by Nick Cook
‘You think that’s fast but they were probably only travelling around Mach 7,’ Jodie said. ‘But once they are out of the atmosphere and power up their helical particle drives, they’ll accelerate up to four hundred million miles per hour.’
‘Nosebleed fast,’ Mike said, grimacing.
‘Yes, I still can’t get my head around the fact that it’s reduced the journey time to the 16 Psyche to just thirty days,’ I said. ‘It took the Voyager probes around four years to achieve that sort of distance and they weren’t exactly dawdling either, thanks to some nifty gravity slingshot work around the planets.’
‘Well it’s a crucial part of how we’re going to defend the world when the time comes,’ Alice said, her face becoming drawn.
Any sense of lightness evaporated from the group. Going by everyone’s solemn expressions, all of us were once again starkly reminded of what was at stake here.
Tom downed the last of his coffee. ‘Well as we’re talking of saving the world, we should all head back and get ready for our own mission. I’ll see you all in the hangar to sort out equipment. Oh – and a suitable disguise, as we’ll be mixing with the Cuban locals.’
‘Oh just great, my favourite, we get to dress up again,’ Jack said, scowling.
As we stood I nudged him in the arm with my shoulder. ‘You love it really.’
Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘Yeah, right.’
As we sat in the hangar inside the X103 that we were going to use for the mission whilst Ariel was being upgraded, I did my best to suppress a smirk. That wasn’t helped by the pissed off expression on Jack’s face. He was sitting opposite me on the flight deck in a dazzling Hawaiian shirt, cargo pants and a dark, shoulder-length wig.
Mike had on a faded green canvas shirt and blue jeans, with a patterned cotton snood around his neck. With the trainers and the fluid way that he was now able to move, I would challenge anyone to be able to tell that he was using a prosthetic leg.
Ruby and I had faired a lot better than the guys in our transformations at the hands of Tom. She was rocking the whole exposed midriff look and had a blonde wig on. Me, well I had a loose fitting white cotton blouse and jeans on, but the biggest transformation was my jet black hair that almost reached my bum. I’d always wondered how I’d look with longer hair and now that I knew, I rather liked it.
But it was Tom that had almost made me spit my tea out when he appeared. The master of disguise had gone for what I could only describe as a Dumbledore look, complete with long white wispy beard and straggling white hair.
The key thing was that I barely recognised us, let alone anyone else and that was the whole point of Tom’s insistence that we all wore disguises. The Overseers had contacts everywhere and we were all very much on the most wanted list, probably more so since Alvarez, a colonel in that secretive organisation, had been killed during our last encounter with him. He’d been buried alive when the glass pyramid we’d discovered back at the Richat Structure had disappeared and the corridor Alvarez had been walking through had reverted to sand. I for one wasn’t going to shed any tears over that particular cold-hearted killer’s death.
Tom slid the tablet he’d been using into the custom recess built into his chair. ‘Okay, that’s all of our preflight checks completed,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how Delphi’s new flight algorithms by Troy work out.’
‘You think the system is ready to take full control like in the old X101s, then?’ I asked.
Before he could answer, Lucy’s avatar appeared in a window that had popped up on the virtual cockpit.
‘If you’re worried, don’t be. I’ve been over Delphi’s code several times and it all looks good to me,’ Lucy said. ‘You have plenty of backup safety systems, not to mention the escape pods. And besides, Tom can take over from Delphi if her flying causes any reason for concern…’ A tightness filled her voice and her words trailed away.
But before I could ask her if she was okay, Jack jumped in, immediately scoring highly on my empathy radar for other people.
‘You do know that staying behind is for the best, right, Lucy?’ he said.
‘Yes…’ This time her voice did catch and she did the very human thing of dropping her gaze in her video window.
It was then that I wished I’d taken the time to have a heart-to-heart with her. ‘Lucy, I’d love you to be coming with us, but like we’ve already discussed…’ I lifted my shoulders.
