by Dean M. Cole
A smile spread across the face of the Russian cosmonaut. “So cool!”
Rachel gave a smug nod and then smiled. “Can’t get anything past you, Singleton.”
He released a snort. “Ha-ha, but I don’t think that tiltrotor airplane has the legs for a transoceanic flight.”
Vaughn looked at Mark Hennessy for confirmation. Like Major Lee and many of the astronauts who’d come before them, the man had attended the Navy’s Test Pilot course.
Mark shook his head. “No way.”
Confusion clouded Rourke’s features. “What’s a tiltrotor?”
Bingham’s face soured. “Did you never pull your nose out of your books?” He pointed at the aircraft. “That’s a bloody tiltrotor. They call it that because its rotors can tilt, allowing them to work like both the rotor blades of a helicopter or the propellers of an airplane. The Osprey can take off and land vertically, but it can also cruise at more than three hundred miles an hour.”
Vaughn nodded. “But like I said, it doesn’t have enough range to cross the ocean.”
Monique walked into the light and hitched a thumb, pointing over her shoulder. “This one does. It is a CV-22B.”
The designation tickled a faint memory, but Vaughn couldn’t quite recall it.
Rachel sighed. “Geez, Singleton.”
Vaughn scanned the faces of the other members of the group. Seeing blank stares, he turned back to Major Lee. “Looks like I’m not the only one in the dark on this one.”
With her fingers laced together in front of her, Monique moved to stand at the center of their semicircle. Walking backward, she led them into the hangar. “This is the Air Force Special Operations version of the Osprey.”
Raising his eyebrows, Vaughn nodded slowly as the memory fully surfaced. An Army friend in Spec Ops had mentioned that the Air Force would soon start transporting them into their clandestine operations in a new version of the Osprey, the CV-22B.
Vaughn gestured at the aircraft. “Extended range tanks?”
Monique grinned. “Exactly. They are built into its wings.”
Commander Bingham shook his head. “Even with those, I doubt this thing could cross the pond in one hop.”
Rachel walked to one of the craft’s wide doors and opened it. After looking inside, she smiled at Monique. “Just like you said.”
Responding to Bingham’s words, Vaughn tilted his head equivocally. “If we can find this thing’s auxiliary tanks, we wouldn’t have to do it in one hop. They’d be additional tanks that ride in the plane’s cargo area. Then we could make stops in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Reykjavík, Iceland.
Major Lee turned her grin toward Vaughn. She pointed inside the aircraft. “Auxiliary tanks like these?”
They walked up to the open door and gazed in.
Vaughn nodded appreciably. He could tell by the plumbing and the straps affixed to the tanks that they were already connected to the aircraft’s fuel system and ready for flight.
He was happy to see they weren’t too big. Even with the tanks in place, there remained plenty of room for the team and the supplies they had procured.
Wing Commander Bingham looked from face to face. “Now, all we have to do is find someone who knows how to fly the bloody thing.”
Major Lee walked over and stood next to Mark Hennessy. “Did we mention that the Navy Test Pilot Course has a mandatory tiltrotor curriculum?”
Part III
“Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
—Dylan Thomas
Chapter 14
As he gazed upon the living hell that was Paris, Rourke wondered if this was what awaited them in Geneva.
He shook his head. If only this were all that awaited.
Leaning closer to the window, he craned his neck, trying to see a bigger slice of Paris through the tiltrotor aircraft’s small portal.
The City of Light now glowed in flickering orange hues as it burned beneath a mantle of black smoke propped up by uncountable roiling columns of the same. Thousands of scattered fires punctured Paris’s smoke-filled night like burning embers glowing in the bowels of Hell.
The scene was just another installment in the serialized apocalyptic shitshow they’d been absorbing over the last five days of travel.
Had it really only been five?
It seemed as if he’d been trapped in this damned aircraft for a lifetime.
Turning from the window, Rourke glanced at the exposed pipes, ducts, and wiring that apparently passed for interior design amongst military planners. Over the last several days, he’d spent countless hours staring at the tiltrotor’s complex interstices. Rourke now felt as if he knew every nook and cranny of the aircraft.
