ANGELS 100

It was the early morning of what promised to be a beautiful day. Paige walked out of the mansion's backdoor... and almost collided with her brother. Sam was standing just outside the same door as he peered up at the clear blue sky.

"Sorry," Sam said as he stepped away from the door.

"Sam, what the heck are you wearing?" Paige asked in surprise.

Paige was wearing a swimsuit and had a towel slung over her shoulder. She had been planning on doing some laps in the mansion's pool. Sam, on the other hand, was dressed in a far bulkier outfit. At first, Paige thought that he was wearing a particularly ugly new uniform. But then she noticed the very thick, multi-layered, material and the massive, two-part backpack. The full helmet Sam had tucked under one arm was also unusual. It would be a lousy outfit to wear in a fight - it constricted the wearer's movement too much. And fighting was something that the X-Men did all too often.

As far as Paige could tell, it looked like Sam was wearing some sort of spacesuit.

"It's a pressure suit," Sam said with a smile. "I wear it whenever I do high-altitude flying."

Sam was being very calm, bland, and reasonable. And that caused Paige's female intuition to immediately kick into suspicious high-gear.

"What are you up to, Sam?" Paige asked warily.

Sam hesitated, but then finally said, "Nothing much. I'm just going to try and get an idea of my maximum flying altitude."

Paige nodded her head slowly as she walked around Sam, looking over the gear he was wearing. Her eyes were narrow with suspicion. Sam had been acting strange the last few weeks.

"Is that dangerous?" she asked.

"No. I've done stuff like this before," Sam answered quietly. "This is just a powers test, Paige. We've both been doing stuff like this since the day we came here. It's probably more dangerous to go for a drive on the highway."

"But why the heck are you wearing a parachute?" Paige demanded.

"The 'chute's just in case I get tired," Sam replied. "I usually come part of the way down on a parachute. Actually, it's kind of fun."

Paige blinked in surprise, "Get tired? Sam, you can fly hundreds of miles. Just how high are you planning to go?"

Sam tried to shrug his shoulders - which was hard to do considering the getup he was wearing, "Climbing is different than just flying straight and level. It takes a lot more energy. I'm hoping to make a hundred thousand feet."

Paige examined her brother's face - their blue eyes meeting. He wasn't lying. But she couldn't shake the feeling that he wasn't telling her the complete truth. On the other hand, it wasn't like Sam to be irresponsible or reckless. And Mrs. Guthrie had told her eldest daughter more than once that sometimes you had to allow men to have their little adventures...

"Okay," Paige said slowly. "This sounds... interesting. Just promise me that you'll be careful."

"I will," Sam promised.

Paige gave her brother a quick peck on the check.

After donning his helmet, Sam took off with his usual roar. His power wasn't exactly a quiet one.

Sitting on the edge of the pool, Paige shaded her eyes and watched Sam climb straight up into a cloudless summer sky. He was obviously keeping his speed throttled down to well below normal. She assumed that was to conserve energy - like a runner starting off at a slow and steady pace.

Despite that, it didn't take long for Sam to climb out of sight.

With a shake of her head, Paige climbed to her feet and dove into the pool.

She still couldn't shake the feeling that Sam wasn't telling her everything.

Sometime between the two world wars, American pilots began measuring altitude in "Angels". An "Angel" is a thousand feet. So a pilot whose aircraft was at "Angels 10" was at an altitude of 10,000 feet. Sam's approach to flying was obviously pretty different than the average pilot's, but he had picked up more than a little pilot-lingo over the years.

Sam checked the altimeter that was on the inside his helmet. It was located just above his visor.

He was at Angels 5.

Below him, buildings had shrunk to toy-sized. You could no longer make out individual people, but cars were still visible crawling along the roads and highways. However, he could still see the mansion's pool - a tiny, light-blue rectangle. But he couldn't see Paige.

Sam hadn't lied to his sister, but he hadn't told her everything. There was no point to telling Paige the complete truth. She would have just thought he was crazy.

And maybe he was.

Just before Angels 10, a small, single-engine plane spotted Sam and altered course to try to get a better look at him. Sam immediately identified it as a Cessna 172, which was a very popular private aircraft. He'd seen more than a few of them over the years.

Even though Sam was keeping his thrust down to the bare minimum, the Cessna couldn't keep up with him. The pilot gave up somewhere around Angels 15 and began to descend back to his previous altitude. Sam chuckled to himself. Pilots almost never reported him. They were too worried that the authorities would demand that they take a breathalyzer test.

Below him, highways and streets were now visible only as white and gray lines. It really wasn't possible to make out trucks or cars. He could still discern buildings, however. Actually, it wasn't hard to identify the mansion. Sam had seen it plenty of times from this height.

It gets pretty cold at Angels 15, but the cold wasn't bothering Sam yet. His power projected a ball-shaped force-field around him whenever he was "blasting". At lower altitudes, his force-field combined with the thermo-chemical energy he emitted to keep him quite comfortable. Actually, at the moment the life support mechanism in his pressure suit was working to keep him cool - the suit was pretty warm.

Of course, the temperature would keep dropping as he climbed. Eventually, he would reach an altitude where the cold would overwhelm his natural ability to keep warm. Then Sam would have to rely on the heating element in his pressure suit.

