by Baen Books
The ship lightened, jumped.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Below and behind them columns of yellow flame roiled up from the ground and buffeted the Osprey.
Patel turned in his seat. “Uh-oh.”
Pete squeezed the cyclic. “What uh-oh?”
“I neglected to close the rear ramp. I believe we have just carpet bombed our visitors with inadequately secured drums of jet fuel.”
Ninety minutes later Pete slowed and dropped the Osprey to match the speed, altitude, and meandering flight path of a crop monitor drone cast adrift by a bad GPS locator. Then he switched on a matching transponder.
Five minutes later they crossed, unchallenged in the dark emptiness of middle North America, over what had remained for centuries the longest undefended border on Earth.
They droned northwest across Saskatchewan as Patel craned his neck, peering at the dark sky like a sparrow awaiting a stooping hawk. “They may rat us out to their Canadian friends.”
Pete shook his head. “And split the finder’s fee? Not for a while. They aren’t sure whether we were a decoy.” He jerked his thumb south. “You may still be bunkered up somewhere underneath your ranch. Or maybe you weren’t even home. Besides, you left some table scraps in the house they’ll fight over.”
Patel leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and sighed. “I never liked that Miro anyway.”
Two zig-zag, hide-and-seek days after they had left Patel’s ranch behind, in the eleven p.m. July dusk that passed for the cover of darkness in the Yukon Territory, Pete rolled their last fuel drum in among the other empties piled in the tumbledown shed beside which he, Patel, and the Osprey had slept away the long hours of full daylight.
Caught far short of the fuel required to fly the six thousand-plus miles from Patel’s ranch to Attu Island, Pete had picked out from old charts and satellite aerials, while they stopped to transfer fuel from drums to tanks the previous day, crop drone stations enroute from which they had midnight requisitioned Jet-A fill ups.
But even though Canada was warmer and drier now than it had been when Pete was born, ninety percent of Canadians still lived within sixty miles of the U.S. border. The Yukon remained a vacant wilderness, and the camo net he had stretched over the Osprey was probably overkill. And this abandoned drone station had yielded only a few clean gallons of Jet-A from the dregs of rusted drums.
Patel crouched alongside the campfire they had decided to risk, poking the flames with a stick. “Coffee!”
Pete took the poured mug from Patel.
Patel raised his own mug in toast. “Au revoir Canada. Hello, Alaska.”
Pete shook his head. “Hello chaos!”
When the post-oil economy finally and abruptly swept the globe in the 2090s, crude oil export dependent economies crumbled. A few boutique producers and refiners survived, and supplied the trickle of throwback products, like Jet-A, that fueled the few throwback technologies that the world still cared about. The Persian Gulf monarchies shrank back to medieval quiescence. Russia collapsed into anarchy.
The U.S. state of Alaska, weary of the meddling of an absentee landlord that was no longer a valued customer, voted to secede. The United States declined a Goliath-versus-David civil war over a discontiguous wasteland that no longer supplied either energy or a bulwark against the irrelevant anarchy that had been Russia.
Since the Secession, Alaska had disintegrated into its own brand of anarchy, a jigsaw of geographically and economically isolated, fiercely territorial, boroughs that reminded Pete of tribal Halfassghanistan.
Patel asked, “Now what?”
Pete squatted beside his passenger. “Well, stealing fuel at 3 a.m. worked fine 'til now. All I got from this place were a few clean gallons and a twenty year old paper road map of Alaska.”
“So?”
Pete unfurled his handheld and drew their route with a finger across the glowing surface. “So we can only fly as far as what we’ve got in the tanks will take us. First things first. We’ll cross into Alaskan air space here, at Yakutat Borough, on the deck and full gas. The panhandle’s only thirty miles wide there. We’ll be feet wet over the Gulf of Alaska before anybody notices we were ever there. Then we’ll head west by southwest.”
With his own finger Patel traced a line west by southwest until it intersected the curving necklace of the Aleutians, and followed along the chain to Attu. “That’s two thousand miles.”
Pete shrugged. “Twenty-one hundred.”
