by Linda Nagata
She’s torn. I see it in her face. She doesn’t want to argue against herself, but she desperately wants to believe in Sheridan’s consortium.
I push her harder. “Jaynie, Guidance has been trying to figure out how to block the Red at least since I got to Dassari. My girlfriend, Lissa Dalgaard, works at a think tank, and they’ve been trying to figure out the Red. Her company even has an army contract, but Lissa had nothing to tell me about how to stop it. They haven’t gotten anywhere. None of that matters to Thelma Sheridan. She’ll believe what she wants to believe.” I tap my head, remembering what Elliot told me. “It’s the mental filters. We all have them. Sheridan’s filters allow her to believe impossible things, and to deny things that are real. She already has a fact-free belief that it’s okay with God if she murders a million people, so why would she require actual facts to believe in something as banal as a magic cyber potion?”
Jaynie is frowning, staring off past my shoulder. I let her think about it for a few seconds, and then I repeat, “You let her play you, Sergeant. And when you indulge her fantasies, you are undermining my authority . . . unless that’s your purpose? Unless you are concerned that it’s the Red speaking out of my mouth?”
Her gaze shifts back to me. “Is it a concern for you, sir?”
I don’t have to say anything. When I look away, she knows the answer.
• • • •
I’m tired and I hurt, so I sit down for a minute. I want to call Lissa, let her know I’m still alive, but the only link I’m allowed is to Rawlings. I think about asking him to contact her, but I know he wouldn’t do it. He’d call it a security violation. At least she’s safe, locked deep inside a secure facility under the protection of Major Chen.
I get up again and go to see Kendrick. Moon is sitting cross-legged beside him, staring at a handheld monitor. He shows it to me. “His heart rate is really crazy. It keeps changing. That’s a bad sign.”
I go up to the cockpit to check our course. So far as I can tell, we are where we should be. I give Nolan ten minutes to pay his respects. When he comes back, I send Flynn. By the time I go back to see Kendrick again, Tuttle has taken over guarding our prisoner. Harvey is lying on the deck, wrapped up in a blanket, not far from Kendrick. She’s got her helmet and her dead sister off, but she’s not sleeping. Her eyes are wide open, staring at the ceiling.
Jaynie is sitting with Moon alongside Kendrick’s pallet. I sit down on the other side. After forty minutes, the monitor can’t detect a heartbeat. We wait twenty minutes more. After that there’s no doubt. I get out another body bag. No one says anything as we move him into it, and seal it up. We carry it to the back, lay it beside Ransom, and tie it down.
I’m the CO now. I should say something—but Nolan saves me the effort when he speaks over gen-com. “LT, we’ve got two fighter aircraft coming up fast.”
• • • •
I sprint the length of the cargo deck and scramble to the top of the ladder, reaching the cockpit just as Colonel Rawlings links into gen-com. “Status?”
At first I can’t see a thing, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out Ilima in the pilot’s seat, Flynn behind her, Perez across the aisle, and Nolan up front in the copilot’s chair. They all have cockpit headsets on. Flynn and Nolan have their audio loops underneath the headsets, so they’re also hooked into gen-com. I ask Nolan, “Do we know who they are?”
“Ilima says they’re American, sir. They haven’t said anything.”
Rawlings is monitoring the feed from my overlay. He can see what I see, hear what I hear, so I don’t repeat the information for him. I lean on the back of Nolan’s seat to look out the wide bank of windows. The fighters are easy to see because they’re flying right alongside us with their navigation lights on. One is flying at our level, the other is higher and slightly behind.
“Flynn, give me your headset.” When I’ve got it on I use the intercom to ask Ilima, “Do we have any defensive systems on board?”
She looks up at me with a resentful gaze. “We are a civilian craft, sir. If they want to shoot us down, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”
I wait for the fighter pilots to contact us, but they stay silent. I assume it’s a way to rattle us—it’s going to be hard to think of anything else while they’re dogging us.
Maybe I should have gotten back to Carl Vanda with a ransom demand . . . but I have a feeling he knows that’s not what we’re about.