Lucy raised her head and nodded. ‘Yes…’ She flapped a hand in front of her face. ‘Sorry, I need to dial down some of the emotional subroutines. But if you need me – as an actress once famously said to Bogart in a movie that I’m paraphrasing here… You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow. Do that and I’ll be straight by your side the moment you recover a micro mind… if you do end up finding one.’
I nodded, but a sense of apprehension had taken hold of me. Without Lucy by our side, our safety net that I’d grown so used to on missions was about to be removed. But that was a cost worth paying to keep her as safe as possible.
‘Okay, let’s get this mission underway,’ Tom said. ‘Delphi, you have control.’
‘I have control,’ Delphi repeated in her silkiest, calmest tone.
‘Then please set a course for the preloaded coordinates and launch when you’re ready.’
‘Understood, initiating launch procedure,’ Delphi replied.
Lucy’s video window vanished as the virtual cockpit walls glowed into life around us. Now we had a view of the hangar that Ariel was parked in. Jodie and Alice were watching us from one side of it and Lucy’s merged micro mind star-shaped craft hovered just to our right. Mike’s gaze immediately travelled to his girlfriend, who was chewing her nails. He’d been unusually quiet since we’d entered the cockpit. Although he was clearly totally committed to going on missions again, I knew that if I’d been standing in his shoes I would have allowed myself a certain amount of apprehension too.
A very soft hum came from the floor as the Element 115 mark two REV drive was brought online. Slowly, the launch silo door above slid open to reveal a disc of blue sky above us.
An array of indicators glowed green in Tom’s pilot seat panel and then our X103 began to rise in almost total silence.
Alice and Jodie waved to us and even though they couldn’t see him, Mike returned their gesture.
I glanced at the team around me, people who I’d trust my life with and had done so on so many occasions. At some point along the journey together we’d become a tight-knit team, something that Mike was very much a key part of.
Almost as though he’d been reading my mind, Jack nodded across to Mike. ‘It’s great getting the band back together, hey?’
‘This is like old times,’ Mike replied, as we began to accelerate up the shaft towards the expanding disc of blue sky.
Jack caught my eye and winked. Yes, I’d chosen well picking him as my partner.
As our X-craft cleared the silo we burst out into sunlight, the lush green jungle canopy stretching away around us.
Tom sat back and let Delphi execute a perfect, fully automated ascent, climbing away rapidly from the jungle until it was thousands of feet below us and all without even the faintest vibration.
‘Peanut butter-smooth flying,’ Ruby said, looking at her CIC screen that partly encircled her flight seat. ‘Looking forward to seeing this baby hit Mach ten.’
‘Yes, thanks to the upgraded REV drive we should be able to reach Cuba in just under twenty minutes,’ Tom said.
Jack whistled.’ Holy crap, that’s a seriously short flight time.’
‘Yes, not even time for an in-flight drink,’ Mike said.
I shot him an amused look as the ship began to rotate back to the vertical. This was so it could use the REV drive’s gravity field enveloped around the ship to create the equivalent of lateral thrust - and a lot of it!
Delphi adjusted our flight path until we were almost flying directly towards the sun. At that moment, Lucy�
�s face appeared back on an overlaid video window on the virtual cockpit.
‘Okay, kids. I’ll be waiting for you to whistle so I can get my arse over to wherever you’re ready for me to merge with the micro mind, if you find one there. In the meantime, safe journey onwards and good hunting.’
‘Amen to that,’ Jack replied.
Lucy smiled, caught my eye, then blinked several times.
I felt a tug of sympathy for her as she cut her video feed. I so knew how I would be feeling right now if I’d been watching everyone else set off without me.
‘Okay, let’s see what this upgraded drive can really do,’ Tom said. ‘Delphi, blank virtual cockpit screens.’
‘Blanking screens,’ our ship’s AI replied.
The screens went dark around us, all part of the secrecy surrounding Eden’s location so we couldn’t reveal it if we were captured.
