Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

For all the skill and talent, though, she’d arrived at the most dangerous stage of her career. Young enough to still hack combat flying but reaching the rank where the responsibilities of command allowed her less and less time for it. A situation made worse, in her case, by trying simultaneously to make the transition from atmosphere to vacuum, and carve a place for herself along the High Frontier.

  Nicole knocked, got the briefest flicker of a glance in acknowledgment, placed a full file folder on her desk.

  “Halyan’t’a status updates are in your buffer, ma’am,” she said, “and here’s a hardcopy of the XSR evaluation for your review. It’s uploaded as well, ready for processing.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” was Kinsella’s reply, without even a glance upward from her own work. “I have Flight Review this afternoon, so I probably won’t be back after lunch ’til near close of business.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but the initial test sequence for Mr. Cobri’s Virtual system is scheduled for two.”

  Kinsella gave her that look seniors have for subordinates whenever they’re about to pull rank. “Tell Captain Hanneford to have a nice time. I’ll expect a full report. Damned if I can see the sense of it.”

  “Mr. Cobri feels it has extraordinary potential,” Nicole began, only to be almost immediately stopped.

  “I read his proposal, Lieutenant. And you know as well as I that if there had been any name on it but Cobri, if he weren’t our best hope for establishing a direct interface between the Hal cybernetics systems and our own... ” Kinsella let her words trail off with a shake of the head. “He wants to play, he can afford his own toys, why not humor him? A decision, as always, made by those who don’t have to deal with the consequences.”

  Nicole saluted and was starting to leave when Kinsella’s voice turned her back.

  “I noticed Miss Cobri outside.”

  “Just dropped in, ma’am. Shall I ask her to leave?”

  There was a strange, ambiguously torn expression on Kinsella’s face, as though the thought was tempting but the risk too great. “If she’s no distraction,” the Colonel said with a perfunctory wave of the hand, “she can stay.”

  Nicole couldn’t help a inner, bitter smile at how neatly her boss had dumped the burden onto her shoulders.

  Stu didn’t look thrilled when Nicole gave him the news.

  “I’ll be hours in that damn harness,” he groused, slouching in his chair and drumming his fingers on the desktop, “and most of the night finishing the report.”

  “Comes with the territory, Stu.”

  “It’s Friday.”

  “These things happen.”

  “You don’t understand, Nicole.” He was on his feet, pacing from the outer doorway to Kinsella’s, with half an eye cocked in case she decided to emerge. “Carla called me, my new bike’s finally in and ready to roll.”

  “Cut yourself some slack, Stu, you’ve got the whole weekend.”

  “Hey,” he snapped. “I had things arranged, today was light duty, just so I could cut loose early and get in some off-road time. Check out the wheels, do whatever mods were necessary tomorrow morning, run it hard in the afternoon, same deal on Sunday. This way, I bookend the weekend with a run. And it’s not as though there’s time to spare. I mean, the race is next month! And all my personal time’s tied up with that,” he explained further, anticipating Nicole’s question, “I can’t ask for any more full days to practice.”

  Nicole said nothing. She’d come to learn that Stu loved schedules—part of what made him such an efficient paper-pusher—a structure for his day to match the structure of his files. But when the real world threw a curve, he found himself boxed, unable to bend. In fact, it surprised her that he was a fighter jock, since they generally thrived on the rush of the unexpected. Stu hated it.

  “Unless... ” He also could have the subtlety of a brick. It wasn’t much fun playing poker with him; he was as achingly predictable as he was conservative.

  “Stu!” she protested.

  “A favor.”

  “That’ll get both our butts in a royal sling when Kinsella sees my name on the report.”

  “I’ll finesse things with the boss, you got my word. We go back, she and I, you got no worries.”

  Famous last words, she thought. Like Colonel, like Captain.

  And, against her better judgment, nodded.

  “All right,” he cheered, then held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Look, I’ll be back this evening, shouldn’t be long after sundown, we’ll work on the report together, howzzat?”

