by Laer Carroll
Only a touch of sunset still colored the western sky when Sasha dropped down out of the night in front of the HQ. Anna Prince was standing out front as she got out of her car, wearing a plain light-grey Bluebird operations uniform and light half-boots. Behind Prince a full moon was rising into the sky over the building's top.
Anna smiled at Sasha and turned to the door. The shapechanger followed her in.
The only other person in the building seemed to be a Bluebird Security officer sitting at a console in a side room. The slender woman wore a similar uniform with insignia on her collars and patches on her upper arms. She was from Thailand or thereabouts and seemed ageless but fit. An automatic pistol was at her hip and a rack of M5 carbines was nearby. A cup of coffee or tea was sitting on a table in a corner, gently steaming, so someone else had moments before left the room.
She looked away from a bank of screens showing outside views and radar scans when Sasha came in. She spun her chair half toward them and handed Prince a laser card. Prince handed it to Sasha as she made an introduction.
"Canaro, Sanitwong. Sanitwong, Canaro." The woman nodded to Sasha and returned her attention to the console.
Anna led Sasha down a hall to an office which she recognized as Storm Cloud's. In it she sat on a couch in one corner against a wall and gestured the shapechanger to a similar couch against the adjoining wall. At ease she propped one uniformed pants leg on the low table in the angle between the couches and crossed her other leg over it at the ankle.
"As you've probably guessed the next job I offer you is secret. The terms are the same as those of your air-ski contract. The pay is forty percent higher. Can you work under secret conditions? Tell every family and friend who asks that you're working on an air ski which will be used in races?"
Sasha nodded.
"What I tell you next is in confidence. Do you promise to keep it so even if you turn down the job?"
Sasha nodded again. She had locked down to icy attention and gone just a bit to slow time.
"What you'll actually be working on is a reconnaissance aircraft. I'll show it to you in a few minutes. It's small and stealthy and the operator can control up to four small unmanned aerial vehicles. It can be armed but will be used as a direct weapon only in special circumstances. Sound interesting? "
Sasha gave a cold little smile. "You got my number a long time ago. You know damned well I'm interested."
Anna Prince chuckled and stood up. She handed Sasha the laser card and walked out of the room. Sasha clipped the card to her collar and followed her.
The path led out a back door and down a path then down a cross path. The sun was fully down now and the full moon had no competitors in the night sky except stars. A cool breeze was picking up, caressing the silky tentacles which were Sasha's hair.
At the door to a large nondescript building like all the others on the base Prince pointed to an access slot beside a door. Sasha slipped her laser card into the slot and the door lock clicked open. At Anna's nod Sasha preceded her through a door. Lights came on inside and Sasha stopped short and began laughing.
Prince came up beside her and looked at the several small air vehicles resting on skids in the room. Only two looked complete.
"What's funny?"
"Did you get this design from a comic book?"
"No. Why?"
"My brother's favorite comic book hero was someone he called 'Duh Bat' for some reason. This looks just like his Bat Plane."
Prince chuckled, walked toward the nearest aircraft. It did indeed look a bit like a bat.
Prince said, "Yes, I get the reference now. No, it must be a case of 'Form follows function'."
Sasha walked slowly toward the nearest vehicle, taking in its details. It was about the length of an air SUV and was a matte black with dull blue highlights.
There were some similarities to an air ski. There were two pontoon-like bodies on each side of a cabin with a seat inside. But the "pontoons" were like small missiles of the air-breathing type, with a small rounded-square mouth and a round rear exit.
Nearby Anna Prince said, "There are grills on the bottom and top, closed now. You can see one there." She pointed. Closed the grill was almost invisible.
"The grills cover top and bottom jets to let it do vertical take-offs and landings. It can fly upside down in an emergency or in maneuvering. That makes it very agile during maneuvers. You shouldn't have to go up against jet fighters, but it can do surprisingly well against them."
YOU shouldn't have to go up against jet fighters?
The cabin was raked back and had an elaborate seat.
"This seat cost several million dollars to get right, and it's still not perfect. It has to be comfortable as well as sturdy and functional, for missions can take hours. For long missions you wear a catheter. Men wear a penile sheathe."
Her voice took on a droll tone. "When we take them up tonight we will dispense with those."
When we take them up tonight...!
"For most missions you control UAVs who do most of the work but even alone these are very capable. It takes some training to learn how to use all the surveillance equipment. You'll be our guinea pig on ergonomics and such. Your word will be law on usability.
"There will be others who will be laws too, but yours will be the final one. Just remember that not everyone has senses as quick and perceptive as yours. Ordinary people will have to fly these also."
Prince was silent as Sasha took a few steps back and began to walk around the vehicle. Besides the cabin and the "missiles" on each side of it there were fat stubby delta wings, the tips squared off. Triangular vertical stabilizers tipped the wings.
"In normal flight the wings provide lift. So does the body, which has a wing-form cross section from the side like that of your air car. Without power it drops but glides quite well and is stable against side-winds and turbulence.
"That was a flaw of the air ski. Without power it tumbled, and in unpredictable ways. Otherwise you could have deployed your chute without trouble once you'd separated from the 'ski."
