by Jak Koke
The plexishield faceplate of Dougan’s helmet was scarred, making Jonathon’s vision slightly uneven for a moment before he adjusted mentally. A fiber-optic line integrated into his armor, letting the datajack at his temple connect through to the command module in the seat of the extensively modified Yamaha Rapier at his tailbone. He piloted the bike cybernectically, like an extension of himself, leaving his hands free for more important things like weapons.
Clamps on the Yamaha locked into hooks along the armor of his legs, making him inseparable from the light machine. The clamps were linked through the bike’s dog brain into his mind and would release at his command. The Yamaha weighed less than he did; it was for highspeed moves and acrobatics. For showing off and scoring. Dodging and running, not fighting.
A concussion grenade exploded two meters ahead as Dougan accelerated toward the flying bogey. Dougan’s cybereyes automatically compensated for the flash, something Jonathon’s natural eyes couldn’t do without special glasses. Dougan’s transparent tactical display showed the clock at five seconds and an overlay of the arena maze, his teammates’ positions showing as yellow motorcycle icons. The opposing team’s positions were unknown, as per the rules.
Dougan mentally cranked the accelerator on his Yamaha.
Dougan’s vehicle control rig wasn’t as responsive as Jonathon’s, but the millisecond of sluggishness didn’t seem to affect his scoring ability. In the sim, Dougan flashed through the smoke left by the grenade blast and unleashed his polycarb whip, sending it cracking toward the bogey, which carried the red game flag.
Jonathon used the same type of tool as his weapon of choice; great reach, better for snagging the flag. Better for dismounting opponents at a distance. Just evil.
The bogey drone hovered just above the tops of the lane dividers, zipping along a quasi-random path, with the thin, flexible flagpole on it. The tip of Dougan’s whip coiled around the pole and pulled the weighted flag from the bogey. With a quick jerk of his wrist, he snapped the flag toward him, then grabbed the pole and jammed it into the slot behind his seat.
Dougan slowed slightly to allow his teammate, Gorgon—a large human lancebiker—to rumble past into a blocking position. The lancebiker rode a huge, armored Honda Viking, his blunt plastic lance locked into the brace above the right fork of the front wheel. Dougan accelerated into formation, his front tire just to the left and slightly behind Gorgon’s rear wheel.
A voice crackled over the headset. "Oncoming. Two lancers and one liner."
Dougan barked into his helmet mike. "Copy, T-bone. Lay suppression. Pollack and Webster run interference."
"Copy, Dougan." There was a distant ka-thunk, as T-bone fired.
The concussion grenade hit around the curve just ahead of Dougan and Gorgon. A blinding flash of white, dimming as his eyes compensated, followed by a ball of flame billowing up toward the stadium’s rafters. Then the thunderclap hit, rattling the air around him.
A deafening cheer went up from the crowd, watching from behind the thick macroglass shielding. T-bone’s voice filled Dougan’s head: "Concussion ineffective. Pollack and Webster won’t reach you in time."
Dougan took a deep breath. "Fragging-A," he muttered. The curve approached at breakneck speed. "Okay, Gorgon, this is gonna be tight. I’m going up and over. You scan, chummer?"
"Not enough distance, Dougan."
"I’m the flyer," he said. "Let me worry about it."
"It’s your funeral."
Dougan stopped his bike for a second to let Gorgon move his big Honda into position near the curve of the lane. Cranking the throttle with a mental command, Dougan crouched low against the bike as the Yamaha squealed into a full-out run.
T-bone’s voice boomed in his ear, "Five seconds to enemy contact. I’m gonna cross the skyway to declaw their thunderbiker."
Gorgon came to a full stop a few meters from the curve and unhitched his lance from its bracket. As Dougan reached forty klicks per hour, Gorgon braced his lance upright against his boot.
Dougan unleashed his whip, sending it cracking toward Gorgon just as the four enemy bikes rounded the curve, the blunt tips of three lances jutting at Dougan.
They'll hit Gorgon regardless, Jonathon thought. But Dougan might just make it.
