Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

  The door opened and she turned to see Matai follow her into the house. Before Nicole could voice a question, the Hal explained her presence in slow, careful phrases, making it as easy as possible for Nicole to comprehend.

  “It is my understanding,” she said in Hal, “my specialty may be of use.” One of the suggestions broached by the investigators had been to summon Alex Cobri to take apart the house computer. Nicole was emphatic in her opposition, drawing a raised eyebrow and an “O” of astonishment from Arsenio Rachiim at this use of her new authority. Colonel Sallinger backed her, and then smoothed the ruffled feathers that resulted. Doomed, Nicole thought with irreverent self-absorption; my career—hah, what a joke that’s become—is well and truly doomed. But where he wouldn’t budge was his decision that she not go in alone. More discussion resulted in his reluctant approval of Kymri’s suggestion that Matai accompany her. Made sense, actually, she’d been working side by side with Alex since the Hal’s arrival and was more familiar with Terrestrial computers than most; among her own kind, according to Kymri, she was near top of the list.

  She gave the room a disdainful glance, smiling shyly as she caught Nicole looking at her. Evidently, she had the same feelings about clutter.

  “The Provost Marshal mentioned messages in my phone buffer,” Nicole told her, thankful that Matai’s comprehension of English was better than her ability to speak it. Her throat was raw enough from the processed air she’d been breathing on her multiple flights, coupled with the sheer exhaustion of what had turned into close to three full days of intense physical activity. Some catnaps were staving off the inevitable but she knew she was running on empty and the crash was simply a matter of will.

  She called for a playback. And as she prowled about the room, Amelia Cobri’s face appeared on the VideoWall.

  “Nicole, it’s Amy,” she said, “heard that you were back.”

  “Neat trick,” Nicole noted, “since according to the date/time stamp, I must have only just landed from San Diego.” Nothing sinister in that. A short-wave radio tuned to the arrivals frequency would have picked up her communications with the Tower. More likely, though, some contact of Amy’s in the Tower or traffic control probably phoned with the information. “I was hoping you and I could get together tonight,” she was saying, “so like, call me as soon as you get in, okay?”

  The young girl’s face appeared again, the time-tag indicating all of fifteen minutes later: “Takin’ your time putting your baby to bed, huh, Nicole? I guess something that old, especially when you’ve put so much work into it yourself, must be worth pampering.” Except that Nicole saw something in the girl’s eyes that belied the compliment, a blankness that indicated the words may only be words, that she really didn’t understand how anyone could care so much, especially about some inanimate piece of machinery. “Alex is like that with his boat.”

  “Maybe you should follow our example, kiddo,” Nicole said, unaware she was speaking aloud what she’d meant to be a thought, “try building something with your own two hands. Little sweat, some pain and blood, give you a whole different perspective.”

  “So look,” Amy finished, “call me, okay, soon as you get in. It’s important.”

  “What’s important, kiddo? Too late for the concert. And not a word from Alex.”

  Five minutes later: “Nicole, I hate to be a bug, call me back, okay, we really need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  And five minutes after that, a little snidely: “Must’ve been a fun little trip, huh, the way Alex blew by, all on his lonesome. Anybody else could say he didn’t get any. Lucky for you, Alex doesn’t know what that means. Maybe lucky for him, too, means never having to live with disappointment. Catty, aren’t I?” Conspiratorial little grin, not at all nice, in a way that little sisters seem to have patented. Turning serious with her next line, “Nicole, you’re making this too hard, it’s no fun talking to a fuzzed screen, I thought we were buddies, please call me back, as soon as you get in.”

  Next was Colonel Sallinger, his first check-in. Then, Amelia.

  “I know you’re there, Nicole.” Her tone was sharper, blending anger and hurt enough to make it abundantly clear that Nicole was about to step over some line, with consequences to match, and Nicole couldn’t help a reflexive, rhetorical response. “Who the hell does that child think she is?!”

