Death From Above!

by J. I. Greco

  Trip plops down onto one of the couches, leaning forward, elbow on knees. “Okay, sure, maybe I’ve felt a tinge of doubt here and there, but I’ve never been a dad before. A real dad. One with a little baby that’s going to depend on me. I can’t even stop a war, how am I supposed to raise a kid—”

  Granpap interrupts. “Enough with the soul-searching introspective bullshit, already. Snap out of it. I won’t have any ancestor of mine tainting my legacy with self-doubt.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Better,” Granpap says with a smile. “Now, if I tell you how to stop this war of yours, you think you can stop being a wittle baby?”

  “How do I stop the war? I don’t have an army.”

  “You don’t need an army. First, you got to get yourself off planet.”

  “Get my ass to Mars, eh?” Trip asks in a growly, weirdly accented voice.

  “You can reference a two-hundred year old movie but you don’t recognize the Oval Office?” Granpap shakes his head. “No, not to Mars. I’ve been. Horrible pizza. Anyway, after what me and Davey did to the place, doubt you’d be welcome. Just get yourself into orbit. Then we’ll go from there.”

  “Orbit? Funny… that would have been impossible up to about twenty minutes ago.”

  “You think that’s a coincidence?” Granpap stabs his cigar out in the ashtray. “You’re not the only head I’m in.”

  “You’re in Lock?” Trip asks, lighting a cig of his own.

  “An echo. She doesn’t have an implant, but she does have nanomachine memory cells. Open-standard, open-source ones. When you interfaced with her while she was the All-Mart, I managed to copy myself over into her.”

  “She know you’re in there?”

  “Not consciously. Yet. She’s pretty bright. Brighter than you. I’m sure she’ll detect my influence someday.”

  Trip looks up. “Wait… how much of her deciding to give up being the All-Mart was you?”

  “That was all her. But her not killing Rox… that was pretty much all me.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah, don’t trust her.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You sure you’re up for this?” Trip asks, crouched behind a crate and peering around it to look out at the tarmac on the south end of the Combine.

  “I’m sure,” Rudy says, crouched right behind him, looking up at the moon, a crescent in the inky black sky, gnawing on a stalk of some green-red leafy thing.

  Trip looks back at him over his shoulder. “I don’t need your detoxing ass fucking this up. We may only get the one chance.”

  “Never been better,” Rudy says, grinning around a mouthful of leaf.

  “Well, you look like hell. And not your normal third level of hell but like level six and a half.”

  “Is that the one with the vampire bats?”

  “And a rerun of the musical Lexx episode on a loop projected on every wall.”

  “I’m fine, really,” Rudy says. “The detox cycle is almost done and I’m feeling good. Better than good. Ready to take on the world.”

  “Really? Because you still seem to be sweating a lot, is all I’m saying. And your pupils are dilated. And your hand seems to be shaking quite a bit. And there’s blood coming out of your nose.”

  “Only a trickle. Look, don’t worry about it, it’s just the gonka.”

  “Is that what that is? I thought it was lettuce.”

  “It ain’t lettuce.” Rudy tears a chunk of the gonka off with his teeth with the gusto of a man biting into a perfectly rare dry-aged steak. “Got it from the Cthulists. And it’s amazing. It’s really taking the edge off the whole detox thing. Now, what’s the plan?”

  “Seriously? We went over the plan like a thousand times on the drive over here.”

  “Oh, my bad.” Rudy shrugs. “So what’s the plan, again?”

  “Vishnu’s Interocitor, dude,” Trip says, exasperated. “I’m just gonna steal the jet myself.”

  “No, no, I’m onboard. I can focus. Swear.”

  Trip reaches for Rudy’s gonka. “Okay, but no more gonka—”

  Rudy pulls the gonka back, close to his chest, and snarls. “You did not just try to touch my gonka, did you?”

  “Settle down, someone might hear you.”

  “It’s the middle of the night, who’s gonna hear us?”

  “Lock’s not dumb.” Trip jogs his head towards the man lying unconscious on the tarmac nearby, the one he’d snuck up behind and stun-gunned a few moments earlier. “There will be other sentries.”

