Janet could see Wendy struggle to pass up the pun. “One, you are a sex goddess. And two—” Wendy snatched Janet’s hand up while she was distracted like it was made of a precious mineral “—you being a sex goddess is not why I’m interested in you.”
“It’s not?”
“I’m interested in you because you gave me a job when anyone else would’ve buried me on the off-chance it would make them look good. And because you’re smart and a really good boss—absolutely the kind of person I want to be in twenty years, divorced and childless or not…and you’re beautiful, that helps, you are just…Roberta’s an idiot.”
“Well, she managed to snag a woman who’s younger than you are and teaches yoga, so…”
Wendy gave Janet’s hand a squeeze. “She’s an idiot.”
Janet nodded. Wendy was holding on to her hand—she didn’t have to. She couldn’t think of anything to do with it but pull it to her chest and not let go, but she hoped that would be enough for Wendy. “I really thought…with the vibrator, that that’s what you would like. I mean, women these days, you have so much more experience, you go to rainbow parties…”
“Me? Experience? What’s a rainbow party?”
“You know, you…people in high school, they put on different color lipsticks and they take turns…well, you know what every single Van Halen song was about?”
“Yeah, they taught us all about it in preschool.”
“Well, that happens, and so at the end, there’s a rainbow—”
“That’s disgusting. And no, no way anyone has ever done that. If anyone ever tells you that young people are having kinkier sex than you had when you were their age, it’s someone trying to sell papers. Or blogs, whatever it is these days.”
“Really?”
Wendy pulled herself up onto Janet by way of her grip on Janet’s hand, straddling her waist and hugging her torso. “Trust me, Janet, I’ve been in, like, two actual relationships and one of them was being catfished. I go to gay clubs and I stare at girls and I wait for someone to make the first move and I spend way too much on overpriced drinks. I give a subsidiary to the alcohol industry every time I try to get laid. So you don’t know about this stuff because you’ve been married for the last fifteen years or whatever? I don’t know about this stuff because I’m a weirdo loner with a massive crush on her boss. But if you want to figure it out, we’re two reasonably smart people. I think we can figure it out.”
Janet smiled. “And you really wouldn’t mind maybe a little of the e-mail stuff? If it wasn’t all the spirits talking?”
Wendy petted Janet’s hand. “I went as Ella Enchanted for Halloween last year. But maybe we could also just cuddle on a couch and watch Game of Thrones? Because honestly, I fantasize about that a little more than collars.”
“Game of Thrones?” Janet looked down at her hand and liked the look of it in Wendy’s. “I can work with that. Wendy.”
“Good, because I’m eighty percent sure that Yara and Daenerys are gonna bang. In fact…” Wendy undulated her body just enough for it to rub against Janet’s. “I kinda have some thoughts how that would go.”
“Wendy,” Janet took her shoulders and rolled her on to the other side of the bed. “I’m rather used to sleeping alone, at this point. Do you think you could stay on your side of the bed? I promise I’ll try to get used to sleeping as a matched pair again, but for now, with the presentation, my rest?”
“Yeah,” Wendy said, sounding so certain that she couldn’t possibly be. “No problem. We’re in the same bed, at least. That’s way better than I thought I’d do.”
“Thank you for understanding,” Janet said, and with only the cool blanket for company, she was asleep as soon as her eyes closed.
CHAPTER 10
All that was missing was a haze of cigar smoke.
The bunker at the Yuma Proving Grounds was lushly furnished, for a room built to withstand the hit of a stray shelling or crashing plane. Rich carpet covered the floor, flags and framed pictures tried to obscure the bulkheads that made up the walls. Wendy examined a few: military porn. A Lockheed Martin F-16V IN Super Viper in flight, a squad of F-22As dropping JDAMs, a few of West Point graduates posing or USMC Scout Snipers in full gear, walking the desert. It made her wonder just how many stories had ended up, after all the blood and sweat and tears, as set decoration.
