by Paul Bishop
It was a close-knit group making up his three flights of four and he hated to foul up something that worked. He had no idea how Jen would react under pressure, and it frustrated him to drop one of his veterans for the rookie spy—no matter how gorgeous she was.
Especially during a Condition One emergency.
He pulled the fluorescent green flight suit over his heat shield and tapped the control panel at his breast pocket twice to activate the armor.
“Sorry, boss—didn’t get that last. Digital interference.”
While he stalled her, he checked the tech on his spinner through the wireless. All the indicators turned positive. He switched channels to talk to his right-hand beacon.
“Dakota Tam, you old boozehound,” he said to the screen. “How’s about you and me take the girls out for a night on the continent? We have ten mph winds, a minus twenty-five windchill, soft rime on the punkins and a swarm of flying spiders who don’t want to honor the Treaty System of 1961.”
“Sounds like a shit-hot good time,” Dak responded. “I’ll bring the fire.” Slade nodded and imagined the tall, blonde Nebraska girl slipping into her mesh, strapping on the green, and donning the same basic armor he was. But because Dakota was chief gunner and sported most of the fire-power, it always took her a few extra minutes to suit up.
“I’m only checking in,” he said. “Rime Ice-One blows in one hundred and eighty seconds. Are you good?”
“Good,” she confirmed.
He logged off and followed up with the other spinner hacks on his flight while the computer imaging armorer went to work weaving his suit.
“Joachim. Simpson.” Check.
He followed the same procedure with the lead pilots of RI-Two and RI-Three.
The armor formed around him in layers, a fresh suit geared to the current environmental conditions—both outside and inside his body. “Your blood sugar’s low,” said Lin Wu. “Did you have breakfast?”
“I’ll grab something in the air,” he replied quickly.
He flexed inside the carbon alloy glass suit—ten times stronger than any other substance known to humanity but as malleable as the lightest polymer.
Was the material the result of a thousand years of man’s ingenuity, or was it also something borrowed from another time and place?
Had it been gained through human trial and error? Through countless refinements and innovations? Or was it something gained from the alien projectile that soared in from Jupiter’s orbit a decade before? Was the glass armor that protected him and interfaced with his ship a weird product of the strange glowing goo retrieved from the missile all those years before?
Like so many recent innovations, it was hard to determine what came from humans and what came from the Biodome.
“We gonna do safety run-through at one minute?” Tylor asked over the link.
Slade checked the time and ran through the familiar routine in his head, the rundown the wing performed in practice every few days at the start of a drill—WDWGF—an acronym that reminded them to cover all bases.
Wake—Green.
Directive—Green.
Wing—Green.
Guns—Green.
Fly—Green.
He repeated the mantra to himself.
WDWGF... Why do we give a Fuck?
Slade knew the answer to that. Because if all the winged spiders and ticks and scorpions ever reached the warmer latitudes, humanity could kiss itself goodbye.
So far, they had only attacked the base. Of course, only didn’t count for much when it wasn’t only your neck on the line.
The steady wash of light in his chamber went from purple to red.
“Safety run-through at one minute, Dak,” he said.
“One minute, aye,” she responded.
A new light reignited the wrist screen. “I’m in, Colonel,” Jen told him.
“No go, Jen. I don’t want you up there. There are too many unknowns.”
“You know I’m qualified.”
“That’s not the point, Commander. We’ve never had a Condition One in winter dark. Hell, we’ve never seen this many bugs coming over the shelf, period. How would it look back home if our bright new executive is fragged during her first tour?”
“I don’t care how it looks,” she countered. “I’m suited up and Lin Wu’s got a spinner fueled and ready for me on the sheet.”
“I’ll have to talk to her about that. You didn’t override her code?” he demanded.
He was only half-joking.
“Are you accusing me of sabotage, Colonel Slade?” Not only did Jen’s tone of voice tell him she wasn’t amused, it spoke of command protocols and harsh legalities that no one had time for. Reprogramming an AI carried harsh penalties and was something even he should’ve known better than to joke around about.