The tip of Dougan’s whip coiled around Gorgon’s heavy lance, and Dougan locked the handle into the holster pin on his bike. The whip cord came taut as Dougan swung out wide, riding up the slope of the pipe. It pulled him into an impossible arc. His bike cut a sharp half-circle using the whip as radius, up the steep, half-pipe bank of the lane to shoot straight into the air.
Dougan threw his weight back as his wheels cleared the top of the barrier, sending himself and his bike into a backflip. The crowd gasped in unison as he tucked in close to the machine to complete the flip, then came down on the other side of the wall into a clear lane. He clamped on full brakes, skidding to a halt.
"Talk to me, T-bone," he said. "Where’s the enemy? Where’s backup?"
"Ion and Chibba are six ticks behind you. No enemy between you and ground zero."
Dougan checked his tactical. Clock ticking toward the thirty-second mark. Toward jittertime. "No enemy?" Dougan asked as he swung his Yamaha around and rocketed toward the Timber Wolves’ goal circle. Ground zero.
Jonathon felt Tamara jack out of the sim. The slight discontinuity as she unplugged herself from the recorder. He stopped the simulation and jacked out.
Tamara hadn’t moved. She sat stock-still in the simrecliner next to him, her hands over her face.
Crying?
"Tam, what’s wrong?"
She drew her hands from her eyes slowly. Then gave a heavy sigh. "Dougan Rose," she said. "He never makes a mistake."
But that wasn’t it, Jonathon knew. "Come on, Tam. What’s going on?"
"Mistakes," she said. Then she sat in silence for a minute. Finally, barely a whisper, "I fragged up."
Jonathon leaned in. "What is it. . . what’s wrong?"
She just shook her head and wouldn’t look at him.
"Talk to me, Tam," he insisted.
"It’s bad."
"Is it something to do with Michaelson? We can fix it. I know we can, but you’ve gotta tell me if I’m going to help you."
"You can’t help, Jonathon. Nobody can. You’re going to have to let me fly solo on this one."
"But—"
"No. I won’t drag you into it." She put her hands over her eyes again, trying to hide her emotions from him. "If I got you into another mess like the Multnomah Falls thing, I’d never be able to forgive myself."
"That was an accident," Jonathon said. But he knew that whatever she’d done must be serious for her to bring up Multnomah Falls.
Now she was murmuring to herself, "Grids was right, it’s too big. Too dangerous. Too fragging dangerous."
"Grids? What did that dreamer—?"
"Leave him out of it!" she yelled suddenly. "It was all my idea so just leave him out!"
Jonathon held his hands up. "Sorry, Tam. I didn’t. .
But she stood, wiping her eyes, and walked away. As he watched the retreating shape of her rigid back, the memory of the accident at Multnomah Falls came over him. The day everything changed in their lives.
After flight school, Jonathon and Tamara had flown prototype Federated-Boeing fighter jets out of Fort Lewis in Seattle. He still considered that the best time of his life, and often dreamed of climbing into the cockpit of an FB1680 once more. Of sliding into the narrow, form-adjusting seat in his blue-gray flight suit, jacking himself through his helmet and into the powerful bird.
The FB1680 was code-named Falcon, and as such, it was smaller and faster than its predecessor, the Eagle. Sleek, single-wing design, painted a radar-absorbing matte black, nearly invisible to electronic detection. It had fully vectored thrust, VTOL maneuverability, and blazing speed. The only things quicker were a few elite cruise drones, and that was only because they could pull gees that would kill any metahuman.
Suddenly he became the machine. Cameras and sensors embedded into the black metal skin of the bird gave Jonathon 360-degree vision, hearing, touch. Plus he had extra senses. Radar relayed from the tower showed him a 3-D view of the surrounding airscape. Digital information about wind speed and altitude were translated into taste and smell.
When Tamara jacked into her Falcon next to him, her simsense link synchronized with his, and they merged. Two planes and two minds becoming one entity. UCAS military headware made it possible.
When Jonathon and Tamara had enlisted together and volunteered for the special pilot-training program, Colonel Carmen Johansen had interviewed them. She was looking for non-magicians who were psychologically compatible and could survive the intense scrutiny of prolonged and continuous wet-feed simsense interconnection. Many previous attempts had ended in insanity or mutual addiction.
