Avery stood close by. “We’re going to ride that into the enemy base?”
Ted nodded proudly. “Can you imagine them even suspecting anyone would be clever enough to bareback one of these giants? We’ll have total surprise.”
“If we can get there safely,” Emily remarked.
Ted turned to face her. “You don’t think this is a good plan?”
The president’s hands were on her hips, wary, like a mother looking out the kitchen window and seeing ten neighbor kids lying on the ground next to a bicycle ramp. What happened next depended entirely on convincing her it was safe.
“We can’t simply get on and hope this plan works. What if Kyla can’t control it once we’re all in the sky? We’d be at the mercy of wherever it wanted to go. We’re going to have to test it before we can commit our whole force to a single plane.”
He was a little disappointed, but Ted also knew she was right. It was one thing for Kyla to punch some code and make the plane land at a specific spot, but anything could happen once they were in the air. She’d need some practice maneuvering it in real time. Any prudent military operation would have weeks or even months of prep on new equipment, with new methods.
“A test flight? Would it put your mind at ease?”
Emily broke her pose. She spoke to Kyla. “Would you feel comfortable going up with a skeleton crew to see if you can fly this manually?”
Kyla’s face turned white. Ted saw it immediately. She was scared. He was about to say something, maybe call the whole thing off, but his niece smiled. “If this is the best way to win the war, I’m willing to give it a shot. This thing is so large, I don’t think it could possibly crash, right?”
“Didn’t they say the same thing about the Titanic?” Avery absently added, staring at the plane. When there was no response, the colonel looked over to Kyla and Emily. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I, uh—”
Emily saved him. “It does seem very stable. I’d say it would glide to earth even if the engines stopped working. I suspect the people who built it wanted to make sure they wouldn’t lose their investment if it ever ran out of battery power. They couldn’t have these fall on top of a city block, right?”
Ted could see Emily was saying everything she could to make Kyla feel better about doing a dangerous activity. Perhaps she was trying to comfort Ted as well, since she was his niece, and doing dangerous activities went counter to the promise he’d made to keep the girl safe.
It seemed to help with Kyla, at least. Her pale complexion had faded, and some excitement was in her voice. “Whatever I have to do to help you guys, I’m in. Tell me what you need me to do. Although I would like to request a seatbelt or something, so I don’t fall off.”
It was a reasonable request. Over the next fifteen minutes Ted and the others scavenged the tiny airport, the few parked planes, and their stolen cars for supplies. They ended up finding a cache of rock-climbing gear in one of the vehicles, which consisted of a climbing harness and an ample supply of rope.
“Good luck, Kyla,” Lambert said at the last moment.
“Thanks,” Kyla said in reply.
They used a pickup truck as a stairway up to the communications disc hanging from its belly, then up to the wing. When he and Kyla were on top of the giant plane, he guided her to the central fuselage. “We’ll tie you up to one of these tie-down hooks. Planes like these are so light, gusts of wind can sometimes pick them up when they’re parked on the ground. They use these to tie them down.”
“Can we get flipped in the sky?” Kyla asked robotically, letting herself get clamped to the metal with a carabiner. There was a full length of rope, so Ted tied a loop to secure it. The plane’s engines were in the front, so he didn’t have to worry about having the rope get cut apart, but he didn’t want a hundred feet of cord smacking them during the flight.
“It would take a tornado, sweetheart,” he said, turning a bit mushy and feeling wrong again for putting his niece into such a predicament, but unable to think of a viable alternative. “These planes have sensors to anticipate wind shifts, and they have a lot of bend in these wings to help it absorb wind shear. The disc under us also acts as a kind of balance, as if we were flying on a frisbee.”
He used some of the extra rope to tie himself to the fuselage. The group had considered putting more people on the first flight, but Ted had refused. He wanted to travel with Kyla by himself, so there wasn’t a lot of pressure for the girl. As he saw how nervous she was, he figured he’d made the right call. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’m a pilot.”
