“I dunno. Big enough for a garden, I guess.”
“We’re going to need books. Lots of books. Lots to learn.”
“Yeah.” Dana heaved a sigh.
“What’s up?”
“Chocolate,” she said. “Gosh, I think I can handle everything else just fine, the work, the danger, the long hours, everything. But that cache of yours was a gift from heaven. I just wish that could happen again. I miss the chocolate! I should have made it last.”
“Wait a minute. Hold on. You ate all the M&M’s? I had like ten big bags of those things!”
Dana glared at him. “I told you if you left me alone then I’d eat them all, remember? And you did leave me, so…”
Carson maintained a theatrically hostile silence. After a minute, he muttered something under his breath.
“What was that?” Dana said.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“Tell me, honey, or you can’t come in my house.”
“I said, thank heaven for Site B.”
“Site B?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What’s Site B?”
“Oh, a secondary location. Back-up for the back-up. You know how I like to be prepared for all contingencies.”
“I see. Site B wouldn’t happen to have M&M’s, would it?”
Carson gazed at the sky, noting some cirrus blowing in high from the north. “It might, yes.”
“It… might.” Dana slipped her hand into his. “In that case, I might stick with you for a while. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He interlaced his fingers with hers, and they stood that way, the world at their feet, the sun warming their backs, looking forward to tomorrow.
END of Part Four of the Denver Burning series: Assault on Cheyenne Mountain
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As police sergeant Alicia Hendrickson’s men are cut down amid a hail of gunfire, she is forced to make hard and fast decisions about what's most important to her: duty, family, or maybe just survival.
Or read on for a sneak peek at Part Five of the Denver Burning series, Lionhearts:
Sneak peek at Part Five of the Denver Burning series: Lionhearts
Lieutenant Jeff Turley thanked the controller in the tower very kindly, pivoted until his F-22’s nose was pointed at the destination marked on his test mission profile, and engaged his afterburners. The aircraft soared away from Holloman Air Force Base and climbed high enough he could see a good portion of New Mexico. The sky was a crisp blue, just transitioning from the sun-drenched end of summer into the early autumn cooling. A beautiful day for another test flight.
He puttered in the cockpit as his Raptor took him toward the deployment point at Mach 2.1. The machine was in excellent condition and had just passed a thorough yearly deep check with flying colors. This was good exercise for it.
Turley gazed out at the ground passing below. He was approaching some more populated areas east of the base, but he was far too high now for civilians on the ground to take notice of his passing.
He wondered briefly about the nature of the new electronic countermeasure system he was testing on this flight. It was classified at a higher level than most of what he had tested in the past. Some new toy from the DoD that the Chinese didn’t know about yet, so it was being kept under wraps even from the pilot himself. It was big, whatever the thing was; larger than any other armament he’d tested. A long rectangular box, painted flat gray with no discernible markings. The early prototypes were always bulkier than the finished product, though, and it would no doubt be slimmed down before ever seeing deployment in combat.
Part of the allure of this gig was getting to play with powerful new tools before anyone else. But even if he couldn’t brag about it at the bar later, it was annoying not to be briefed on what he was carrying at all. How was he to provide effective feedback if he didn’t know the parameters of the test, or the nature of the device he was carrying? He resolved to enjoy the flight for what it was worth. Let the eggheads monitor the test however they wished.
Minutes later he approached the target point, somewhere over Kansas, and slowed the aircraft to a gentle cruising speed as directed in his flight instructions. He communicated with the tower again, confirming his actions and notifying them that he was about to deploy. Then he got final clearance to deploy munitions, and reached for the trigger. It was a simple, smooth mission, one test flight among hundreds. Textbook operation.
But the lieutenant’s finger hesitated slightly as it came into contact with the button on his flight stick. The control somehow felt cold, even though his hand was gloved. It was icy, and his hand almost retracted involuntarily.
