She didn’t stand to step onto the wing after opening the door, but slid out onto the walkway, pausing to pull her flight jacket around her shoulders against the surprisingly chilly air before pivoting on her backside to stretch her legs full length, semicollapsing her forehead to her knees to ease the kinks from her back. Off in the distance came the whooping sound of sirens as rescue vehicles sped towards her across the desert hardpan, mostly drowned by the ear-busting shriek of the Sikorsky’s monster jets as it settled downwind of her.
She dropped to the ground herself as the first of the “Hot Papas”—firemen in gleaming, flameproof bodysuits that allowed them to plunge safely into the heart of the most fearsome inferno—lumbered over, lugging bulky foam extinguishers. They weren’t needed, the medic was.
She winced as the other woman gently touched a gauze to her scalp, along the hairline by her ear where the headset boom had made a ragged slash.
“I thought that plastic was supposed to be unbreakable,” Nicole grumbled.
“Write the manufacturer,” the medic replied matter-of-factly. “Helluva bump.” She held up a finger. “What do you see?”
“One finger, in focus.”
“Follow it,” and Nicole did so, tracking her eyes right, left, up, down, in concert with the medic’s movements. “How do you feel?”
“Wrung out. Achy. Sore.”
“Tired?”
“It was a long flight, even before the emergency.”
“Might be concussed. We’ll take you into the hospital, do a preliminary workup.”
“Terrific.”
“Hey, Lieutenant, ain’t my fault.”
“Ain’t mine, either.”
Brass with the vehicles, a brace of MP’s and one of the duty officers, a Major who raised his eyebrows in silently obvious astonishment at the sight of Nicole’s jacket. Few of the senior pilots had one, much less any baby blue shirts. Nicole handed over her CardEx and orders, which he inserted into a portable Reader slung over his shoulder.
“Certainly have a knack for making an entrance, Lieutenant,” he said, handing back her document cards.
“Not my intention, sir, believe me.”
“Colonel Sallinger”—boss of the Flight Test Center—“wants to see you.” Probably, she thought sourly, after a stunt like this, to throw me out on my ass. He hadn’t been that fond of her last tour here, when he was Harry Macon’s Vice-Commander, vocally and vehemently protesting what he perceived as the special treatment his friend was giving her.
“I have first dibs on her, Major,” the medic said. “Boss’ll have to wait ’til we make sure she’s okay.”
“What about my Baron?” Nicole asked, and the Major turned to a stocky weather-beaten man with Top Sergeant stripes on his fatigues.
“Your call, Castaneda.”
“Came down hard, Major,” the Boss LineTech said, looking up from where he was crouched by one of the engines, his words softened by a mild Spanish accent, “but these old brutes were built to take worse. No problem to roll it up onto a flatbed and take it over to the maintenance ramp, give it a proper once over.”
“Thanks, Ray,” Nicole said. He shrugged and smiled, came with the territory, the fun that made the job worth having.
“Major,” the medic said, “you got nothing more here, the Loot an’ I’re gonna roll.”
“Take her, Adani. But soon as you’re cleaned up, Lieutenant, Colonel Sallinger’s office, full burner, copy?”
She pushed herself erect and gave him a sharp salute, which he returned in kind, waiting ’til he was back in his car and speeding away before muttering, “What’s the bug up his ass?”
Medic laughed. “Midlevel on the totem pole, worked hard to get where he is . . .”
“And resents hotshot junior officers on what appears to be a faster track?”
“You said it.”
Nicole shook her head. “If he only knew.”
* * *
two
It wasn’t until much later, when shock gave way to pain only marginally dulled by basic pills, that she began relating to what had actually happened, pulling the pieces together, cohering random imagery into a complete, sequential whole.
And got angry.
She’d been where she was supposed to be, on track, on schedule, following a flight plan filed and approved over a week before, certainly listed on the Master Regional Plot if not on the screens of the local Route Centers. And some pudknocker sonofabitch had zipped up from below and behind—where even her on-board radar hadn’t a prayer of spotting him—out of the mountains, where he was blind to everyone else’s ground-based scans, to bounce her. And damn near buy her the farm.
