Death Dream

by Ben Bova

  DEATH DREAM

  BY

  BEN BOVA

  Copyright @ 1994 Ben Bova

  First published in l994 by Bantam Books

  First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Hodder and Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline pLC

  A New English Library paperback

  The right of Ben Bova to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and patents Act 19gg.

  ISBN 0 450 58881 5

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-908-1

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  To the "loose cannon" who is my life dream.

  And to Jennifer and Lou, for eight-hundred-some reasons.

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n

  —John Milton

  Paradise Lost

  When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. This is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Virtual Reality. Just who coined the phrase is uncertain. It has also been called "alternative reality" and "cyberspace." Virtual reality has become the catchword, the title that is most generally used to describe a computer-produced environment in which you can experience a complete electronically induced "hallucination."

  —Ben Bova

  CHAPTER 1

  "A pair of bandits, Daddy. Five o'clock high."

  Jerry Adair was startled by his daughter's voice. The sons of bitches sure know how to get my attention. Using my daughter's voice. The dirty pissing bastards.

  He pulled back on the pistol-grip side stick and felt his F-22 jet fighter tilt upward into a steep climb. His right forearm rested comfortably in the cradle that protected it against the crushing g-forces that would punish him in a real flight. The F-22 could pull nine g's when it was going balls-out; no human pilot could handle an ordinary up-from-the-floor, between-the-knees control stick under that kind of acceleration load. The side sticks and arm cradles were the only way to get the job done.

  With the thumb of his left hand he nudged the throttle control knob and felt himself pushed deeper into his padded seat from the increasing acceleration. He knew it was actually the seat deflating, but damn it felt real. His back even throbbed slightly where the vertebrae had been cracked years earlier in that wheels-up landing he had made in Saudi Arabia. Should never have told the bastards about that, he grumbled to himself. They use every goddamned thing against you.

  Barely vocalizing the words, he murmured, "Panoramic view." His Agile Eye IV helmet visor lit up and he saw his own fighter as a bright yellow swept-wing symbol in the center of the universe, its nose aimed at the sky. Sure enough, a pair of red symbols were moving in swiftly after him, but far behind. Nothing else in the area. No radar locks, no missiles launched. Not yet. The ground was a rolling green carpet far below, like a cartoon or a kid's drawing, with his potential targets drawn in with big red X's painted over them.

  Damn, the g-suit was squeezing his guts just as if he was really flying. How do they do that? Great simulation. Physical reactions just like the real thing. Got to hand it to those double-domed sons of bitches, they're making this ride everything you could ask for. Maybe even more. The two bogies were diving down toward him, Adair saw. He kicked left rudder and leveled off, hoping they would overshoot him; then he would slip behind them and fire his Sidewinders at the bastards. He was surprised at how much effort it took to reach the missile arming switches and flick them on. A small deadly black cross appeared on his helmet display. If it touched the symbols of the intruder aircraft the missiles would launch automatically.

  But the bogies were not going to overshoot him, he saw. They were slowing down, popping their airbrakes to begin a high-speed yo-yo that would plant them on his tail. Cursing, puffing from exertion as if he were really flying, Adair thumbed the throttle control forward to full military power and pulled the stick back, trying to put as much distance between them and himself as he could while he clawed for altitude. The intruders immediately broke off their maneuver and hustled after him.

  "They're closing in, Daddy," his daughter's voice warned, edging higher, tinged with fear. Adair scanned the view rastering across his visor. The two red bogies were closing the gap damned fast.

  "Range coordinates," he said, barely mouthing the words. The microphone in his oxygen mask caught the vocalization and immediately the picture before his eyes was crisscrossed with a grillwork marked in kilometers. Even as he blinked his eyes, the red bandits came nearer.

  Adair's mission was to strike the ground targets, not to get himself involved in a dogfight. He was alone in the sky except for the enemy fighters; he knew he would get no help. And he was a fighter pilot. His first instinct was to deal with the bandits.

  The ground targets won't go away, he told himself. And the ordnance is all tucked inside the bomb bays, nothing hanging from the wings to slow me down. If I try to hit the ground targets, they'll wax my tail for sure. No sense getting myself shot down before I can even start my run on them.

  He kicked right rudder and turned into the bandits, who were still slightly above him. Coming at them head-on he presented a smaller cross-section to their fire-control radars and masked the heat emission form his jet engines. Heat-seeking missiles like the Sidewinder worked best when fired from behind their target; they usually followed the jet exhaust signature right up the engine's stovepipe.

  Abruptly the two red bandits multiplied into four, two of them breaking off to Adair's right, two to the left. "Hey, that's not fair!" he yelled aloud.

  No response from the controllers at their consoles.

  "You fuckin' sonsabitches are really out to get me, huh?" he muttered, kicking in the thrust vectoring as he pulled his F-22 into a hard climbing turn. The jet nozzles swiveled to make the climb steeper than the enemy planes could match.

