by Dale Brown
Zen slid his speed back and ducked the Flighthawk’s wing, gliding toward the designated airspace like an eagle checking the crags for a new aerie. He’d grown so used to flying the Flighthawk with his control helmet that handling it with the screens felt a little like backseat driving.
He pushed the Flighthawk into a rough trail on the drone, setting his speed precisely to the drone’s at 280 knots. All Fentress had to do now was nudge the slider on his throttle bar, located on the underside of the all-control stick, and wait for the “hit me” sign from the computer.
“All yours, Curly,” he said, punching his hot switch again to give control back.
His student hunkered down in his seat, pushing forward against the restraints as he concentrated. Zen watched the targeting screen count down as Fentress closed on the drone in a rear-quarter attack. The pilot pressed the trigger the second C3 cued him to fire.
And he’d been doing so well.
“I told you, the computer is almost always optimistic from the rear,” Zen told Fentress as the bullets trailed downward toward the empty desert. Oblivious, the Phantom began its turn, taking it outside the target cone.
“Count three before you fire.”
Firing the cannon — an M61 from an F-16 modified to fit the robot plane — killed some of the U/MF’s momentum, and Fentress struggled to get back into position. Finally he dropped his speed to the point where Zen worried the Phantom would lap him. Gradually, Fentress pulled himself toward the F-4’s tail. After nearly a half hour of nudging, he finally got the fire cue, waited this time, and then fired — only to see his target tuck its wing and disappear.
Not completely. It zipped up behind him as the Flighthawk’s RWR blared and nailed him from the back.
“Bang, bang, you’re dead,” said Zen, who had overrid-den the controls.
“That’s not fair,” said Fentress.
“Damn straight. Let’s try the whole deal again. Try and close a little faster, okay? We have to land while it’s still daylight.”
Chapter 6
Megafortress Project Office
Megafortress Bunker, Dreamland
1745
Captain Breanna “Rap” Stockard folded her fingers into tight fists behind her back, controlling her anger as she waited for Major Nancy Cheshire to answer her question.
“I’m not saying you’re not fit for duty,” said Cheshire.
“What I’m saying is, you have to follow regulations like everyone else.”
“I’ve had my physical exam already,” said Breanna.
“I’m completely healed. What? You think I can’t fly? I’m rusty?”
“You have to follow procedures like everyone else on this base,” insisted Cheshire. “That means ten hours as copilot, and then a reevaluation.”
“And I can’t take Galatica.”
“Galatica is not cleared beyond the stage three static tests,” said Cheshire.
“Sure it is.”
“No, Breanna, the repairs covered more than forty percent of the airframe, and that’s not even counting what they’ve added. Rules are rules — that plane has a long way to go. They haven’t even painted the nose, and the radar hasn’t been replaced. Don’t worry — I’ll take good care of it.”
“The rules are bullshit,” said Breanna, pushing her fingers together. “That’s my plane.”
“The planes don’t belong to anyone, Breanna.”
“You’re only being a bitch to me because I’m a woman.
If it were Chris or Jerry, you’d cut them some slack.”
Breanna caught her breath, realizing what she’d said.
Major Cheshire didn’t react at all, which made Breanna feel even worse.
“You have a flight at 0500,” said Cheshire. “I would expect you might want to get some sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Cheshire started to turn away. Breanna caught her sleeve. “I’m sorry, Nancy. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t.”
Cheshire nodded almost imperceptibly, then turned and walked from the simulator walkway.
Breanna hadn’t flown since crash-landing a Megafortress several weeks before. Her actions had won her an Air Force Cross — and a stay in the hospital for multiple injuries. But she’d just blown away the standard Megafortress simulations, proving she was fit to return to full duty.
In time, Breanna thought, to take Galatica up tomorrow for its first flight test after being repaired. She’d even be willing to take second seat if it meant flying her plane again.
Not that the planes belonged to anyone, exactly.
“Problem there, Captain?”
Breanna jerked around to find Clyde “Greasy Hands”
Parsons standing with a canvas tool bag a few feet from the ramp.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Ah, don’t let ’er get your goat, Captain. She’s always going around like she just stuck her butt in a power socket.” Parsons put his bag down and pulled a small tobacco tin from his pocket. He continued to speak as he wadded a tobacco plug into the side of his mouth. “She’s always looking to give someone a hard time’s all.”
“She’s doing her job, Chief,” said Breanna sharply.
Had she said that to any other chief master sergeant in the Air Force, the chief master sergeant would have snapped erect and walked on, undoubtedly cursing her under his breath. But Parsons and Breanna had been through a great deal together, and in fact the gray-haired chief liked to claim he’d been in the delivery room and pulled Breanna out from her mother’s womb.
An exaggeration, though not by much.
“You’re taking it all a bit hard, Bree,” said Greasy Hands gently. “Truth is, a lot of guys banged up like you were would take six months getting back, maybe more.”
“I wasn’t banged up.”
Banged up was what happened to her husband, a year and a half ago. That accident had cost him his legs — but not his career.