  Rudy looks over at the prone sentry. “Sure I can’t draw a mustache on him?”

  “Don’t you think I’d love to draw some handlebars on him? No, we need to focus.”

  “You’re right. Focus.” Rudy pulls a nub of charcoal out of his bandolier. “I’m just gonna draw a small one on him.”

  Trip knocks the charcoal out of Rudy’s hand. “Just eat your gonka and pay attention. Think you can do that?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Rudy says, a touch of sadness in his voice. “But when that guy wakes up without a charcoal Van Dyke, that’s on you, brother.”

  “Okay, maybe just a small one,” Trip says, glancing around them. “But be quick about it.”

  “On it.” Rudy grabs the charcoal from the tarmac and, still couching, waddles over to the sentry. “Now tell me the plan.”

  “I’ll wait until I have your full attention.”

  Rudy rolls the sentry over onto his back and starts in on drawing. “Let’s face it, you are never going to have my full attention. But thanks to the gonka, I’m feeling fairly confident I can do two things at once. Maybe even three — if you count chewing the gonka. Man, gonka is amazing. Now, be honest with me. Are my ears bleeding?”

  “Yes, yes they are.”

  “Whew, that’s a relief, I thought I was hallucinating again,” Rudy says, tearing off more of the gonka. “Okay, hit me up with the plan.”

  “First, we sneak into Lock’s city under cover of darkness.”

  “Done,” Rudy says, dabbing a final touch of charcoal on the sentry’s chin. “And done.”

  “Then we find the prototype jet.”

  “Which I’m guessing is that thing of beauty over there,” Rudy says, nodding at the small twin-engine jet sitting on the tarmac a few hundred paces away.

  “Right.” Trip glances around them one last time to check the shadows for other sentries. “Come on, let’s go. Time to steal it,” he says, standing and heading not for the jet, but a portable staircase on wheels near it.

  Rudy rushes to catch up with him. “Wait, what about the rest of the plan?”

  “We steal the jet, I figure out how to interface with it, then we fly it into orbit.”

  “Into orbit?”

  “Yes, into orbit,” Trip says, grabbing the staircase and pushing it towards the jet. “We’ve gone over this.”

  “Yeah, but… can the jet get into orbit?”

  Trip eases the staircase up against the jet’s canopy with a soft thud as the staircase bumps against the fuselage. “I don’t know. It’s a scramjet. The ghost in my head seems to think it can.”

  “Oh, right. Virtual great-great-grandpappy. When do I get to meet him? I’ve got so many questions about the past… like, why did they let Zach Snyder keep making DC movies?”

  “I don’t think it works that way.” Trip lights a cig, stepping on the first stair. “He’s my ghost, tied to my implant, I don’t know if he can come out and play. Besides, he’s a bit of an asshole.”

  “Like I’m not used to hanging out with assholes.”

  “Shut up and keep an eye out for sentries.” Trip gingerly mounts the stairs, trying to make as little sound as he can. His footsteps still clang with every step, and the staircase creaks with his weight. At the top, looking down through the canopy, he says, “Oh…”

  “What?”

  “There’s only the one seat. And before you ask, no, we’re not doubling up. Looks like it’s going to be a solo flight.”
/>
  “Shit, I wanted to go into space, too.”

  “You can take her for a spin after I come back.”

  “Right, like you’re coming back.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Trip asks, flicking the exterior latches to raise the canopy. “You saw Lock fly it, Death From Above won’t touch it.”

  “I’m not talking about Death From Above. Come on, we both know this is just one of your elaborate misdirections. You’re just stealing the jet to run farther away this time, somewhere Rox can’t track you down easily.”

  “It’s not a misdirection,” Trip says, bending down to get a better look at the cockpit. “I swear.”

  “Yeah, a ghost in your head wants you to steal a jet so you can get into orbit. Which will somehow let you stop the war. Right.”