  “C’mon, this isn’t funny, all you have to do is pick up the phone. Talk to me, willya, stop acting like a flat line, I’m not kidding, it’s really important, Nicole, c’mon, please!”

  Five more messages, all Amelia, and, as Colonel Rachiim had said, increasingly terse and paradoxically more agitated. Until the very end, when the expression on Amy’s face was so flat and cold she might have been a computer-generated image herself.

  “I’ll have to see the kid,” she said quietly, aware that the words were being picked up both by the Provost Marshal’s ScanTeam and Kymri’s. She sank down on the couch, resting her face in her hands as exhaustion came crashing in on her, her body heavy as though she were pulling five times her weight in G’s, so much so the smallest movement was an effort and the most natural thing in the world her slow sideways collapse onto the couch. A few minutes, another nap, she told herself; won’t be fine, won’t be anywhere near my peak, but I’ll be functional.

  She closed her eyes, opened them...

  ...and stretched full length on the bunk, extending herself as far as she could go, feeling—both with her body and her ears—the rush of water sliding past the hull. They were making good time, a smooth passage, the dawn of another day with the trade winds full at their back, pushing them westward across the Pacific. The better part of a week since departing Catalina, the better part of a thousand kilometers beneath their keel.

  Casting about for something to wear, she came up with a T-shirt of Alex’s and a pair of jogging shorts she’d found during their last frantic race through the pier-front shops and boutiques. Not her usual style at all, too daringly tight a cut and way too garishly much color. But then the same could be said for what she was doing. Probably mean a court-martial when the Air Force caught up with her—frowning, as the military is wont to do, on officers who go Absent Without Leave—but she didn’t really care. Alex would take care of things. And her. She liked that.

  She took time for a quick glance over the boat before giving him a smile that couldn’t possibly show how she felt, offering him a mug of steaming coffee before tucking herself in the cockpit beside him. The sun was behind them, just clear of the horizon, its warmth just beginning to counter the nighttime chill. As she settled herself, a wayward toss of spray hit her full across the body, plastering her clothes to her skin, and she struck a poor parody of a bathing beauty pose that made Alex spill his coffee with laughter. On impulse, she reversed position and stripped off her shirt, letting the sunlight fall on her bare breasts. She hooked one foot on the rail, the other braced on the deck, legs spread invitingly wide. She still wore the shorts, but the material was so sheer—especially soaked through as it was—she might as well have been naked.

  But then he was standing over her, and she closed her eyes and bit her lower lip as some fingers stroked lightly across a nipple. A groan then, as he moved them down her flank, across her belly, teasingly following the elastic band of her shorts. She didn’t want to wait, he refused to be hurried, she wanted to scream and thought of killing him. And then she squealed as his mouth closed over her crotch and he exhaled, the moist warmth of his breath seemingly reaching deep inside her. Her teeth were chattering as she grabbed him by the hair over the ears and pulled him tight against her, wrapping her legs behind his shoulders to lock him in place. He kissed and sucked and nipped and she went dizzy with desire, wanting more but also not wanting this to end. The cords of her neck stood out as she arched her back, whimpering with sensations that couldn’t be distinguished between pleasure or pain. It was more than she could stand, and she pulled his head hard enough to hurt to bring his face to hers,
so she could kiss him on the mouth.

  The sun was directly behind him, so Nicole had her eyes mostly closed, Alex no more than a silhouette seen beneath lowered lids. And then, his body was stretched out full length on hers, his mouth on hers, his tongue teasing responses from hers. Only now it felt wrong and she struggled to push him away, wriggle herself free, her eyes opening wide in shock and disbelief and no little horror as Charles Russell pulled away, smiling as a Great White does when its killer jaws close about some unsuspecting prey. The President kept moving away, as Nicole tried to find voice enough to call for Alex and demand an explanation, and the sun flashed blindingly bright in Nicole’s eyes...