Now the only things projected onto the virtual cockpit were the flight stats, including our airspeed, which had already climbed to just over a thousand knots, well beyond the speed of sound. Then, with the barest increase in hum from the REV drive, our speed began to climb. Two thousand knots became six thousand and all with only the softest tug of gravity to indicate the absolutely insane acceleration. A quick mental calculation told me we were moving at the equivalent of six hundred miles per hour.
‘Bloody hell, I knew the new drive system was good, but that’s incredible,’ Mike said.
‘Yes, with the improved efficiency of the drive, the sort of G-forces we would have experienced in conventional craft – if it could even go that fast – would basically have killed us by now,’ Tom said, looking at his readouts.
‘Well if we did have that in-flight drink, I doubt it would even have spilled a drop,’ I said.
Jack snorted as we returned our attention to the somewhat mesmerising display of data that was telling us that we were now travelling over six times faster than a speeding bullet. And that was breathtaking, whichever way you wanted to look at it.
Chapter Four
On the restored virtual cockpit view, now that we were a suitable distance from Eden, we had a view of the island of Cuba laid out before us, sitting in the middle of the aqua blue sea. Small fishing boats were visible everywhere around its coast and a commercial jet was making its final approach to the island’s main airport.
‘So this is the place that nearly ended the world back in the sixties with the Cuban missile crisis,’ Jack said, gazing down at the island.
‘Yes and it seems that once again what happens around Cuba is going to play a key role in whether our planet survives for much longer,’ Tom replied.
‘Hey, let’s try and keep a positive outlook on this and assume we’re going to have a positive mission, guys,’ Mike said, shaking his head.
It was good to hear someone who still had a fragment of optimism left inside them, but the truth was that I was feeling more than a little bit unsettled about the presence of the Russian military in the waters. At best, that was going to complicate things and at worst, who knew? I looked down at the tapestry of fields and towns. So many people lived down there and right now, they had no idea that the fate of the world was playing out around them.
Our X103 came to a hovering stop. ‘Destination reached. Pilot please stand by to resume control,’ Delphi announced.
Tom reached forward and placed his hand on the three axis control joystick and flicked a button. ‘I have control, Delphi.’
‘You have control,’ she echoed.
’So where exactly are we going to land? I think the main airport might raise a few eyebrows, Tom.’ I said.
‘We have a local asset on the ground. An American ex-pat called Glenn Nelson, who has made Cuba his home and now runs a sugarcane farm there. I’ve already contacted him and he’s set aside a field for us to land in where our X103 won’t be noticed or disturbed.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re five minutes early, so we’ll hold position here before going in. Everyone should grab the opportunity to check their mission equipment because we’re going to head out almost immediately that we touch down.’
‘Okay, you heard the man. Let’s get to it everyone,’ I said, unbuckling my harness.
Soon we all had our heads buried in our lockers examining our packs. As always, my Empyrean Key – a carved stone ball that allowed me to communicate with a micro mind using my visual synaesthesia – lay safely tucked in the bottom of my small rucksack. I also had the tuning fork that I used to activate the Key stowed in there as a backup to the carrier tone that my earbud could generate, in case that failed. In a holster already strapped beneath my shirt was my trusty Mossad .22 LRS. As usual, I had plenty of spare magazines and ammunition for my weapon of choice that over the years had grown into an extension of my arm.
Jack had his Glock 19 safely stowed in a low profile holster beneath his shirt, along with the usual array of grenades. But it was the weapon that Mike was bringing on the mission that caught me completely off guard. As opposed to the usual dart gun that I’d already seen Tom place into his own shoulder holster, I saw Mike slide a magazine into a small pistol.
‘What the hell have you got there?’ I asked, staring at him.
Mike gave me a small shrug. ‘A Walther PPK as favoured by James Bond.’
Jack looked at him. ‘Since when are you packing a firearm on a mission, buddy? What happened to our conscientious objector to anything that fired bullets?’
