Bronwyn shrugged, then saluted the general and made her way to her quarters.
Thirty minutes later, Bronwyn was showered and in her casual uniform standing in front of the officer's mess with Major Sherman. The mess had taken a bomb on the day of the attack but the bomb hadn't exploded so it had just been a matter of patching the large hole in the roof. The bomb casing now stood outside the mess hall with a sign proclaiming it to be petrified meatloaf from the week before. From the outside, on ground level, the mess looked no worse than it ever had—which was to say it looked like an old, weathered frame building that needed to be bombed.
Major Sherman had gone inside to make sure Major Ambrose wasn't already inside and Bronwyn was about to go inside herself when a voice behind her said, "Captain?" in a tone that sounded like the word tasted bad on her tongue.
Bronwyn turned with a forced smile that she hoped looked real and said, "Hello, Major. Are you ready for your tour?'
The major replied grimly, "I'll be honest with you, Captain. I don't want to go on this tour with you but I will because I follow orders."
"Excuse me? Um, ma'am."
Standing with her feet slightly apart, Major Lucille Ambrose put her hands on her hips and said, "I've worked very hard to get where I am, Captain. The military is a man's world and I'm not going to let myself be pigeon-holed on this base as 'one of the girls.'" In a condescending voice, she said, "I'm sure you're a very patriotic young woman and all that, and I understand our country's need to recruit everyone who is willing to serve, but I am not 'one of the girls.' I saw you land that '38 and you did a good job. That's probably why they made you a Captain so soon. But, I earned every bar I've got on these collars and—"
"Major," a voice said from behind Bronwyn. Bronwyn jerked around in surprise to see Major Sherman standing there. Looking at Major Ambrose with an unusually calm countenance, Sherman said, "You are free to conduct yourself however you like, providing it is within military decorum. However, I should warn you not to assume too much about your fellow officers."
"I was—"
Major Sherman continued, "You were making the same judgement about Lieu—Captain—my apologies, Bronwyn—Captain Dalmouth that you seem to resent receiving yourself. Yes, Captain Dalmouth is as feminine a young woman as I have ever met," she said, smiling at Bronwyn, "But you would also do well to acknowledge that she is also the best pilot at this post."
"She's not the best woman pilot now that I'm here—"
"I did not say best woman pilot, Major. I said best pilot." Before Ambrose could object, Sherman thumbed over her shoulder and said, "Probably half the pilots on this post are inside right now. Go inside and ask them who the best pilot is. Male or female. If you don't get at least a ninety-percent mandate for Lieuten—sorry—Captain Dalmouth here, I'll run naked across the parade ground during morning formation."
Major Ambrose was gritting her teeth, literally, to keep from responding in some petty or unbecoming fashion. As if anticipating the next objection Ambrose might make, Sherman said, "And if you even start to entertain the notion that they would be saying that only because Captain Dalmouth is also the prettiest woman in Marathon—" Bronwyn turned on her with an expression somewhere between anger and shock, but Major Sherman brushed aside the look with a wave of her hand and said, "Of course you are." She turned back to Major Ambrose and said, "Then you have insulted her and your fellow officers.
"Go ahead and ask why she's the top gun around here. The answer you're going to get is that this young woman has shot down eleven enemy planes in the last three weeks. In her first sortie she survived—what was it, six?—six shots to her fuselage and a mid-air collision. I would guess that the reason General McIntyre asked Captain Dalmouth to show you around the post rather than someone else was not because she's a woman but because he figured a pilot like yourself would appreciate getting to spend some time with someone who is an ace twice over.
"So let me say to you, Major, that she has the respect of every man and woman on this post and if you would like the same then the first thing you need to do is get that chip off your shoulder. I know the people here and if you are a good pilot and a capable officer, you will fit right in.
"Now," she said in a completely calm voice, "We two girls are going to go in and grab a bite to eat. Would you care to join us?"
Through gritted teeth, Major Ambrose replied, "No thank you." She saluted them crisply then turned on her heel as if she were on skates and stepped stiffly away.
Bronwyn looked at Major Sherman and said, "You really didn't have to do that. I can take care of myself."
"I know. But women like that just really rub me the wrong way. I knew some of them in medical school and at the Medical Center. I have come as far or further than any of them not because I behaved like a man but because I have always done whatever I did the best I could. And one thing I do best—because it comes very naturally to me—is act like a woman. Except, perhaps, when I run into people like that."
As Bronwyn stepped into the dimly lit officer's mess, she said seriously to Major Sherman, "I think I'll remember that."
Jason took the Comal 42 up twice just to get the feel of the aircraft. It wasn't tremendously different from the 38 he had been flying at Crockett, but it was a little faster and the controls were just a hair more responsive. This particular model was also affixed with all the latest innovations in altimeter and radio. Of course, the cockpit also contained controls for Eddie, though all the computations would be done long before he took off. After the first two trips, he had made "serious" runs in the 42 to time the route he would need to fly for the experiment.
The first time he took her up and headed south, out over the Buffalo Gap hills—"Mountains" some of the locals called them. He flew west from there and buzzed Camp Billings, then came back up north to Abilene. He circled the town a couple times before landing.
