3
Sharman Hix wrestled to control her pod in the wild currents of the storm. The craft didn’t want to do the things she asked it. It kept throwing her off her line.
“I have to find Marnie,” she told the craft out loud. She wasn’t calm enough to say it only with her mind. But the pod bucked through the air again, then spiraled on a path of its own.
Sharman was the best pilot in the Factory’s program and she was failing.
The pods weren’t like regular aircraft, even the experimental ones. They might look like spaceships, but they weren’t. Not really. They were more like horses. They were alive. They had emotions. They had opinions.
Who made them, how Major Zimholt got hold of them, Sharman still didn’t know.
She wore a lighted band around her head—they called it a head harness—that help