  “I’d appreciate it. What is this miracle machine, anyway, aren’t you satisfied with what you’ve got?”

  “Oh, Nicole, you’ve got no idea. I mean, my old bike’s a piece of work, but this—! Totally blew my credit line and worth every penny.”

  “All for Baja.”

  “I can win it with this.”

  “To each his own, sport. Have a nice time.”

  “How’s it feel,” Alex asked as she settled the helmet a little more comfortably on her shoulders.

  “Disconcerting,” Nicole replied, rolling her eyes in every direction, trying to find the smallest pinpoint of light in the absolute darkness, “as always.”

  “State-of-the-art CyberSpace,” he told her, “I thought you’d’ve become used to it ages ago.”

  “There’s them that do, pal, an’ them that don’t.” She didn’t need the image in her mind’s eye to tell her how silly she looked, lying on a contour chair in Alex Cobri’s lab, wearing a helmet that looked like nothing so much as a giant, opaque goldfish bowl.

  “Sealed?”

  “Tight,” and she felt the rubber gasket that fit snug around her neck. Normally, of course, the helmet would seat into the locking ring of a pressure suit, but for this test that wasn’t necessary; she was wearing just a regular flight suit over a body-hugging skinsnug that literally wrapped her in the sensor web that would key her into the Virtual Reality field.

  “You sound a bit edgy. Scared of the dark?”

  “I just like to see where I am and where I’m going.”

  “Oh, well. If that’s all.”

  She couldn’t help a gasp of surprise as daylight burst all around her. There was a moment of disorientation while her mind struggled to accept the new input and then, with an almost physical shock, she realized where she was. Or rather, she told herself desperately, where she appeared to be. Ten thousand meters, maybe fifteen, over Tehachapi, in air so brilliantly clear she could pick out the Los Angeles skyline off to the south. Looked left and down, aware of her head moving, but no sense of any shift in her globular helmet—indeed, disconcertingly, no sense of any external physicality at all—saw intermittent flashes from the giant NOAA windmills at the foot of the pass, Mojave Airport almost right beneath her, Edwards itself a comparatively small ways beyond. The other direction, across the San Rafael Mountains to the Pacific beyond. An impossibly perfect flying day, classic CAVU—Clear Air Visibility Unlimited.

  “Eat your heart out,” she heard Alex Cobri say, and she started—ever so slightly—as his disembodied head appeared in midair before her, “Man of Steel.”

  “Not too shabby,” she conceded. “No live input, everything here’s computer-generated?”

  “Synthesized, the lot. What, you think weather this clear comes naturally? That bother you, L’il Loot?”

  “I’m not looking at the real world,” she said. “All I know about what is, and what’s going on, is what your interface chooses to tell me. And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop calling me that, Mister Cobri.”

  “You’ve got all you need to know and more. Anything you like, any way you want it. For example, how ’bout a Fox-two-niner, standard air supremacy package—that’s six air-to-airs and a gatling, conformal fuel tanks to top you out at roughly thirty minutes hang time.” Before Nicole, but slightly off-center, appeared a miniature down-view silhouette of the teardrop-shaped F-29 interceptor, with weapons clearly marked. Straight on wa
s a gun-sight targeting grid. “Let’s throw in a solo bad guy,” the Alex-head continued with a chuckle, “at Mach three closure.” No gasp this time, but a snarled “Jesus” as Nicole suddenly found herself barreling through the sky at one and a half times the speed of sound.

  “God’s-Eye,” she snapped automatically, and a tactical schematic overlay of the situation materialized before her. A single bogey, as promised, her altitude, thirty klicks out. At this speed, approaching head-on, she had all of seconds to act.

  “Data, hostile,” she said, and a data window opened off to one side, zooming in for a close-up of the other aircraft, displaying all its relevant statistics. F-31, dual-role fighter-bomber, with capabilities on a par with her own. She had the edge in raw speed, it in maneuverability; it carried more hardpoints for ordnance—in this case, missiles—while she had the higher gun load.