She looked relieved. “But I’m the one driving this machine.”
He winked at her. “But I can side-seat drive. I already know you can take command of this plane and make it go where you want, so this test flight will be easy and greasy. We’ll slide back into the airport and make our friends feel safe about flying with us on the next one, right? We’ll do this together.”
Emily and the others pulled back from the plane. The president waved at him as she walked away, leading him to assess another good decision of his. His reasoning for going alone wasn’t only for Kyla’s benefit. He’d made sure Emily stayed on the ground, so he wouldn’t have any extra worries. She’d been reluctant, but after telling her how concerned he was to not stack too much pressure on Kyla, Emily had agreed to his idea.
“I want you to command this plane to turn around, take off on the highway, make a low loop around the airport, then touch down again. We won’t have to do anything more complicated than that when we go to Lamar. Got it?”
She tapped the black tablet. “There’s not much too it. Most of what it does is automatic. Making a few turns should be easy.”
Her first test was turning the plane around. The SACA was so large, there was no room to use differential steering nor was there anything like a tiller in Kyla’s control system to turn the nose landing gear. He figured the giant aircraft were always moved by tugs when they were on the ground. To solve the issue, Emily found a tow strap in the stolen Jeep and was able to lash it to the landing gear. Working together, they managed to spin the plane around a one-eighty.
He keyed Avery’s radio, which allowed him to talk to the ground. “Thanks for the assist.”
Avery replied. “You should be clear. We’re pulling for you.”
Ted looked over to Kyla, who sat to his left, but was toward the front of the fuselage to give her the best visibility ahead of the aircraft. “Are you ready for takeoff?”
She looked down the empty highway.
“Let’s do this!”
Eastern Colorado
For a person who fancied herself a tour guide, Tabby found herself on unfamiliar terrain. She was riding on the back of a dirt bike with Dwight as the driver. She had to hold onto his waist to keep from falling off, and she had his rifle slung over her shoulder, but she almost wanted to let go and fall to the ground rather than suffer through another mile. The only thing he talked about, yelled actually, was how she’d made him lose his only friend.
She ignored the harassment and looked over to her real friends.
Peter and Audrey were on the second bike. She chuckled to herself at the odd sight of little Audrey sitting in front, with Peter holding onto her waist. No one thought the young girl would be the one who knew how to ride.
“I have three older brothers,” Audrey had explained when they got started. “Had,” she added sadly. “I had three brothers. They taught me how to ride when I was seven.”
They’d gone toward Colorado Springs, using the dirt and gravel forest roads the entire way. When they reached the city and saw how large it was, Tabby knew there was no way they were ever going to find the others.
“What do we do now?” she asked, standing next to the bike as they filled it with gas. “Should we try to find a better means of transportation?”
“No!” Dwight barked. He’d shut his eyes and held them closed with obvious strain. It seemed as if he was going to say more, but he stayed w
here he was.
“What, Dwight?” Peter asked impatiently.
“I’m—I’m sorry about my behavior. I can’t think clearly without my…guide.”
Tabby caught Peter’s attention and whispered, “His bird.”
Dwight nodded in the affirmative. “Yes. I miss her, but it isn’t only her. I’ve had voices in my head my whole life. They weren’t loud when I was in the Army, at least at first, but they grew louder when I got out. It’s what landed me on the streets. Booze and the struggle to stay alive kept me busy for the next ten years. I can barely remember any of it. However, ever since I woke up in the empty city, the voices have been far worse.” He opened his bloodshot eyes. “In David’s cube of white, the voices went silent. I could actually think again. I knew who I was.” Quieter, he added, “I knew what I’d done to Bernard.”
The fuel pump clicked off, signaling the dirt bike had a full tank of gas. It seemed to distract Dwight for a few seconds, as if the pump was talking to him. When he noticed the three of them looking, he seemed surprised. “What?”
