This is my sixth story.  At 4200 words, it’s my shortest yet, and my third official “short story”.   (The SFWA definition is under 7500 words…)  I’d been batting the idea for this one around for a week or two, but I needed a second short story for my Clarion application, so I headed to the café and wrote it down in two long sessions.

The story starts:

Freia is beautiful, and she knows it.  Richard Wooten says so, at 0:47.

Wisps and curls whip overhead, limned blue by starlight; the fog ceiling is lowering, the top tattered by the offshore wind.  She drops another three meters, switches on ultrasonics.  There are patches of trees here–“unmarked obstacles up to thirty meters” the map says–and she is skimming just twenty meters above the ground.  The woods show up as ghostly towers in the sonics, blurred and dopplered by her two hundred thirty meters per second; further to her right the hills run parallel to her course, solid in passive radar and the occasional glimpse in visual light through the fog.

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