Shaking his head, he dragged his eyes back to the window.
As Commander Brown and Captain Singleton had predicted, massive fires were doing their utmost to scour humanity’s legacy from the planet. A week after the event, infernos still engulfed many of the towns and cities that they had seen while en route. Even as they had crossed the Atlantic, the haze in the atmosphere had limited visibility to a few miles.
A moment ago, as Major Lee had guided the tiltrotor southeast over Paris, she’d directed them to the left side of the aircraft by shouting over the intercom, “Shit on a shingle! You're gonna want to see this.”
Unstrapping from his seat, Rourke had activated the microphone on his flight helmet. “What is it?”
“We’re coming up on downtown, Rourky. I'm going to fly along its south side, so look out one of the left windows.”
Now at the window, and still not seeing anything new in the shitshow, Rourke shook his head. “What am I looking for?”
Major Peterson’s deep voice came through Rourke’s helmet speakers. “Oh, you’ll know it when you see it.”
Looking back inside, Rourke saw that Commander Brown had remained seated. She appeared to be sleeping. Considering everything the woman had been through in the last several months, he wasn’t surprised. Angela had a significant sleep deficit to work off. During the previous five days, she’d eaten well and gotten lots of rest. Her appearance and apparent health had improved dramatically.
After peeking outside again and still see nothing exemplary, Rourke glanced ahead, looking through the door into the cockpit. Anchored to their pilot chairs, the silhouettes of Major Lee and Colonel Hennessy leaned left and right, cutting black voids in the burned orange and smoky black mural painted across the aircraft's windshield.
Just behind them, in the tunnel that led to the flight deck, sat Major Peterson and Captain Singleton. Their silhouettes framed the left and right side of the opening, both of them staring at something off to the aircraft’s front left.
Vaughn had also benefited from the last few days of recovery. The man looked significantly better than he had five days ago, standing in that Nebraska wheat field.
Major Lee and Colonel Hennessy were flying the aircraft tonight, but as they had crossed the ocean, the other pilots had taken turns rotating onto the flight deck, spelling one of the formally trained tiltrotor pilots for several hours at a time. However, this was to be their final leg, so Rachel and Colonel Hennessy had opted to fly this one themselves, although they all hoped the two pilots wouldn’t need to apply their skills in any meaningful way tonight.
They’d met in a Nebraska wheat field five days ago, and now they were two short hours from finally seeing Geneva: Ground Zero for the event that had wiped life from the planet.
Rourke’s chest heaved, and his pulse raced in his ears as he contemplated the coming events.
What if …?
Rourke sighed, willing himself to calm down.
What if, ha!
Frowning inwardly, he shook his head. Major Lee had taught him the futility of that line of thinking a couple of days ago. He'd been feeling sorry for himself, lamenting that he’d have saved himself all of this misery if he had turned and run when McCree had spotted him outside Houston’s va
cuum chamber. Rachel had cut off his whining, right at the knees. Putting her usual subtle touch on it, she had shouted back from the flight deck, “Can someone get Doctor Geller a nice cup of suck it the fuck up?! He's not in Kansas anymore. This shit is real!” Then she’d leaned over and looked back at him with a humorless smile. “If!? Ha! If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.” Seeing the shock on his face, she’d nodded, but a measure of the kindness she usually reserved for him had returned, her look softening. “We’re all in this together, Rourky. It is what it is, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to wonder what might have been.”
Rourke nodded then as he did now.
He could do this.
Tonight, they planned to pass south of Geneva and land on the back side of the same ridgeline that Commander Brown and Captain Singleton had used to get their first glimpse of Geneva. It was Mont Salève, a small mountain above the city known as the Balcony of Geneva. It was there that Vaughn and Angela had first seen the Necks’ Machine City.
This time, they planned to get their first sighting of the area as the sun rose on the seventh day of an Earth devoid of life, wiped clean but for the nine of them … and two mice in a Nebraska wheat field.