She forced herself to smile. “You were saying about Bernard?”
A darkness passed across his eyes. “I killed him. I killed them all. I lit them on fire and watched them burn. Seven men. Gone.”
Tabby didn’t know what to say.
Dwight spoke in a whisper. “Poppy said it was the right thing to do. That they were bad men. But I grew up as a church-going boy. This means I’m going to Hell. I’m going to burn with them…”
“Poppy was right,” Tabby spoke up, instantly unsure if it was right to talk about his bird, who was simultaneously real and not real. She’d witnessed him talking to the animal long before the real bird showed up in David’s torture cube.
“She was?” Peter said with surprise.
Tabby shushed him.
“Yes,” she went on. “There are bad people in this world. You and I just survived a whole campground full of the bad ones. They were responsible for killing my parents. They killed everyone in your city. They were evil enough to wipe out our whole country. If you managed to off a few of them using whatever you had at your disposal, then Poppy was right. It was your duty to take them out.”
If someone had told her a week ago she’d be giving speeches advocating the killing of her fellow man, she would have asked them to check themselves into an insane asylum. She was telling Dwight the world had changed and extreme measures had to be taken, but she was also reminding herself of the same fact. Seeing people die exacts a toll. She’d watched three men meet their end not two hours ago…
“Yeah,” Audrey added. “I’d kill anyone who threatened Peter or Tabitha. That goes for you, too.”
Peter chucked Dwight on the arm. “Yeah, you may be a little messed up in the head, but it doesn’t change how we feel about you. We’re all Americans. We defend each other.”
“I’m not going to Hell?” Dwight asked with evident surprise.
“No,” Tabby replied quickly, knowing she couldn’t make such a promise. “Those men were evil invaders. You would have been in bigger trouble if you’d let them live. They might have later come along and killed the three of us.” It was how it always went in the movies.
Dwight brightened. “Then let’s finish this. My mind is…up and down. Right now, I can think. To answer your question, we should stick to these bikes. Our target is that way—” He pointed one direction, then shifted it. “I mean this way.”
“Lamar, yes,” she added.
“Right. Lamar. We’ll take the bikes through the fields. Stay off the roads. The enemy force of Bernards will be in their big trucks, scanning the highways. They won’t think to look for some kids riding across wheat fields.”
She didn’t know if it was good news or bad that he was the one coming up with the plan, but it didn’t sound like the ravings of a lunatic. Of course, the result was going to be an attack on a fortified military base dug deep into the ground.
Maybe they were all a little crazy.
CHAPTER 23
Above Wild Horse, CO
“I’m getting the hang of this!” Kyla shouted over the wind. They’d hung on as the titan lifted off the highway and she tapped the screen to create new waypoints that would allow her to turn the aircraft to the left. She quickly figured out the system had a failsafe, which wouldn’t allow her to place waypoints the plane could not physically handle. Thus, the leftward turn was a lot wider than she would have anticipated. She enjoyed the feel of the wind carrying her hair as the plane made its first banking maneuver. The tapestry of grass and farmlands spread out for hundreds of miles around them.
“Don’t get cocky,” he replied. “If you want to impress me, get us back down to the ground.”
“Is this as fast as it goes?” she asked immediately. The sun was out, so she imagined all those black panels gobbling up energy. They should have been going a lot faster. The airspeed indicator said they weren’t even up to seventy miles an hour.
“It’s solar-powered, super-light, and with a huge wing surface area. It’s designed to get into position over a city and stay there for years. It only needs enough speed to maintain lift. It might take days to ease its way back up to sixty-thousand feet. I don’t really know. Once there, it can loiter at slow speeds. I bet this is all the faster we’re going to get.”
She couldn’t say for sure, but her uncle seemed scared as he spoke to her. For a seasoned pilot, he didn’t seem to enjoy the experience half as much as she did. However, a little sliver of caution crept up in her consciousness. Like he knew something she didn’t.