“You’re as stubborn as your old man. A real bee whacker,” said Greasy Hands, not without admiration. He started chewing his tobacco very deliberately.
“That’s a disgusting habit,” Breanna told him.
“Pretty much its main attraction.”
Breanna laughed as a small bit of tobacco juice drib-bled from his mouth.
“You’ll have a good flight tomorrow in Fort Two,” he said. “Garcia’s going along for the ride.”
“Oh no, not the Dylan freak!”
More tobacco squirted from Parsons’s mouth as he smirked. Garcia was one of Parsons’s best technical people, a whiz at both electrical and mechanical systems; supposedly he had once reassembled two turbofans blind-folded. But the staff sergeant was also an insufferable Dylan freak who saw fit to quote the master at every turn.
“Your dad wants everyone on the base to fly at least once a month. Garcia’s up,” said Parsons. “I told him not to touch nothin’ or you’d whack his fingers.”
“You did that on purpose,” Breanna told him. “You know I can’t stand Dylan.”
“Me? Never.”
Chapter 7
Aboard Raven , over Dreamland Range 2
1620
If the macho world of fighter jocks was ever compared to a high school football team, Kevin Fentress would be the water boy. Maybe not even that. The short, skinny kid was also painfully shy, and hadn’t been the type to join teams or clubs in high school. In fact, most of his classmates would have been surprised to find he had gone to an Army recruiter one warm day toward the end of his junior year. Intelligent and very good with math, Fentress was hoping for a way to fund a college education. The recruiter spoke to him for a half hour before Fentress finally volunteered that his true wish was to fly aircraft. After a slight hesitation — and undoubtedly observing that the would-be recruit weighed less than an Al-ice pack — the soldier dutifully directed the young man to an Air Force sergeant down the hall. Fentress surprised the skeptical recruiter by blowing away not one, but three different aptitude tests. He eventually found
his way into an ROTC program with high hopes of becoming a pilot.
He hadn’t, though, for a variety of reasons both complicated and uncomplicated. His tangled path through engineering and into robotics made sense if one kept in mind two things: the original aptitude scores, and the fact that in his whole history with the Air Force, Fentress had never expressed his personal wishes or desires to any superior officer. He had never questioned any order, let alone assignment, no matter how trivial. That alone meant he would never be a fighter jock — pilots seemed to have been bred to view orders not given under fire as optional requests.
Which did not mean that Fentress didn’t have personal wishes or desires. At the moment his dearest wish was to show his boss, Major Zen Stockard, that his selection as a pilot on the U/MF program — and the only pilot in the program besides Stockard — wasn’t a huge mistake.
“One last thing, Curly,” Zen said to him. “You have to always, always, always stay in the proper test range.” He clicked off the video replay of the test mission.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re not flying a Global Hawk or a Predator,” added Zen, mentioning two other projects Fentress had worked on. “This is real stuff.”
“Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”
“Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry.”
Fentress tried to bite the words back. Major Stockard embodied everything he’d once dreamed of becoming — he was a bona fide member of the Right Stuff gang, an F-15 jock who’d shot down an Iraqi jet during the Gulf War. Testing the Flighthawks, he’d survived a hellacious accident that had cost him the use of his legs. Though confined to a wheelchair, he had won his way back to active duty. Not only did he head the Flighthawk program, but he had seen action over Somalia and Brazil.
“We try again tomorrow,” added Zen, his voice still harsh.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do better. I promise. I can do better.”
“I suggest you hit the simulator.”
“I will. The whole night,” said Fentress.
“Not the whole fucking night, Curly. Get some sleep.”
“Yes, sir,” said Fentress. “I will.”
The major wheeled himself away, shaking his head.
Chapter 8
Dreamland
1800
“Some of the D boys were praying, I swear to god.” Danny laughed so hard he nearly dropped the phone. His wife Jemma made a little coughing sound in acknowledgment. He knew from experience that it meant she wanted to change the subject, but he was having too good a time to stop.
“You shoulda seen Russ, the helo pilot, when we landed. White as a ghost. And he’s blacker than me,” added Danny. He stretched back on his plush but very worn gold chair so his head touched the bookcase. “And Peiler. Shit.”
“Peiler is which?”
“Major running the Delta Force squad we just finished the exercises with. Smug son of a bitch is going home with his tail between his legs. Top dogs, huh? We whomped ’em!”
“I can’t keep track of all these names,” said Jemma.
Her tone was absent, distant — further away than the nearly three thousand miles between them.
“So what’d you do today?” asked Danny, finally taking her hints.
“As a matter of fact, I had lunch with James Stephens.”
Her voice changed dramatically; suddenly she was all perky and enthusiastic. “You remember him? He worked for Al D’Amato and George Pataki.”
Big-time New York state politicians — D’Amato a senator and Pataki the governor. Jemma was a black studies professor at NYU and heavily involved in politics; she was always dropping names of big shots.
“They’re Republicans,” she added. “Conservative Republicans.”
“And?”
“Jim Stephens is a good man to know,” she said. “He believes African-Americans need to be more involved.
And it’s a good time. A time when things can be done.”