The tiltrotor aircraft heaved as it churned through the tumultuous atmosphere.
Rourke bumped into Monique’s shoulder. “Sorry.”
Standing beside him and staring through the same small window, she waved off his apology. The naval lieutenant frowned as she continued to study the scenery that was scrolling past the portal, a deep sorrow evident on her face. “I never imagined I would see Paris like … like—” Her head snapped left, eyes widening. “Oh my word!”
Following her gaze, Rourke blinked as he saw what had drawn Monique’s awe.
Above the burning embers of the ruined city sat a surreal image of a listing Eiffel Tower. Two of its four curved legs had buckled. Most of its now tilted upper reaches lay hidden within the low-hanging mantle of black clouds. However, strangest of all, the Cupola and the tower’s top antenna hung upside down, protruding from the ceiling of smoke. Evidently, that portion of the structure had snapped when the steel monstrosity had tilted. It hung by a virtual thread, a tenuous connection that lay hidden within the churning, black mantle.
Illuminated by the city’s myriad fires, the inverted top of the Eiffel Tower now pointed straight down from the clouds like the accusing finger of a dark god.
A stifled cry escaped Monique.
Rourke turned to see her holding a hand over her mouth as she looked not at the tower but the city beneath. Orange light glinted off a tear rolling down her cheek.
The sight of it pulled Rourke out of his thoughts.
Peering back through the portal, he saw the tragedy from a fresh, raw perspective. For the first time in days, he allowed himself to truly see it.
He had grown numb to the scale of the loss they had all suffered, but now he looked upon row upon row of burned-out apartment homes and businesses as they scrolled past the left side of the V-22 airplane. Ceilings and roofs had collapsed, leaving jagged walls that outlined the spaces formerly occupied by innumerable Parisians.
Tears began to cloud Rourke’s vision as he contemplated those families: the parents, the kids, and even their pets banished to a place, to a Hell so dark that Vaughn and Angela still wouldn’t discuss it in detail.
Rourke’s thoughts went to his own lost family and friends. Swallowing, he pressed back the emotions, reminding himself that, if they succeeded in the coming day, they’d reset all of it and bring everyone back.
A few heart-wrenching minutes later, they finally left the last of Paris behind them, the tiltrotor continuing its low-level southeasterly course across the thankfully dark French countryside.
Leaning back, Rourke peered through the door into the cockpit. In the faint green glow of the instruments, he could see Major Lee and Colonel Hennessy scanning through the windshield. Twinned tubes of night-vision goggles—or as they called them, NVGs—now hung from their helmets. Their heads pivoted side-to-side, but since he had no NVGs, Rourke had no clue what they saw in the inky void ahead of the aircraft.
The silhouettes of Major Peterson and Captain Singleton still buttressed the left and right side of the opening. They were also wearing night-vision goggles and appeared to be acting as a third and fourth pair of eyes. They craned their necks, peering into the darkness ahead of the onrushing V-22.
Looking over the crates of munitions and weapons that occupied the center of the narrow cabin, Rourke saw the sleeping form of Teddy, the Russian cosmonaut. Next to him sat the equally motionless robot. Before departing England, they had strapped BOb into the aftmost of the seats that lined each side of the cabin.
Movement drew Rourke’s eyes back to the front. In the shadowed green glow of the night-vision goggle-friendly lights that illuminated the interior of the cargo bay, he saw Wing Commander Bingham massaging his temples. It was no wonder that the man’s head ached, considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed the night before this final leg.
The thought brought back the events of that last day of rest. As the sun had set on a chilly evening of last-minute preparations, the group had gathered around a campfire. They had been discussing the details of what they would do today. Everything had gone south when the wing commander returned to his mantra about nuking the robots. He’d brought up the subject several times over the last few days, but this time, alcohol lent a level of vitriol to his words.
“While you twits sit here arguing amongst yourself, Her Royal Majesty’s nuclear arsenal is just sitting here doing nothing.” He tilted his half-empty bottle of whiskey toward them. “Give me a couple of days, and I’ll pop one over those bastards’ heads.”
