Excerpt: Subject to Change at Whim of Author 7: Dial the Crackpot to Eleven!

The Aleutian Islands spread like a string of pearls in the North Pacific, a wide arc of active and dormant volcanoes stretching from Alaska to Siberia like a long-decayed landbridge, but on this day it was mostly in theory as endless seas of white and grey rolled by under the soft hum of a chopper and only the occasional mountaintop broke the monotone view of clouds and fog.

Photos lied, Tessa had always known that, and the Aleutian islands had apparently had some really good marketing people working for it, judging by what she saw now.

Of course she had checked out the facts before she left – anything else would be stupid, since the place would be her home for at least the next year – but theory was very different from reality sometimes when it came to stuff like that, and the endless stretch of whiteness below her just reminded her of that now.

It also reminded her of the solitude of it all – not even the majority of the islands were populated, and she was heading about as far away from the mainland and the main settlements as she could possibly get, and even by chopper it was hours in every direction to get anywhere even remotely civilized. The only saving grace was apparently an internet connection in the seriously heavy-duty category and that was needed as much for scientific reasons as to keep the few people on the island sane because it was also, she had noticed with a slightly nervous feeling to her stomach, a very, very tiny island at that, too. She hadn't really considered how tiny until she had stared at the map and it had taken her a full two minutes to find the thing while stubbornly refusing help from the map itself.

Something up ahead pierced the cloudcover, immense and solid and snowcovered with only a few tendrils of green reaching up past the clouds and fog, and heavy waves of steam came roilling off of the top as snow-white was broken by the blackness of an obviously active volcano crater. White steam, though, her mind noted again, not grey – thermal activity, then, not a genuine eruption, but there was still a lot of it and the volcano was clearly not dormant by any stretch of the imagination.

"Mount Vsevidof," one of the pilots commented over her headset and pointed unnecessarily out the window at the only thing that really was to look at. "It erupted a few years ago but it's been calm lately. They're keeping an eye on it, though. There's a settlement there and it's big enough to disrupt traffic. It diverted planes for days last time it blew. One of the Mammoths had to do an emergency landing after they hit the ashcloud. It was just ash, right? How bad could it be? They had to replace two of the engines. They don't make them like they used to. The older models could've handled it."

"I head about that," Tessa responded and watched as the volcano sped by beneath them and was gone again minutes later as they chased the clouds and the sea and the mountaintops and continued their lone voyage. "I saw a smaller plane with damage from ash like that once. One of the flight schools in the Cascades have one outside as a reminder to the students – 'you're small and stupid and fragile. Don't get into a flight with a volcano; you're always going to lose'. They need more reminders like that sometimes. They should have kept those Mammoth engines as a mark of human stupidity in that airport."

Would probably have scared the tourists, though, even if it might have saved the company some money in the long run and kept the poor volcanoes from getting blamed for stuff that was really no fault of theirs, and the chopper's communications channel fell silent again as the flight continued and Tessa was left to her thoughts again.

Another hour to go, she knew, and every minute brought her further away from the relative civilization of academia – although that could reasonably be debated – and closer to their ultimate destination, an impossibly tiny island in the middle of the emptiness of the freezing sea and with only the company of other islands like itself for hundreds of miles in every direction.

A few more volcanoes dotted the skyline as the continued, even if none of them were as obviously active as Vsevidof had been, and eventually the cloud cover started to yield, to break, and finally vanished completely by the time they, true to schedule, saw their destination come into view, the distinct shape of it all making it impossible to mistake for anything else.