Iglesia ………………Episode 9

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(Last weeks episode!)

The train had slowed down to one hundred and sixty miles per hour for the curve. The noise and the rush of wind were still pretty damn impressive when you were standing in a little cave 5 feet away from it as it was passing though. As soon as the last car had passed he stepped out onto the tracks, right next to his partner. Together they triggered the toggles that would unfold and inflate their parawings. He was now struck by just how many large pointy cacti were on the walls of the canyon…and by how high the canyon walls were…and those sharp looking boulders on the canyon rim over there. Suddenly, he decided that this was perhaps not the best plan that The Center had ever come up with. He gave a quick tug on his harness and bent his knees. Cactus or no, this was gonna hurt.

The filament had been strung across the canyon at the precise height The Center had calculated would be optimal considering the trains quickly but carefully studied design. As it caught just below the protuberance of the trains nose it cut into the metal casing of the nosecone just far enough to embed itself firmly. The filament tore the pitons out of the sandstone wall. The filament had been designed to be nearly invisible, yet incredibly strong and with as much shock absorbing stretch as possible. They would need it. Their harnesses were also made to stretch just to the point where they would not fall out of them.

Standing next to his partner, each with their feet on their own track and precisely parallel to each other with their parawings just overlapping. He heard the spool attached to his harness stop spinning a split second before his body underwent an incredibly massive acceleration. The train rolled on, picking up speed now that it was coming out of the turn. The filament stretched, the harness stretched, the airbags on the back straps of their harnesses inflated and the parawings plucked them nearly straight off the ground and nearly instantly hundreds of feet into the air. Everything, including their muscles and ligaments stretched to their absolute limit …..just before their speed equalized with the speed of the train. The filament unstretched, the harness unstretched, the airbags on the back straps of their harnesses deflated and there they were, flying a few hundred feet off the ground through the Arizona skies with the big red sun sinking over the sandstone mesas behind them, tethered to a train sliding through the desert at 200 miles per hour, pulled by an invisible thread.

The motors on their spools clicked on and started reeling in line. He started breathing again. He now had the opening line for his report.

Ow.

Drawing them inexorably forward and down, the whirring spools reeled them in towards the speeding locomotive. The comm channel reported no alarms from the trains sensors. The first star twinkled above them and a crescent moon peaked its yellow tip above the far distant purpled mountain range ahead of them, in the east.