  And yet—while mind and body kicked instinctively into combat mode, the one racing through a score of possible options to get the jump on her opposition, the other preparing to execute them and deal with the physical consequences—something, a wrongness, kept burring at the base of her consciousness. More and more information was flashing at her from the floating displays, so much that she deliberately ignored most of it, focusing solely on what was necessary for the fight, letting the rest pass on through to storage in her back-brain, accessible when needed but otherwise out of the way. This had been the major problem with air combat since before the turn of the century, vehicles that far surpassed the physical capabilities of their operators, combined with an ever-more bewilderingly comprehensive volume of data. A multitude of critical elements to keep track of, requiring split-second responses, in a regime of acute physical and mental stress. It had gotten to the point where it wasn’t possible to think your way through a dogfight anymore—it was like playing an entire Grand Master chess match in five seconds or less—everything had to be left to instinct. Which essentially made any decent fight a match between flash responses; if a body took time to take a breath, that was pretty much guaranteed to be its last. The antithesis of how she’d learned to behave in space.

  She shook her head angrily to clear the hair from her eyes, squinted against the sting of the wind across her face, sheer speed cooling her skin while the raw sun high overhead tried to roast her bare back. And came to a dead stop in midair, just by thinking about it, as the realization crashed home that she wasn’t in an aircraft any longer, simulated or otherwise. She was stark naked, a Valkyrie figure with hair sweeping most of the way down her back, staring in dumb astonishment at the equally naked, dauntingly impressive figure of Grace Kinsella diving towards her at better than fifteen hundred klicks per hour. The impact sent Nicole tumbling head over heels, and as she tried desperately to recover herself, she sensed rather than saw Grace sending a right cross towards her jaw.

  The punch was about to connect when Nicole tore at the helmet, yanking it off with desperate force and an almost incoherent cry of rage to find Alex standing safely out of reach—very sensible boy—by the monitor console with a shit-eating grin plastered over his face.

  “What the hell,” she snarled, and would have thrown the helmet at him, cheerfully used it to pulp his matinee-idol features bloody, if not for the minimal play of the data and power umbilicals linking it to her couch. Not to mention the fact that the helmet alone represented an expenditure of perhaps ten times her current annual salary. She was panting, as much from physical exertion as anger—a part of her felt as if she herself had actually provided the motive force to propel her through the air, as though it had suddenly somehow become physically possible for the human body to fly at Mach one and a half, with the equivalent drain on her inner resources, and there were equally real aches as well from where the Kinsella avatar had slammed her. She half expected to find bruises running down her side, but wasn’t about to give Alex the satisfaction of looking. Amy didn’t help matters from her perch in a corner, wearing an I-told-you-so smirk.

  “Had you fooled,” he said with bland delight, as though he scored this sort of triumph every day.

  “Very fucking funny, sport.”

  “You’re missing the point,” and she made a rude noise. “Nicole”—he paused, hunting for words that wouldn’t make things worse than they already were (a forlorn hope, from her perspective)—“look, if I hadn’t gotten carried away”—and she gave him a glare to match her vocal comment—“you had no differentiation”—he hammered each word, to give it emphasis—“between doing and being. Until I let the Virtual Reality get too silly to support, you were flying. All the characteristics of the aircraft, all its capabilities, but you were doing it. And you didn’t know. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.”

  To buy herself some time before responding (because a response was clearly what he wanted, and applause, too, but also because she was damned if she would show him how truly shaken she was, she’d never been sucked so quickly and completely into an illusion before) she reached up with both hands to set the helmet back on its pedestal at the head of the couch. She was moving slowly, as though pummeled, growly stomach and light-headedness combining to tell her she needed some food, quickly. A shower, too, her skinsnug was plastered to her by sweat that the room’s air-conditioning was turning to clammy ice.

  “It wasn’t me, though,” she said, taking refuge in the trivial. “Not my shape. And in my whole life I’ve never had hair that long.”

  “Artistic license,” he replied, trying for the joke.

