The days after Sophia had started her emotional recovery were a mixed bag of emotions for me. It felt good to have her living with me, especially once we furnished a small part of the bunker in a way that was pleasing to her and acquired some extra furniture for her, at the same time, I was worried about her behaviour. She enjoyed watching the careful pushes and prods I was applying to put pressure on the Omegas and happily went with me, covering my back, when I prepared hints to be discovered by the police once they completed the raids they were doing. But that seemed to be her only interest, her only goal. It scared me, the question what would happen once her revenge was completed. There was the old adage that one should dig two graves, before embarking on the path of revenge. One for one’s target and the other for oneself. Would I have to dig the second grave, once we had buried the Omegas? The fact that Sophia sometimes stared into the distance, eyes unseeing, did not assuage my fears at all.

Something I felt great about was the testing of my flight-frame after its second test-flight. My tests had revealed that everything was as it should be, without any problems. Sadly, after the grey clouds during that flight, the weather had grown steadily worse and I was not ready to do a test-flight in a small storm. Not that it should pose problems for the frame or to Galatea’s flying ability, it was more a psychological fear. I would test it once there was a either cloudy or clear night with little wind. I had redesigned parts of the frame, adding a compartment for a single passenger and some gear, so I would be able to take Sophia with me, but that would be a surprise for her, once I had flown it myself.

But with the frame more or less completed, I had some extra time on my hands and was using it to reassess the Omegas. All my plans had been preliminary, with wide open contingencies to deal with their strange information-source. But ever since the warehouse blew up before the scourge-incursion, there had been no additional occurrences, no events in which they had acted in an unexpected manner or in a manner that hinted at information that they could not have. Galatea’s models correctly predicted their movements to a high degree, making me suspicious. It was annoying, the models were accurate which made me suspicious because the Omegas had demonstrated that models that did not take into account their additional information-source should not be accurate. But if the additional information-source, about which I simply had no information, did not give the Omegas information, would I really be able to pull their roots out? Or would I just chop off the sprouts, leaving the organisation backing them intact, if it was controlling that scource?

It was a headache and a half and I went with the straightforward solution. Burn down the Omega’s house and watch what happens. If they simply vanish, try to follow the Powered or even the better-trained members, trying to find out where they hide. If there was a bigger organisation behind the Omegas, which I believed by now, due to the amount of equipment and money used to establish them, they might abandon the foot-soldiers but I doubted that they would simply toss aside the Powered.

Finally, the weather-forecast looked good, low-hanging clouds but no rain and almost no wind. Good enough to reach for the sky. Well, in a way. I told Sophia what I was planning and she gave me a kiss for luck, before stating that she wanted to fly with me. I almost told her no, but the look on her face, the sheer fear of being left behind, made me reconsider. The flight-frame had the second compartment, so it should not hurt.

If I could have figured out a way to absorb the radiance of her smile, it would have powered the earth for decades to come. But there was no way I would share her smile freely, it was for me and me alone. I had looked around a little and found a concrete-platform around some sort of locked manhole, maybe an access-shaft for the water-mainline, deciding that it was well enough hidden to serve as a launch-pad. It took away the risk of someone finding the heavy tarp I had used before and wondering what it was. It was incredibly unlikely but I preferred not to take avoidable risks.

Once again, I was lugging the heavy flight-frame with me, Sophia walking alongside. She was slightly apprehensive about flying in an experimental craft but giddy that she could come along. Or maybe that she was not left behind.

At the designated launch-pad I was explaining Sophia how she had to position herself in the compartment as it was not intuitive. The compartment was made so she could be strapped in tight, almost completely unable to move so she would not be thrown around by maneuvers. It should be relatively comfortable, akin to lying on a soft mattress, at least as long I did not try any interesting flying maneuvers, like turning her back to the ground. If I did, she would be held in the straps, making sure that nothing bad happened, to either her or my flight-frame.

Once she was secured, I locked my own armour, getting ready to launch. I would be completely unable to move, beyond the finger-twitches I used for manual control, or talking to Galatea. Not that I would do any manual flying, the frame was far too unstable for that. There was a theoretical set of controls, using normal, dumb, computer-programming, but even with a lot of training, I doubted my ability to fly, or rather land, the frame without Galatea. Unless I wanted to build a combat-flight-frame, Galatea would happily pilot the frame, if I made a combat-version, we would have to talk about it. In my armour, she was assisting me in combat-operations, but would not actively control anything. But, it was a moot point anyway, the only way the current flight-frame could be used as a weapon was by turning it into a cruise-missile and playing divine wind. Which I would not do.

The, by now well accustomed, countdown commenced, together with the take-off preparations and a few seconds later, I felt as if I was strapped into a strange elevator. The pressure was not only located at my feet but anywhere on the lower side of my body, the armour distributing the pressure. My vision was dominated by the overlay, giving me all the information I needed while the true out-side vision was rather useless.

After we rose above the treeline, the flight-frame switched from purely hovering to a combination of hovering and flying forward and I went belly-down while getting the camera-view from the nose, not that there was anything to see in the darkness. No, information was gathered by the instruments and that was what I had to be focusing on. When the frame pitched forward, I heard a small squeak on the com, clueing me in that Sophia was linked in and had not expected the switch.

“Approaching minimum-velocity for the ramjet.” Galatea told me while I looked at the projected flight-path. After a short burst with the ramjet, we would ‘glide’ or rather be tossed for a few moments until the air reduced our speed to the point that we could maneuver, before turning, getting a new vector and using the ramjet again, in effect making small hops between maneuvers.

“Ramjet engaged.” Galatea announced, not that it was needed. Where before, I had felt similarly to being in an elevator, now there was a slight pressure on my front, holding me up against gravity when suddenly, I was pushed forward everywhere. The sensation was quite indescribable, almost like getting a kick but everywhere and with sustained pressure for a few seconds. In my ears, I heard Sophia squeal and I might have made some undignified sound myself. There was a world of difference between intellectual knowing that you are subject to six g of acceleration and feeling those six g with your own body.

The sensation of flying with the ramjet was a strange one. When thinking about flying I had thought about graceful dances in the clouds, dancing like a leaf in the wind, topping the wind-swept heights with ease and grace, trodding where never lark or eagle flew. But the reality? The reality was far from it. With the flight-frame what I was doing was not poetry, if it was any form of art, it was an explosion. Violent, barely controlled and if I was not careful, it could tear me to pieces.

The rest of the test-flight went as expected, the projected performance-envelope worked out well and after a few hops with the ramjet, I directed us back towards the landing-pad, feeling almost let-down. But at the end of the day, the flight-frame was built for utility, to allow me, and now Sophia, to get where we wanted to go, in an incredibly small amount of time, without the pesky legalities intervening. And that it did.