or so) of the story that came out of Jeff's seed-plant topic on wind farming. It's first draft, but I'd love to get your perspective on it while I'm in polishing stage. In particular, do I have a good balance of character and setting, or am I too heavy on either side of that equation?
Any comments--general or specific---most welcome! And thanks!
---
Wind Farm Annie
by Tony Lavoie
The control room didn't just bounce, it bucked.
"What in the world was that?" asked Greene, picking himself off the floor and brushing a clump of sandy hair from his eyes. The wind farm had been hit by turbulence before--a hundred and twenty-nine kilometers up in Titan's thick atmosphere it was kind of hard to avoid--but never before had the massive kite been jostled with enough force to throw an operator from his seat.
The older man securely buckled into his seat beside Greene didn't immediately answer. Instead, he pulled his ragged cap back down over his grey hair and began punching buttons and flipping switches on the control panels before him. His rough fingers flew expertly from one bank to the next in sequence. Despite his surprise, Greene watched with interest. Farmer had been harvesting wind on Titan since before the boy was born, and he knew this kite better than any captain knew any ship.
"Pull up the feeds," Farmer grunted, "and you should buckle down in case there's another bump."
The younger man sat back down and began punching his own buttons, waking up the monitor screens on his panels. He did not buckle himself in, Farmer noticed.
"Interior video is good," he said. "Port and starboard extererior...both okay." He paused, staring down at one of the screens. "What the...?"
Sparing a glance from his own panels, Farmer looked over at the young man.
"You seeing some gaps in the grid, are you?" he asked.
"Yes," the younger man's surprise was apparent in his suddenly strained voice. "I count...fifteen generators missing in the port wing. Looks like maybe...twenty-three starboard. And I get no feedback from generators one ninety-four through two hundred. They're all blank!"
"Easy, Son," Farmer calmed. "Remember your training. Can you get any video off the starboard wing cams?"
"Uh..." the younger man flipped several more switches, throwing the last one several times. "I get feeds up to row eighty. Everything further out is blank. Hang on, lemme swivel cam eighty out toward the tip."
The cameras were specially made to cut through the thick Titan cloud cover, using a combination of radio and other waves fed into the kite's powerful computers to build a picture, since visual cameras were useless way up here. Greene turned a couple of dials and stared at the accompanying image. His eyes widened.
"The end of the wing is gone! It's just...torn off! What can knock the wing off a kite?"
"Get a grip, Ace," Farmer said, concentrating on adjusting several controls at once, "Which way are the struts bent?"
His companion stared back down at the screen for a moment, adjusting the camera's focus.
"Looks like the girders are bent groundward." Greene announced, his voice quavering. "What does that mean? Did we get hit by a meteorite or something? Couldn't have been a cow, could it?" Titan's only native sky-dwellers were certainly big enough to cause serious damage to a kite, but he'd never heard of one drifting this high up. The winds up here would tear apart their delicate wing membranes in an instant.
Despite the situation, a smile curled Farmer's lips at the younger man's nervous energy. Everything was a crisis for this younger generation. Well, okay, so this was a crisis.
"Probably not meteorite," he said, chuckling, "and definitely not sky-cow."
"Well then, what did hit us?"
"Nothing, if I'm right," Farmer said, eliciting a confused glance from the younger man. "Tell me how far down the tether you can see."
Despite his apparent and growing fear, Greene began scanning screens and punching pads.
"Cams are good until kilometer one-sixty, then nothing."
"Try modifying the antenna pick up to the 4500 band or so." Farmer's hands were in constant motion on the panels before him. Greene seemed to pick up on this for the first time since the jolt had shaken their world.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Piloting." the older man replied.
Greene's mouth suddenly went dry. If Farmer was piloting the kite, that meant--but no, that couldn't happen. He'd been taught that it just couldn't happen. He bent over his controls, adjusting the kite's surface-facing antennas to the frequency Farmer had suggested. An image began to form in his screen, hazy at first but becoming slightly clearer as the computers began sorting solid features from the thick cloud cover.
"Okay," he adjusted the feeds some more, "I'm getting a weak feed from the K160-2 cam. It's hard to make out."
"That signal's coming over radio from nearly a hundred and sixty kilometers away, through several different layers of Titan atmo," Farmer intoned patiently. "You're forgetting about having to tighten the pickup area to eliminate noise."