Patel frowned. “You said we’d be lucky to exceed eleven hundred miles with full tanks. Your improvisation has been brilliant, Peter. But perhaps we could have devised a less dramatic plan.”
Pete pressed his lips together and nodded. “Perhaps if somebody had told me sooner where we were going we would have. We’ve been playing catch up ever since we, um, diverted those drums to other use.”
Patel crossed his arms. “I’ve been waiting a hundred years to watch bastards like them eat it for a change.” He thrust out his lower lip. “The satisfaction was worth it.”
Pete nodded. “Satisfaction’s great. But Rolls Royce turboshafts can’t use it. We’re going to need one more fuel scrounge stop between here and Attu.” He tapped a spot in the center of Kodiak Island, near the planned route’s midpoint. “The United States Coast Guard operated a major air station right here. The Coasties left in a hurry when the Secessionists stormed the gates. Three Secessionists died, and Kodiak Island Borough’s left the place closed as a martyr’s tomb for the last half century. At Kodiak we should find barrels full of Jet-A that the U.S. left behind.”
“Excellent.” Patel nodded. “Why are you frowning? We can’t make it to Kodiak on the fuel we have?”
Pete shrugged. “If the current tailwinds hold, fuel’s not the issue . . . ”
“But?”
Pete pointed back along their route, at Anchorage. “Alaska’s population’s concentrated along its south coast, like Canada’s is concentrated along its south border. Big city populations, big city problems. When the Coast Guard air patrols left, drugs smuggled north by plane increased. To fill the vacuum the coastal boroughs contracted mercenary-flown Emag fighters to intercept smugglers. Unlike the Coast Guard, the mercs shoot first at any unidentified aircraft that even tickles their borough’s airspace.”
Patel raised his eyebrows. “Ah. Frontier justice. So we remain well out to sea.”
“'Til we reach Kodiak. Then we have to encroach on Borough airspace. And find out how quick on the draw the Borough of Kodiak Island is.” Pete eyed the still-dimming sky. “'nother hour to wheels up.” He lay back in the grass, hands clasped behind his head, and closed his eyes.
Ten minutes later Patel broke the evening’s silence. “Peter, did you ever marry?”
“You mean after The Trouble?”
Patel nodded.
“Once.”
“Children?”
Pete felt the start of tears burn his eyes. He breathed deep, then answered, his voice thick. “Three. Buried them all. Just like I buried their mother. Never going through that again. Why?”
“What if you could marry another Millennial?”
“Dunno.” Pete sat up, stared into the dying fire. “Is that what Attu is? A safe harbor? A colony for Millennials?”
“Colony?” Patel shook his head. “No.” He tossed a pebble into the flames and watched sparks eddy up into the sky, then nodded slowly. “Harbor? In a way.”
They cleared the coast without incident, then over the Gulf of Alaska the skies grayed and mist obscured the sea below them.
Patel peered down at the mist, his flight helmet too big and vibrating at the end of his thin neck, so that he looked like a last-century bobble head doll. “Peter, have you given any more thought to the riddle?”
“You mean about the man being the weak link, not the machine?”
“And?”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Nobody ever gets my riddles. It won’t matter. Only Attu matters.�
�
Pete eased the Osprey forward, fifty feet above the surf breaking on the southwestern-most tip of Kodiak Island, the wipers’ thump sluicing rain in sheets off the canopy. Dripping green brush blanketed the land that sloped steeply up from the rocky, treeless shore.
Patel said, “This weather is bad.”
“This weather is great. Most of Kodiak Island’s people, what there are of them, and the current airfield, and the borough’s interceptor, are sixty miles northeast of us, centered around the town of Kodiak. That’s why we burned some extra fuel to swing south and sneak in the back door. The old Coast Guard station’s north, too, but in this stuff nobody’s gonna see us, or be anxious to investigate us even if we show on their radar. So if we wipe our belly on this green crap we may be able to creep right up—”
Patel pointed at the radar, where a blip had appeared at the new airport. “Is that—?”
“Maybe it’s a local helicopter. Or a commercial flight headed east to Anchorage or—”
The blip moved southwest and accelerated.