Slade counted to five and took a deep breath. “Fine. If you want to rush the gates of Valhalla, you know I can’t stop you,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“But up in the sky, I’m in charge,” he insisted. “It’s my squadron, Jennifer.”
To her credit, there wasn’t even a pause.
“Understood.”
Reluctantly, he tapped his arm panel. “Joachim, stand down. Commander Morocco will fill your slot in the flight.”
“Okay, Slade,” the man agreed. “Godspeed, gang.”
“One minute to launch,” Slade advised. “On my mark.”
From the outside, when the spinners were lined up on the sheet—something no one there had seen since the onset of the polar night—they looked like American F-86 Sabers, the early jet engine powered fighters used over the Korean peninsula. Of course, the spinners balanced upright on their tails rather than resting on their landing gear like the F-86s. Elevated into the cabin with smooth magnetics, Slade hovered in the glowing blue cylinder, a blinking, squawking, buzzing cousin of his dressing room. He jacked his suit into the ship with direct fiber-optics, made sure he was still online with Lin Wu’s resident bio-unit, and counted twenty tics from launch.
“Bio-unit alive and healthy,” said Lin Wu.
“Do you feel as cheerful as you sound?” he asked.
“Naturally,” she replied. The topic of whether custom-built piles of neurons floating in micro-thin films of protoplasm could feel true emotion was the stuff of endless debate and a century of speculative fiction. In the end, they only had the AI’s word for it.
“That’s good enough for me. Five…four…three…”
During the last seconds before launch, he always thought about summer and hot desert sands.
The spinner went red around him and he was airborne in an instant. The ship’s fuselage whirled around him, the solid cement and steel of Endurance Base now tens of thousands of feet below. Gravity-damping waves made the launch less physically strenuous than climbing into the suit, and he pictured the squad’s badminton birdie logo twirling toward the stars.
Above him, the cosmic panorama opened above like nowhere else on earth, a billion billion suns and all their planetary systems. Lin Wu calculated his vector-based on global positioning satellites, but the squadron leader still preferred to take his own readings from a visual assessment of the sky. The spinal column of the Milky Way was his guidepost and the stars his waypoints of twinkling light.
The VR screen inside his helmet confirmed that all twelve ships were in the sky.
He blinked twice in rapid succession, and a new screen displayed to feed him altitude, range, wind speed, air pressure, and a dozen other indicators.
“Looking good, Rime Ice,” he said. “Lin Wu, give me coordinates for the bugs and keep me posted audibly.” He switched to a wide visual of the outside environment. A light sleet struck the windscreen as they rose. It was like careening through a tunnel loaded with fireflies.
“I have an orange light on my rear magnetic disruptor,” Simpson said.
“I see it.” Slade tapped into his number four board. “Compensate with a forward ion slush.”
>
“Done. That fixed it.” The other pilot’s indicator blinked green.
As the atmosphere thinned, the revolving curvature of the earth dropped under them, an open vista of blue with twists of green and gold and floating spirals of purest white. Through his port window, Slade saw Simpson and Jen twirl in formation. Out the starboard hatch was Dak.
“RI-One is eight kilometers up,” he said. “Welcome to the stratosphere, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Atmosphere, green. Pressure, green. Magnetics, green,” said the AI.
“Thanks, Lin Wu.” He queried logistic pads in his gloves that answered with a visual scan in all directions. He counted eleven blips against the indigo bands leading into space.
He addressed the squadron informally. “Is everyone okay?”
“Roger, dodger,” Dak responded cheerfully. “Let’s go swat bugs.”
Slade checked his earpiece, then called up a diagnostic. “Jen, you have a blue light on your magnetic field.”
“Blue, affirmative,” she confirmed. “I see it too. It’s probably an atmosphere bubble.”