By the time she hit headquarters, after a shower and a change into a fresh uniform, anger had become white-hot fury, a flame as piercingly intense as any from an acetylene welding torch. Only to discover that Colonel Sallinger was off-base, not expected back ’til sometime much later that evening. Hunger got the better of her then, and after leaving word with the receptionist, she flagged a lift up Rosamond—the main drag in from the small desert town of the same name—to Hap Arnold Park, named for arguably the greatest Chief of Staff in Air Force history, who’d commanded through World War II and up until the Air Force became a separate service in 1946.
Not much in the way of greenery, there was a perverse pride on the base about keeping true to the environment’s prehistoric desolation. Paths led away from the road, between twin rows of parked aircraft, representing the benchmark test flights made off the high desert, going all the way back to the Bell X-l. From the most primitive to designs too outrageous to be credible, some looking like they’d never get off the ground, others like they couldn’t wait. So many she’d read about, videoed, more than a few she’d seen, and a rare couple or three she’d actually flown herself. If Eagle Landing was her favorite place on the Moon, this was it on Earth. Where she lost herself in memories of a time when Edwards was mostly make-believe, Mad Monk nutcases perched on the edge of nowhere, teasing the impossible out of machines that were state-of-the-art one morning, obsolete the next, the cutting edge so sharp it more often than not killed those who tried to ride it. When the Unknown truly was that.
She looked over the ridge lines where they rose and fell like waves curling across the ocean swell, perched chock-a-block with houses and trees and even lawns for God’s sake, all the hallmarks of a fair-sized company town, complete with schools and stores and a minimall. And tried to imagine what it had been like for Yeager and Ridley and Crossfield and Kincheloe in those first crazy years when they were pretty much all by themselves, hanging out on the outside of the envelope, and then thought of the time not much later when it seemed like a pilot a week was being buried and some started wondering if the price of knowledge was too high.
The sun had gone while she was in her reverie, hardly anything left of day but a wild palette of colors streaked in layers up a small ways from the horizon, where they faded into the deepening twilight. A couple of stars flickered over the east, a chill breeze making her turn up the collar of her jacket and wish for something warmer than shirtsleeves underneath. She’d left her gear aboard the Baron, God knew where it was now. Made a disgusted noise and strode through the park, across a grassy knoll to a sloppily haphazard building set off by itself in the middle distance. There was a driveway, but that was really supposed to be restricted to delivery vehicles. The right and proper way to approach Hotshots was through the park. Past the planes. So you entered with a true sense of place and perspective.
The club was nothing really special to look at, inside or out. Weather-beaten because most of the materials had fallen off the back of somebody’s truck. Scrounged. Stolen. The pilots did it, no one knew whose idea it was or who’d set things in motion, it seemed to be one of those synergistic moments that just... happened. Fliers started hanging out here, on this little rise overlooking the park and the huge dry lake beyond, chugging beers and doing their best with barbecue grills and hibachis
of steak or burgers while they talked and boasted and argued about their work. Then the picnic ground sort of grew some walls and became a type of lean-to, shelter from the elements when they turned nasty. And one thing led to another. Until there was a real, honest-to-by-God restaurant. With one tradition carried over from the oldest days, when the pilot’s hangout had been a rumpled, tumble-down paradise called Pancho’s: the wall behind the bar was crammed with pictures, men and women and the planes that killed them.
“Hail the conquering hero,” cried the woman behind the bar as Nicole crossed the threshold, rolling her eyes in dismay as she took herself a stool and ordered a seltzer.
“Don’t like the limelight?” Sue asked while Nicole nursed the drink and scanned the shadows for anyone else she knew.
“Gimme a break.”
“I’m only busting chops, Nicole, ’cause I care. And I’m damn proud.”