“Yeah? So when are you running?” Danny asked, reaching for his drink on the table — lime-flavored seltzer.
“Not me. You,” she said sharply. “War hero. Conservative. Man of color.”
“Who says?” said Danny.
“You’re conservative.”
“Who says I’m a war hero?” He didn’t necessarily consider himself conservative, either. Nor liberal, for that matter.
Hell, he wasn’t even comfortable with “man of color.”
“Come on, Daniel. Give yourself some credit. You would be an excellent congressman. From there, who knows?”
Danny rolled his eyes but said nothing. They’d had conversations along this line two or three times before. At some point he thought he might want to work for or in the government somehow; a lot of service guys ended up there. But as far as politics was concerned, he didn’t think he could manage the bullshitting.
“I want you to talk to him,” said Jemma. “I gave him your phone number.”
“What?”
“The general line, routed through Edwards,” said Jemma quickly. “Don’t worry. I was vague on your assignment, as per instructions.”
“Jem, I really don’t want—”
“You can’t stay in the Air Force forever, Danny. You have to think about your future.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, now — you have to think about us.”
“I do think about us,” he said, and had an impulse to throw down the phone, grab a flight to New York, race to the small apartment she rented near campus, and throw himself on top of her.
Not that that would solve anything. It’d feel good, though.
“You have responsibilities,” she said, back in her professor’s voice. “Responsibilities to our people.”
Jemma really did believe in cultural and societal responsibility, but generally when she started talking about it, she was skirting some issue between them.
“I miss you a lot,” he told her.
“Me too,” she said. “I saw little Robert today.”
“How are they?” Danny tried not to let the wince get into his voice. Little Robert was the cuter-than-hell two-year-old son of a friend of theirs who lived near Jemma.
His father had served with Danny in the Air Force, leaving to take a job in the city as an investigator for the SEC.
“They’re great. He called me Auntie,” she said. “I like it.”
“You feeling those urges, Jem?”
“What? For a kid? No way. No way.”
They talked for a while more. When Jemma brought up Stephens again, he agreed to at least talk to him.
“Don’t go back on your word,” she said. “I’ll know.”
“All right, baby, I won’t.” As he hung up the phone, the urge to go to her was so strong that he got up and decided to hit the gym before dinner.
Chapter 9
Melcross, Nevada (outside Las Vegas) 1900
The restaurant advertised itself as handicapped accessible, but like most places, the advertisement fell far short of the reality. The first barrier was a two-inch rise at the curb from the parking lot — not a great deal, certainly, and not the biggest bump Zen Stockard had even faced that day, but it was an annoying precursor of what lay ahead. The front entrance sat behind three very high and shallow steps; Zen had to wait outside as his wife went in to ask that the side door be unlocked. That was at the end of a tight ramp, and Jeff had to maneuver through the door and into the narrow hall with a series of pirouette re-versals that would have been difficult for a ballerina, let alone a man in a wheelchair. Getting into the dining room involved passing through the kitchen; Zen was almost smacked in the face by a waitress carrying a tray full of fancy spaghetti. On a different day, he might have laughed it off with a joke about not wanting his calamari in his lap, but tonight he was in a foul mood and just barely managed not to complain when the kitchen door smacked up against his rear wheel as he passed onto the thick carpet of the eating area.
&n
bsp; It was no wonder many disabled people thought A.B.’s — the abbreviation stood for “able bodied” and was not necessarily benign — had it in for them. It wasn’t a matter of being different; that was something you could accept, or at least view as a necessary condition. It was more the smiley stares that accompanied the bumps and turns, the “look at all I’ve done for you and you’re still bitchin’ at me?” attitudes.
“We’d like a better table,” said Zen as the maitre d’showed them to a small, dim spot at the back, basically hiding them from the rest of the clientele.
“Jeff—”
“How about that one,” Zen said, pointing toward the front of the room.
It was a challenge, and the maitre d’ knew it. But give the man credit — despite his frown, he led them there.
“You really want to sit up here?” Breanna asked. “It’s going to be right in a draft.”
“I like drafts,” said Zen.
“And I thought I was in a bad mood.”
“I’m just hungry.” He took the menu.
“Wine?” Breanna asked.
“Beer.”
“I doubt they have anything you like,” she said, glancing around the fancy Italian restaurant.
Her prediction proved incorrect, as there were several relatively good brews on tap, including the Anchor Steam that Zen opted for. But even that failed to lift his mood.
“Happy anniversary,” said Breanna, holding up her glass — a reserve Chianti from Antinori that she pro-nounced “perfect.”
“Anniversary of our first date,” said Zen, clicking the glass gently. “If it was really a date.”
“A date is a date is a date. Boy, you are in a bad mood,”
said his wife. She took a long sip from her glass. “I should have ordered a whole bottle.”
“Hmmph.”
“Fentress did bad today, huh?”
“He’s lucky I don’t wash him out.”
“Oh, come on, I saw him fly yesterday. He wasn’t that bad.”
Zen took up his menu, trying to decide between the gnocchi with pesto or one of the ten thousand spaghetti choices.
