Sleeper Seven

by Mark Howard

  Walking underneath the older model ship, Star reached up and grabbed a recessed lever. Pointing to the lever was a red arrow outlined in white, with the words Pull for Release and Rescue stenciled underneath. As Star pulled it down, three circular hatches above them slid open with a heavy metallic thunk.

  "Jess, you take that one," Sag said, pointing to the hatch farthest from them. "You're gonna need a boost, though." Walking over with her, he lifted her until she was able to catch hold of a grab bar within the hatch. After climbing a few rungs, she emerged into a darkened crew compartment, with tiny white lights embedded into the floor blinking in sequence, leading the way to the three open hatches.

  With some effort, Star climbed aboard, and after hitting a few keystrokes at a workstation, illuminated the cabin. Jess noticed immediately the crew compartment of this ship was almost an exact replica of the one she had piloted, even though the exterior dimensions were smaller. Unlike the government ship, however, there were no items of flair, with the exception of a Jolly Roger hung on one wall, and an American flag opposite it.

  Star, situated at the Captain's workstation, pulled a pair of small reading glasses from her overalls pocket and put them on. Squinting at the screen, she began hunting and pecking at the keyboard. As she did so, the video panels in the floor and ceiling cleared, revealing the dim light of the hangar, while the hum of the ring rose in pitch and volume.

  "Wow, this girl is loud!" Jess remarked, buckling herself into a chair. It reminded her of Six Flags when they turned on the juice to the bumper cars.

  "Well she is a bit long in the tooth," Star maintained, "but she gets the job done."

  "Doors are open," Sag announced, climbing aboard and taking his place at the workstation across from Star.

  "OK, call Vic and get clearance."

  Sag pulled a giant off-white brick of a cellphone, complete with long black rubber antenna, from a large pocket on his cargo shorts and began dialing it.

  "Yeah, all set, how's it look?" Sag said into the brick, and after a few moments, looked towards Star and nodded. "...perfect day for flying. Nobody within two miles. OK then."

  "We gotta check the area just in case," she informed Jess. "At low altitudes it's pretty easy to see the outline, even when I'm projecting a perfect image of the sky above us."

  Star leaned towards her console and hunted and pecked some more, until suddenly Jess was startled by a loud boom from her left that jostled the ship. A second followed, from her right, and then a third from just beneath her. Looking around wildly, she grabbed the arms of her chair as her co-pilots chuckled. The thrusters, increasing their cycling rate, eventually joined the higher pitched hum of the ring. She noticed several pairs of headphones velcroed to the center console, but unlike the government ship, nobody here bothered to wear them. It didn't seem this loud on my ship, she thought to herself, as the rumbling vibrations shook her viscera.

  Rising a few feet to clear the posts, Star piloted the ship slowly towards the hangar opening. Without enough lateral space to maneuver around Big Mama, however, she deftly lowered the ship to the dusty cement floor, passing underneath the larger ship with only inches to spare.

  "Now you know why we keep 'er up so high, huh?" Star joked, noticing Jess once again clenching the sides of her chair.

  "These girls are pretty smart though, they generally won't let you crash into anything, unless that's your intention. And they know it too. We haven't quite figured it out, but there's a kind of sentience in 'em, so you can get attached to 'em, like to a pet. Dare say you can love 'em, huh, Sag?"

  "Man's best friend, right girl?" Sag replied, patting the center console. Jess began to laugh, but caught herself as she realized they weren't joking.

  "Just wait 'til you get your own, you'll see," said Sag defensively, prompting a hearty guffaw from Star.

  Reaching the exit, Star raised the ship to clear the threshold. The cool air they pushed out ahead of them hit the warmer outside air and instantly condensed into a fog, from which the ship emerged to ascend over the green pasture. The noise of the cycling thrusters faded as the walls of the hangar fell away, the ship becoming nearly silent as it slipped into the blue sky.