The crowd was a robust mix. Mostly colonels, if Wendy was getting her stripes right, and from all branches. Lots of full birds, lots of lieutenant colonels, lots of medals as well. Purple Hearts, Silver Stars—if Wendy had to guess, she’d say this was grunt work, but still important grunt work. These guys might not have been primetime, but they were the rising stars, and what they said today would influence the top brass decisions in five, ten, fifteen years’ time.
Then there were the defense contractors like her and Janet. Business suits so dark they were practically a uniform in and of themselves; their only medal was that they’d gotten an invite over here. Wendy straightened the lapels of her jacket. Dress code, informal as it was, meant no skirt and panty fun, but it also meant Janet in a pantsuit. Small blessings.
Janet returned from schmoozing a DARPA chief, with two cups of coffee. Styrofoam.
“You’d think sixteen percent of the national budget would get them some mugs,” Wendy said, taking hers.
“You’d think twenty-four percent of it would get my nana better social security benefits, but there you go.”
“Oh my God, you call her your nana?”
Janet drank her coffee. So did Wendy, suddenly feeling a wave of guilt. Speaking of grandparents, she hadn’t exactly been honest…
“If everyone is ready? We’re about to begin,” said the major in charge of the exercise. He was easy to distinguish, wearing fatigues to emphasize that he was on active duty. The room was one long hall, the entrance at one end, at the other an open viewing port that ran the length of the wall. Covered by bulletproof glass, it looked out over the gunnery range, HDTVs mounted over and below to show off footage being recorded by chase planes and drones. Now all we need is a jumbotron and a hot dog vendor, we’re in business, Wendy thought to herself.
She drew close to the glass, looking out at the range. It reminded her a bit of period pieces about Hollywood: films where Marilyn Monroe or James Stewart were characters. Someone always visited the backlot, an Old West town with facades of buildings that were just plywood when seen from behind. These buildings had four walls, but not much else. Junker cars and retired tanks were laid out on the unpaved streets, as well as dummies dressed in black bad-guy uniforms. The few acres formed a reasonable approximation of some blocks in an enemy city, if bisected and transported on to government land. “We’ll begin with our new AEW&C, the Boeing 898 Sentinel, which will fly overhead to perform area search, and command and control duties…”
The monitors showed various views of the aircraft, a big pelican of a thing, feeds showing its crew, the view from some of its many cameras, and the view from within the ‘city.’ Wendy craned her neck to see it in the sky. There was barely a dot.
It went like that for the better part of an hour, though rarely that peaceful. Many of the planes being demoed were refinements—theoretically, at least—on old classics—again, theoretically. So Wendy saw a lot of old news. F-22s with upgraded weapon systems flew trailing colored smoke to show off their moves, lobbing off flares as if they were being shot at and dropping new PGMs on a few targets. They saved some for the H4 Self-Propelled Howitzer, the Multiple Launch Rocket, airstrike after airstrike after airstrike, the targets being reduced to rubble and smaller rubble and then into dust.
The major kept up his narration, gesturing with a laser pointer to a model of the alleged city, pointing out how an attack would target this building in particular, or this floor in particular, or this wall in particular. It was all a bit moot when saturation bombing left the whole thing a parking lot. A parking lot with a lot of potholes.
“Kinda scary, isn’t it?” Wendy
whispered to Janet, watching another explosion punch at the air.
“It’s a scary world,” Janet replied. Then, as the fireworks went off, their noise demanding attention, she reached casually into Wendy’s pants and felt her bareness. Just a taste of Janet’s hand before she took it away. “No panties. Good. I love a woman in bare skin.”
“You have a cavewoman fetish? I’m not that butch!”
There was a hill on the far end of the range that took the really big hits, the ones that just showed off how big a bang they could make. Wendy wondered how long it would be there. If one day it would just be worn down, like a boulder in a river.
The final bomb fell, a bunker-buster taking out a fortification that could’ve been theirs, as the major almost gleefully noted. And then the meat market was open. Her, Janet, the Boeing boys and the Lockheed Martin guys and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, all trying to cast aspirations here, suggest improvements there, find a way to get their hat in the ring and someone else’s out of it.