He heard Greene's murmured curse at himself. Farmer knew the lad was aware of what to do with the feeds, but clearly his panic was getting in the way. Greene tightened the antenna array's focus, bringing the image into clearer view. He gasped.
"It looks like...but it can't be!"
"What do you see?" asked Farmer.
Greene swallowed and said, "I can see the end of the tether. It's...it's all frayed. It's not attached to the ground! We're not anchored!"
Farmer grunted and said, "That's what I suspected. Something yanked us loose from the ground, probably an extra strong gust of wind. Just goes to show that nature always gets her way when she wants it."
"But I thought the tether anchors were supposed to be able to withstand anything!"
Greene's panic raised the pitch of his voice by several notches. Farmer knew if he didn't calm down soon, he wasn't going to be any good at all. Concentrating intently on keeping the kite from becoming unbalanced and crashing to the ground, he could spare little effort toward mollifying the young apprentice farmer, but he needed to calm the boy down. Thank God the tether was still attached to the gondola. The drag on the lower end was helping to keep the kite facing into the wind, making Farmer's job just a little easier. Later, he'd really need to draw on his piloting skills.
Sparing a precious few moments away from his panels, he locked eyes with Greene.
"Now listen here, son," he said. "We're gonna find a solution to this, but only if we keep our wits about us. I've piloted kites before and they're a lot more stable than you think. The beacon went off automatically the moment the land-lines broke, so the colony down there knows the power's been cut off. They'll re-route to get their feed from New Vega's kite long before they run out of power, and we have all the juice we need up here even with the missing generators. The drop ship's likely already been notified and should be coming into comm range within the hour."
"But what about the tether?" Greene asked. "Won't it drag the kite down?"
"Son, this kite is flying in the face of winds in excess of four hundred kilometers an hour," well, that was technically true, but it was now drifting with that wind so the forces keeping the kite airborne were actually weakening. To say so would send Green over the edge of panic, sthough, so Farmer kept that piece of information to himself. Already his keen ears could hear a lessening of the incessant drone of the wind against the control gondola's hull. Soon Greene would notice it too, and then he'd start panicking all over again.
"We were pulling something like a hundred and forty million kilograms of lift," Farmer went on. "The kite weighs five million. The tether's just over two and a half mill. That still leaves us with over a hundred thirty million kilos of lift, right?" He grinned at the young man, and was pleased to see him visibly relax, just a little.
Controlling the kite's stability would become increasingly harder as its relative speed against the wind fell lower and lower. Soon it would reach a point where Farmer would have to angle the control surfaces to bring them to a shallow glide, effectively turning the kite into a huge hang-glider. The real problem was that most of Titan's surface was nothing more than sea. The chances of landing on one of the moon's few sizeable land masses were very slim indeed. Not to mention the difficulty in piloting a kite when there was little wind for it to push against.
But there was no point mentioning any of that. Greene buckled himself in, finally.
"You've piloted kites before?" he asked.
"Yep."
"Any as big as Annie?"
"Nope." Farmer wouldn't lie to the lad. "But Annie's the strongest and most atmo-worthy wind harvester I've ever captained. She'll keep us alive and safe until the drop ship can pick us out of the sky."
"I hope you're right." Greene's anxiety was beginning to re-surface.
"You got family down-side, Ace?" Farmer asked, trying to distract the younger man.
"Wife and baby girl," Greene replied. "She just turned three. Guess she's not a baby any more, really."
"You believe in God, son?"
"Yeah," Greene replied after a moment's thought, "I guess so. I mean, He has to be real, right?"
"Well, then," Farmer looked up briefly, "You believe in Him, you put your trust in him. He'll take care of everything."
As if to emphasize Farmer's words, the communicator crackled.
"Wind Farm 22, this is drop ship Miyagi. How do you read?"
Farmer smiled at Greene and clicked open the channel.
"Miyagi, this is Wind Farm Annie," he said. "That you up there, Jack?"
"Aye, Will," the voice came back. "How you guys doing down there?"
Farmer smiled again. "Not as well as we'd like, but we're still alive and aloft."
"Glad to hear it, Colonel. You got a lot of folks pulling for you up here."
Something about his friend's choice of words cut through Farmer's soul.
"Jack, you and I been through too much together for gentle words," he said into the comm. "Spit it. What's the deal?"
He heard the sigh over the channel.
"Okay, Colonel, here it is, straight and level. We can't pick you up."