  "Now I suppose you flew with the training wheels on like I am right now — the thrusters," Star said as they rose above the farm and came around to a hover. "Not much choice in these models. But like I said, a lot more capability in Big Mama — her full-on grav-null, plus the higher ring speed, means you can use momentum alone for propulsion by tipping where you want to go. In this gal, though, we always need to have the thrusters active both for hover and directional assist."

  As if to demonstrate, Star gently tipped the nose of the ship down, and as the hum of the ring increased, they began to slide forward. Pushed back into her seat, Jess watched the landscape below slip into a blur. The acceleration didn't subside until they slowed thirty seconds later, and coming to a hover again, Jess found the land below had now become a turbulent mix of grayish-green water.

  "...And that was twenty-six miles, ladies and gentlemen," Sag, as airline captain, announced. "If you look below, you'll get an up close and personal look at the Old Man himself, the mighty Mississippi."

  Star, ignoring him, continued with her lesson. "Now if the thrusters are Kindergarten and tilting is High School, then College is using the ring alone to maneuver, without any outside help. It's possible to adjust the rotational patterns of the plasma within the toroidal flux, which directly affects the momentum, and thus the orientation and travel of the ship. Takes a steady hand though, to avoid a wobble. Right Sag?"

  "Right, Star," replied Sag dryly. Jeez, I guess every crew needs a mascot, Jess thought to herself, but at least the ribbing was relatively good-natured.

  "How about a little rock-a-bye?" Star asked.

  "Ugh, really?" Sag replied contemptuously. "You really want her to heave. On our nice little Sunday drive."

  "Ah, he's no fun," Star asserted to Jess, smiling. Abandoning her idea, she tipped the ship again, slower this time. "We use the rivers as our highway system; generally less observers, especially at night."

  "Or if our camo is broke," piped in Sag.

  "Yeah, the camo on this one is busted."

  "Well, except for one feature..." Sag hinted.

  "I was waiting to see when you'd bring that up," Star said derisively.

  "Why not?" countered Sag.

  "Fine, fine, fine." Star replied begrudgingly, and righting the ship, she tapped at her console, initiating a climb.

  "Wait, aren't we exposing ourselves up here?" Jess inquired.

  "Not for lo-ng," sang Sag, as he worked at his own console. A mist soon began to form over the viewing panels. "Voila, instant cover."

  "Oh, so we're in a cloud?"

  "Well, you can do that too, sure, but right now it's nothing but blue sky, so we're making our own."

  "Huh?"

  "The waste heat from the thrusters can also be redirected to combine with water in onboard baffles, creating an instant fog around the ship. The water's superheated and dispensed at high pressure from tiny nozzles all around the ship."

  "When you're moving fast, though, won't the wind strip it right off?"

  "At the edges, yeah, but at high enough pressure and low enough speeds, it's stable for a good three feet out from the hull," Sag explained. "It's pretty awesome."

  "Oh, now that's a load of bullcrap right there," Star countered. "Even I think it's cheesy as hell, and I'm from Wisconsin. I, for one, am glad they discontinued it along with the other camo in the Gen III's. It's like an 80's Bond film gimmick. You should see it from the ground, Jess. A weird, smoky cloud, flying a hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction of the wind. Like that's not obvious. Ridiculous."

  "Yeah, but you gotta admit it's cool to demo..." Sag replied, sounding like a wounded puppy.

  "It's pretty cool, Sag," Jess offered, coming to his rescue and crinkling her nose at Star. Looking down at the panels, she noticed the fog d
issipating. "Why is the panel clearing now — did we run out of water? And where do you get the water anyway? And what happens to the waste heat when you don't heat the water with it?" Jess thought the feature was pretty neat, but mostly just wanted Sag to feel better.

  "Well first, it's just plain water we can get from any lake by dropping an intake tube. And if we're not cloud-making, the waste heat from the thrusters is just jetted out from the same nozzles, but without the water."

  "And that's another knock against these Gen II's," Star interrupted, "Even in full camo mode, if the atmospherics are right, you can clearly see the heat shimmer all around the ship. It's a dead giveaway."