  “I don’t know which is more insulting. The idea that you think I’m running away, or the idea that you don’t think I can come up with a better misdirection.” Trip straightens and sighs. “Shatner… I can’t find an interface. Nowhere to plug in, and no wireless connection point I can sense. And no manual flight controls, either.”

  “That’s because there aren’t any,” a familiar voice says from below.

  “Oh, hey,” Rudy announces. “Trip, Lock’s here.”

  Trip looks down. Lock stands at the base of the staircase, fists planted against her hips. “I can see that,” Trip says.

  “Snuck up on me,” Rudy says.

  “How about you stick to one thing at a time from here on in, gonka regardless?” Trip suggests to Rudy, then smirks at Lock. “What do you mean there’s no interface? How are people gonna fly it?”

  “It’s a prototype. The production model will have flight controls. This one I fly by nano-connection,” Lock says, waving her fingers in front of her face, fingertips giving off a cloud of microscopic machines.

  “Well, do some nano-magic and reconfigure it to have a neural interface,” Trip says. He looks around the tarmac, past the crates they were hiding behind, and into the shadows of the hangar beyond. If Lock came with backup, they’re hiding real well. “Gotta borrow it.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “You gonna try and stop me?”

  “Don’t need to,” Lock says. “Death From Above will.”

  Trip thumps the side of the jet with his palm. “This thing flies. We saw it. Didn’t get blown away.”

  “Sure, because I was aboard,” Lock says.

  “Of course,” Trip says. “That’s how you licked the problem. By not licking it.”

  “I’m missing something,” Rudy says.

  “Usually,” Trip says. “She cheated.”

  “Not cheated,” Lock says. “Just needed a working prototype. And fast. The Belgians are on the verge of a breakthrough.”

  “So you faked having a solution so you can get enough pre-orders to pay for coming up with a real solution,” Trip says.

  “And divert any potential orders from the Belgians. Fuck them.”

  “Wait, but we saw it fly. That wasn’t fake. Or was it? Was it some kind of hologram?” Rudy shoves a handful of gonka into his mouth. “It was a hologram, wasn’t it?” he asks, chewing.

  “Not a hologram,” Trip says. He smirks at Lock. “You were in that jet, and it flew. So how’d you pull it off?”

  “I cover the thing in a sheath of nanomachines I extrude. I figured if I could keep the nanomachines in motion, a constant shift between ablative and nonablative, deflecting and absorbing electromagnetic spectrum randomly, it would continually mask the thing from Death From Above’s sensors.”

  “It worked,” Trip says.

  “Sure did. Only thing is, my nanomachines have enough CPU of their own to do simple tasks, but they don’t have enough onboard computer power to keep up with the processing needed to keep the jet masked, even when they’re networked together.”

  “They need your core processor.”

  “It takes most of my concentration to do it. And it means I have to be in physical contact with them—bandwidth of our link isn’t fat enough or fast enough to do it over the wireless.”

  “So you can’t just detach a bunch of them and sell them along with the jets. Without you, they’d have no computer to do the magic.”

  “It’s not just that. I only have so many nanomachines. Sure, they self-repair, and I can make new ones, over time, but not quickly. Not anywhere quick enough. It takes about five percent of my mass to make the masking sheath, and a year for me to produce that much new nanomachine mass.”

  “So even if you had a computer to go with them, you could sell maybe nineteen jets before—”

  “Before it became impractical, yeah,” Lock says. “So I need to find another way. Some way that doesn’t depend on my nanomachines. Or at least not so many of them. And it also means, if you’re looking to steal the jet to reverse engineer it, you’re out of luck, there, dad.”

  “Not reverse-engineering. And not stealing. I told you. I’m borrowing. I’ll bring it back.”

  Lock looks at him dubiously. “Borrowing it why?”

  “He needs to get into orbit,” Rudy says.

  “Orbit?” Lock asks. “Why do you need to get into orbit?”

  “I have no idea,” Trip says.

  “The ghost hasn’t told him yet,” Rudy says, Trip shooting him an unhappy glare that he mentioned Granpap. “If the ghost actually exists,” Rudy quickly adds.

  “The ghost?” Lock asks.