Nicole lifted her glass in an acknowledging toast. Sue barely touched five feet and life for her seemed a perpetual battle with a figure that would never be as svelte as fashion demanded. Scuttlebutt cast her past in terms of exotic mystery, which everyone knew was a crock because there was no way anyone got on base, especially to work, without being checked out every which way by Air Force Security and the FBI. Some even wondered if she was a spook herself. She’d come west ages back, casting off a career as an accountant to cook and tend bar, and gradually made Hotshots her own, eventually becoming its manager. The Air Force had no complaint with that because she made a tidy profit; the customers loved it because she ran the place like her own home, dispensing superb eats, advice offered whether it was asked for or not, and very occasionally help with taxes and budgeting.
“Hungry?” Nicole was asked.
Sue got a shrug in return, and gave a short, barking laugh. “I thought you blue-suit zoomies were trained to be decisive.”
“It’s been a long day, what can I say?”
Arms came around her from behind and a beery voice growled, “Booga booga booga,” in her ear.
“Seductive as ever, eh, Ramsey.”
“Where you’re concerned, L’il Loot, I can’t help myself.” A Major, with a lazy smile and classic features that got him more than his share of second looks when ladies passed him by, wearing a leather flight jacket that matched Nicole’s own. The name came from a WASP father, the looks and natural grace from a Tuscan mom, Ramsey Sheridan bringing to social occasions the same easy, relaxed, seemingly unflappable manner that made him one of the Center’s premier test pilots.
“You’re the proverbial lifesaver,” he continued, draping an arm across her shoulders and accepting the Anchor Steam Sue poured for him.
“My cue to rabbit.”
“No, seriously, Nicole, we got a game going, we’re a bod short.”
“Rain check, Ramsey?”
“Hey, would I be asking if I could take no for an answer?” And he gently bumped her off her stool and towards a back table, where the usual gang of ruffians had gathered for the weekly game.
Stakes were moderate, which suited Nicole fine. She wasn’t that thrilled with the idea of playing—the more time passed, the more the effects of this afternoon’s landing made themselves felt—but Ramsey left no courteous way to back out. She was in an odd state where she felt consumed by weariness—there was an ache across her shoulders that reminded her of her first ride in the centrifuge—yet was far too jazzed to sleep. Dangerous combination, guaranteed to make her sloppy, but she didn’t care enough to focus out of it. Couldn’t be bothered, what was the point? She stayed for two cards the first hand, then folded when the bet to her hit ten bucks.
Second hand went pretty much the same way. Third, she stuck out with two pair, only to be nailed by a trip, three of a kind. By the time the deck came ’round to her, she’d won some, lost some more, was down about twenty dollars and thinking some seriously hostile thoughts in Ramsey’s direction, of which the son of a bitch seemed serenely oblivious.
“Room for another?”
A young man, within two or three years of Nicole’s age, tall and lean with a Byron-esque cast to his heartbreaker features. Good bones over naturally hollowed cheeks, creating a splendid frame for his wide-spaced, dark eyes, though the total effect was perhaps a tad too delicate. Full lips, quirked in the slightest of smiles that carried an edge of mockery, the sense that this was a person used to getting his own way, bound by only the most minima) of limits. There was a sleek, almost designer athleticism to his form, coupled with a self-awareness of the body Nicole was most used to seeing in her youngest brother and his fellow dancers.
“Your game, Ramsey,” Nicole said, masking her pleasure at the flash of discomfiture across the Major’s face; here, she decided, was appropriate payback for putting her on the spot earlier. “Your call.”
“He can have my seat,” groaned Stu Hanneford with a glance at his watch, “I gotta be over at Ops for my shift in an hour. ’Sides, the cards have not been kind tonight, no sense prolonging the agony.”
“Stakes?” the newcomer asked, pulling a handful of bills from his wallet. He wore civvies but it was the way he carried himself that told Nicole he wasn’t military. Even in the most casual and informal of settings, every rank had a way of relating to each other that told you subconsciously where they stood on the totem pole. This guy’s attitude was that he topped them all.
