Piranha

by Dale Brown

  “Major Stockard is on the line, sir. They’re just landing on Okinawa,” said the lieutenant.

  “It’ll take ten or twelve hours to get here,” said Rubeo.

  “Eight,” said Gat.

  Ascenzio’s voice surprised Dog—he’d actually forgotten the others were in the room.

  “Hardly,” hissed Rubeo. “But even if it were only eight, you want to lose all that time? We can have the UMB off the main runway in four hours, perhaps even less.”

  “Zen doesn’t have to be here, does he?” asked Dog. “If he’d guiding by voice. You just have to work out a connection, right?”

  “It’s not that simple.” Rubeo frowned, then put his finger on his small gold earring. “I’d have to talk to Dr. Gleason. Maybe,” he added, as if reluctant to concede his assistant would have the final say. “The communication protocols—if we use the channels reserved for the extra Flighthawks, and reprogram them into the network. Maybe. Yes.”

  “Put Major Stockard on the screen.”

  His son-in-law’s helmeted face came on the screen. Zen was still piloting a Flighthawk and had his visor down; he looked a bit like a race car driver in his crash cage, head bobbing left and right before he spoke. “Stockard.”

  “Jeff, I want to talk with you, Major Alou, and Jennifer Gleason,” said Dog. “Dr. Rubeo has an idea—”

  “This is not exactly my idea,” said Rubeo.

  “I have an idea,” said Dog. The others plugged into the line and he laid it out.

  “I think we can do it,” said Jennifer. “We may even be able to use the Flighthawk controls for limited maneuverability.”

  “Don’t get fancy,” said Dog. “There’s no time.”

  “It’s not fancy—we built the control section from the same module; it’s meant to be portable.”

  “That storm’s pretty fierce,” said Zen.

  “The KH Storm and Eyes modules are to be tested,” said Rubeo, using the nicknames for the sensor arrays. “We’ll see anything we want to see.”

  “Can I see them on my screens?” asked Zen.

  “That part’s easy,” said Jennifer.

  “Voice commands can be issued by myself—or even you, Colonel,” said Rubeo. “There’s no need to create a camel here—with all due respect to Major Stockard, I’d imagine he’s tired.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I want a combat pilot at the controls,” insisted Dog. “Major Alou, Admiral Woods may call you to assist other missions. Could you accomplish them while you’re handling this?”

  “I don’t know that we can be in two places at one time,” said Major Alou.

  “You won’t have to be,” said Jennifer. “It’ll be just like a regular mission with Flighthawks—except you won’t have to stay close to the UMB. We can do it, Tecumseh.”

  Her use of his name paralyzed him; he felt a strange mix of love and fear.

  “Ray,” she continued, “on the Piranha translation module, the 128 processor—”

  “Yes. The assembler will—”

  “But we won’t need the weapon section.”

  “That’s where we’re routing the KH radar unit.”

  “I can do it, I can do it. We can use the channels reserved for the helmets. I can do it!”

  “Don’t play schoolgirl.”

  “All right, listen,” said Dog. “Major Alou—you land your plane, gas up, take off ASAP. Dr. Gleason and Dog—” he pointed at Rubeo. “See what you can work out. I want a go, no-go recommendation in two hours. Less if possible.”

  “It’s go,” said Zen.

  “I appreciate the sentiment,” said Dog.

  “What do I do if I’m given a mission before then?” asked Major Alou.

  “Take it,” said Zen.

  “We need to be on the ground for at least two hours,” said Jennifer. “Maybe a little more.”

  “It’ll take a while to refuel,” said Alou. “And the weather may delay us too.”

  “Two hours, go or no-go,” said Dog. “Lets get to work.”

  Aboard Iowa

  August 29, 1997, 0207 local (August 28, 1997, 1107 Dreamland)

  Zen checked the instruments on Flighthawk One, preparing to land on Okinawa. Jennifer was bouncing up and down next to him, already working out the problems on one of her laptop computers. He could feel her adrenaline rush, the excitement that came with facing the impossible, the sureness it could be overcome.