Out of the corner of his eye, Farmer saw Greene blanch. Both men stared at the comm for a long moment.
"I understand, Jack. Why not?"
"You're smack underneath an extreme-high level storm, and you're losing altitude. Now that's both good and bad, as you know. You're safe enough at your altitude from the storm, so that's not a player for you, even though it is a deal-breaker for us. As you drift down you're going to come into gentler winds, but you have to pass through the Vilitas Layer."
"That's gonna be tricky with the tether," Farmer said.
"Well, Colonel," said the voice, "that's not gonna be a problem, because you're going to have to drop the tether within the next twenty minutes. You may want to look at your lowest tether-cam."
Greene punched up the screen first. He gasped, and whitened even more.
Farmer's screen showed the bottom of the tether, now broken through into the clear lower layer of Titan's atmosphere. Below the frayed cables and girders was the vast expanse of Titan's ocean.
Farmer whistled.
"I see what you mean, Jack," he said. "I didn't realize we were dropping that fast."
"Does Annie have any sleds, Will" Jack asked.
"One," Will answered with a wry grin. "Never got around to replacing the other one."
"I see." Jack said, then went silent.
"What does that mean?" Greene asked.
"It means, Ace, that as long as I can pilot Annie through the Vilitas Layer, you'll be able to suit up and take the sled down."
"What about you?"
Farmer's eyes remained locked on the controls before him, and didn't answer.
"Farmer," Greene's voice had an odd, quiet tone to it. "What about you?"
Farmer took a deep breath and blew it out.
"I'm gonna take Annie all the way down," he said.
"What? Are you nuts? You can't land a kite this big! There's no way--"
"I ain't gonna land her," Farmer interrupted gently. "I'm gonna ditch her in the ocean."
"That's crazy!" Greene insisted. "Forget it! We'll lighten the sled, cut it loose at the last possible second, so that we can both--"
Farmer was already shaking his head.
"Annie's sled is too small for two," he said. "but it'll get you safely down."
"But how are you gonna safely glide two square kilometers of kite to a safe stop on the ocean? As soon as the wings hit, she'll nose down and crumple against the waves. This control room'll be mangled, even before you sink!"
"Maybe not," Farmer said with another grin. "Maybe not. But we have more immediate things to worry about. We have to cut the tether or it's gonna drag us both down into the drink."
He switched the mike back on.
"You still there, Jack?"
"Still with you, Colonel," Jack's voice came back.
"Okay, we're going to drop the tether," Farmer informed him. "Any land masses coming up in our path?"
"Negative, until New Vega colony, but that's fifteen hundred kilometers from the tether's down-side and you've got a couple hours before that comes up."
"Okay, stand by."
Farmer turned to his companion. "I'm going to need your help, Ace," he said. "You up to it?"
Greene, color returning to his face, said, "I have a choice?"
Farmer grinned. "Good lad. Now, when I cut the tether, there's gonna be two jolts. The first, small one will be the explosive bolts holding the tether. The second jolt's gonna probably knock a few more generators loose, and you better be buckled in for that one."
Green tightened his harness.
"Right," Farmer went on. "I'm going to route aeleron and cover control over to your panel. Then I'm going to count down 'three, two, one, cut'. When I say 'cut', I'm going to blow the bolts. As soon as I say 'cut', then, I want you to open all covers and raise all of the flaps one-eighty degrees. That should lessen the impact on Annie's wings. You got all that?"
"'Three, two, one, cut, I raise all flaps one-eighty and open all generator covers."
"You got it, Ace," Farmer smiled widely. "Ready?"
Greene nodded, swallowed visibly, and positioned his fingers over his control panels.
"Okay, feeding you the controls now," Farmer said, flipping several switches. The panels in front of Greene glowed with new life.
"Okay, here we go. Three. Two. One. Cut!"
Simultaneously with the word, he jabbed a finger down hard on a switch. There was a muffled bang! and the cabin was kicked from beneath by a giant boot. Greene threw several switches as fast as his fingers could hit them. A full second later, the control rool was jolted skyward, kicked by another boot a dozen times stronger than the first. Watching a pair of cam screens, Greene saw a handful of hundred-square-meter generator housings instantly fall from their perches in the hollow wings of the kite, wrenched loose by the too-sudden lessening of the kite's groundward drag..