“As you can see,” the major concluded, “we’re quite confident in the current range of warfighters in suiting any power projection need, from destroying a single room with a Predator drone to complete area denial. Any questions?”
“I have one,” Janet said. She finished her coffee before continuing, having nursed it all through the demonstration. She handed the empty cup to Wendy. “I assume, in the field, this will all be integrated with forces on the ground. Tanks, Humvees, troops…”
The major nodded, not feeling the need to verbally confirm such an obvious question.
“So then…” Janet gestured out the viewing port, where the smoke of the bombardment lingered like morning mist. “What happens to them in this onslaught? Say you have a squadron of Marines cut off by enemy fire here.” She tapped a rooftop on the model city. That it was still standing while its scale approximation was rubble struck Wendy as slightly surreal; cut-rate David Lynch. “Or here, where you have hostages you want to extract. There, let’s say a high-value target who’s been taken captive, but needs to be transported away for interrogation. I know the major has aptly demonstrated that you can fire around them, but that doesn’t get them medical assistance.”
Pausing to see if anyone would take issue with her—and they didn’t—Janet reached into her pocket and brought out a scale model about the size of a Hot Wheels car.
“The NA-44 Hawkowl, our new helicopter, already in testing. It’s light, nimble, but with enough armor to withstand virtually any small-arms fire. You give it ten seconds, it can get in, defend itself with electronic and physical deterrence, and then evacuate with any asset you want. Because the enemy isn’t going to be a bunch of empty buildings. It’s going to be people. And to fight people, you need boots on the ground, and when you put boots on the ground, you need a way to get them back. Without getting brought down by a rickety Soviet RPG that any teenager can get off the Dark Web for two hundred bucks.”
Someone cleared his throat and Janet set herself, staring across the model at the Sikorsky representative. Janet had fired a shot across his bow, reminding everyone of his Blackhawks going down in Somalia. Even if she wasn’t looking to take his slice of the pie, he’d have to respond. “I’ve heard of your Hawkowl—a weapons platform with peashooters.”
“Less ordinance means more room for passengers, increased maneuverability. And we all know the future of directed munitions isn’t a man in a cockpit pushing a button on his joystick, it’s someone an ocean away on a computer telling a Predator drone to launch a Hellfire. But you can’t provide battlefield support with a laptop. The Hawkowl will let the aerial drones do what they do best, while increasing support for troops in the field. Better a master of one trade than a jack of all.”
The rep smiled tidily. That was the only way Wendy could think of it: tidy. “You paint your girl here as invincible against small-arms fire. Well, these ships won’t be going up against street gangs. What will your Hawkowl do when it’s targeted by enemy armor?”
“Explode, I expect. The same as your Blackhawks do. The Hawkowl isn’t a miracle, no weapons system is, but it can evade enemy fire, work in conjunction with escorts to—”
“The Blackhawk can engage enemy armor directly.”
“With all respect to a distinguished colleague, not very well. You don’t use a Swiss army knife to cut your steak and you don’t use a steak knife to open a bottle of wine. The Armed Forces can’t afford to pretend that one size fits all on the battlefield of the future. We need specialization.”
“Overspecialization,” the rep corrected.
“What war has ever been fought without a man holding a weapon? That man needs support, and the Hawkowl will give him support, not treat him as cargo. We’ve designed it with modular support for ambulatory duty, mass evacuation, even a skyhook system for supply delivery—”
“There’s also the RadarVoid system,” Wendy said.
Janet snapped to her, as shocked by Wendy’s voice as she would’ve been by her blood gushing over the floor. “Yes, the RadarVoid is one of many proprietary technologies being developed for future incarnations of the Hawkowl,” she said, trying to recover.
“And what’s it do, exactly?” the rep demanded.
“Large-caliber fire,” Wendy answered for Janet. “Which these days is all directed by electronics. The Hawkowl’s electronic signature is specifically designed to be easily spoofed, so with the RadarVoid system engaged, it’s impossible for the real one to be locked on to among a…a plethora of duplicates.”