“An interceptor, Peter?”
“Dammit!” They had come so far. If they had had the fuel they planned on, they would have just found an empty spot west of the population centers, set down, and transferred fuel.
The blip inched straight for them, the Emag already only eight minutes out.
“Can we fight him?”
“Bring a cargo plane to a dogfight?” Pete shook his head. “And we sure can’t outrun him.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll set us down before he knocks us down.” Pete found a flat spot on a shallow ridge, cranked the ship back to helicopter mode and nested the Osprey into the sodden foliage like the sea eagle that she was named for.
Pete shut down the engines, lowered the rear ramp and half dragged Patel behind him and out into dripping, thigh-high brush that crackled as they dove into it.
“What are you doing, Peter?”
“We’re off his radar. He may not get a visual on us. Even if he does, he may not shoot on sight. Or he may blow this aircraft apart rather than risk it getting away. Which I’d rather watch from a distance than experience.”
They were only ten yards clear of the Osprey’s tail when the fast mover burst out of the mist two hundred feet above them, a cruel, black scimitar. At five hundred fifty miles per hour it vanished as fast as it had appeared. The following whoosh of displaced air, and the high-pitched Emag warble, swept over them, the only records of the aircraft’s passing.
“He couldn’t have seen us. Not that fast in all this rain.”
Pete cupped his hand around his ear. “Hear that crackle? That’s rain boiling off the engine exhausts. He didn’t need to see us. On his infrared we looked like a bonfire.” Pete grabbed Patel’s arm again and thrashed, knees high, further from the Osprey. “Emags turn slower than cows. It’ll take him a few to spin it around and line us up but—”
This time orange flame preceded the scimitar’s arrival. The missile struck the Osprey’s fuselage just aft of the cockpit.
Boom!
The heat of the explosion’s fireball singed Pete as the blast tumbled him through the air and dropped him, stunned and rolling, into the brush.
He lay there, listened to fire crackle somewhere, smelled wood smoke and burned jet fuel.
Clarity returned in an adrenaline rush. “V.J.! V.J. you okay?”
As though a pillow had been wrapped around Pete’s head the reply trickled back into his ringing ears. “Peter?”
Pete struggled upright, found Patel draped face-up, back arched across a bush. His hands and face were spider webbed red with scratches.
Pete peered at him. “You feel okay? 'Cause you look like hell.”
Patel shifted his eyes, focused on Pete’s face, then snorted and whispered, “Pot and kettle.”
Pete touched fingers to his own cheek, found blood, and smiled.
“Peter, I believe my right leg is broken.”
Pete turned his head to look and sucked in a breath. “Maybe.” He touched Patel’s shoulder gently. “Don’t move. At all. I’ll see if I can get the aid kit out of the Osprey.”
Patel nodded, breathing through clenched teeth.
The Osprey lay like the proverbial chicken with its head off. The warhead’s explosion had severed the fuselage just aft of the flight deck. The airfoil’s exposed ribs and the proprotors dangled like piled, broken feathers. Flame scorch blackened the fuselage’s flanks, and smoke drifted from the wreckage, but there was no flame. They had been that low on fuel?
Pete limped on a suddenly sore right leg toward the wreck, ducked inside through the rear hatch. If this clusterfuck had a silver lining, it was that the fuselage aft of the break, and particularly the emergency gear they had stored back there, was intact.
Pete limped back to Patel, whose teeth remained clenched, carrying the aid kit. He slipped a morphine pop between the smaller man’s pale lips. While Pete waited for Patel’s rigid face to soften he erected a poptent and laid Patel on his back inside.
Patel, dreamy, felt no pain but Pete grimaced as the active dressing Pete applied set the broken bones, then infused the limb with medication.
Pete sponged his own abrasions with antibiotic, stripped them both of their sodden clothes, then lay down alongside Patel and covered them with the kit’s thermal blanket. As rain coursed off the tent, Pete heard the Emag warble overhead again. Damage assessment.