  She wanted to thump him, he was so blissfully dense; instead, she said simply, “I’m not your canvas, sport.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” he protested, starting belatedly to relate to her anger—but only by turning sulky, as if she were ruining a perfectly great and triumphant moment.

  “Standard VR is limited,” he went on hurriedly, “there’s always a sense of being removed from the event, an observer rather than a participant.”

  “Strikes me that’s not an altogether bad thing.”

  “I’m working on a way to integrate all the elements of the system—biological and cybernetic—into a true synthesis. A software linkage that allows wetware and hardware to function as one. A true cyborg.”

  “Is that an altogether good thing?”

  “You’re the astronaut, Nicole, you tell me. If I can give you a chance to experience through a remote a walkabout on the Venusian surface, or a swim through the Jovian atmosphere. To be outside a ship on EVA, without actually going. To be the ship itself. You gonna say no?”

  She honestly wasn’t sure. The only thing she’d encountered that came close to matching this was the Halyan’t’a Environmental Sensorium aboard Range Guide, that managed to create not simply the look of a place but all the physical sensations that went with it. Sights, sounds, scents, everything but the raw texture of the materials. At least there, though, she had the protection of knowing she was in a room aboard a starship, and that all around her was illusion. Alex was talking about erasing that “fourth wall” and making the subject one with the illusion. Taking the “Virtual” out of Virtual Reality. But what, she thought, if you got lost?

  Her hands were trembling and she tried to cover it by shaking out her arms, flexing her cramped shoulders.

  “This isn’t playtime, Alex,” she said in a tone she’d learned as Spacecraft Commander aboard Wanderer. “We’re here for a purpose. If you can’t relate to that, stop wasting my, and the Air Force’s, time.”

  “My apologies,” strangely sounding like he meant it.

  “Let’s just get on with business,” she responded flatly, returning to the couch, Alex helping fit the helmet once more into place.

  Most of the base was in bed by the time she made her way home, the desert touched with a special sort of stillness that she wished she had the energy to enjoy. That first session with Alex’s VR system had been the merest harbinger of what was to come, a run of scenarios that proved as grueling and physically exhausting as the real t
hing. Just what she needed after this morning’s ride in the simulator.

  It didn’t help that every so often, he’d throw her a curve—like the naked Kinsella—just to see if she’d notice. Nor that a couple of times, especially towards the end when fatigue was wearing her down, she almost didn’t. The whole point of the exercise was to evaluate the system, and then fine-tune how well it resonated to the operator.

  In the end, as at the beginning, it was Nicole who’d called it quits. She was totally wired, crackling with a nervous energy that wouldn’t let her stay still, either on the couch or her feet. She spoke in quick, staccato bursts, with moves to match, and a barely concealed fury towards Cobri that she didn’t bother to hide. Alex’s reaction only made things worse, as though this was an extension of the test sequence and her actions more grist for his notebooks. She couldn’t wait to strip off the skinsnug, but for a long while after that she just sat on the bench in the pilot’s locker room, clothes in hand, undisturbed, unmotivated by the slightest conscious thought.

  She shook her head when the fugue finally broke, smiling in wry dismay at how she must look, just like one of her parents’ cats whose favorite activity was to snuggle face-first into the corner seam of a sofa, where the back met the arm, staring at nothing and seeing who-knows-what.

  She moved like an old woman, exercising joints that had forgotten how to move, slowly donning her uniform, and returning past Alex’s lab to the project offices. The lights were out, the doors locked, a post-it on the door from Alex telling her she could return the skinsnug Monday morning since he had plans for the weekend.

  “Lucky you,” she murmured without even the energy to muster some appropriate profanity, hoping the ’snug would be safe in her locker with her flight gear.

  The sky was still light, the sun just gone, as she slumped at her desk over a mug of leftover tea, freshly nuked in the office microwave, and tried to collect her thoughts for Kinsella’s report. No sign of Stu, but she wasn’t surprised; when he was playing with his toys, it was always better to give him some serious latitude. She was glad of that, in fact, grateful for a chance to sort out her reactions—thoughts and feelings—while she was still by herself.