“I’d like to see the data on that.”
“I have it right here,” Wendy said, taking Mary’s folder from her jacket. She dropped it on the model. “The Blackhawk simply can’t disguise its signature the way the Hawkowl was designed from the ground up to do. You’re looking at a helicopter that can’t be hit.”
The representative said nothing. Especially as the major stepped in and picked up the folder to read.
It was a long drive back to the hotel, even with an MP chauffeuring them.
“You’re upset,” Wendy said, much as she hated stating the obvious.
Janet was going through the RadarVoid report backwards and forwards, so fast and so intently it was like she was trying to commit suicide via papercut. “I’m not upset. I’m concerned. You’d know if I was upset.”
“Look, I’m sorry, I know I wasn’t supposed to tag myself in, but it shut him up, right? That was exactly the opening we needed to drop the bomb; I bet they’re saving their pennies for the Hawkowl as we speak.”
“You do understand that makes it worse, right?”
“Huh?” Wendy asked eloquently.
Janet rapped the sheaf of papers against Wendy’s knee. She lowered her voice. “I can’t speak to the efficacy of the RadarVoid system. If I knew it worked, fine, you spoke out of turn, it’s not a big deal. If it doesn’t work—”
“You think it doesn’t work?”
Janet lowered her voice even farther, shushing Wendy with the sheer intensity of her words. “I don’t know if it does or doesn’t. That’s what concerns me.”
Wendy flicked her finger against the papers. “Look at the tests. They all show it works fine.”
Janet let out a long-suffering sigh and paged through the reams of test results. “They all look aboveboard, but really read them. You know at Savin, our R&D department assigns every test a unique code. Month, day, year, hour, minute, second, location. Look here. D/C/16/I/AA/B/JJJ. So that’s April the third, 2016, 9:27:02 AM, and I believe the Kirkwood lab. That’s test one. Test two should take place maybe an hour later. A few hours at the most, because they go to lunch, someone pulls a fire alarm, what have you. It doesn’t, the code’s completely different. All of them are like that.”
“So? Kirkwood ran one test for the RadarVoid program, then some different tests, then they came back to it.”
“For all of them? Or are we just looking at the most successful ten tests out of fifty? Out of a hundred? Out of two hundre
d?”
“C’mon, we don’t do that.”
“We don’t?”
“No. Savin Aerospace has a reputation to uphold, we don’t cook the books like that.”
“You said it yourself. Everyone cooks the books.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“I didn’t get this far by being something else.”
Janet’s phone rattled. She took in a sharp hiss of breath before she answered it. “Roberta, hello…”
They were still going at it hammer and tongs when the MP dropped them off at the hotel. Wendy made it through the lobby before watching Janet’s reverse-massage wrack her body up into knots became too much for her. “I’ll take the stairs,” she said, and left Janet in the elevator not even noticing her.
Ten flights of stairs later, she was keenly aware of the difference between her fatigue last night, when Janet had wrung her out just enough to be comfortably exhausted, and just hating her legs. Sore, and really regretting going with kitten heels that morning, she went down the hallway and heard Janet shouting right through the walls.
“It was a trial separation, Roberta, a trial separation! Not a hall pass to go fuck your way through the nearest sorority!”
Wendy let herself into the room. Might as well have been invisible. She went to get herself a glass of water.
“You thought I’d be okay with it, fuck you, you thought I’d be okay with it, if I was okay with it, I would’ve told you to take a weekend in Ibiza and be done with it!”
No ice. Wendy picked up the bucket, went around to the ice machine—conveniently right next to their Shriner-free room—filled it, came back, added ice water, took a drink, sat down.
Better. Much better.
“If you want to run off and play trial lawyer, fine, but you can do it on your own dime! You are not getting one red cent for abandoning me, it is my money, I earned it, and I would rather burn it than let you use it as your goddamn safety net. Have some fucking balls and live in a studio apartment like the twenty-year-old you so desperately, obviously want to be!”
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