Down on the combat sand of the Grand Coliseum, Frank stood with his heavy insulating work boots planted firmly in the dry dust.
He raised his left hand, shading his eyes beneath the curved brim of his yellow spun-glass hard hat. Then he squinted up through the human-shaped hole punched through the outer iron-hard metal wall. A thin, clean trail of white water drops—the heat vapor trail left by a human body traveling at Mach Eight—stretched across the blue sky toward the center of the Conferred Megacity.
Frank tilted his head. He watched the flight path with the practiced eye of an artillery land-mapper checking a curved arc.
“Good launch angle,” Frank remarked, his voice fully flat. “Roughly forty-two degrees height. First speed around nine thousand feet per second. Accounting for standard sky drag and that crosswind coming off the southern mountain ridges, he ought to land right in the royal throne room if the wind holds.”
Across his HUD, neon-amber flight vectors calculated the high-speed flight path down to the nearest tiny fraction of an inch.
Shen Shitou stepped up beside Frank, still cradling the tin lunchbox. “Master, what if he overshoots into the royal lotus pond?”
“He won’t overshoot,” Frank said confidently. He pulled his yellow carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear to jot a quick note. “I adjusted for the drag multiplier of torn silk. If he’d been wearing proper heavy cotton canvas overalls, the friction would have dropped him in the market square. But cheap pink…