“Probably. But keep an eye on it. If it goes orange, abort and return to Endurance Base.”
“We’ll be fine,” she assured him.
“I’m counting on it.” He punched up the magnets and held a joystick in each hand. “Rime Ice-One on point. Like the lady said, let’s go swat bugs.”
They swooped in a V-shaped formation with deadly, practiced precision, Slade and Dak side by side with Jen and Simpson following in spinners three and four respectively. Above Simpson, the four ships of Rime Ice-Two flight took an identical position. Rime Ice-Three’s quartet was above Jen. Slade bounced a test beam off Mount Vinson at sixteen thousand, five hundred feet as a reference point and primed his disruptors.
Positioned horizontally and falling headfirst to earth, he thought about clips he’d seen from the old days where UN Saberjets took on their MiG-15 opponents in early dogfights. With three-sixty spherical sensor arrays, high def night vision, and energy-acceleration retention far greater than anything those warhorses could imagine, Rime Ice confronted an enemy directly out of that era’s Saturday monster matinees.
“Happy Monday, you bastards,” Slade said as the blue-black vermin swarmed onto his monitor and a thirty-foot-long scorpion with pterodactyl wings veered up from the glacier side of the mountain.
He didn’t wait for Lin Wu to lock the beast into the target cross-hairs and pressed the trigger of his cannon to stitch a belt of magnetic distress through the bug that forced it to buckle and spin toward the snow.
“Wake ʼem up with a few magnetic disruptor bursts,” he told his team. “Your discretion.”
“Gotcha boss. MDBs,” Dak confirmed, and the purple trace of disruption fire struck the swarm when she triggered the flow. Bright flashes against the dark, like starbursts, signaled the burning ozone that would dissuade the colony’s advance. “The bugs are falling back,” she said.
Three summers before, the first arachnids had savagely announced themselves by infecting an unwary New Zealand research crew. Seven of them died from the resulting bites and stings and the first most pressing question was what to do about them.
They weren’t too abnormal in those days, hardly bigger than their higher-latitude kin but obviously stronger. While they seemed impervious to cold, they were, as Jen had suggested, never visible when the mercury fell past ten below zero on the Fahrenheit scale.
But there was still the question—what should be done?
And like everything involving Antarctica, it involved sixty nations and sixty thousand opinions, each one of those righter than the last.
For more than four billion years, the continent had been a world unto itself. Forty-two million square miles of frozen desert with foundations of volcanic rock. Devoid of soil, vegetation, and native wildlife, the only terrestrial animal that could truly call the frozen world home was the flightless midge fly, roughly three millimeters long. The scattered tribes of humanity who finally began to creep down in the name of science and exploration weren’t interested in pest control.
To the credit of those early pioneers, they actually tried to get things right for a change.
The treaties in place at the time said in the Antarctic, you literally couldn’t hurt a fly.
Seven years before—an eternity—there were barely six thousand people resident on the Antarctic ice during the summer months of October to February, and fewer than nine hundred stayed for the long, dark winter.
Now, since the advent of the arachnids, Endurance Base alone housed three thousand year-round soldier-scientists, their focus divided between past and future. Where had the bugs come from and what would we do about them?
The one thing everyone agreed on—and it set Slade’s teeth on edge—was that they shouldn’t be killed. Despite their best efforts to kill humanity, of course.
The magnetic disrupters on the spinners were designed to do exactly that—disrupt. He was allowed to herd the swarms, corral the swarms, and break the swarms apart.
But he was prohibited from what he wanted to do most—blow ʼem out of the sky with fire and extreme prejudice.
“Keep scattering the swarm,” he said and activated his own disruptors as he flung the ship back and into a barrel roll that ended over a floating mass of eight slick, gyrating arms.
He pitched a stinging wave of magnetic pulses toward the puffy scaled abdomen, and the six-eyed sander’s leathery wings flattened into a spin that sent the ʼnid toward a snowy chasm.