After their basic and advanced flight training, he and Tamara had undergone an extensive and grueling series of physical and mental tests. Then they were asked to participate in the test-pilot studies. They accepted instantly; it had been one of Jonathon’s dreams to fly fighter jets, and this was that dream coming true in a way he could never have imagined.
After they signed the liability release, both he and Tamara went under the knife. The headware they got was a prototype vehicle control rig, very fast. Very advanced. Plus the doctors installed a full-X simrig and a sophisticated transmitter that acted as a simlink as well as a singlechannel remote control unit for the vehicle rig, so if Jonathon ever had to eject, he could still remote-pilot the expensive aircraft to a safe landing.
The simsense ’ware kept Jonathon and Tamara connected to each other during their flights; it allowed Jonathon to switch instantly to Tamara’s point of view during a test move, then back. And over the course of months, they grew to know each other more intimately than he’d ever thought possible between two people. They knew each other’s emotions, sensations, actions, responses. The technology had created as close to a telepathic link as could be accomplished without magic.
That thirteenth day of March, their sixth test flight of the Falcon, was their 213th mission together. And their last.
Their tactical officer was a dwarf named Theodore Rica. Theo was a brilliant mathematical mind in a squat, muscular body. Under his black curls, he was equipped with the same headware as Tamara and Jonathon, but he didn’t fly with them. He remained in the control bunker in Fort Lewis, pulling together radar and satellite recon data to reconstruct an accurate taste of the airscape. He also took in the digital data flow from the two jets, flew the "enemy" test drones, and orchestrated the exercises.
That day, Theo directed them up and south of Seattle, over Salish-Shidhe territory. Burning fire rocketed through Jonathon as he throttled up his jets. His meat body sank into the cushioned seat as his mental body directed thrust down. With a searing push he was airborne, angling then hurtling then blasting across the forests of the Salish-Shidhe tribal lands.
Tamara nudged his left-wing space, flying just outside his slipstream. Jonathon knew from her stance, from her surge of adrenaline, her laughing, which he felt through the link. From a million tiny and subtle clues, he knew she wanted to lead this run. So he acquiesced, letting her slip past into lead formation.
They moved low and fast, edging down to skim the tree-tops, feeling the tickle of douglas fir needles as they blew past. Theo’s voice crackled over the com, "Bogey at ten o’clock." He highlighted the target on the tactical overlay—an Aztechnology Cheetah class drone, a remote-rigged unit that was no match for the Falcon speedwise, but could turn on a credstick, and maneuvered through trees and canyons like a cockroach through dirty dishes.
The drone flashed in and out of radar, but once Theo had highlighted it, Tamara and Jonathon never lost track. Flying as a unit, one or the other always sensed it. Simul-sim-linked. One being made of two minds, two black metal bodies in perfect unison.
"Closing," Tamara said as she narrowed the distance with a spark of afterburner, and they found themselves weaving through the fissures of the newly erupted Cascades. The ice canyons around Mount Rainier, then the scarred earth near Mount Saint Helens.
Tamara had the targeting array nearly locked down when the drone made an unexpected move. It cut south in a quick turn and bolted for the Columbia River, toward the elven nation of Tir Tairngire. Later, Jonathon learned that part of the test centered around their response to this move.
The overly paranoid elven security forces were under orders to shoot down any aircraft violating their airspace, and any pilot would know that, but this was a drone. No time for complex analysis. Their mission was to destroy the bogey, and that’s just what Tamara was going to do. She angled her thrust and spun into a sharp carving turn.
Jonathon let his autopilot slave to her commands, though he was ready to assume control if necessary. She’s trying to play hero again, he thought.
"Tam, we’re too fraggin’ close to civilians for anything so risky," he barked into his headset, even though she would know how he felt from the simlink long before she heard the words.
Tamara always had a craving for ratings. Always wanted to be admired, the center of attention. And that was her ultimate dream, to feature in sims, to become a megastar whose name was known to the whole world.