  "Anyway," Sag continued, ignoring her, "we can see down below now because I lowered a camera mast. Kinda like a reverse periscope."

  "Wow, that really is some James Bond stuff there. Why did they get rid of it again?"

  "Just too damn complex," Star answered, butting in again. "This was the 80's, they had plenty of black project money, and they got their rocks off on all the doo-dads. They all thought they were 'Q'. Then, over the years, the crews realized how useless and unreliable most of this camo stuff was, and just plain didn't use it. And you know what? The reports didn't go up one iota. Nobody freaked out seeing these huge black triangles with insanely bright thrusters just silently floating above their houses, fields, and highways. Well, not in any large numbers, anyway — nothing meaningful. I think the reportage rate stayed pretty much the same — one report for every two hundred sightings was their internal estimate. They had a upper threshold of one report for every fifty sightings, and as long as the needle didn't go above that, they didn't care. They underestimated the ability of human psychology to deny, forget, or just plain not give a shit about the weird stuff people see, especially when they made sure it was a solitary experience. If you suspect you're crazy, you don't generally share that with your friends and family. Course, fearing you're crazy is the first sign you're not — but never mind that. So they capitalized on that little loophole of human reasoning and instituted processes and procedures — not technological doo-dads — to make sure it didn't become an issue. Things like ensuring large groups didn't see one — no stadium flyovers — or that the hovering time in a single area didn't exceed a few minutes, tops. There were actually studies on this! A close-range, twenty minute sighting is much more damaging than a thirty second one — with the shorter ones, folks are more likely to go back to whatever they were doing at the time and forget about the whole thing. It just doesn't make a lasting impression."

  As Star explained all this, she kept slowing the ship to a stop, then speeding off again in a slightly different direction each time. Jess was curious about this, but waited until she was done talking so as not to interrupt her train of thought.

  "So what's up with the course corrections?"

  "Well, this isn't really a leisurely stroll here; since we're in daylight, time is of the essence. So each leg is a quick hop. But before I can commit to the leg, I need to ensure the way is clear, so to speak. Don't want to sneak up on some unsuspecting Lear jet or Piper Cub, much less a 727, right? There's a hell of a lot of air traffic during daylight hours that we need to account for. So we send out a radar signal, the ship computes trajectories for all objects within range of our intended course, and if it's all clear she'll go. Now, the government ships can do this dynamically without human intervention, but since we're off the grid, I need to do it manually. It's a big pain in the ass if you ask me, which is mostly why we don't go out during the day."

  "So wait, this grid, is this the ELF network you were telling me about, Sag?"

  "Yeah, same one," he replied, then turned to Star. "I told her about the fleet management aspects of it."

  "Yeah, the grid is another thorn in our sides, environmentally speaking. You tell her the backstory behind it?"

  "Nope," Sag replied. "But go right ahead."

  "Well back in the 80's and 90's they were deploying this worldwide ELF communication infrastructure, basically the biggest, baddest radio station in the world, without telling anyone. It used a grid of antennas blasting out these longwave radio signals into the ground, and who cares what it was doing to the livestock, much less the humans, that lived near all this stuff. So the government finally admitted it was for nuclear submarine communication, but they still had to scale it back significantly due to the heat they were getting. They shut it down, mostly, but it still exists, like Sag said, for minimal data bursts of fleet management stuff and clearpath confirmations now. Wish we could hack into it — make our lives a little easier! But of course, if we did, Big Mama would probably get bricked pretty quickly."

  "Yeah," Sag continued, "they never got a response to their kill command back when we took her, since we had shut the receiving equipment down first thing, but they still send the command every few days just in case we forget and turn it back on."

  "How do you know this?" Jess asked.

  "Oh, because I record the ELF channel and I can pick out that little warble — it's different from all the other comms I hear."

  "Flight attendant," Star announced, looking at Sag, "prepare for arrival."

  Jess noticed the cloud starting to form again outside the bottom window, but realized it was just Sag retracting the camera mast. Then the mist dissipated fully as a stand of pine trees came into view beneath them.