Nolan says, “At least we’re not directly in front of their guns.”
Ilima gives him a withering glare. “That could change in a second.”
An alarm goes off. She looks at the instrument panel. “Two more planes. Russian, I think.”
Colonel Rawlings opens a solo link. “Don’t do anything, Shelley. Don’t say anything. Just stick to the course.”
What the hell else can I do?
The fighters stay with us as we pass over the top of the world. I stand there and watch them as an hour rolls past. When I notice Flynn nodding off, I send her downstairs. “Grab a blanket. Sleep while you can.” Then I take over her seat, behind Ilima. The feedback from the prosthetics is starting to burn my spine, but I don’t adjust it. It’s keeping me awake.
The fighters dog us as we head south on a route that will take us over the Atlantic. Time creeps past. We take breaks. We eat—or we try to; I can’t eat. After six and a half hours in the air, we’re coming up on Iceland, and it’s still night. An unchanging Arctic winter night with stars and northern lights dancing and blazing above us. A night that will last for the duration of this flight, that will follow us all the way to Africa.
I’m staring at that astonishing sky, thinking about Lissa, wondering if I’ll get to talk to her again, when our escort finally contacts us.
Everyone in the cockpit jumps as an American voice, male, speaks over the radio: “Vanda-Sheridan Globemaster Eight-Seven-Z, this is an interdiction. You are ordered to divert from your present course.”
“Hold your course,” Colonel Rawlings says using a solo link.
“Hold steady,” I tell Ilima over the intercom.
I unstrap and stand up, leaning on her seat back to make sure she doesn’t do anything. Nolan is still in the copilot’s seat. He watches her too, poised to intervene.
The American speaks again: “Eight-Seven-Z, acknowledge this order.”
Ilima reaches for the panel. I tell her, “No.”
Several minutes pass, and then the two Russian fighters pull away. One of the American fighters shoots ahead of us, blazing on afterburner as it cuts across our flight path. We hit the jet wash and buck and wobble. I hold on to Ilima’s seat back, trying to remember if everything in the back got strapped down.
“Eight-Seven-Z, if you do not immediately comply with the course change, we will commence firing. You will be shot down.”
I turn again to our treacherous engineer. “Perez.” He flinches when I say his name, watching me, the whites of his eyes bright in the dim light. “I want you on the radio again. Like before. Tell him you’re a hostage. Ask him not to kill you. Don’t give me any reason to kill you. Ilima, put him through.”
Perez keeps his eyes on me as he speaks. “This is Lucius Perez. I’m a hostage on this plane, along with Thelma Sheridan and Ilima LaSalle. Please don’t shoot. You’ll kill all of us if you do.”
Ilima screams.
I look up in time to see twin lines of tracer rounds coursing above us, streaking down over the cockpit. Holy hell. Modern fighters have laser-guided sights. They must have loaded up the tracer rounds just to scare us.
Ilima leans forward; her fingers fly across a keypad.
Nolan and I realize at the same time what she’s doing. We lunge for her. I get to her first, grabbing her wrist. “Stop it!”
“Don’t you get it?” she says, cowering in the seat. “They’re going to kill us!�
� Her gaze cuts from me to the window. “Oh Jesus, here they come again.”
I look up as one of the jets passes in front of us. Our plane bucks again. I have to release Ilima and grab on to the seats to keep from falling. She gets the new heading entered before Nolan can stop her. Our C-17 starts to turn.
I reach out to Rawlings. “Colonel, you got anyone with you who knows how to fly this plane?”
“That is affirmative, Lieutenant. Get her the hell out of there.”
Ilima cringes as I reach down, unbuckle her harness, and strip off her headset. I grab the front of her jacket and use it to haul her to her feet. Then I shove her at Jaynie, who has just climbed up the cockpit ladder to receive her.
I glance over at Nolan, wondering if I should put him in the pilot’s seat. But he’s been awake as long as I have, and it’s Flynn who likes big toys. I speak over gen-com: “Flynn! Break time’s over. Upstairs, now.”