Mountain climbers - a breed never adverse to melodrama - call elevations above 23,000 feet the "Zone of Death". Pilots simply note that as the altitude past which you either better have breathing gear or be in a pressurized cabin.

Somewhere around Angels 20, Sam switched on his breathing apparatus and the cold, dry oxygen mixture in his tanks began feeding into his helmet. He also switched off his cooling system.

Sam was beginning to feel the stress of the climb. There was a some sweat on his face that he couldn't wipe away. That was always irritating.

Between Angels 30 and 35 was cruising altitude for airliners. While the airspace above the mansion was supposed to be clear - Sam had checked before he left - Sam kept his eyes open anyway. On the outside chance that he was hit by an airliner, it would do more damage to the aircraft than to him, but Sam didn't particularly want to cause an catastrophes.

The heater in his suit was now turned on, but Sam was keeping it at a low setting in order to conserve battery power. So Sam could feel a trace of chill in his hands and feet.

Sam periodically checked and rechecked his suit instruments. If anything went wrong with his breathing apparatus, he had to know immediately. He had a back-up system, but it couldn't be trusted to kick in automatically. One of the dangerous things about high altitudes was that you could enter into a state of oxygen-deprivation and not realize it. In the early stages, victims lost the ability to think clearly. They often began making bad decisions without realizing that anything was wrong. Eventually, they would fall unconscious. After that... well, for someone who was flying that meant you either woke up or you died.

Angels 40 and above is the province of high-performance military aircraft. Various air-forces had taken an interest in Sam before, but he now had a Shi'ar-based stealth gizmo on his belt that kept him off of radar screens.

Sam wasn't bothering to watch the ground any longer. At that altitude, there wasn't a heck of a lot to see. Ground features tended to blur together.

He now had to blink his eyes constantly to keep sweat out of them. His breath was steadily coming faster, too.

Sam kept thinking about Paige. Was there any way he could explain to her why he was doing this? Would she understand if he told her what he was seeing when he hung on the edge of space?

He didn't think so. Paige was steadily growing in a different direction than Sam.

Somewhere between Angels 50 and 55, Sam hit that point of fatigue and pain that runners call "The Wall". Sam was eighteen years old when his ability to fly had first manifested. He was twenty before he finally beat "The Wall".

Gritting his teeth, Sam pushed on. He now knew that the trick was to think past The Wall - to tell himself that it was just a stage in a longer process.

At Angels 60, Sam could see the curvature of the Earth.

Sam was starting to shiver from the cold. He kicked the suit heater up to max. That helped, but he was still chilly.

Angels 70, 80, and 90 came and went. Essentially, Sam was now in space and the only thing keeping him alive was the heating element in his suit and the oxygen tanks on his back.

Below Sam, the Earth was a stunning swath of blue, white, and green. The Boston-to-Washington corridor was visible as a light-gray streak along the US coastline. Far off to the west, you could see the edge of the day/night terminator. The night side was illuminated by sparkling city lights. However, Sam wasn't really enjoying the view. He'd long ago discovered that this stretch was best accomplished with his eyes closed as he concentrated on keeping his breathing deep and level and his rate of climb slow and steady. The atmospheric mixture in his tanks had a higher percentage of oxygen than was normally present in air. That definitely helped.

But despite that, Sam's rate of climb was steadily slowing as sheer fatigue began to claim him.

By the time he reached Angels 95, Sam was trembling with exhaustion. The interior of his suit was soaked in sweat, yet the cold was now steadily creeping past the best efforts of his suit's heater to keep him warm.

It would be impossible for him to descend completely under his own power. That was what the parachute was for.

But Sam kept on pushing upwards - and now he was carefully scanning the black sky. The stars were not only visible, they were eerily bright. The bulk of Earth's atmosphere was well below Sam and the stars could be seen with a clarity only a few mortals would ever enjoy.

However, Sam wasn't really looking at the stars.

Sam began twirling slowly while maintaining his rate of climb as best he could. That allowed him a complete view of his surroundings.

"Dammit, where are you?" Sam whispered to himself, craning his helmet up and around. A gnawing doubt filled him. He still wasn't completely sure if what he was seeing up here was real or some combination of fatigue, hallucination, and hope.

Then Sam saw what he was looking for - and gasped aloud.

There was a speck of red up above him.

Sam immediately stopped spinning and checked the stars in the background. No. That wasn't the right location for Mars...

Hissing out a noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a growl, Sam kept climbing.

Angels 100.

Sam was shaking and his breathing was a rasping sob. He was feeling hollow and cold inside and he knew his power would give out on him very soon. But above him - just above him - Sam could see...

He could see...

Wings.

Wings as red as blood.

"JAY!" Sam screamed. Of course, wearing a helmet and far above the ability of the atmosphere to propagate sound, it was impossible that anyone could actually hear him.

This was the closest he'd ever got. Just a few more seconds, Sam told himself... Just a few more feet and...

Sam threw every last bit of will and guts that he had within him into a final effort to gain more altitude. Somehow, he managed to crawl upwards another few hundred feet. But whatever it was that Sam was seeing seemed to stay just above him. Just out of the grasp of his frantically reaching hands.

"Jay..." Sam called again. This time it was more a sob than anything else. And he couldn't really see clearly anymore, but his hands kept groping upwards.

That was when Sam's power finally cut out.

With a howl of loss and rage, Sam flipped onto his back and began his long, long fall down from heaven.