<to be continued...>
Here's the fist half (2500 words or so) of the story that came out of Jeff's seed-plant topic on wind farming. It's first draft, but I'd love to get your perspective on it while I'm in polishing stage. In particular, do I have a good balance of character and setting, or am I too heavy on either side of that equation?
Any comments--general or specific---most welcome! And thanks!
---
Wind Farm Annie
by Tony Lavoie
The control room didn't just bounce, it bucked.
"What in the world was that?" asked Greene, picking himself off the floor and brushing a clump of sandy hair from his eyes. The wind farm had been hit by turbulence before--a hundred and twenty-nine kilometers up in Titan's thick atmosphere it was kind of hard to avoid--but never before had the massive kite been jostled with enough force to throw an operator from his seat.
The older man securely buckled into his seat beside Greene didn't immediately answer. Instead, he pulled his ragged cap back down over his grey hair and began punching buttons and flipping switches on the control panels before him. His rough fingers flew expertly from one bank to the next in sequence. Despite his surprise, Greene watched with interest. Farmer had been harvesting wind on Titan since before the boy was born, and he knew this kite better than any captain knew any ship.
"Pull up the feeds," Farmer grunted, "and you should buckle down in case there's another bump."
The younger man sat back down and began punching his own buttons, waking up the monitor screens on his panels. He did not buckle himself in, Farmer noticed.
"Interior video is good," he said. "Port and starboard extererior...both okay." He paused, staring down at one of the screens. "What the...?"
Sparing a glance from his own panels, Farmer looked over at the young man.
"You seeing some gaps in the grid, are you?" he asked.
"Yes," the younger man's surprise was apparent in his suddenly strained voice. "I count...fifteen generators missing in the port wing. Looks like maybe...twenty-three starboard. And I get no feedback from generators one ninety-four through two hundred. They're all blank!"
"Easy, Son," Farmer calmed. "Remember your training. Can you get any video off the starboard wing cams?"
"Uh..." the younger man flipped several more switches, throwing the last one several times. "I get feeds up to row eighty. Everything further out is blank. Hang on, lemme swivel cam eighty out toward the tip."
The cameras were specially made to cut through the thick Titan cloud cover, using a combination of radio and other waves fed into the kite's powerful computers to build a picture, since visual cameras were useless way up here. Greene turned a couple of dials and stared at the accompanying image. His eyes widened.
"The end of the wing is gone! It's just...torn off! What can knock the wing off a kite?"
"Get a grip, Ace," Farmer said, concentrating on adjusting several controls at once, "Which way are the struts bent?"
His companion stared back down at the screen for a moment, adjusting the camera's focus.
"Looks like the girders are bent groundward." Greene announced, his voice quavering. "What does that mean? Did we get hit by a meteorite or something? Couldn't have been a cow, could it?" Titan's only native sky-dwellers were certainly big enough to cause serious damage to a kite, but he'd never heard of one drifting this high up. The winds up here would tear apart their delicate wing membranes in an instant.
Despite the situation, a smile curled Farmer's lips at the younger man's nervous energy. Everything was a crisis for this younger generation. Well, okay, so this was a crisis.
"Probably not meteorite," he said, chuckling, "and definitely not sky-cow."
"Well then, what did hit us?"
"Nothing, if I'm right," Farmer said, eliciting a confused glance from the younger man. "Tell me how far down the tether you can see."
Despite his apparent and growing fear, Greene began scanning screens and punching pads.
"Cams are good until kilometer one-sixty, then nothing."
"Try modifying the antenna pick up to the 4500 band or so." Farmer's hands were in constant motion on the panels before him. Greene seemed to pick up on this for the first time since the jolt had shaken their world.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Piloting." the older man replied.
Greene's mouth suddenly went dry. If Farmer was piloting the kite, that meant--but no, that couldn't happen. He'd been taught that it just couldn't happen. He bent over his controls, adjusting the kite's surface-facing antennas to the frequency Farmer had suggested. An image began to form in his screen, hazy at first but becoming slightly clearer as the computers began sorting solid features from the thick cloud cover.
"Okay," he adjusted the feeds some more, "I'm getting a weak feed from the K160-2 cam. It's hard to make out."
"That signal's coming over radio from nearly a hundred and sixty kilometers away, through several different layers of Titan atmo," Farmer intoned patiently. "You're forgetting about having to tighten the pickup area to eliminate noise."