  ...and she twisted her head, blinking fast to clear the dazzle-flashes from her vision, furious that her shades hadn’t done their job to cut down the glare. Automatic quick-check of the sky around, as best she could given the cumbersome mass of her crash helmet, thankful to find her wingman on station twenty meters off her left wins.

  “God’s-Eye,” she snapped, and an aerial panorama of the sector flashed into three-dimensional being before her. Terrain wasn’t a critical factor, they were too high, almost at the top of the blue, though still well within their equipment’s performance envelope. Nothing else showed, friendly or hostile. But that wasn’t the assurance it sounded. Stealth technology—the infernally artful blending of form and materials to create an airframe that gave radar fits—had progressed to the level where most state-of-the-art fighters had become functionally invisible to the electronic eye. Between jammers and active defense pods, the missile had become less and less effective as a weapon, especially from long-range. Which, in a weird—but for the pilots, wonderful—sort of way, brought the art of aerial combat full circle, back pretty much to the way it had been in the First and Second World Wars. You sought out the enemy—as much with your eyes, now as therv-you tangled with him up-close and personal, and did your level best to punch him into the ground. The gun had once more become the weapon of choice. Because it couldn’t be blocked, and it couldn’t be jammed.

  She was flying the Mustang Deuce, the modern namesake of the ace World War II dogfighter and touted by its manufacturer as its functional equivalent. Pilots knew better. It was a wicked-looking bird and if specs were anything to go by, a holy terror. But there was a world of difference between paper predictions and the reality of aerial combat. What worked fine in computer models and wind-tunnel simulations didn’t quite follow through on the production aircraft. But commitments had been made, procurement contracts issued, the full force of Charles Russell’s presidential prestige placed behind the project (because he desperately needed the votes of the men and women who’d be put to work building it), and so the Mustang went on-line. Didn’t matter that the company had oversold and overcommitted, that the designer’s imagination had nothing whatsoever in common with the manufacturer’s capabilities, because at every step of the line, when objections were raised, Russell either ignored or discredited them. What emerged at the end was a hodgepodge of compromised improvisations and a brute that had become the quintessential JOATAMON—Jack-Of-All-Trades-And-Master-Of-None—a plane that was reputed to be more dangerous to its pilots than any enemy they were likely to face.

  She switched her “God’s-Eye” view to a tactical presentation—the heads-up display in front of her filling with all the critical data of her aircraft: course, speed, fuel state, stores list, and weapons status. She was lying in the cockpit at about a forty-five-degree angle, to better enable her to withstand the stresses of high-acceleration maneuvering, primary controls concentrated on a pair of sidestick yokes, one on a panel by her right knee, the other by her left. The main panel had a half-dozen analog dials clustered off in the corner; otherwise, the space was taken up by a quartet of video display screens, each capable of presenting any aspect of aircraft operations, far more comprehensively than the mechanical instruments they’d replaced. She had a veritable wealth of information at her fingertips, far more than she usually needed and she feared far more than was good for her in a fight. This was the Catch-22 of modern combat: Take time to keep track of everything coming at you off your glass panel, you got your ass cooked; yet miss anything, and you ended the same. The trick—which only a very few of the very best mastered—was to achieve a Zen state, where the data was assimilated directly to the back-brain. You were never consciously aware of the input, you were too busy hurling the aircraft through the sky in ridiculous gyrations at even more ridiculous speeds, yet whenever the data was needed, there it was in your head.

  Another flash from above, as something broke the smooth pattern of the sunlight, barely a moment to register the hos-tile’s presence—much less cry a warning—before a short-range air-to-air punched its way into Hana’s cockpit and her plane became instant history. Nicole never saw the explosion, her reaction came with the realization of an attack, hands and feet moving to throw her Mustang into a downward twist, to reverse course after the hostile. It had come from above and ahead, in a diving attack; this was designed to put her on its tail. At this range, even Super-Stealth configurations couldn’t avoid detection, but the hostile had jammers to pick up the slack, spreading its return across her screen in a smear of static. She tapped her thumb on the left-hand yoke, tagging the hostile with infrared, homing on his engine exhaust—which was fine so long as she remained behind him—muttering a curse as she caught a glimpse of the aircraft, painted in an air-superiority scheme of mottled blue and grey that made it that much harder to distinguish against the horizon haze. She opened the throttle on the downslope of her own dive, grunting as she pulled up after her foe, gravity crushing her into her padded chair, the bladders of her pressure suit filling with air, tightening around her legs and abdomen, forcing the blood into her upper torso and head.