In further walk-arounds Prince pointed out other features. This included "hardpoints" like small wings which retracted into the hull when not used. In use weapons or small UAVs or both were attached to them.
"At first most attachments will be instruments. Operational equipment will come later.
"Now the last thing before we take these up and go home for tonight.
"Notice the paint? It's not paint. Watch." Anna Prince stepped up on a wing and over a missile/pontoon to slide back the canopy and reach into the cockpit. Then the skin turned a light grey.
Standing on the wing looking down at Sasha Anna Prince said, "This cost many millions of dollars to develop. Even when we go public, years down the line, only this country will have access to it. Other countries will spy and work to equal it, and eventually succeed, but we will not make it easy for them.
"At night the color will be the default one of black which you saw. But in the day the bottom will be blue on sunny days and grey on cloudy ones. The top will be brown or olive or white depending on what is below."
Right now the top was a grey which matched the concrete floor below. The bottom, she saw as she bent to look under the vehicle, was a white like the brightly lit ceiling. And from the side the color was a composite of the colors of the other side, which from her vantage point was the black of the second air vehicle beside it and the others in a line beyond it.
"There are other stealth functions, such as radar invisibility, which I won't go into. You'll be briefed on them when you come to work."
Prince bent over and reached inside the canopy, then took a couple of steps and lightly dropped to the floor as the color of the air car returned to black.
Prince chuckled and began walking toward a far door. Sasha caught up with her.
"One LAST last thing I've got to show you. Your brother would love this."
The next room was devoted to flight suits of many kinds, most simil
ar to the pressurized suits which jet pilots wore to squeeze blood into extremities deprived of blood by high accelerations and decelerations.
Draped over a mannequin in one part of the room, to which Prince led her, was a black skin-tight suit. At a first glance it looked just like those worn by very muscled or very curvy superheroes.
Sasha burst out laughing and Anna Prince joined her.
Back in the first room Anna took out her cell phone and spoke into it. A short exchange with the security operator inside the HQ building and Prince led her to the first air vehicle in the line of several. She leaped up on its wing and gestured Sasha to follow her.
"Won't this hurt the wings?"
"Sledgehammers can't. Your tennies won't. Now, take your seat and let me show you a few basics you won't already know from your air car."
Sasha slid into the pilot's seat and automatically buckled a seat belt with two crossed over-the-shoulder restraints.
Sitting sideways on the nearest "missile" shape Prince leaned into the canopy and did as she had said she would. It was fairly easy for Sasha to comprehend.
"If worst comes to worst your controls are slaved to mine and I'll fly you by remote control. But it won't come to that. Not with you as the pilot."
Prince stood and Sasha spoke up to get her attention before she turned away. "Won't we have to contact local air control?"
"Honey, WE are local air control. We, and Pendleton to the south, are military air space. If we wanted to we could destroy any intruders. And in fact we do. All sorts of spy UAVs invade our space occasionally. Though not so much of late. People do learn eventually. Or run out of resources.
"And spysats trying to observe us have mysterious malfunctions. Now put on your helmet and adjust it. I'll talk to you over it."
Sasha did so, reviewing her controls several times. She was so focused she was almost startled when she heard Anna Prince's voice in her ears.
Patiently the woman led Sasha through adjusting her oxygen mask and regulating its air flow, closing and locking the canopy, reviewing the manual ejection procedure, and other functions.
Not that much patience was needed. Sasha was now operating at full efficiency and needed no instruction repeated.
Slowly then more surely the two lifted onto their paramagnetic cushions and maneuvered outside through the hangar doors which Sasha had only subconsciously noticed. The night was as clear as daylight to her with the infrared and light amplification and radar senses of the two vehicles. Sasha was led to put up several kinds of displays to gauge her surroundings.
They lifted onto their jets and slid higher and higher, scribing S curves in the sky to familiarize Sasha with the full range of her controls. Then they did a few corkscrewing rolls and a few other mild—for these two women—acrobatics.
"OK, this as good as you need to be tonight. I want to show you a treat. Follow me."
Sasha did so as Anna Prince flew westward out over the Pacific, chasing the sun, accelerating. G-forces pushed Sasha back against her seat and her body adjusted to them easily.
Faster and faster they flew, soon far outpacing the speed of sound even at their rarefied heights. Tilted upward the two craft screamed ever westward into the sky like wrong-way meteors.
And a short time later for the first time Sasha Canaro saw the sun rise in the west.
Chapter 3 - Bats and Russian s
With the usual Anna-Prince swiftness paperwork was done in just a few days to allow her to work on the "bat plane" project. Sasha still was amazed, for it had happened in a pre-New-Years-Eve holiday week when so many people were on holiday.
So on the first Tuesday of the new year, the first workday for most people, Sasha landed her air car at the Bluebird Security headquarters in the northern section of CampPendleton. She was a half hour early in case there was further paperwork or notifications needed to get her to work.
Colonel Adrian Storm Cloud came out of his West Coast office just as she opened the big clear double doors to the HQ. The security guard at the front desk was just putting down her phone. He nodded at the guard and gestured Sasha to follow him. They walked down a long hall, then another, and exited into small parking lot. Most of the vehicles there were golf-cart-sized paramag floaters. Two of them were hulking paramag attack vehicles with hefty aerial jet engines.