Flynn comes running.
“You’re up,” I tell her when she hits the top of the ladder. I hook my thumb at the pilot’s seat.
Her eyes look huge in the dim light. “Sir, I don’t know—”
“Move.”
She edges past me, drops into the seat. I tell her, “Strap in. And don’t worry, Flynn. All you have to do right now is program the autopilot.”
She reaches for the pilot’s headset, but Rawlings tells me, “Get her into her helmet, so we can use the cam.”
I put the word out on gen-com, and Tuttle brings her helmet. We get Flynn properly hooked up and then, after some fumbling, she starts entering numbers into the keypad. Seconds later the plane shifts course again, and the radio wakes up: “Eight-Seven-Z, maintain your new heading! Do not return to prior heading or you will be shot down.”
They haven’t shot us down yet. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to.
They threaten us with more tracer rounds. They rock us with jet wash. But it turns out they’re not ready to murder our hostages.
Not yet.
• • • •
I take the copilot’s seat, and send Nolan to rest. Samuel Tuttle takes over the seat behind Flynn.
Our escort sticks with us. At long intervals the fighters drop back, one at a time, to rendezvous with a refueling plane, but they never leave us alone. They continue their antics, rolling across our flight path, rattling the air around us with gunfire . . . making sure we don’t sleep as the hours creep by—or at least that we don’t sleep for long.
Whenever things quiet down for a few minutes, I catch myself nodding. Flynn is still at the controls. She’s got her visor transparent, so I can see she’s drifting too. Thank God for autopilot.
We both jerk awake as Colonel Rawlings speaks on gen-com. “Shelley, Flynn. We’ve come to the tricky part.”
I check our position: We’re off the northwest coast of Africa—which means it’s time to refuel. We knew from the start we couldn’t make it all the way without a stopover, but to protect the secrecy of our initial operation, the mission plan called for our landing site to be negotiated with a host country after we were in the air. “Jaynie,” I say over gen-com. “Bring Ilima back up here. We’re going to need her to land this plane.”
“Negative,” Rawlings says. “There will be no landing. It’s too risky regardless of promises of safe passage. We’ve arranged for a tanker to meet you. Scheduled rendezvous in eleven minutes.”
I’m alert enough to know this isn’t good news. “Sir! Those fighters aren’t going to let us rendezvous with a tanker.” I peer out into a star-filled night, looking for our escort, but right now they’re not in sight.
“I think they will. Any interference on their part and your plane could blow up, along with the tanker. We’re betting they’re not going to take that risk.”
If he intends this as comforting, it misses the mark. Flynn looks at me through the transparent shield of her visor. I can’t think of anything reassuring to tell her.
“You copy me, Shelley?”
“Yes, I do, sir.”
“This is our only option.”
“Understood.”
• • • •
Jaynie fulfills my original order, sending Ilima back up to the cockpit. I decide to let her stay. Leaving Flynn where she is, in the pilot’s chair, I yield the copilot seat to Ilima, handing her my headset. She scans the instrument panel, notes the level of our remaining fuel, and turns to me with a waxen face and pleading eyes, speaking words I can barely hear—but I can read her lips: Lieutenant Shelley, we have to land.
I gesture to her, palm out, asking her to wait. I need a headset.
In the seat behind Flynn, Tuttle is wide awake, watching me with worried eyes. I don’t want to send him downstairs—I like having him at my back—so I turn instead to our accomplice, Perez. He’s done a good job of playing the frightened hostage. Even now. He’s hunched over, rocking slightly in his seat, avoiding my gaze.
“Jaynie?”
“Here.”
“I don’t have room for Perez, so I’m sending him down. See that he’s confined.”
He cringes when I tap his shoulder, but when I give him the signal to go, he’s eager, slipping off his headset and rushing the ladder.
I take over his seat and his headset, then I use the intercom to explain to Ilima about the tanker, adding, “If there’s a problem, if we can’t pull it off, you’ll need to have someplace lined up where we can land.”
