Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  “What would…”

  “Shot it.” She seemed cooler toward him, as if she did not look forward, like him, to going to bed together again. Was she having second thoughts? “Pulled out my gun and blown its head away. That would have stopped it.”

  She made a face and looked at her food. She had chosen salami, cheese, onions, and green peppers on a sesame-seed bun. “But I still have the Tortoise, alive.”

  “That’s true.” He eyed his sandwich at last. He had pushed the button for tuna fish on rye, but it looked more like canned cat food on dirty foam rubber. “Do all genimals stop like that when you pull the plug?”

  She held one hand palm upward, fingers spread. “I knew the Tortoise would. I read the owner’s manual after Nick and I got married, and I thought I remembered that. But others? Some Buggies, I think. But I really don’t know for sure.”

  “I suppose it would make sense for private vehicles. But what about jets?” He was, quite naturally, wondering about the Hawks he loved to fly. Would the same ploy, if it ever became necessary, work for him?

  She shook her head. “Probably not. They would need some control in the air, wouldn’t they? In case of accident.” She paused while she unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite. He followed suit, first setting the chip on the table between them. Then she said, “Of course! The Chickadee! They can’t possibly turn off the same way.”

  He made a disappointed face. She laughed around a mouthful of sandwich, but then she choked the sound off abruptly. He looked at her curiously, and in a moment she said, “Your colleague came by the house this morning. She wanted the dope on the Mack attack.”

  “Connie?” he asked.

  She nodded. “She also laid some heavy hints on my husband.”

  He winced.

  She reached out one hand to touch his wrist. “I don’t believe you’d brag about your women, Bernie. But…”

  He sighed. “Yeah. We’ve been pretty close.”

  “So she wants you for herself. She’s jealous.”

  “So’s Nick,” he said.

  She reached out one finger to touch the chip. “Would she…?”

  “No.” He hesitated. “She’d probably try for me.” He set down his sandwich, sipped his coffee, and picked up the chip. “And not this way. I’m willing to bet that when I take this down to the university, Narabekian will say it’s set to activate on the expressway, and then watch the traffic until just the right situation comes up. Those ‘hunting’ motions you noticed. It was looking for gaps in the traffic, and maybe an oncoming truck. When it found them, it moved left, and…” She shuddered.

  “Whoever we’re looking for, he doesn’t care about bystanders. Your response was perfect, and just in time,” he said. “But you were still lucky.”

  “Very lucky,” she agreed.

  “He couldn’t have known…” He stopped suddenly.

  “Not Nick,” she said softly.

  “Of course not,” he murmured gently.

  She stared at the sandwich in her hand. She nibbled at a bit of meat that stuck out between the halves of bun. “He’s suspicious,” she finally said. “But only partly because of Connie. He thinks I’m seeing you too much. More than the investigation calls for.”

  “Let him.” Had he been behind the call to headquarters? The one that accused him of chasing skirt when he should be chasing murderers and rapists? “Grown-ups have a right to have friends of their own. Even outside marriage. Even bed-type friends.”

  She set her foot down and clenched her hands together, staring at them. “But not in secret,” she said. A tear glistened on the lashes of her right eye. She looked up, her gaze meeting his squarely. “That’s not fair. It’s dirty.”

  “You feel guilty.”

  She nodded, her eyes still meeting his. “And we really shouldn’t keep it up.” She shook her head, so hard that her hair swung wildly. “We’re not, we’re not, really compatible. Are we?” The tear was back in her eye, and her broad lips were pinched with pain.

  She was right, of course. Connie was much more his type. But…“What do you mean?”

  “I thought you were sensitive. You are. But you also have a cruel streak. I saw it with Ralph’s Armadon first. Then the Mack. Now you say you would just have shot my tortoise. Nick’s Tortoise.”

  He could have left the Armadon to Chowdhury’s own tender graces. And she had shown him what else was possible with the Tortoise. “What else could I have done with the Mack?”

  Her hair flew again. “That’s not the point. You’re like that Hawk you fly. Bloody-minded. A predator.”