  “Some kind of digital revenant in his implant,” Rudy says, getting another unhappy glare.

  Lock sucks in a deep breath and nods. “Should have guessed you’d have a copy of him in you, too.”

  “You know about your ghost?” Trip asks.

  “He’s not as clever as he thinks he is,” Lock says. “None of your ancestors were.”

  “Clever enough to survive for a couple hundred years hidden through the generations,” Trip says. “Which makes me curious about him. And his motives. Aren’t you curious about why he wants me to get into orbit?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Then come with me and find out.”

  “You mean come with us,” Rudy says.

  Trip snorts. “Us?”

  “I wanna see space,” Rudy insists.

  “Okay, fine, but that gonka crap is staying here. Don’t need it stinking up the cabin.”

  “You’re jumping the gun, Trip,” Lock says. “I haven’t agreed to come.”

  “Of course you did. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t already made the decision.”

  Lock shrugs. “We’re going to need a bigger jet.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “I wanna say woo-hoo,” Rudy says from behind a pressure mask, as scram-jets light, kicking the spaceplane over another sound barrier. “Can I say woo-hoo?”

  “Knock yourself out,” Lock replies back over her pressure mask’s built-in mic. Eyes gone over to blinking green, her hands extended towards the featureless dashboard, her fingers wriggle, swirling clouds of nanomachines trailing around her fingertips.

  The real clouds fall away beneath them and Rudy lets out a whoop.

  “Sure this thing isn’t going to fall apart?” Trip asks, looking out the wide canopy at the port delta wing. He swears he can see it shaking, flapping up and down like a bird’s wing. “It feels like it’s going to fall apart.”

  “That’s just turbulence,” Lock says. “It’ll settle down once we hit the ionosphere.”

  Trip grips the armrests of his acceleration couch tighter and he stares straight ahead. “Nobody said anything about turbulence.”

  Lock glances back at him. “This was your idea, remember?”

  “Last time I listen to a digital artifact,” Trip says. “And last time I let somebody else drive.”

  “Hold on, I’ll tweak the flight surface shape. That might help.” Lock lets out a chuckle. “If you can’t take a little harmless shimmy.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Trip says. “Just concentrate
on keeping the nanomachine sheath working.”

  “We haven’t been blown out of the sky yet, have we?”

  “We’re not in orbit yet.”

  “Speaking of which, any word from the ghost about what we’re supposed to do when we get there?” Rudy asks.

  “He’s not the talkative type.” Trip closes his eyes and taps the nub behind his ear. “Let me check in.”

  The old man’s lying on one of the couches when Trip pops into the Oval Office this time, wrapped up in a colorful Afghan, snoring.

  He comes awake with a snort. “What, you again?”

  “Okay, granpap, we’re almost in orbit,” Trip says, plopping down onto the other couch. “What’s next?”

  Grandpap sits up. Under the Afghan he’s wearing long-sleeved pajamas with a galloping horse pattern. “You actually made it to orbit?”

  “Just about, yeah. Any second now. Why is that so surprising?”

  “You’re no me. Plus you’ve got that anchor Rudy around your ankle.”

  “Look, he may be an anchor, but he’s still my brother. And you know, I can live without the implant, so let’s try and be a little less awful, all right? What’s next after we reach orbit?”

  “It’s not obvious? Even to you?”

  “Let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s not and just tell me already.”

  “Why am I even bothering to help you?”

  “Would you rather I bring Rudy in here so you can work with him instead of me?”

  “Okay, here’s the plan…”

  Trip opens his eyes and sees the Earth filling the canopy, a sparkling blue-white curve of Pacific Ocean filling the horizon. The only sound in the suddenly not shaking cockpit is the sound of his own breath inside his pressure mask.

  “We made orbit?” Trip asks, his voice coming out in an awed whisper.

  Rudy, staring out the canopy, his jaw slack under his own pressure mask, eyes wide, can only nod.

  “We are in orbit,” Lock says, tearing her gaze away from the vista before them. “I’ve reconfigured the jet into an orbital vehicle while we wait for instruction. Do we have instruction?”