The spider glowed gold, then white, and faded unexpectedly from view.
Slade surged into the maelstrom. “Where’d you go, buddy?” he said and tapped the short-term sensor app. Suddenly, the spider was in front of him, and he banked the spinner hard to the right, grazed the snowpack, and traced a neat circle around the beast.
His expression tense, he piloted the ship straight up and flipped it end over end as he fired disruptors into the snow in the hope that he could bury the spider under it. But again, the monster was gone.
“That’s a new one,” he said aloud.
“What’s up, skipper?” said Simpson.
“Will-o’-the-wisps,” Slade said. “Phantom spiders. They’re there, then they’re not.”
“Share some of that locoweed with the rest of us, Slade.” Dak chuckled.
“Rime Ice-Three reports ghosts on the periphery,” Jen said.
They used to be called gremlins, he thought. And they used to gum the equipment up.
“Lin Wu, run a sensor diagnostic,” he said.
“Run complete. All systems functioning within normal parameters.”
“Which means mother nature has something new up her sleeve,” he said acidly.
“I wish she’d tell us about it first,” Dak responded.
“Mother nature’s not your friend,” Jen said, “and she never has been.”
“Continue with the bottom tier of the swarm.” He targeted a brown recluse the size of a pickup truck. “Drive them toward the chasm.”
“RI-Two reports bugs are changing course,” Simpson advised and fed him the satellite data.
“Give me good news, hippy,” Slade quipped.
“Heading away from Endurance Base,” the man replied. “Peace and love, brother.”
“Got any bad news?”
“Hell, yeah. They’re heading for us.”
“They know we’re here,” Jen muttered.
“Holy Christ, lookit their airspeed,” said Dak.
“Lin Wu, clarify bug telemetry,” Slade said as the air exploded around him. “This can’t be right.”
He struggled to keep his ship aloft in the gut-wrenching shockwaves.
“Bugs are now transonic,” the AI informed him.
Flying faster than the speed of sound.
But that was impossible!
2
The spider’s shockwave hurled Slade’s spinner across the Antarctic sheet in the direction of Mt. Erebus, o
ff-course and alone.
At least he thought it was a spider. He’d have to check his wing cams later.
If there was a later.
The ship was like a tin can kicked across the surface of the moon. It tumbled over and over and he pounded at the frozen controls in an effort to logically assess which of the systems were affected by the shockwave. All the while, he wondered desperately why in hell the redundancy systems hadn’t snapped on.
During two years on the international base, he’d learned to curse in five different languages. None of the words did any good.
“Lin Wu, release the suit and override Alchemy Tango,” he said.
Utter silence was the only response.
“Lin Wu?”
Oh, Christ. This was terrific. Outside, without night vision enabled, the world was an empty black void.
He had no choice but to turn off half the automatic life control systems and reboot. No Bible-thumper he, Slade prayed anyway. He hoped he didn’t have to reignite the magnets.
With the armor unhitched from the cabin walls, he could move around more freely and access control panels he wouldn’t normally need to touch. That was the sum total of the good part.
Within fifteen seconds, the gravity damps would quit and he’d be tossed around the interior of the cylinder like macaroni in a blender.
That was the bad part.
Slade manually tapped the navigation charts to life and let the gyro system cycle through. He caught a fringe satellite beacon on an amateur frequency and strapped in with three seconds to spare.
“Hey, Spinner,” a female voice said, not unlike Lin Wu. “Idee you’self?”
He grinned but didn’t have time to make idle chatter with civilian AIs from half a world away. “Some other time, but thanks for the lift,” he said, cut the connection, and re-engaged the Rime Ice orbiters.
“Suit re-engaged,” he said, and the black image on his viewscreen was divided in two with starry night above and white snow beneath. He soared over the tundra, straight and true.
At last, he had control again.
“But that was too close,” he said out loud.
“Agreed,” Lin Wu said.