Probably, he thought, it was obvious neither plane nor survivors were going anywhere. It would be hours or a day before a salvage party reached them overland from Kodiak. A helicopter was an unlikely extravagance. As Pete closed his eyes he thought that, at this point, he didn’t give a shit.
Pete sat up and realized that what woke him was the silence when the rain had stopped. He checked Patel’s vitals then limped, slipping repeatedly on the sodden, upsloping ground, back to the Osprey through fog so thick that he could barely glimpse the tops of the wreck’s vertical stabilizers.
By the time Pete dragged the raft alongside the tent and inflated it, Patel was awake.
“What are you doing?”
Pete stood, pointed at the raft’s fabric floor, piled with supplies from the Osprey. “You can’t walk. You lie in the raft and I’ll pull you. You’ll slide like a kid on a toboggan. It’s a good mile, but all downhill.”
“A mile to where?”
“The Gulf.”
Patel’s eyes widened, drugged or not. “You’re joking. Thirteen hundred miles in an open life raft?”
“The alternative is we wait here until they mistake us for drug smugglers and shoot us on sight, or they recognize us as Millennials and shoot us on sight. And we can’t go down guns blazing even if we wanted to, because the guns are in your locker in South Dakota, remember?”
Patel’s eyelids sagged as the dressing dosed out a shot of juice, and he shook his head as he faded back to sleep. “I should have known one of you would turn out to be nuts.”
Scrambling on hands and knees back up the slick grassy slope Pete regained the flat ledge where Patel dozed, groggy in the life raft. Panting, Pete turned and sat, hands clasped around his knees, while he listened to the surf that rolled so nearby, now again invisible in the mist.
The first hours of the downhill journey, towing Patel in the raft across and around wet vegetation by a line attached to the raft’s bow, had been neither as fast or as easy as he had expected, but he had managed. This sharp downslope, however, had required him to pause and reconnoiter.
Patel awoke, on the drugs’ upcycle, and Pete helped him out of the raft so he could kneel alongside it and urinate in the weeds.
Patel unzipped his fly and asked, “So where are we now?”
Pete took the opportunity to step into the raft that would be their home for the next thirteen hundred miles and tidy up.
Patel had tried to eat protein bars and jerky enroute, dropped more crumbs inside the raft than he ingested, and finally chucked the leftover
s into the bushes as he fell back to sleep.
Pete answered his patient as he policed up wrappers. “We’re only four hundred feet from the waterline, and it’s a flat beach down there ten feet wide that the raft can practically slide across on its own. But the slope between here and there’s so steep I’m going to have to lower you in the raft by paying out the rope, in stages, a few feet at a time.”
Patel zipped up. “Or we could take a toboggan ride.”
“And you called me nuts.”
Patel turned his head, stared up the slope, into the mist. “What was that?”
Something rustled out in the fog. Pete wrinkled his forehead and glanced at his wristpiece. The salvage party should still have been miles away. And he would have heard any helo.
The rustle this time was unmistakable, and with it came the splash of rain shaken from foliage and the crack of limbs as something large displaced brush.
Pete paused, listened. The rustle gave way to a snuffle, a grunt, and a vast, darker gray shadow swelled in the pale mist ahead of him.
At first the bear ambled closer, head cocked as though curious and so close that Pete felt he could reach out and touch its snout.
Then the bear snorted, growled, reared on its hind legs and Pete realized it was farther away, but had appeared close because of its enormity.
What had he read? Grown male Kodiaks weighed a ton and a half and stood nearly ten feet tall. And when fattening during summer they tracked down and ate anything that crossed their paths, even other bear’s cubs. And certainly discarded protein bars and jerky, and the cub-sized humans who discarded them.
Heart hammering, Pete held still as a dead man, but below the bear’s line of vision he closed his fingers around the plastic paddle on the raft’s fabric floor. A pathetic weapon, but a weapon.
The bear dropped back down on all fours, advanced a step.
Pete extended his arm slowly toward V.J. and flicked his fingers while he stared into the bear’s black eyes. “C’mon, V.J.! Into the toboggan nice and slow. Then off we go down the hill. By the time this guy figures out we’re gone we’ll be halfway to Attu.”