A Question of Anatomy
As they ran through the last of their component checks, Ryan felt like an explorer from another age, one in which far more primitive equipment had been used to test the limit of human knowledge and endurance — a deep sea diver being helped into his canvass suit, perhaps, or an astronaut from the heroic age of space exploration being strapped into his couch on the launch pad, waiting to be lifted into orbit by rockets larger than many of the buildings surrounding the launch site.
It wasn’t just his heels that had brought him here to this strange departure point. Wings, in all their many varied forms, had played their part too, as they would in the journey that lay ahead. This time they would be far smaller than those that had carried Galileo, symbolically at least, across half the solar system. But they were still big enough to dwarf a man. Or more precisely, one man and one woman.
Few machines were more expressive of their function than the two that Ryan and Tanya would use to travel through the Axis. The suits themselves were armoured, self-contained systems. They wore the wings as though they were part of their very anatomy, appendages born of their own muscle and ligaments, rather than an extension of the suits. It was the most intimate of relationships, perhaps superseded in that intimacy only by the relationship between an intensive care patient and their life support equipment. And that, in many ways, was the function this technology had been created to perform, designed as it had been to keep them alive in the most hostile of environments, under the most intense pressure.
The journey had been planned on the assumption that they would encounter a vacuum of some description inside the Axis (unless both their senses and instruments had been grossly deceived). Apart from that, few other assumptions had been made, either about the direction or the duration of the journey that lay ahead. They might be gone for only a few minutes or for months, depending on what they encountered in the flux of passage. They might be boarding an express designed to deliver travellers into the furthest of distant dimensions, or one that travelled through a region scarcely more remote than the one they left behind. Either way, it would be a journey into the unknown, nova incognita: the exploration of an unknown star.
No matter what their fate, Ryan knew there would be others only too eager to follow. Men who called no galaxy home, still less any one world. There were, he suspected, worlds aplenty within the Axis. Maybe on one of these he would find a home, perhaps on a world similar to the Earth as it had been before global pollution took its toll.
Ryan glanced across at Tanya, saw her wearing the wings he had for so long associated with her but was only now seeing for the first time. They suited her, in their line and sweep, their upward tilt and lilting brow, their suggestion of enormous power waiting to be released. Like everything else about her they possessed a feminine quality. There had never been, nor ever would be, any trace of the androgyne about Tanya. Her every movement was expressive of a femininity he had seen in few other women, and the wings enhanced that quality still further.
Even in a vestigial state the wings were still impressive. But their entire sweep would not be apparent until the moment of full kinetic deployment. At that point their span would increase to over thirty feet and their range would be almost without limit. They were the sort of wings Icarus himself might have sold his soul to possess, inspiring the envy of father and son alike.
Ryan smiled at Tanya as he watched two technicians help her with the final checks and preparations. She showed no trace of fear, a reaction he could only marvel at. For the first time in a long while, he felt his pulse increase and stay at a higher rate than normal. The palms of his hands were damp and his mouth was dry. They were welcome sensations. At least they proved he was alive.
The armoured suit made Tanya look invincible, placing at her fingertips the sort of power undreamt of in an earlier age. But Ryan knew how vulnerable the body beneath that armour was. He knew its softness, its capacity for penetration. The tenderness it was capable of, none of which had any place in an aggressively hostile environment.