  But they did match it. Hell, they must have given the bastards viffing capability too, Adair thought as he watched two of the red symbols match his climbing turn almost exactly. His chest hurt now from the continuous exertion, the g forces made his arms heavy, squeezed the breath from his body. His back throbbed with pain and the helmet felt as if it weighed six hundred pounds. How the hell do they do that? he wondered. He felt sweat beading his forehead, running into his eyes. Inside the helmet and oxygen mask he had no way to wipe the perspiration away.

  Blinking and squinting he nosed over into a split-S, but instead of completing it, he turned it into a vertical dive. Two of the red bogies followed right down after him, gaining on him. The other two had disappeared from his visor's panoramic view. Maybe that was just a glitch in the program and there's only the two of them, he thought. Adair pulled up sharply, his g-suit hissing and squeezing his guts to keep him from blacking out. It's not supposed to be like this, he told himself. But it was.

  Blasting along on the deck, only a few feet above the cartoon drawing of the ground, his Mach meter jittering just below Mach 1, the plane rattled and jounced, shaking his guts, jarring his eyeballs so badly it blurred his vision. The two bandits roared along behind him, inching closer.

  "Radar lock!" his daughter's voice screeched.

  Adair snapped the F-22 into a turn so tight that his vision grayed out despite the g-suit. The bandits stayed fixed on his tail as if they had been painted there.

  "Missiles launched!" she shrilled.

  He popped a flare, pulled back on the control stick and slammed the throttles to full emergency power. The overwhelming push of tremendous acceleration crushed in on his chest, flattening him against his seat, making his old
back injury scream with agony. His lungs felt raw, flaming. He could feel his heart thundering in his ears. The missiles raced. past below him, chasing the bright infrared signature of the decoy flare. He saw their trails as brilliant red pencil lines darting across the green cartoon landscape. He almost gushed a sigh of relief. But the other two bandits suddenly appeared on his visor ahead of him.

  "Radar lock missiles fired!" his daughter screamed all in one breath.

  Adair gasped. "Shit! Punching out!"

  Then the real pain hit.

  The three controllers outside the mock-up cockpit were sitting at their posts in front of the simulation system's consoles, sipping coffee from styrofoam cups and talking quietly among themselves. Twenty feet away from their desks, the sawed-off cockpit section of an F-22 tilted and shook in the grip of heavy mechanical arms that could rotate the simulator cockpit completely upside-down if necessary.

  The twenty feet separating the technicians from the simulator where Adair was testing the new program was festooned with cables snaking across the concrete hangar floor and coils of wire dangling from rickety support struts.

  The consoles had an improvised look to them, as if a dealer in used electronics hardware had just dumped a truckload of gray metal boxes on a trio of warehouse tables. Lights flickered across the faces of some of those boxes. Display screens showed graphs and cartoon-like drawings in garish colors. The three technicians—two men and a woman—paid no attention to the lights or screens.

  Until the emergency buzzer began hooting, its red light glaring on and off in the middle of the main console.

  "What the hell?"

  The chief controller, a civilian employee wearing dingy coveralls that had once been white, yelled at the Air Force technician to his left, "Turn that damned noise off, will ya?"

  The technician leaned across the rows of CRT display screens and flicked the toggle switch beneath the baleful red light. She was a young kid in neatly-pressed Air Force blue fatigues with a tech sergeant's stripes on her sleeve. The alarm refused to go off. Its foghorn wails echoed off the hangar's metal walls. She glanced at the main controller and shrugged.

  "God damn it," said the chief controller, pronouncing each word distinctly in his irritation.

  All three of them got to their feet and stared at the simulator's closed cockpit.

  "Why doesn't he pop the hatch?" the chief controller asked no one in particular.

  The other tech, a corporal also in starched blue fatigues, pushed his little typist's chair back on its rollers and hurried across the concrete floor of the big hangar toward the F-22 simulator's cockpit. Its plastic canopy was painted a dark gray so no one could see into it or out. The simulator had stopped moving. The big mechanical arms held it tilted slightly nose-down.

  "Must be the hatch release is stuck," said the woman tech. The chief controller nodded absently, but the strained expression on his pinched face as he stared at the mock-up clearly said that he did not believe that.

  The corporal ducked between the embracing steel arms and clambered up the metal steps built into the side of the cockpit. He opened the hatch easily. It slid up and back smoothly, just as it would on a real plane.

  "Jesus Christ," the corporal yelled over the hooting of the emergency alarm. "Call the medics, quick!"

  CHAPTER 2

  Susan Santorini stood in front of the kitchen range, carefully reading the instruction pamphlet clutched in her hand. Frowning with concentration, she pecked at the range's control keyboard with one finger. No lights turned on and she noticed that her nails looked as if she had made the trip from Ohio crawling on all fours. She clucked her tongue in frustration. "Dan," she called, her voice slightly shrill. "I can't get this stove to do anything."

  Her twelve-year-old daughter Angela appeared at the open kitchen doorway. "Daddy's in the garage."

  "Would you call him for me, honey?" Susan said, adding silently, before I start climbing the wall.

