As the girls in the back played make-over, Al leaned into the cockpit's side window and gazed down. It was awfully blue. He'd never been this far south. And while most of his previous flying had also been over water, it was the darker-hued, more restless Gulf of Aztlan that had seen the majority of his flight hours. Cargo choppers. Big, unwieldy, and generally overloaded, those whirlybirds had made this fixed-wing-flying-at-altitude stuff seem like child's play. Sure, landing was a little different, but when the whole damned ocean was your airstrip, as opposed to a stamp-sized, wind-buffeted platform atop an oil rig, well, he'd done harder things.
Not to mention the passengers this time were, by comparison, a rather sedate lot. He remembered his last run out to UO57, packed to the stern with intoxicated tusker and round-eared whores and some foppish technodweeb that ran some sort of virtual casino single-handed. The crew of the rig had paid him handsomely for putting the party together...and then management had terminated his contract. Pussies. It had been for the best though - Hollywood had been beckoning. Too bad the Olamiposi - bound for the Canal - had headed unexpectedly back to West Africa....