  He’d heard it in their voices back at Dreamland too. They all had it. Even Rubeo, despite grousing that the computers would do a better job than Zen could.

  The one thing they hadn’t talked about was that Bree and the others were very likely dead already, blown to bits in the plane.

  Which was why they didn’t talk about it.

  Somewhere in the South China Sea

  Time and date unknown

  She was the rain, soaking them. She was the wind sheering through their skulls. She was the tumult of the ocean, heaving her chest to plunge them into the black, salty hell, then lifting them up into the pure gray clouds. Again and again she twirled them back and forth, lashing them in every direction until she became them all, and they became her.

  When Breanna Stockard pulled the handle on the ejection seat, time and space had merged. She now occupied all possible times and all possible places—the moment of the ejection seat exploding beneath her, the storm reaching down to take her from the plane, the universe roaring at her pointlessness.

  She could see the canopy of the parachute. She could see the ocean collapsing around her. She could feel her helmet slamming against the slipstream; she could smell the rose water of a long-ago bath.

  Somehow, the raft had inflated.

  Stoner had saved her with his strong arms, pulling against the chute that wouldn’t release, but that finally, under his tugging, did release. Breanna had pulled at Ferris, who bobbed helmetless before her, but it had been Stoner who grabbed her. It was Stoner who disappeared.

  She was the roll of the ocean and the explosion that sent them from the airplane. She was the storm soaking them all.

  Stoner felt his fingers slipping again. They wouldn’t close. The best he could manage was to punch his hands on the raft, shifting his weight slightly as the wave swelled up. It threw him sideways and, whether because of good luck, or God, or just coincidence, the momentum of the raft and the swell threw him back into the small float, on top of the two pilots. Water surged up his nostrils; he shook his head violently, but the salt burned into his chest and lungs. Fortunately, he didn’t have anything left to puke.

  The sea pushed him sideways and his body slipped downward. An arm grabbed his just as he went into the water. In the tumult, it wasn’t clear whether he pulled his rescuer into the sea or whether he’d been hooked and saved; lightening flashed and he realized he was on his back, lying across the other two, the man and the woman.

  “Lash ourselves together,” he told them, the rain exploding into his face. “Keep ourselves together until the storm ends.”

  The others moved, but not in reaction to what he said. they were gripping on to the boat, holding again as the waves pitched them upward.

  “We can make it,” he said. “We’ll lash ourselves together.”

  He reached for his knife at his leg, thinking he would use it to cut his pants leg into a rope. As he did, he touched bare skin on his leg.

  They’d already tied themselves together. Somehow, in the nightmare, he’d forgotten.

  Aboard the Dragon Ship in the South China Sea

  August 29, 1997, 0800

  The message was not entirely unexpected, but it nonetheless pained Chen Lo Fann greatly. In language bereft of polite formulas and its usual ambiguity, the government demanded an explanation for the activities of the past few days that “led to this dangerous instability.”

  Dangerous instability. An interesting phrase.

  Obviously, the Americans were making the presence felt. Peace was in the American interest, not theirs
; true Chinese prayed for the day of return, the instatement of the proper government throughout all of the provinces of China. Inevitably, this war would lead to the destruction of the Communists.

  The angry gods of the sea had thrown a typhoon against the two fleets, halting their battle after a few opening salvos. In the interim, the Americans, the British, and the UN had all stepped up their efforts to negotiate peace.

  Surely that would fail. The Communists had lost an aircraft carrier and countless men. The storm would multiply the damage done to their ships. They would want revenge.

  The Indians too would fight. They understood this battle was about their survival. If the Chinese and their Islamic allies were not stopped, the Hindus would be crushed.

  Chen Lo Fann stood on the bridge as the storm lashed against the lass and rocked the long boat mercilessly. He had always understood that, as necessary as they were, the Americans were not, at heart, their brothers. When their interests did not coincide, they would betray his country—as Nixon had shown a generation earlier, bringing the criminals into the UN.