“Give me a minute . . . okay, we have enough fuel to make Cape Verde.”
I remember seeing that name on the navigation maps. I check my encyclopedia and confirm it’s a group of islands off the African coast, between fourteen degrees and eighteen degrees north latitude. “Cape Verde is good. But don’t change the heading until I tell you.”
“Lieutenant,” she pleads, “you don’t understand. We don’t have fuel for maneuvers. Our margin is minimal. We need to adjust heading now.”
“Not until I tell you.”
I check the time. Four minutes until the tanker is due. I shut off the intercom so Ilima can’t hear. “Rawlings. Status?”
“Stand by.”
We wait.
A minute passes, and then another. I open a solo link to Rawlings. “What the hell is going on?”
“Stand by.”
I get up again, standing just behind Ilima. She tried before to change our heading on her own. If she’s scared enough, she’ll do it again and I’ll need to stop her—though this time I’m not so sure I want to.
I search the night sky for the lights of the tanker.
Tuttle says, “It’s been eleven minutes.”
My heart thuds, each beat a painful strike against the bruises on my chest. My spine hurts too, so I give in and drag the feedback bar lower, but not by much. I don’t want to lose track of my feet.
“LT?” Flynn asks on gen-com. “What do we do?”
Ilima’s hand darts for the instrument panel. I don’t know what she’s planning, and I don’t wait to find out. I catch her wrist and twist it back. “Rawlings? Where is the tanker?”
Several seconds pass without answer—which tells me the tanker isn’t coming. I release Ilima’s wrist, and over the intercom I tell her, “Adjust our heading.”
“Do not adjust heading!” Rawlings barks on gen-com. “You are not going to land.”
I signal Ilima to wait, and ask Rawlings again, “Where is our tanker?”
“On the way. It was delayed. Rendezvous is rescheduled. Estimated time, twenty-two minutes.”
Twenty-two minutes sounds like forever. After twenty-two minutes, we’ll have no margin at all. “What happened, Rawlings?”
“Someone leaked. The tanker delayed takeoff to allow time for an accompanying passenger jet. It’s transporting a pool of mediots, Lieutenant, armed with video cameras. In other words, witnesses.”
Witnesses to what? Our deaths, when our plane runs out of fuel?
Another ten minutes pass, and then the proximity alarm goes off, announcing the return of the two fighters. They slide in from above, moving ahead to occupy the airspace required by the tanker. “Rawlings, are you looking at this?” He can see exactly what I see in the feed from my overlay. “They are not going to let us refuel.”
“You are not going to land, Lieutenant Shelley.”
I don’t answer. There’s no need. We’re not martyrs. Rawlings has to know that if it’s a choice between landing and running out of fuel, we will land.
A few minutes later, Flynn spots the distant lights of the tanker. “There, sir!” The lights of the media plane flash behind it. We move quickly toward rendezvous—but the fighters hold their position.
Ilima looks up at me. “This is not going to work,” she says on the intercom. “We need to land.”
“Continue on,” Rawlings says.
I argue with him. “Sir, there is no margin—”
“I know that, Lieutenant. So does our enemy. So does everyone on the media plane. Don’t give in. They will let you refuel, if you leave them no choice.”
He’s so sure of himself, but he’s not here. I want to override his order. I know I should override his order for the sake of everyone on this plane . . . but I don’t want to give up on the mission.
“We have to go now,” Ilima pleads.
Flynn feels the same way. She turns her big eyes on me. “Lieutenant Shelley?”
I lift my gaze to look again out the window at the lights of the fighters. They’re holding their positions. I watch them for another twenty or thirty seconds. I do not believe they will let us refuel. I’m on the verge of telling Ilima to change our destination to Cape Verde when the skullnet icon flickers. It brings with it a sense of certainty and suddenly I know—I just know—that Rawlings is right. “Hold steady,” I say, using the intercom and gen-com, so everyone can hear. “We’ll be okay. Just a few more seconds and they’re going to leave.”