He heard Greene's murmured curse at himself. Farmer knew the lad was aware of what to do with the feeds, but clearly his panic was getting in the way. Greene tightened the antenna array's focus, bringing the image into clearer view. He gasped.
"It looks like...but it can't be!"
"What do you see?" asked Farmer.
Greene swallowed and said, "I can see the end of the tether. It's...it's all frayed. It's not attached to the ground! We're not anchored!"
Farmer grunted and said, "That's what I suspected. Something yanked us loose from the ground, probably an extra strong gust of wind. Just goes to show that nature always gets her way when she wants it."
"But I thought the tether anchors were supposed to be able to withstand anything!"
Greene's panic raised the pitch of his voice by several notches. Farmer knew if he didn't calm down soon, he wasn't going to be any good at all. Concentrating intently on keeping the kite from becoming unbalanced and crashing to the ground, he could spare little effort toward mollifying the young apprentice farmer, but he needed to calm the boy down. Thank God the tether was still attached to the gondola. The drag on the lower end was helping to keep the kite facing into the wind, making Farmer's job just a little easier. Later, he'd really need to draw on his piloting skills.
Sparing a precious few moments away from his panels, he locked eyes with Greene.
"Now listen here, son," he said. "We're gonna find a solution to this, but only if we keep our wits about us. I've piloted kites before and they're a lot more stable than you think. The beacon went off automatically the moment the land-lines broke, so the colony down there knows the power's been cut off. They'll re-route to get their feed from New Vega's kite long before they run out of power, and we have all the juice we need up here even with the missing generators. The drop ship's likely already been notified and should be coming into comm range within the hour."
"But what about the tether?" Greene asked. "Won't it drag the kite down?"
"Son, this kite is flying in the face of winds in excess of four hundred kilometers an hour," well, that was technically true, but it was now drifting with that wind so the forces keeping the kite airborne were actually weakening. To say so would send Green over the edge of panic, sthough, so Farmer kept that piece of information to himself. Already his keen ears could hear a lessening of the incessant drone of the wind against the control gondola's hull. Soon Greene would notice it too, and then he'd start panicking all over again.
"We were pulling something like a hundred and forty million kilograms of lift," Farmer went on. "The kite weighs five million. The tether's just over two and a half mill. That still leaves us with over a hundred thirty million kilos of lift, right?" He grinned at the young man, and was pleased to see him visibly relax, just a little.
Controlling the kite's stability would become increasingly harder as its relative speed against the wind fell lower and lower. Soon it would reach a point where Farmer would have to angle the control surfaces to bring them to a shallow glide, effectively turning the kite into a huge hang-glider. The real problem was that most of Titan's surface was nothing more than sea. The chances of landing on one of the moon's few sizeable land masses were very slim indeed. Not to mention the difficulty in piloting a kite when there was little wind for it to push against.
But there was no point mentioning any of that. Greene buckled himself in, finally.
"You've piloted kites before?" he asked.
"Yep."
"Any as big as Annie?"
"Nope." Farmer wouldn't lie to the lad. "But Annie's the strongest and most atmo-worthy wind harvester I've ever captained. She'll keep us alive and safe until the drop ship can pick us out of the sky."
"I hope you're right." Greene's anxiety was beginning to re-surface.
"You got family down-side, Ace?" Farmer asked, trying to distract the younger man.
"Wife and baby girl," Greene replied. "She just turned three. Guess she's not a baby any more, really."
"You believe in God, son?"
"Yeah," Greene replied after a moment's thought, "I guess so. I mean, He has to be real, right?"
"Well, then," Farmer looked up briefly, "You believe in Him, you put your trust in him. He'll take care of everything."
As if to emphasize Farmer's words, the communicator crackled.
"Wind Farm 22, this is drop ship Miyagi. How do you read?"
Farmer smiled at Greene and clicked open the channel.
"Miyagi, this is Wind Farm Annie," he said. "That you up there, Jack?"
"Aye, Will," the voice came back. "How you guys doing down there?"
Farmer smiled again. "Not as well as we'd like, but we're still alive and aloft."
"Glad to hear it, Colonel. You got a lot of folks pulling for you up here."
Something about his friend's choice of words cut through Farmer's soul.
"Jack, you and I been through too much together for gentle words," he said into the comm. "Spit it. What's the deal?"
He heard the sigh over the channel.