  Lao Tze had spoken of this.

  The god of heaven and earth show no pity. Straw dogs are forever trampled.

  Now, his government was making him the straw dog. He needed leverage.

  The American Megafortress had been shot down; undoubtedly its crew was dead. Americans were charmingly emotional about remains; a body or two, handled with the proper military honors. Even an arm or leg. Such could be found and prepared if the authentic article were not available.

  Two of his ships were in the area. As soon as the storm abated, they would begin the search. After a short interval, they would find what they were looking for, one way or another.

  Meanwhile, he would sail for Taiwan, as ordered.

  Or perhaps not.

  Aboard Iowa

  August 29, 1997, 1036 local (August 28, 1997, 1936 Dreamland)

  “Not there, Jen,” Zen told her.

  “I’m working on it.”

  Jennifer jammed the function keys on her IBM laptop, trying to get the requested program data to reload, Zen tapped anxiously on the small ledge below his flight controls. He was usually very good at corralling his frustration—to survive as a test pilot you had to—but today he was starting to fray.

  Of course he was. If it was Tecumseh instead of Breanna down there, she’d be twenty times worse.

  This ought to work—the program simply needed to know what frequency to try, that was all it needed, and she had it right on the screen.

  It had accepted the array—she knew it had because when she looked at her dump of the variables, they were all filled.

  So what the hell was the screwup?

  Shit damn fuck and shit again.

  “Dreamland Command—hey, Ray,” she said, banging her mile button on. “What the hell could be locking me out?”

  “The list is exhaustive,” replied the scientist.

  “Yeah, but what the hell could be locking me out?”

  “You’re not being locked out,” he said. “The connection gets made. The handoff just isn’t completed.”

  She picked up one of the two small laptops from the floor of the plane, sitting it over the big IMBer in her lap. It was wired into the circuit and set to show the results of the coding inquiries. Data was definitely flowing back and forth; something was keeping it from feeding into the Flighthawk control system.

  The security protocols of C³ maybe? The system had a whole series of protocols and traps to keep out invaders. Even though the UMB plug-ins were being recognized as “native,” it was possible that, somewhere along the way, they weren’t kicking over the right flag.

  She’d put them in after C³ was up. Maybe if she started from scratch.

  Right?

  Maybe.

  But, God, that would take forever.

  Kill the Flighthawk. They wouldn’t use it anyway, right?

  That would save shitloads of time.

  “Jeff, I’m going to try something, but to do it, I have to knock the Flighthawks off-line. You won’t be able to launch it.”

  “Do it.”

  “I guess I should check with Major Alou in case, you knot, it interferes with her mission.”

  “Just do it.”

  She guessed he’d be angry, but she went ahead and talked to Alou anyway.

  “We won’t need the Flighthawk,” Alou told her. “Go ahead.”

  “We’re doing an adequate job from here,” said Rubeo when she told him what she had in mind. “We’re already over the Pacific.”

  “I think this might work.”

  “You still have to take the computer off-line, enter new code, then reboot it. Twenty minutes from now, you’ll still be in diagnostic mode.”

  “I’ll skip the test.”

  “How will you know you load right?”

  “It’ll work or it won’t. If it doesn’t, what have I lost?”

  She found an error in one of the vector lines before taking the system down. She fixed it, then began the lengthy-procedure.

  “Want a soda?” Zen asked, pulling his helmet.

  “Love one, but—”

  “I got it,” he said. he undid his restraints, pulled over his wheelchair—it was custom-strapped nearby—and then maneuvered himself into it. She’d seen him do this before, but never in the air. He looked awkward, vulnerable.

  Would she have the guts to do that if she’d been paralyzed?

  “We got Pepsi, Pepsi, and more Pepsi. All diet. Which do you want? Asked Zen.

  “Pepsi.”

  “Good choice.”

  Ten minute later, C³ gave her a series of beeps—at one point she’d wanted the program in “Yankee Doodle” as the “I’m up” signal, but Rubeo had insisted—and then filled the screens with its wake-up test pattern.