  "Just a quick stop first to get her topped off," Star explained as she navigated to tree-top level and stopped over a small clearing containing a pond. As she lowered the ship to just a few feet over it, Jess noticed the water below remained as smooth as glass.

  "Why don't the thrusters disturb the water?"

  "They're vectored at an angle," Sag explained, "and highly diffused, to avoid any big downdrafts. It ain't like a rocket. It's part of the stealth; when you hit people with a blast of air they tend to look up."

  Sag managed the intake tube for a few minutes before reporting back.

  "OK, we're topped off."

  The ship rose, and they took off above the treetops, speeding over open fields and then miles of arroyos. Several minutes later they began to descend, and Star announced their arrival as she halted the ship a few feet above the ground.

  "Grab your packs and water," she said as the thrusters cycled down, "and watch your feet."

  With a thunk, all three hatches shot open and small swirls of red dust entered the cabin. Sag was the first to descend, and after reaching the ground, he ran over to assist Jess. Star was last, dropping to the red earth below with a thud. As they walked out from under from the ship, a blast of warm air hit their bodies, like that from a high-speed hand dryer.

  "And that's why you want to stay a minimum fifty or so feet above anything in these Gen II's," Sag explained, referring to the draft from the thrusters, "if you want to remain undetected."

  "So we're just going to leave it here, hatches open, in the middle of nowhere?" Jess asked. As if in answer, they heard the thunk of the ship's three hatches closing behind them.

  "The lower it is, the less people are able to see it, so yeah," Star replied, "but don't worry, she'll be just fine."

  They headed out over the arroyos, with the late morning Texas sun beating down on them. After forty-five minutes, they came to a dirt road that led to a small town in the distance, and after a few minutes walk down that road, an old pock-marked sign welcomed them to LeMar, Texas.

  "The founders must have had some sense of humor," Jess commented, however they didn't seem to get her meaning.

  "Le Mar — the sea. This is pretty much the opposite of a sea," she explained, as they looked at her crosswise. "Oh forget it," she added, finally provoking a laugh.

  Star led the way down the main thoroughfare of the rusty old town. As they came upon an old building containing a cafe, Star had them stash their gear along the side, behind a doghouse — complete with an old, snoring Great Dane.

  Walking around to the front, Sag opened the screen door with a creak, and after a
llowing the ladies passage, let it slam shut behind them.

  ~ 57 ~

  Julio pedaled as fast as he could, swinging the bike wildly from side to side. Catching some good air on the small dirt mound, he lifted his feet and twirled the bike underneath him. Aaron and Dominick, watching from the sidelines, both gave him thumbs down as he landed and skidded to a stop.

  "You got to do three, man, at least," Dominick commented, shaking his head.

  "Yeah, can't get the speed. Let's head down some more," Julio replied, pedaling away. "There's a big one my brother used last year down this way," he yelled back to them.

  His two friends followed as they pedalled up and down the gravelly arroyos, catching a few inches of air at each apex. Reaching the larger hill a few minutes later, they easily found the well worn-trail. Starting at the top of a medium-sized mound, it mainlined straight down, then up to the apex of the larger hill for the jump. The trickiest part would be navigating the rocks embedded in the slot on the way down.

  "I'ma do this one," Aaron declared, walking his bike up the steep slope of the send-off hill. The others pedaled off to the side and perched on a small rise to get a good view. Aaron found his launch spot and took a breath. As he steadied himself in the slot, it seemed much higher than he originally thought, but there was no chance he was going to back out now, with everybody in position. It would be worse to back down than to wreck and bust a leg — at least then he would still have his pride, and a story to go along with it. He had to go big, and to go now, before his friends sensed his hesitation, otherwise they would be merciless.

  With a final deep breath, he pushed off and slotted the wheel in the rut. He risked a spill if he navigated left or right, so he had to take the rocks jutting up from the rut head on as he pedaled furiously. With relief, he found the bottom, and pedaled even harder on the upslope, gaining more momentum. The hesitation was gone now.