They floated over a footpath of tightly packed seashells in one of the "golf carts." Off to one side he pointed at a gate into the compound surrounded by a high security fence.
"Next time just use your laser card to get in there and skip HQ."
The morning was chill and he wore a light uniform jacket to cut the air, but the air would have to be below zero to bother Sasha. She was in a demure dark-blue skirt and light-blue sleeveless blouse. On her feet were medium-heeled dark-blue shoes. Her pale gold hair was caught up in a high pony tail. She was trying for a look that was nice but efficient, not too formal but not her usual "sloppy" look, as Silvana called her jeans, tees, and tennies.
"None of the people in this program are softies like your old engineering pals. They are combat veterans, the cream of the cream of the crop. They are the people who will use the bat planes and similar vehicles for operations. Their purpose is to tweak the design based on their experience, then test the vehicles to destruction as the Boss has decreed."
He glanced at her. "They are going to be a bit tough on you. Don't let them get you down."
She snickered. "This is the first time I've ever heard you waffle on anything. They are going to be a lot tough on me.
"Good. I was afraid this job was going to be boring. Uhm, are you going to yell at me if I put a few of them in the hospital?"
He chuckled, then sobered. "Don't get cocky. These men and women are as good as I was when I was young."
Sasha said nothing. His self-deprecation was false modesty. After well over a year of her tweaking his health he was stronger, faster, and more durable than he ever was. And at some level he must know that. But if he wanted an excuse for his more cautious life-style so as to avoid leaving his beloved wife a widow she was not going to meddle in that.
At the door to the classroom he pulled up and let her out. With mutual waves he was off back to his office.
Like most of the buildings on Camp Pendleton, in the Bluebird or Marine areas, the one in front of her was four or five dozen years old. It was large, prefab, and made only a bit less shabby by having its surface recently sanded clean and painted a light blue.
Inside the first room, made up into a classroom, the furniture was new and modern. The seats were the comfortable skeletal ergonomic chairs found throughout many modern office buildings, placed around a long oval conference table. There was a large flat video screen on the wall at the far end of the long room.
An instructor was already at that end arranging material for today's briefing. He glanced up at her and frowned. She walked up to him and held out her hand. Grey-haired, stout, but very fit, perhaps a Russian or something similar, he frowned at it and reluctantly shook it.
The usual flood of information came to her. Nothing stood out that was not already evident from his appearance.
"Sasha Canaro, Mr.—" She glanced at his name strip. "—Carnahan. I'll be part of this test group."
"Pleased to meet you, Ms. Canaro. If you'll just find a seat. Pardon me if I don't chat."
A more politely reluctant greeting Sasha had yet to hear. She smiled inwardly.
Shortly the first other test members began to show up. The stream of people grew then dwindled well before 8:00 o'clock. A prompt lot.
All glanced at her then ignored her. Some did so pointedly, most not. A few stared hard at her in evident dislike. Stranger. Not one of us. Untrustworthy. Possible enemy.
Several of the soldiers and (she guessed) spies knew each other and settled near enough to chat quietly. Sasha watched them mildly from her chair near the head of the table opposite the instructor's chair.
They ranged in age from late twenties to early fo
rties. All were in terrific shape. All were very lethal fighters, though that would not be evident to most people. One late-middle-aged woman looked like an absent-minded schoolmarm from the recent stream of newly popular western frontier movies and TV shows. One petite very pretty blond looked like a classic cheerleader horror-movie victim. One man with a receding hairline wearing unneeded eye-glasses looked like an ineffectual intellectual rabbi.
At precisely 8:00 the instructor stood from his chair opposite Sasha and looked down the table.
"Good morning, everyone. I hope you have all recovered from any recent celebrations. And wore shoes suited for running. Because we are going to begin with a little jog to wake you all up.
"Ms. Canaro, I see you wore inappropriate shoes. And clothing. You are excused from this exercise."
"So thoughtful of you, Mr. Carnahan," purred Sasha. "Thank you."
His glance was sharp but he compressed his lips against any possible reply.
Everyone got up and headed out the door. Some of their clothes were clearly exercise clothes and shoes. Other clothing and footwear was not obviously so but was also loose-fitting and sturdy.
Sasha let them get several minutes away and removed her shoes and skirt. Underneath she wore skimpy but opaque panties less revealing than a bikini bottom. She placed the skirt atop the table near her chair and the shoes underneath the table.
Then she left the classroom and followed the others. Her long legs quickly made up the distance and soon she was running easily in the middle of the group but to one side.
Some of the crowd did double-takes to see her join them. One of the women actually smiled at her and winked. She was a tall lean black woman who could have been a sister to the Xulu warrior Sasha had disguised herself as at the Olympics.
The instructor was at the front of the group. It was several minutes before he glanced back and become aware of her.
He slowed and pulled off to the side, waving Sasha to him and the others on ahead .
"Ms. Canaro, I can't allow you to put yourself in jeopardy by running barefoot. You will injure yourself."