  Two minutes later, Zen shouted so loud she didn’t need the interphone.

  “I’m in. I’m there. I have a view.” He worked the keyboard in front of the joystick. “Wow. All right. This is going to work. I can select the still camera, and I have a synthesized radar. At least that’s what it says.”

  She glanced over and saw his hand working the joystick. “Woo—this is good.”

  “Magnification on mini-KH Eye?” asked Jennifer. She couldn’t dupe the optical feed on her screen yet—she had to get the feedback through Dreamland’s circuit—but she didn’t have a control window with the raw numbers showing whether it was focused.

  Rubeo was cursing over the Dreamland circuit, using words she’d never heard from his mouth before.

  “Ray?”

  “I’ve lost the visual feed, the synthetic radar, everything. Damn it, we’re blind here.”

  “I can see,” said Zen.

  “Well, we can’t,” insisted Rubeo. “Jennifer, kill the program now.”

  “Hold on,” said Colonel Bastian over the circuit. “Major Stockard, do you have control of the aircraft?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can override it here,” said Rubeo.

  “Jeff, we’ll back you up, but you’re the one I want on the line.”

  “Colonel, I don’t believe that’s necessary,” said Rubeo.

  “I want a pilot in the plane,” said Colonel Bastian. Jennifer recognized the words—they were the Colonel’s mantra in his debates with Rubeo over the future of air warfare.

  “He’s not in the plane,” said Rubeo.

  “Close enough,” said Dog.

  Somewhere in the South China Sea

  Time and date unknown

  The blur coalesced into lumps of reality, like the precipitate in a test-tube solution. The lumps had shiny edges, crystalline pieces—her head pounding in her helmet, a body pulling off the side of the raft, the waves turning from black to an opaque green.

  Breanna’s flight suit felt both sodden and stiff. She pushed her hands down, felt the ocean giving way beneath her—she was on a raft, a survival raft.

  They were in the ocean. The storm w
as passing beyond them.

  Were they alive?

  Slowly, she reached to take off her helmet. Her fingers groped for several seconds before she realized she’d pulled it off earlier.

  Breanna managed to sit up. The air felt like salt in her lungs, but she breathed deeply anyway.

  Chris Ferris lay curled against the sides of the raft. She leaned toward him, felt something heavy fall against her back—Stoner was sprawled against her, legs trailing into the water.

  She pulled at Stoner’s thigh, trying to haul them up over the side. She got one, but not the other, finally decided that would have to do.

  A PRC-90 emergency radio lay beneath Stoner’s calf. As Breanna reached for it, she felt something spring in her back, a muscle tearing. Pain shot from her spine to her fingers, but she managed to pick up the radio. She stared at it, her eyes barely focusing. It took a moment to remember how to use voice—even though it was only a matter of turning a small, well-marked switch—then held it to her head.

  “Captain Breanna Stockard of Dreamland Quicksilver looking for any aircraft,” she said. “Looking for any aircraft—any ship. We’re on the ocean.”

  She let go of the talk button, listening for an answer. There wasn’t even static.

  The earphone?

  Long gone. Was there even one?

  A Walkman she’d had as a child.

  Breanna held the PRC-90 down in her hand, staring at the controls, trying to make the radio into a familiar thing. On the right side there was a small dial switch, with the setting marked by a very obvious white arrow. There were only four settings; the top, a voice channel, was clearly selected. The volume slider, at the opposite side of the face, was at the top.

  Madonna was singing. She was twelve.

  Snoop Doggy Dog. Her very first boyfriend liked that.

  Breanna broadcast again. Nothing.

  Switching to the bottom voice channel, she tried again. This time too she heard nothing.

  Shouldn’t she hear static at least?

  The spins—they’d listen for her at a specific time

  The hour on the hour or five past or ten past or twelve and a half past?

  She couldn’t remember when she was supposed to broadcast. She couldn’t think. The salt had gotten into her brain and screwed it up.