  He sighed and looked away from her, fingering the chip. “You’re right. I even think of myself that way.”

  “And I prefer a gentler man.”

  “Like Nick.” Now he knew who she was wishing would walk down the hall.

  “Like Nick.”

  When Bernie had arrived at Neoform, he had been pleased to find a parking space for his Hawk beside Emily’s Tortoise. The genimals cared nothing for each other, unless his Hawk might look upon a shelled reptile as food. He didn’t think it would. It was crows, wasn’t it? Or ravens? Whatever. He once had heard of a bird that carried turtles aloft and dropped them on rocks, as seagulls did with clams.

  He had, however, enough of a romantic streak to wish that their genimals might, like their riders, at least enjoy each other’s company. At the same time, he was practical enough not to forget that the other vehicles in the lot might seem more tasty fare.

  Laughing at himself, enjoying the sparkle of sunlight on the water flowing in the trough between the rows of genimals, the small puffs of cloud overhead, even the scent of dung, he had given his Hawk and Emily’s Tortoise a moment in which to recognize each other. A moment more, while he soaked in the lushness of the nearby plantings, surely fertilized with the sweepings from the lot, those the litterbugs missed, and he had admitted that in truth they barely seemed to notice. Then he had laughed and toggled the Hawk into dormancy. As he had walked toward Neoform’s entrance and his appointment with Emily—his date, he had felt, with his mind on what might come, once more, after lunch—he had told himself that surely he fooled himself just as much by insisting whenever possible on the same Hawk. It never recognized him, or if it did, it did not care.

  Now, telling himself that perhaps the Hawk had known better than he all along, he climbed aboard again, awakened it, and strapped himself into his seat. Carefully, he inspected the panels of the control board, the papers on the other seat beside his own, the litter on the floor. There was no sign of tampering or intrusion, and he laughed at himself. Emily’s Tortoise had been sabotaged. Now he was wondering about his Hawk. He reached forward and gave the panel that hid the control computer a tug. When it popped loose, he tucked it back. It was enough, for now, to know that the panel was not locked or jammed in place. He could, if that action became suddenly necessary, yank it free, find the motherboard, and remove the foreign chip. There should be no problem, for gengineered aircraft could continue to function without the carrier signal from their computers. If, for some reason, Emily’s conclusion on the matter proved faulty and the Hawk froze up as had the Tortoise, well, he would still be high in the air. He would have plenty of time to repair the problem while the Hawk fell.

  Still, he was not sure. He checked the Hawk’s pod again, and again he saw no signs of trouble. He felt the edges of his seat, and, yes, there was the button that would eject him from the pod if necessary. There was a parachute beneath the seat that would lower him, seat and all, safely to the ground. But there was no piece of paper that offered him a guarantee of long life and happiness. There never was.

  He manipulated the controls. The Hawk spread its wings for takeoff. The engine roared, pressing him back into his seat, and the bird leaped into the air. The wings tipped, warping its flight into a climbing spiral, and the Neoform buildings diminished below, shrinking to the incongruity of a child’s playroom, a modern office building set beside a farmer’s red and
white barns, the bulging blue and yellow stripes of a fabric dome, all among white fences and green paddocks surrounded by city streets, stores, and tracts of homes.

  Bernie looked toward the city center, now ahead, now to leftward, now to rightward. His office and the Aerie were there. His apartment. Connie. She might be jealous, but she was a cop. A predator herself. Like him, a hawk—his mind flashed that ancient line, “She stoops to conquer,” into his consciousness just long enough to evoke a dusty memory of high-school English class and forgotten plays. He wondered if she would be free for the evening.

  With one hand on the steering yoke, he bent the Hawk’s course toward the Aerie. It rolled, throwing him against the straps of his seat belt. Had he oversteered? A gust of wind? It rolled again, pitching abruptly to the right and back again. He felt the pod in which he sat slip against the Hawk’s back, and adrenaline surged through his system. His pulse raced. His palms grew damp and his mouth dry.