Commander Brown had sighed heavily. “I told you, Chance. If we try to hit them with an EMP, we’ll just as likely wipe out our computer network as shut down the Necks.”
“Pfft!” Bingham had scoffed with drunken exaggeration. “You’re always going on about how it’s two hundred feet underground.” He’d spread his arms out, sloshing whiskey from both the cup in his right hand and the bottle in his left. “Ought to be enough to protect the network.”
Angela nodded. “Yeah, and it’ll be enough to protect the robots down there as well.”
Bingham sat bolt upright. “Maybe, but it won’t be any protection for all of the bastards on the surface, the ones we’ll have to go through to get anywhere close to your bloody computer console.”
At that point, Captain Singleton had moved to the edge of his seat, leaning into the sightline between Bingham and Brown. “What the hell good is that going to do, Bingham?”
“It will give us a helluva lot better chance of getting to ATLAS. It was pure luck that the two of you ever got in there at all.”
Vaughn held up two fingers. “Twice! We made it all the way in there twice.”
“Well, you bloody wanker, if we don’t cull the herd, we don’t stand a chance of making it a third.”
Captain Singleton’s eyes flared, but Angela had placed a hand on his arm and shaken her head.
Then Monique’s soft voice had broken the stalemate. “Why are you so intent on attacking our enemy with nuclear weapons, Wing Commander?”
Bingham hadn’t replied. He’d just glared at the ground as if trying to burn a hole through it.
“Chance …” Major Bill Peterson paused, appearing to search for the right words. “Chance, all the nukes in the world won’t bring them back.”
Raising the bottle, Bingham had stared at the sloshing whiskey. Filtered by the amber liquid, the fire cast wavering ocher light across the man’s tortured visage. Then the wing commander threw the bottle into the fire. It shattered and the whiskey within combusted in a hot flash. The man dropped onto his butt and lowered his head. Emotion twisted his words. “They have to pay!” Voice dropping, he appeared to shrink as if pulling into himself. “They have to pay for what they did.”
Surprising Rourke, Rachel Lee had walked ove
r and plopped down next to the wing commander. She draped an arm across his shoulders and held up a glass of whiskey and clinked it against the one still clutched in Bingham’s right hand. “Oh, we’ll make them pay, alright, Chance. We are all going to make sure those no-neck-having mother fuckers pay dearly for ever showing their ugly little heads in our dimension.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Then Teddy had pointed at a nearby bike. “My dog used to chase people on bicycle. He did it a lot.”
Rourke looked at the man through knitted brows. In his peripheral vision, he saw the other members of the group doing the same.
Teddy pursed his lips and nodded. “Da. The dog chased people so much, I had to take bike away.”
Everyone stared in shocked silence for a moment. Then they had dissolved into fits of laughter.
After Teddy had broken the tension of the moment, they had spent the rest of the evening laughing and sharing jokes. Near the end, even Bingham had added a couple.
At one point, Major Lee had nodded at the robot. “You know any other good jokes, BOb?”
Over the last few days, their mechanical friend had proven to be quite humorous at times, so it was a reasonable question.
Sitting cross-legged, the robot pointed at the campfire. In its flickering light, BOb almost appeared to grin. “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson go on a camping trip. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep.”
BOb had surprised them then by lying back and staring up at the sky. After lacing his fingers behind his head, he’d continued. “Sometime in the middle of the night, Holmes wakes Watson and says, ‘Watson, look up, and tell me what you see.’ The doctor says, ‘I see millions and millions of stars.’ ‘Yes, Watson, and what do you deduce from that?’” BOb extended an arm and pointed at the sky. “‘Well, if there are millions of stars, and if some of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are many planets like Earth out there, so there might also be life.’” The robot had stopped for a beat. Then his head had lolled to face the group, and Rourke could’ve sworn he’d seen a glint in one of the machine’s eyes. “‘Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent!’”