  Tried for a missile lock, no tone, no joy, too much separation to even think about gunfire. Quick, instinctive visual check of her six—a look over her shoulder above and behind—to make sure the sonofabitch hadn’t come with friends.

  Her attacker—an air-superiority fighter, code-named Stiletto—feinted right, then pitched left into a barrel roll, popping flaps and spoilers to chop his speed and force her to overshoot, to put him on her tail. But she rolled out the other way, a flipover that hit her like a punch to the belly, throwing her plane to the brink of stall and spin as she reversed direction, shooting past him and away before he could set up a shot, hauling back on the stick to burn for altitude, plumes of visible condensation pouring off the fuselage strakes as her nose came up to vertical, taking the calculated risk of lighting up her backside by going to afterburner for the few seconds it would take to gain the height advantage. If the Stiletto had been facing the right direction, a heat seeker would’ve ended things right then and there. But by the time he’d hauled himself around, she was cresting off her climb, nose-on to him, engines cycled back to a less prominent signature.

  A shrill tone in her ears, the Stiletto tagging her with his targeting radar, screens confirming what her eyes were already telling her as two missiles flew off his wings. Seconds later, he was past her, turning even as she did. Her own counter-measures systems coped—she hoped, she prayed—with the missiles.

  She saw him turning in the distance, pushing hard to the left, and she quickly pulled back on her stick, rolling away from the direction of his turn, inverting herself at the peak of her climb, and flipping into a shallow dive that brought her straight across the radius of the circle he was forming. Before she got close though, he flipped the other way and they began a scissors, she and the Stiletto sashaying back and forth across the sky, as though winding a ribbon through the air, each trying to reverse position and tuck in tight enough behind the other to get off a fatal shot. With two evenly matched planes and pilots, one-on-one, the usual result was a stalemate. But he could pull a turn tighter and faster than she, each cut of the scissors forced her to push a little harder to come out on his tail, and then keep him from getting on hers.

  She was
breathing in hoarse animal gasps, the constant compression of her bellyband G-belt making her feel like she was being broken in half, and she knew that if she survived the dogfight, in the morning she’d be lucky to move, much less get up. After only a few minutes, each breath sent sharp spikes of pain up the center of her chest. A glance at the display told her they were maneuvering at the top end of the operational window, nothing less than seven G’s and more than a few twists that pushed ten, each one of those giving her an effective body weight of over half a ton. If it got any worse, she’d have no choice but to break off. Her only consolation was that the pilot of the Stiletto had to be feeling the same.

  The Stiletto popped a BackShot, a rear-firing micro-missile, at the same time taking their scissors vertical, express to the desert below. She had the option of breaking off. Stay level while he dove and firewall the throttle. By the time he could even begin to respond to her maneuver, she’d be so far gone there’d be no point to continuing the engagement. But he owed her for Hana. She knew she was making a mistake, operating on balls rather than brains, and didn’t care.

  Computer raised some warnings. As they moved into thicker, heavier air, the potential for serious acrobatics increased, but so did the risk. The Stiletto’s electronics had to be telling him the same but it also seemed to bother him even less than her. He was actually accelerating, and she risked a longer look at his aircraft’s specs on the basement display to see if he had that kind of margin in his performance envelope. She knew she didn’t in hers. Starting to regret the impulse that had pushed her after him. They’d lost so much altitude that should she decide now to cut and run, his own higher max speed would cancel her head start. He would catch her, with ease.