  The sensation was familiar. He felt it anew every time he faced a criminal. He had felt it when the Mack had been bearing down on him and Emily. He was sure she had felt it when her Tortoise had headed for the median.

  He eased up on the throttle and jerked at the yoke. For a moment, he thought he had solved the problem, whatever it was. But then the Hawk pitched forward, back again, from side to side. He could feel the movements of his pod and the strain on the straps. Those straps were heavy. They were strong enough for all foreseeable strains. They had to be. But they could not possibly be infinitely strong. They could be broken.

  Or torn. He was reaching for the computer cabinet, the truth having penetrated that his Hawk had indeed been sabotaged. Emily had rejected him, but still he could learn from her. But before he could open the panel, much less remove the motherboard or cleanse it of its parasitic infection, the Hawk pitched into a forward roll, like a diver from a board. It bent, and it tore at its breast with its great hooked beak.

  Bernie seized the yoke. It was, he knew, too late to remedy matters in Emily’s way. If he let go, the Hawk’s gyrations would slam him back and forth against the straps that held him in his seat. He would not have the stability, the steadiness, he would need to pop the panel, find the board, and remove the chip that was surely there. But, he thought, it didn’t matter. The Hawk would shortly sever the straps that held the pod to its back, just as it and its fellows had severed the Sparrow’s straps. And the saboteur’s influence would have to end.

  He hung on, while the Hawk’s gyrations spun the blood to his head and his vision darkened. He barely noticed when his bladder let go. His face distorted into a rictic grin, but that grim expression was due only partly to the g forces he was experiencing. He too, he told himself, was a hawk. He would survive. He would triumph.

  The straps gave way. The pod leaped from the Hawk, its tangent course quickly curving into a parabolic plummeting toward the ground. Bernie grunted relief at the sensation of free-fall, but his rictus remained.

  He pressed the ejection button. Explosive charges shattered the clear shell of the pod and propelled his seat and him into space. Wind struck his face. He tumbled, and nausea flooded his stomach. When he faced the ground he saw that he was above a residential neighborhood, one whose street pavements had been replaced with turf. Where other neighborhoods were blocks of green embedded in a lattice of gray tar or tan concrete, here the lattice was light green, the blocks darker, and there, to one side, was a square of tar, beside a building of red brick, a schoolhouse, a playground, and the wreckage of his pod was tumbling slantwise, pushed by wind, toward it. He thanked God that it was summer, school was out, there would be no kids at recess. Then, realizing, remembering his own childhood, he prayed that none of the neighborhood children would be on the playground anyway.

  He extended his arms and legs to slow the tumble and let air pressure stabilize his position. He looked for the Hawk, afraid that now it would see him as prey on the wing and…

  And “Eee kai vai!” There it was, screaming its siren call, already stooping toward him, and the favorite curse of the few Franco-Americans among his childhood playmates sprang to his lips. “He! Calvaire!” or “Oh! Calvary!” He had not thought of it in decades. He wished he too believed. He crossed himself anyway, just as those playmates always had in moments of stress.

  His magnum was, as always, under his arm. He fumbled, cursing the seat straps that got in his way, and drew it. He aimed and fired, and the recoil renewed his spin, but not before he saw the Hawk shy off.

  The Hawk swooped past him while he spun. It screamed. It climbed. By the time he had himself stabilized once more, the Hawk was attacking again. He fired, missed, and spun. Frantically, he squeezed off another shot as soon as he swung into position anew, and again, and again.

  The Hawk’s scream stopped. Bernie felt a buffet of air at his back, and then the Hawk, his Hawk, his soaring, swooping, stooping steed of air, was falling past him, already tumbling. Less dense than the pod, offering more surface area to the wind, it would strike the ground well past the playground.

  Once more he stabilized his fall, and then he felt for the D-ring that would activate his parachute. He pulled it, knowing that the wind would carry him much farther than it did the pod or Hawk. He might never see either again, or until he visited them in the warehouse, surely the same one that had held the Mack, to retrieve the chip, the evidence of sabotage.