He hadn’t experienced a gut feeling like this since his time over the skies of Afghanistan, when he had been about to hit a ground target with a thousand-pound bomb and hesitated on a hunch. Something in the ground controller’s voice, a hint of uncertainty. Seconds later the JTAC frantically radioed up that the coordinates were wrong and he needed to abort the strike. His hunch had saved lives that day.
But this wasn’t combat, and he wasn’t carrying a bomb. His eyes flickered over the display and he noted that all systems were performing optimally. It was a routine test job, and he could hardly tell the tower that he didn’t want to deploy because of a funny feeling in his finger. He pushed the erratic sensation away and pulled the trigger, leaning on years of following orders and getting the job done to overcome his personal misgivings.
He felt a sudden chill in his chest as well as his finger, and the back of his neck tingled. Was the sensation caused by some problem with his cockpit systems, or was that an effect from the mystery device he had just deployed?
The answer came swiftly. All his electronics went dark, the plane’s engines cut out, and its nose began to pitch sharply downward.
It was eerie. There were none of the flashing lights or alarm tones that accompanied other in-flight emergencies. The entire aircraft was a silent, dead hulk, and he was trapped inside it. Efforts to restart the engines and breathe life back into the machine provided not a single flicker of hope. The radio silently ignored his increasingly frantic Maydays.
It was total electrical failure, and no emergency measure had any effect. The F-22 did not glide well like a smaller aircraft would have, and its fly-by-wire systems meant that Turley had zero control over the plane now. Soon he was tumbling and rolling toward the ground at near terminal velocity. As the adrenaline threatened to choke off his brain’s oxygen supply with hyperventilation, he made the decision to eject.
Unfortunately, the sensors and computer circuitry responsible for ensuring a safe egress from the cockpit were as fried as the rest of the plane. The charges ignited successfully to burst the canopy off and rocket Turley’s seat out into the wind, but he spun wildly out of control and when the chutes eventually deployed, he was unconscious and had multiple broken limbs.
The F-22 pilot sank the last thousand feet to the trees below limp and unaware of the violent impact rushing toward him.
Sign up here to be notified when Part Five: Lionhearts becomes available, and be among the first readers to join the Leonhardt family as they struggle against the grid-down apocalypse that’s raging across the country. (You’ll also get a free exclusive short ebook, Denver Overrun, following two police officers during the initial fall of Denver.)
Algor Dennison lives in Idaho, where everyone else is going to go when the world ends. If you enjoyed this novella, he welcomes criticism, witticism, and reviews at Amazon.com, and you can sign up to be notified of future releases here.
Also available in the Denver Burning series:
Get Out of Denver (Part One of the Denver Burning series)
Take Back Denver (Part Two of the Denver Burning series)
Deep Thaw (Part Three of the Denver Burning series)
Denver Overrun
As police sergeant Alicia Hendrickson’s men are cut down amid a hail of gunfire, she is forced to make hard and fast decisions about what's most important to her: duty, family, or maybe just survival. Sign up to be notified of future releases, and get this exclusive short story for free!
Writing as Shad Callister (science fiction):
Machines of Eden
PARADISE GONE WRONG. Awakening on the beach of a tropical island, a combat hacker finds himself at the center of a plot to turn Earth into a new Eden where humanity has no place. Caught between an advanced A.I. and her sadistic physical counterpart, and with the clock ticking toward an apocalypse, only one thing is clear: they picked the wrong man to push around.
Edge Space: Memoir of a Teenage Starfighter Pilot
A fleet of humanoids from beyond known space came in blasting, but Earth is fighting back. Young ace pilot Deckham Bannison is the tip of the spear, and he knows humanity is depending on him and his wingmen. But Earth’s strategists aren’t telling the young pilots everything they need to know in order to secure victory in the wider war, and it’s up to Deckham to uncover the hidden forces that are keeping humanity at war with their mysterious enemy.
Assault on Cheyenne Mountain (Denver Burning Book 4) Page 13