‘This…’ Mike gestured to his prosthetic leg. ‘It sort of changed my perspective when those beliefs didn’t stop an Overseer soldier trying to take my life.’
‘But we all understood your reason for using a dart gun,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’re really ready to cross that line and use that pistol in anger?’
‘No, but I will if I have to.’
I was taken aback by his determined tone and looked to Tom for support. ‘Did you know about this decision?’
‘Yes, because I’m the one who has been giving Mike extensive training on the target ranges. This is his decision to take and we should all respect that, even if I think he’s making a huge mistake.’ Tom gave Mike a pointed look.
I spread my hands wide as I turned back to Mike. ‘You really don’t have to take this step; I know it’s against everything you stand for.’
‘I’m afraid that’s the more innocent version of the guy I used to be, Lauren. Unfortunately, that man was lost the day he took a bullet that cost him his leg.’
Not able to ignore the hardness that had crept into his tone, I stared at my friend for the longest moment. There was so much that I wanted to say about why he shouldn’t do this, but the problem was that Tom was right. At the end of the day, however big a mistake I thought Mike might be making, this was his decision. The problem was that choosing a pistol favoured by a fictional spy made me more than a little suspicious that he had romanticised the reality of being able to put a round into someone. And crossing that line for the first time was unfortunately something I knew way too much about from personal experience.
’Time for the rendezvous,’ Ruby announced, gazing at her CIC screen.
Exchanging a scowl with Jack who, based on his deeply furrowed forehead was just as worried about Mike’s decision as I was, I headed back to my flight seat and strapped in.
‘Okay, let’s get going and find out what Cuba is like,’ Tom said. He took hold of the joystick, adjusted the throttle and began to descend us towards the island.
A lazy sea lapped around the shoreline, white gulls spiralling out over it as the island began to reveal its details. A mosaic of fields stretched out towards a mountain range that cast a large shadow in the early morning and ran along the spine of the island. The virtual cockpit view was helpfully labelled with tags to identify what we were looking at, the most significant of which was the large and sprawling metropolitan mass of Havana.
I’d always had a strong yearning to visit this island, specifically because of its capital. In my imagination it was fi
lled with people dancing in the streets to salsa as brightly coloured vintage American cars wove their way through them. Whether the reality matched up to that, I was about to find out.
Tom appeared to be flying us towards a remote corner of the island set back from the coast. A few loan farms became visible as we dropped to three thousand feet. I spotted a battered blue van parked alongside a metallic green, old style Cadillac parked in the corner of the field that we were heading towards. It was just like the sort of car I pictured the islanders using.
A faded brown crop filled the view in the bottom half of the virtual cockpit. As we dropped to less than a hundred feet and began to slow, I could see little orange dust devils spinning up dirt in the powder-dry ground around the plants.
‘That looks in pretty bad condition for a crop,’ Ruby said.
‘Yes, Glenn would be the first to tell you that farming isn’t exactly his forte, but more of a hobby he dabbles in,’ Tom replied. ‘It also gives him the perfect cover for his family – he’s actually on Sky Dreamer Corp’s payroll as a part-time spy.’
Tom slowed our descent down to a crawl as he flipped a switch to extend the landing legs.
Ruby peered at her CIC screen. ‘Apart from the two human heat signatures that I’m reading in those vehicles, there’s absolutely no one else around,’ she said.
‘That will be Glenn and his son Antonio,’ Tom said. ‘However, based on the fact they haven’t even got out of their vehicle yet, it would suggest that our chameleon cloak camouflage system is doing an excellent job.’
With a quiet rustle from outside as we descended into the crop, our X103 pushed the stalks apart and flattened them as we gently touched down on the ground with a slight shudder.
‘You do realise we have just created our very own crop circle?’ Mike said.
‘Maybe this Glenn guy will be able to sell tickets to it as an attraction,’ Ruby said with a grin ‘And talking of whom…’ She flicked her hand and the camera feed she’d been watching on her CIC screen was displayed on our virtual cockpit.