  In a moment, the chute yanked at his seat. His seat straps yanked at him, squeezing his chest and stomach. He began to sway, and it was all too much. He vomited.

  * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE COUNT, LIEUTENANT Napoleon Alexander, was a martinet with delusions of grandeur, but he did care about his people. Bernie had to give him that: Just as soon as the word reached headquarters, the Count himself would come to pick up the pieces.

  Bernie wished it would do him some good.

  He had had paratroop training long ago, in another war, and he knew how to land. But only when his legs were free, not when he was strapped to a massive, stinking pilot’s throne, unable to cushion the blow on bent knees, or to roll. All he could do was grit his teeth, ignoring their taste, and clutch the arms of his seat, his gorge convulsing at the touch of what his stomach had expelled. The wind of his fall buffeted his face and chilled his soaking legs.

  He waited, staring alternately at the rapidly nearing ground and the canopy of nylon that billowed above his head, thinking that the Hawk had cheated. It had kept on attacking even after the loss of the pod had broken all connection with the saboteur’s subverting chip. Was it because the new programming had somehow taken root in the genimal’s brain? Had the chip simply activated reflexes that had to run their course? Had it seen him, tumbling in the air, as irresistible prey? Or did it hate its masters and seize its opportunity for vengeance?

  When the impact came, he felt it in his butt, jarring up his spine. His teeth bounced apart, despite his clenched jaw muscles, and whammed together again. His vision blanked.

  When his eyes agreed to work again, they showed him a broad expanse of green, a lawn splashed with color, trees onto which the chute canopy was settling. There was a house to one side. He tried to blink the daze out of his eyes as he looked closer, and he realized: He was neatly embedded in a cluster of thorny rosebushes. Their pale pink blooms nodded away from him on stems bent by his presence. He assumed they had the fragrance typical of roses, but at the moment his nose was as stunned as his butt.

  He remembered a movie that had featured hapless cinematic aviators plunging into thickets of barbarian swords. He untangled himself from his seat straps and the cords that had suspended him beneath the parachute. He struggled free of the rose thorns, swearing that his magnum would at least have given him a fighting chance against the barbarians. He tugged the chute out of the trees beside the lawn, used it to wipe his hands, face, and shirt clean, and wadded it up. Then he yanked the seat out of the roses and weighted the chute down.

  Finally, he turned t
oward the house. It was a green cylinder rounded on the ends, with small windows studding its low length. “A goddamn zucchini,” he said aloud. Except for the color, it reminded him of the antique Airstream trailers that still, from time to time, queued up to tour the countryside and the pages of travel magazines.

  A young woman clad in a skimpy bathing suit leaned on the railing of the house’s central porch. A screen door stood ajar behind her. A gaily striped towel, one corner tucked up where a parachute cord had brushed it, marked where she had been sunbathing. A glass lay on its side beside the towel, as if she had knocked it over. Perhaps, he thought, she had heard the Hawk scream, looked up, seen the fight and its end, and then run for the house to get out of the way of falling objects.

  “I saw it all,” she said. “Wow! Do they do that often?”

  Bernie shook his head. He was still dazed. “It keeps the job interesting,” he managed. “Got a phone?”

  “I called already.” She waved a hand toward the street and the other houses of the neighborhood. “So did they, I guess.” He turned to look. A dozen people—men, women, and small children—were standing there, carefully staying off the lawn, not approaching, perhaps wondering whether there would be more gunfire. Two dogs stood spraddle-legged, howling their defiance of his invasion of their turf. A few other people were trotting purposefully down the greenway, away from him. He was still too disoriented to know which way was toward the city center, or where his Hawk had come down. He presumed they knew just where to look.

  Sirens echoed across the sky and down the nearby streets. Four Hawks swept into view and stooped, two toward him, two beyond the trees. A Pigeon ambulance howled into view and half a dozen Roachsters rattled to a stop by the curb.

  The Count was in the first of the Hawks to land. He tumbled from the pod, tripping on the edge of its hatch, catching himself, running toward Bernie, his dignity forgotten for the moment. “Bernie! You’re okay! What happened?”