  Angela nodded unhappily and pushed past her mother to the door that led to the breezeway and then to the garage. Susan saw that her daughter's blonde pigtails hung limp and frayed. Just the way I feel, she said to herself as she stood alone in the strange new kitchen, surrounded by unopened cardboard cartons and ultramodern appliances that stubbornly refused to work the way the instructions said they should. On top of everything else she had to locate an orthodontist for Angie right away. Welcome to Pine Lake Gardens, the housing development brochure had said, the most modern community in Florida. Susan thought she could use a little of the old-fashioned world she had left in Ohio. At least she knew how to turn on the stove there.

  She was a slight woman in her mid-thirties, pretty enough to have been an actress in college, with a pert upturned nose, striking turquoise blue eyes, and auburn hair that hinted at a temper. She called it spirit. Her hair was tied up and out of the way; she was in faded jeans that hugged her butt and a sweatshirt that was much too heavy for Florida despite the new house's air-conditioning—which also did not seem to be working properly. The house felt warm and much too damp to her. It was two weeks into September but still the muggy heat outside seemed unbearable. Susan had visions of loathsome insects crawling behind the closed cabinet doors, making nests and getting into everything.

  The baby woke up with a squalling cry. Susan flung the useless instruction book onto the stove top and hurried into the living room. More half-unpacked crates and cartons. At least she had cajoled the moving men into spreading the carpet for them and placing the sofa and chairs where she wanted them instead of leaving them in a jumble the way they had intended to. Little Philip was squirming in his makeshift cradle, a colorful oversized wicker basket they had picked up on their honeymoon in Mexico a hundred years ago. The baby was wet and decidedly unhappy in these strange surroundings. Susan reached for the bag of diapers she had left on the sofa beside his basket.

  "What's the matter?" Dan asked.

  She turned to see her husband standing tensely in the kitchen doorway, biting his lip the way he always did when he was harried. His sports jacket was gone; his short-sleeved shirt looked wrinkled and soggy, his tie was askew.

  Angela stood slightly behind him, looking worried, almost scared in all this confusion and turmoil.

  "Did the car start?" Susan asked.

  "Not yet. The damned battery must be shot. If we had driven from Dayton it would've been okay, probably recharged itself. But now it's gone."

  While her hands automatically removed Phil's wet diaper, Susan said, "You'll have to find somebody who can jump it, then."

  Dan shook his head. "It's not holding a charge. We're going to need a new battery."

  "But they guaranteed it for as long as we own the car."

  Another shake. "That means five years, max. We've had the battery since '90. I checked the warranty in the glove compartment."

  He was not much taller than Susan, lean and dark with an artist's slender hands and delicate fingers. To her, Damon Santorini had the brooding seductive looks of an Italian film star or a male model. But Dan himself did not realize it, did not believe it even when she whispered it to him as they made love. It was if it did not matter to him what she or anyone else thought. He went his own way, withdrawn, alone, self-contained inside his protective shell. It was the one fault she found in him. He was brilliant, but he could not see it. He was a quiet, steady, hard-working husband and father. He took his responsibilities seriously; once he decided to do something he plowed straight ahead and nothing could stop him. There had been only one real crisis in their marriage, and they had worked their way through that. It had been painful, but they had put it behind them at last. Yet somehow, somewhere in his youth, he had built a shell of armor around his inner self that only rarely could she penetrate. She knew there was pain and anger bottled up inside him, but she had never been able to shake him out of his iron self-control for longer than the time it took to make love.

  "Angie said you needed me?" he asked. His voice was usually soft,
gentle. But now she heard a nervous edge in it.

  She could see how tense he was. Diapering the baby, she said, "I can't make anything in the kitchen work. You need an engineering degree just to get the stove to turn on."

  He broke into a grin. "Don't worry about the stove. I'll take you out for dinner. I can afford a night on the town, on my new salary."

  But Susan shook her head stubbornly. "I've had enough pizza this weekend. I want to cook a meal at home."

  "The stove is voice activated," he said. "It's got to be programmed to recognize your voice, then it'll respond to your voice commands. You'll get the hang of it. I'll show you later." And he turned back toward the kitchen.

  "Where're you going?" Susan called.

  "Got to call the yellow-pages directory and get somebody down here to start the car. Otherwise I'm going to miss my first day on the new job."

  It was going to be a new start for them. A new job in a new company in a new community. At three times his Air Force salary. Dan had jumped at the chance; Susan had been reluctant, but she saw that this move meant so much to her husband. It scared her to move so far from everything and everyone she had known all her life, especially with the new baby, but she had taken her courage in her hands and decided that it was time for her to see if she really could stand on her own two feet, without family and lifelong friends surrounding her.

  On Susan's insistence they had flown from Dayton to their new home near Orlando on Friday so that they would have the weekend to get settled in. But the furniture and car and the rest of their belongings did not arrive until the middle of Sunday afternoon, after a dozen angry phone calls, and the moving men told them they would be charged extra for the overtime work. Now, on Monday morning, their new house was in a jumble after a weekend of fast-food deliveries and sleeping on blankets laid out on the bedroom carpeting. Nothing seemed to be working, including the car's battery.