“I won’t,” she said seriously, already plotting the dots for the wide loop around the airport. Once back down, she was going to dance like a mad woman at flying the biggest plane in the world. Until then, she was back to business.
She got them around the first curve to the back side of their oval-shaped loop, imagining herself on a horse track. After flying a few miles in a straight line, and enjoying the flow of air as it whisked by, she was viciously tempted to stand up and claim she was the ‘king of the world,’ like the scene in the Titanic movie, to counter Avery’s negativity about big ships. However, she was soon into the final turn. When the plane swung around to the homestretch of her journey, she waved toward the airport.
Uncle Ted got on the radio. “This is…Rebel One calling Team Yankee. We’re coming in for approach.”
“Team Yankee. We see you, Rebel One,” Avery said over the radio, evidently happy the test was a success.
Beaming with pride about the call sign she’d been given, she used the tablet interface to lay out the last few waypoints, including a special one which was labeled “Touchdown.” She placed that on the highway. Once there, a line shot out next to it, signifying the room necessary for the plane to come to a stop.
“This is going to be a snap,” she said.
As she switched between the view ahead and the data on the tablet, she noticed the color of the dots had changed from black to red.
Ted answered. “We’ll have to figure out how many of us can ride on this outer shell. There has to be a weight limit. We’ll have to find out...”
She only half-listened. A new series of dots appeared on the screen. She had to zoom out the map to see where the curious new route would take them.
“Uh oh,” she said to herself. Louder, she added, “Unk. We have a problem.”
“What’s happening?” he asked, his voice thick with worry.
Kyla held the tablet so he could see what had her bothered. “The waypoints. I didn’t put these in. If I had to guess, I would say there’s secondary guidance for if the plane loses contact with its home base. It’s trying to put itself back in position over Denver.”
The plane turned to the right and angled up a few degrees. The engine pitch changed, too, as if it was now serious about gaining altitude.
“Can you override it?” he asked.
“Trying.” She already had access to the code guiding the plane, but the mor
e she tapped around and opened new avenues, the more she realized the answer wasn’t inside the tablet. It was inside the plane’s internal guidance. All the tablet did was display what the plane intended to do, almost as a courtesy.
She watched, helpless, as the airport came and went. They were on the first loop of a huge spiral going high into the atmosphere. There were thousands of waypoints on her screen, making them appear as a solid helix line when she was fully zoomed out.
Turbulence caught the aircraft, rocking her and Uncle Ted in their rope seatbelts.
“No luck?” he asked, ready to report back to Avery.
She smiled sheepishly. “I don’t suppose you packed a pair of parachutes?”
Above Wild Horse, CO
The pit of Ted’s stomach turned into a sucking black hole as the SACA made another loop up to the stratosphere. Kyla furiously tapped at her tablet to regain control of the plane, but he had to assume that effort was going to fail. In the back of his mind, he saw his sister tapping her foot and saying, “Well, how are you going to save my little girl?”
“Team Yankee, this is Rebel One again, we’ve got a situation here.”
“Why are you guys going up?” the man asked with evident confusion. “This was a one-loop test.”
“I’ve been asking the same question,” he said with a strained laugh, trying to level out his panic. “It seems as if the plane wants to do its own thing.”
A short pause. Emily jumped on the line. “You have to bring it back down. There’s no telling where it will go.”
His laughter sounded fatal. “Oh, we know where it’s going. Back above Denver.”
“That’s too high,” she said sensibly.
“We’re working on it. Standby.” He looked to Kyla. “Hey, any progress?”
A chill wind blew across the wing. He knew from spending time in high-altitude aircraft they were soon going to be cold, and, eventually, freezing. They had to do something, fast.
“I’m not sure how much time we have. I might be able to grab one of the planes on the ground in Lamar and fly it up here to meet us. We could then try to jump from one to the other.”
Minus America | Book 5 | Hostile Shores Page 16