The second time out he went north and flew over his old stomping grounds up around Haskell and Paint Creek. He scared the bejeebers out of some cows with a few low swoops, and also plucked at the edge of safe oxygen intake with some high flights. All in all, he decided he really liked the '42. It was a good plane and—the thing he liked best about it over the '38—it could do a fair bit of gliding. He was thinking how handy that would have been the day he dumped his fuel and came in without landing gear. He had had to have enough fuel for a little power, just to keep it up, but with a plane with some gliding ability he could have dumped all the fuel and cruised in fairly comfortably. As comfortably as one can land a fighter plane on a dirt road without landing gear, anyway.
It was a bright Tuesday morning, two weeks after his arrival in Abilene, that he was up in the air preparing to engage Eddie. He had been briefed and rebriefed about the scientific principals underlying Extra-Dimentional Integration, but the truth was it had all been so far over his head as to be almost a foreign language. He was a scientist and an engineer himself and while he knew how to compute the tensile strength of a forty foot I-beam, he realized he was putting himself in someone else's hands this day. He may have been given this post because of his supposed acumen for what went on here, but he had a feeling any other decent pilot in the world could do just as good a job because mainly he was a flying puppet who pushed the right buttons when told to do so.
So here he was, circling over the town of Coleman at exactly five thousand, one hundred and fifteen feet and turning on Eddie. He knew what to look for and saw that he got the readings he was supposed to get. He even checked his little notepad just to make sure.
"Kirby this is Susan One," he announced into his headset. "Everything is green and go."
Tony's voice came over the receiver (because Gustav's was too hard to understand when distorted by radio) saying, "Roger, Susan One. Flight path is all clear. You may commence your run."
"Roger that, Kirby. Susan One coming north."
Directly over the Coleman water tower, Kerrigan set his onboard stopwatch into motion. He said a brief p
rayer for the success of the mission, but it never even occurred to him to pray for his own safety as it would have most pilots. Despite his trepidations—and what Lt. Dalmouth had called a death wish—he was actually anxious to see the mission through. He knew he was breaking ground that no one had ever experienced before and couldn't wait to find out if it worked.
They had tried it in the lab, of course. In what had seemed more like a college prank than an earth-shattering scientific experiment, Jason had climbed up on the Eddie that was strapped to the rolling cart like a kid climbing on a toy horse in front of the dime store and had been transported across the room.
There had been no sensation to it. One moment he was in one place and the next he was in another. He had felt nothing and seen nothing. It had been like watching a movie change scenes, for all the effect it had had on his body or mind. The same had been true of larger experiments when they had transported one another across distances of up to one hundred yards. It was instantaneous and completely sense-free. They had even transported one another from inside Building Seven to outside Building Seven. Walls had no effect on onter-dimensional travel, it seemed. Gustav had explained how it was possible, mentioning something about the space between atoms, but much of it had been incomprehensible.
There were no physiological effects, either. They were given more than complete physicals after every experiment—and monitored closely by medical personnel during the experiments—and not a single adverse affect was ever seen in their bodies or minds. It was travel that was both instantaneous and safe.
He was probably strapped in, Bronwyn thought. Locked in, more accurately. And with only a limited amount of fuel, to boot. He had no more plan of coming back from this mission than she had of flying to the moon by flapping her arms. So what if she was shooting at him? He didn't care. She could see his engine smoking and she knew she had put at least one bullet right through his cowling. Still, he had the throttle open and was making a bee-line for the bomber to ram it. Only seconds remained.
The problem was that the bomber had been hit, too. They were doing all they could to just to stay alive and airborne. Their maneuverability was somehow shot and Bronwyn knew they knew what was happening.
She could catch up with the kamikaze before he slammed into the bomber, but to what end? She was out of ammunition. There was no way she could drop her one bomb on him. No other escort plane could get there in time. There was only one thing she could try. The Comal 38 was faster than that rice-burner he flew.
"Pull up, Captain," came Major Ambrose commanded.
"No ma'am," Bronwyn replied before shutting off her radio.
With the throttle open full, she caught up with the zero with less than a mile separating them from the bomber. He juked slightly to the left, thinking she was trying to do to him what he was trying to do to the bomber. It was just what she needed.
With a half mile between the two fighters and the bomber, she was alongside him. With a deft move she would have said only an insane person would try, she banked her plane and clipped his wing, knocking it upward.
It jarred her to the bone and it was all she could do to hold onto the stick, then pull the plane level without crashing into the desert floor.
The kamikaze was not so lucky. He had thought at first she would ram him, and then that she would come between him and his target. It would have never occurred to him that she was going to do what she did. Before he could recover from the surprise, he was spot on the desert floor.
Bronwyn pulled back on her stick and gained altitude. Finally, at three thousand feet above the floor, she relaxed and began to breath again. She knew that when she landed she would probably have to sit down right on the flight line to stop the shaking, but while in a cockpit she was under control. Her heart was beating pretty fast, though.
An alarm went off in her cockpit, which startled her, but she saw that it was just the radio. With a deep breath, she turned it on. An almost frantic voice was saying, "Captain! Come in please! Captain this is Bomber Baxter, please respond."