“Dollar, five, ten bets,” Ramsey replied in too even a voice. “Three raise max. Dealer antes and calls the game.”
“A hundred dollars worth of chips, please?”
“It’s a friendly game, Alex,” Ramsey said, “and some of us work for a living.”
“No problem.” Alex flashed perfect teeth in a perfect and pro forma smile, and took fifty instead. “I’m Alex Cobri,” he said to Nicole.
“Ah,” she said, as all became clear. She knew the name; there wasn’t an astronaut flying who didn’t. Since Cobri, Associates built the starships they flew. Manuel Cobri—Alex’s father, she assumed—being the man who, virtually single-handedly, had turned Jean-Claude Baumier’s conceptions into reality and thereby booted humanity out of the Earth-Moon system and into the galaxy. Hailed by media commentators as the modem equivalent of Da Vinci. Not to mention Croesus.
“Nicole Shea,” was her reply.
“I know.”
She called seven-card stud, and proceeded to deal herself aces, a pair down. That got her attention.
“Rumor has it,” one of the other pilots noted, continuing the political discussion from the previous hand and opening with a dollar bet, “Mansfield’s going to challenge for the nomination.”
“He feels betrayed,” said Alex, and Nicole heard a faint intake of breath as he saw the dollar and bumped it ten.
“He was,” this came from Nicole’s right. “President Russell said he’d bow out in his favor after one term. That’s why the man backed down last election and came aboard as Veep.”
“What the hell,” Ramsey said, “six years in the White House oughtta be enough for any man. Almost half Lee’s term, after the President died, and one in his own right, what more does he want? You’d think he’d be glad to get out.”
“Circumstances change,” Nicole noted, calling the cards as she dealt another round, “four years ago, there were no Halyan’t’a.”
“You had something to do with that”—Alex turned a sidelong glance towards Nicole—“am I right?”
“A very small something, in point of fact,” she replied noncommittally.
“You took a fair beating, Lieutenant, as I recall,” he continued.
“The better part of a year in hospital and therapy,” this from Ramsey, answering for Nicole, “but quite fit now, I understand.”
“Physically, at any rate,” Nicole acknowledged.
“I wonder, what’s it matter who grabs the Oval Office,” mused Alex, “Mansfield or Russell, or whoever the Democrats toss into the ring?”
“Smart money,” Ramsey noted sotto voce, “pegs the Demo
cratic nominee as Senator Ishida.”
“Good choice,” another agreed, “she’ll give either of ’em a fair run for their money.”
But Nicole wasn’t paying attention to their exchange, she was focused on the younger Cobri.
“It matters,” she said, “because of the Halyan’t’a.”
“How so?” Alex demanded.
“They came to us as equals. One civilization—one species—to another. They’ve no interest in dealing with a balkanized political structure. They want one government to deal with, that speaks not simply for the Earth but for the Colonies as well.”
“I can’t wait to see how the Afrikaaners on Nieuwhome react to that,” he countered with a sneer, “they made it plain when they left they want nothing more to do with Earth.”
“They may have no choice,” Nicole said softly.
“I’m an American,” Alex said, leaning forward on the table, his eyes on Nicole, and suddenly she had a wild sense that things were spinning out of hand, a roller-coaster ride down a set of open-ended tracks, “and as an American, I’m not terribly thrilled with the idea of ceding national sovereignty to the United Nations.”
“You think the Russians like it any better,” she heard from across the table, “or the Europeans or the Chinese or the Japanese or the Brazilians or the Iranians?”
“Not to mention the Belters,” added Ramsey.
“Consider the alternative,” Nicole said.
“Which is,” this from Alex.
“We’re not the Halyan’t’a’s equals, militarily or technologically. If they’d wanted, they could have moved in on us just like the Great Powers did on Africa and China—and tried to with Japan—two centuries ago. Playing one country off against another, divide and conquer, until we woke up one bright morning to discover we worked for them. You don’t think there are factions on s’N’dare advocating just that? Why share when you can dominate, it’s a seductive argument.”
Grounded! Page 3