THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 5 - Night Flight

Sarah awoke from a void of nothingness, from sheer silence to the steady hum of an electric engine. At first, she felt weighed down by a fog of drowsiness, as if she had been under anesthesia for hours. She cracked open her blurry eyes and saw streaks of light sweeping by. Slowly, the cloud enveloping her brain lifted and faded until she recognized her predicament. Within seconds, she realized she was sitting in the passenger seat of a hover car, her hands tied behind her back, shoulder slumped against the door, her cheek and lips mashed against the window. With a beleaguered moan, she peeled the side of her face from the glass and peered over at Wolf. He sat at the helm, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the flight joy stick in the center console, navigating them to a destination unknown.

As the scenery rushed by outside the airborne vehicle, he beheld her with a victorious look plastered on his face. A fire kindled behind Sarah's eyes. She wanted to inflict pain on him, anything to even the score, but that desire evaporated when she realized how fast they were traveling. A hundred miles an hour was the speed limit, according to the hover car's onboard computer, visible from the center of the dashboard. And to make matters worse, Wolf had the throttle pegged out at a hundred and fifty.

"It's good to see you conscious again," he said, "even if it is for a short while. Thought I'd have to break out the smelling salts for a few minutes."

"Where am I? What happened?" Sarah's stomach twisted into a terrible knot. Even though the forward motion was smooth with only minor turbulence, the thought of riding, or flying, whichever term fit, in a hover car always played with her mind, and her gut. She preferred a conventional automobile on the sweetness of solid earth. A plane was different. People built them to fly, but this thing... she choked back a wave of nausea.

"I'm fresh out of Dramamine, truly sorry." Wolf's tone reflected an obvious hint of sarcasm. "But if you're wondering how you came to be in this quandary, it all boils down to the fact your dart didn't, ahh..." He threw up a hand. "I'll explain later. I can see you're having trouble processing everything at the moment. The important thing is our next stop is coming up soon."

Saliva thickened in Sarah's mouth, bringing with it a metallic taste she hated, because that meant vomiting, and throwing up was the last thing she could handle right now. If she upchucked with her hands tied behind her back, it would have nowhere to go but all over her.

"Look around you," Wolf said. "On second thought, maybe that's not such a good idea."

Despite his warning, she peeked at her surroundings, anyway. It seemed unavoidable. It was the natural thing to do, like taking her next breath. Street lights whisked by below, highlighting a rundown urban district with a pharmacy, a liquor store, and a charging station for electric automobiles. The businesses zipped by like the ground was traveling in the opposite direction. To stare at it made her stomach ball into a tighter knot. To fight the feeling, she shifted her attention to the front windshield, where the motion was less noticeable.

Battling her rumbling gut, Sarah scrunched her nose and looked over at Wolf and caught him with the same look of satisfaction on his face that he had moments before.

"All the battery powered stuff is pretty amazing," he said, "especially when you think about how the world used to run on petroleum... I mean gasoline. Still need oil to lube things. Good thing the Japanese started using solid state batteries back in the early twenties. They developed them into powerful, lightweight energy cells." Wolf waved a dismissive hand. "Anyway, had to be tough and dependable enough to use in airborne vehicles, or else we'd go bloop." He turned his thumb down.

"I get the drift." Upon seeing an object fast approaching them in her peripheral, Sarah flinched and twisted sideways, ducking her shoulder. "Watch out."