Bronwyn, in the most calm voice she could muster, "This is Crockett Four. How can I help you?"
"Are you all right?" Major Ambrose asked, still frantic but not quite so bad.
"I feel fine, ma'am. How are you?"
"Captain, when we get back to Marathon, I'm going to either have you written up on a mental—or see to it personally that you get the Flying Cross."
"Thank you, ma'am. Right now, I'll take either one without argument."
"No, thank you, Captain."
The giant L-117 limped back to Marathon under the skilled hands and guidance of Major Ambrose. Even without ammunition, Bronwyn patrolled the skies while the other bombers landed and the 68th squadron took off to take over patrol duties. By the time Bronwyn landed her fighter and pulled into her spot on the flight line, it seemed that all the bomber crews had gathered in a group nearby. When she popped the cowling, they let out a cheer and clapped.
Embarrassed, Bronwyn climbed slowly out and onto the ladder, momentarily thinking of getting back in the cockpit and ducking. Carter ran to the foot of the ladder—having landed just before her—and demanded, "Are you out of your mind?"
As the bomber crews rushed over, still talking about what had happened, she told him, "It was the only thing I could think of at the time."
"That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen!" Then he smiled, gave her a hug, and said, "Being a double ace wasn't good enough, you had to go and survive your second mid-air collision."
"It wasn't really—"
"That's how it's going to go in the books."
Suddenly she was surrounded by the bomber crews, who were patting her on the back, congratulating her and asking questions she couldn't even begin to answer amid the din. She smiled at them and tried to act like she wasn't on the verge of her nerves catching up with her. She only hoped that when she threw up, it wouldn't be on someone she liked.
With that thought, Major Lucille Ambrose suddenly pulled her close with an incredibly strong handshake and said into her ear, "You're not just the best pilot on this base. You're the best pilot that ever flew an airplane." And with that, she let go and disappeared into the crowd.
Now, here he was, less than a minute from being transported not across a room or even from one building to another, but across sixty miles.
He calmly checked all the variables. Speed, altitude, Eddie. All the readouts were good. And he had a great day for it, too. Wind less than twenty miles an hour, no clouds, and the green of spring popping up all around. It was the kind of day he enjoyed flying.
In the last three quarters of a minute, Kerrigan's thoughts jumped back to Crockett. He kept up with the daily reports, of course, and had read of all the sorties flown by his old comrades. There was a lot of ground war going on right on the border, with tanks dug in from both sides, but his flying buddies were taking it to the enemy from the air as well.
It hadn't been good news, though. Lt. Carter had been shot down over Boquillas and was presumed dead. Hanson had been killed with a light artillery unit over by Presidio. Luis had been wounded in the Battle of Lajitas and was being sent home for recovery—which was often just a euphemism for being sent home to die. All of the Crockett survivors had been awarded medals for meritorious conduct, but now it looked like three more would join Private Clark in never seeing the award.
"Well, maybe I can end the war before we lose the rest of the Crockett faithful," Kerrigan mumbled to himself. Looking at the stop watch, he counted down, "Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Go."
On the ground, Gustav and Tony and a handful of brass had stood on the ground with their binoculars watching the sky. They heard the countdown over the speakers and—at "Five"—some had shouted, "There he is!" The plane was little more than a speck, but with the binoculars they all held he was clearly visible against the blue sky
They watched the plane—holding their breath just like the pilot would be doing if he
hadn't had to count out loud—and counted down in their heads. At "Go" the airplane disappeared.
Instantly, they heard an alarmed, "Oh man!"
"Captain Kerrigan!" Gustav said, grabbing the microphone. "Are you all right?"
After a moment in which everyone imagined the worst they could think of, Kerrigan replied, "I'm fine, Gus—Colonel. It's, um, it's just a little disorienting when it first happens. I'm fine now." After another moment, in which everyone sighed, Kerrigan told them, "I came out right where I was supposed to: right over Lake Haskell. As far as I can tell, everything worked perfectly and the calculations were absolutely correct. This is Susan One swinging around and heading home."
"You plan on doing this a lot?" the mechanic asked laconically, pointing at a bullet hole that went right through the panel on Bronwyn's wingtip that he had had to replace after her experiment with purposeful mid-air collision. He was a short man, stocky, with a closely cropped haircut and an accent that said he had immigrated from somewhere on the east coast. The patch on his uniform said his name was Calivito.
"No. I promise," Bronwyn replied, her heart racing like it always did when she saw a bullet hole in her plane, "I am not doing this on purpose." When she had finally gotten a good look at her wingtip, it had brought back extremely detailed memories of how it had happened and she had thrown up like she had expected to do earlier.
She ran a hand over the bullet hole and said, "I really don't remember where this came from. I've got to think this was from someone on the ground with a high-powered rifle because none of us saw anything of anti-aircraft emplacements." Fingering her grandfather's badge, she asked, "So, will this be hard to fix?"
"For you, Captain, I'm tempted to just leave it until the next bullet hole so I can just do it all at once."
"Please don't talk like that, Sergeant," she replied seriously.
The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 3): Lost Time Page 12