"Just three more seconds," came Tamara’s reply as she armed two of her Ares Rattlesnake III air-to-air missiles.
Jonathon readied his own with a thought as the air below them grew cool and moist. They dropped to skim just above the surface of the broad river. Sun glared off blue water, smells of fish and mist hit him, and the water flew up behind them into the vacuum of their wake.
"Abort," came Theo’s voice. "Repeat, abort."
But it was too late.
In the split second before Tamara fired, a gathering of people on the far bank came into view. The drone cut sharp, downriver, its tiny wings glistening a dull bronze against the twinkling silver of the river’s surface.
Ahead, a tall waterfall fell from the top of the gorge. Multnomah Falls. At its base, tourist buildings sat, crammed with unsuspecting civilians. The two Ares Rattlesnakes locked on target and flew from Tamara’s bird. One hit the drone just as it turned downstream. The other missed.
Jonathon never discovered why it happened. Why the missile didn’t track its target. Perhaps it encountered some electronic jamming from Tir Tairngire. That would be up to the elves’ typical paranoid standards.
The other missile rocketed into the parking lot of the tourist attraction, retargeting on a huge bus full of corporate children, the sons and daughters of sararimen from Portland. Blew it to shrapnel in a huge mushrooming fire cloud. Jonathon saw the silver shape of the bus lift in the middle, split open for a brief moment before the whole thing turned to shrapnel engulfed in flame and smoke.
They learned later that nearly two hundred people burned to death in the explosion, but it was a number Jonathon could not comprehend. How could he and Tam have done such a thing, even by accident?
Tamara went into shock, and Jonathon had to take control of her jet. Fly them both back to Fort Lewis, with a growing sense of distance, the increasing numbness of unreality surrounding his brain. The Tir Tairngire government demanded prosecution of all the responsible parties.
Theo, Tamara, and Jonathon were court-martialed, sentenced to five years in the military prison in Fairfax, and permanent ground. They’d only had to serve two years, but they’d never fly again; the elven High Council had warned the corporate world that any attempts to hire them as pilots would be considered a direct affront.
Jonat
hon and Tamara had decided to try professional combat cycling. And though riding the line was thriller chiller and another of his childhood fantasies come true, it couldn’t compare to the rush of flying.
Now, Jonathon gritted his teeth against the frustration of the memory and pushed himself up from the simrecliner. He took a deep breath and went after Tamara. "Wait," he said, catching up with her. "Whatever happened, whatever trouble you’re in now," he said, "I want to help if I can. We were a team back in Fort Lewis. And we still are."
Tamara bowed her head and stared down at the gray concrete floor. "No, Jonathon," she said, slowly shaking her head. "You know too much already." Then she looked up at him. She stared into his eyes with a dull, glazed expression.
He saw conviction in the flat color of her irises, in her dead stare. And he knew what her response would be.
"I fly solo on this one, Jonathon," she said. "Solo."
Jonathon had never felt more alone.
7
Luc Tashika stared out the window of his seventieth-story office at the infection that was Los Angeles. His building—the sleek, black MCT monolith—pushed up through the concrete and steel canopy of the urban blight. His building was a pinnacle of polished obsidian glass, shiny and clean against a backdrop of grimy concrete. Well, it wasn’t his yet. But perhaps soon ...
Tashika ran his fingers through his wiry black hair and contemplated his next move. This Michaelson acquisition must not fail, he thought. He’s my ticket out of the entertainment division. Tashika had been left to stagnate by the purists in the corp, the oyabun distrusting the loyalty of his mongrel blood. Tashika oversaw subsidiaries such as Boromaker, Matrix News Corp, and the sports franchises, but entertainment was a dead-end track at MCT, and he had reached its terminus.
Michaelson will be my ticket back into electronics, perhaps even into the president’s office.
Tashika’s gaze tracked up toward the ocean from the crumbling concrete scourge that clung like guano to the feet of his building. The view was much the same all over Downtown and East Hollywood, but changed after a couple of kilometers as the sickly tenements gave way to the walled enclaves of Studio City-Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the Palisades.