"Okay, Colonel, here it is, straight and level. We can't pick you up."
Out of the corner of his eye, Farmer saw Greene blanch. Both men stared at the comm for a long moment.
"I understand, Jack. Why not?"
"You're smack underneath an extreme-high level storm, and you're losing altitude. Now that's both good and bad, as you know. You're safe enough at your altitude from the storm, so that's not a player for you, even though it is a deal-breaker for us. As you drift down you're going to come into gentler winds, but you have to pass through the Vilitas Layer."
"That's gonna be tricky with the tether," Farmer said.
"Well, Colonel," said the voice, "that's not gonna be a problem, because you're going to have to drop the tether within the next twenty minutes. You may want to look at your lowest tether-cam."
Greene punched up the screen first. He gasped, and whitened even more.
Farmer's screen showed the bottom of the tether, now broken through into the clear lower layer of Titan's atmosphere. Below the frayed cables and girders was the vast expanse of Titan's ocean.
Farmer whistled.
"I see what you mean, Jack," he said. "I didn't realize we were dropping that fast."
"Does Annie have any sleds, Will" Jack asked.
"One," Will answered with a wry grin. "Never got around to replacing the other one."
"I see." Jack said, then went silent.
"What does that mean?" Greene asked.
"It means, Ace, that as long as I can pilot Annie through the Vilitas Layer, you'll be able to suit up and take the sled down."
"What about you?"
Farmer's eyes remained locked on the controls before him, and didn't answer.
"Farmer," Greene's voice had an odd, quiet tone to it. "What about you?"
Farmer took a deep breath and blew it out.
"I'm gonna take Annie all the way down," he said.
"What? Are you nuts? You can't land a kite this big! There's no way--"
"I ain't gonna land her," Farmer interrupted gently. "I'm gonna ditch her in the ocean."
"That's crazy!" Greene insisted. "Forget it! We'll lighten the sled, cut it loose at the last possible second, so that we can both--"
Farmer was already shaking his head.
"Annie's sled is too small for two," he said. "but it'll get you safely down."
"But how are you gonna safely glide two square kilometers of kite to a safe stop on the ocean? As soon as the wings hit, she'll nose down and crumple against the waves. This control room'll be mangled, even before you sink!"
"Maybe not," Farmer said with another grin. "Maybe not. But we have more immediate things to worry about. We have to cut the tether or it's gonna drag us both down into the drink."
He switched the mike back on.
"You still there, Jack?"
"Still with you, Colonel," Jack's voice came back.
"Okay, we're going to drop the tether," Farmer informed him. "Any land masses coming up in our path?"
"Negative, until New Vega colony, but that's fifteen hundred kilometers from the tether's down-side and you've got a couple hours before that comes up."
"Okay, stand by."
Farmer turned to his companion. "I'm going to need your help, Ace," he said. "You up to it?"
Greene, color returning to his face, said, "I have a choice?"
Farmer grinned. "Good lad. Now, when I cut the tether, there's gonna be two jolts. The first, small one will be the explosive bolts holding the tether. The second jolt's gonna probably knock a few more generators loose, and you better be buckled in for that one."
Green tightened his harness.
"Right," Farmer went on. "I'm going to route aeleron and cover control over to your panel. Then I'm going to count down 'three, two, one, cut'. When I say 'cut', I'm going to blow the bolts. As soon as I say 'cut', then, I want you to open all covers and raise all of the flaps one-eighty degrees. That should lessen the impact on Annie's wings. You got all that?"
"'Three, two, one, cut, I raise all flaps one-eighty and open all generator covers."
"You got it, Ace," Farmer smiled widely. "Ready?"
Greene nodded, swallowed visibly, and positioned his fingers over his control panels.
"Okay, feeding you the controls now," Farmer said, flipping several switches. The panels in front of Greene glowed with new life.
"Okay, here we go. Three. Two. One. Cut!"
Simultaneously with the word, he jabbed a finger down hard on a switch. There was a muffled bang! and the cabin was kicked from beneath by a giant boot. Greene threw several switches as fast as his fingers could hit them. A full second later, the control rool was jolted skyward, kicked by another boot a dozen times stronger than the first. Watching a pair of cam screens, Greene saw a handful of hundred-square-meter generator housings instantly fall from their perches in the hollow wings of the kite, wrenched loose by the too-sudden lessening of the kite's groundward drag..
<to be continued...>