Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  Next he put up the photograph of the bright-orange flight recorder he’d shown them before.

  “The shaft turned into a rain of shrapnel surrounding a spear. That’s why it utterly destroyed the flight data recorder. I tried again. There was nothing recoverable. The inner data capsule that was supposed to be able to survive thirty-four hundred g’s of impact force was breached and destroyed. Did you know that’s a hundred and twenty times the acceleration of the gravity on the surface of the sun?”

  Miranda did the math in her head, “That’s a hundred and twenty-one times, Jeremy.”

  “Uh,” he thought for a moment. “You’re right.”

  “Keep going.”

  “I had slightly better luck with the cockpit voice recorder, but only slightly.” The next image revealed the slightly less shredded recorder.

  He clicked play on an audio file, displaying the jagged lines of a spectrum analysis on another screen.

  “I’ve only focused on the final sixty-four seconds so far. It contained just forty-one words, and many background sounds that I’ve only begun to analyze. I’ve sent everything back to the NTSB with a Top Priority, not that they have any equipment I don’t for this kind of situation.”

  “Play that again,” Andi Wu spoke softly.

  Miranda listened again, but there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary before the final eight seconds.

  Did you see that?

  What?

  Six seconds.

  Saw that.

  The recording ended abruptly two seconds later. Not even a final curse.

  “Morales saw something. Christianson finally saw whatever it was, but after a long delay.” Andi’s voice cracked strangely and Miranda looked away from the outline of the recording and turned to inspect her.

  Andi was holding the edge of the table so tightly that her fingers weren’t merely bloodless white, but also shaking with the strain of it.

  Mike rubbed a hand up and down her back with a surprising familiarity. Miranda had been so sure that Mike and Holly were a couple that the gesture was very confusing.

  Holly had her feet up on another chair and was staring at the screen with a frown.

  Miranda slipped out her personal notebook. She flipped to her new page of emoticons and tried comparing them to Holly’s look. No red-enflamed cheeks, so perhaps not anger. No half-shuttered eyes of boredom or fully closed of sadness.

  Perhaps frustrated? Though there weren’t little steam bursts shooting from her nostrils like the emoji but perhaps the rest was correct.

  Andi’s expression matched sadness, except for the lack of tears.

  “What’s that?” Holly pointed at the screen.

  Miranda snapped her notebook shut and tucked it away.

  40

  Mike was glad when Miranda turned away.

  This was a crappy moment to smile—he could feel Andi’s shuddering breath as he gave her shoulder a final squeeze. But it was really hard to keep a straight face while watching Miranda review the emoji stickers he’d given her. She hadn’t appeared satisfied with her results this time.

  She used it less often around the team now, so she must be stumped by Andi, Stimson, or Helen. The latter two were probably barely on her radar except as a source of information.

  That meant Andi was confusing her.

  “She’s very sad and more than a little scared,” he whispered to her.

  “She is?” And Miranda turned to inspect Holly.

  “No. Not her. Andi.”

  “What about Andi?”

  “Yes, what about me?” Having overheard, Andi was now glaring at him. Perfect. Teach him to try to help.

  “What’s what?” Jeremy was asking Holly.

  “Remove the voices, just give me the background noises for the last eight seconds.” Holly was ignoring the rest of them.

  Mike decided that was his only route out, and directed Miranda’s attention to the screen.

  All it sounded like to him was ten seconds of white noise.

  “Again, louder.”

  This time he was able to identify the sound. The deep muffled roar of the twin rotors, overriding the higher whine of the turboshaft engine filled the room.

  “Go back another ten seconds,” Miranda called out when she could be heard again.

  So Miranda was successfully returned to the crash investigation and Holly hadn’t heard a thing.

  However, Andi’s glance said that this wasn’t over yet.

  Oh, well. Two out of three wasn’t bad.

  With the longer initial sound reference, Mike heard the change this time. Though Jeremy was playing it so loud that Mike’s ears popped at the sudden silence at the end of the flight.

  There was the tiniest confusion at the end—the recorded moments before the microphones and the recorder were destroyed—but the change had started before that.

  The steady, unchanging drone of the rotors and engines had altered in the final second of the flight.

  “The turbine would have already been at its set speed. So most of that sound change must be the abrupt correction of roll and pitch by Morales.” Stimson signaled Jeremy to play it again. “And stop before the actual crash, it’s distracting us.”

  For another twenty seconds, Helen’s office roared with the S-97 Raider’s final moments.

  “Exactly as Captain Wu predicted. The strengthening of that deeper tone is probably due to additional blade loading from the abrupt rollout maneuver.”

  “There’s also a change to the engine noise,” Andi’s voice was carefully firm. “I think he might have opened the throttle wider, though it was too fast for the engine to react.”

  “You have a good ear, Andi,” Miranda turned to her.

  “Thanks. I have two—”

  But Miranda wasn’t done and continued right over her. Just like the rest of them, Andi would get used to not interrupting Miranda.

  “At one-point-eight seconds, there is a small spike on the spectrum analyzer. I suspect that will be revealed to be the sound of Morales’ glove or the throttle itself as it was rotated wide open. The sudden flood of evaporating fuel would have cooled the engine momentarily—that dip at one-point-one seconds—then accelerated, that increase at zero-point-four to impact. This supports GE’s insistence that the crash wasn’t due to a failure of the engine.”

  Mike hadn’t heard any of that. Nor could he really see what Miranda was talking about. But if she said it was there, then it was.

  “The GE rep will be relieved to hear that,” Stimson spoke up. “He’s been a real pain in my ass. My prime suspect for who tried to backdoor you, General Thomas.”

  Helen nodded, finally mollified, at least toward the colonel.

  “She only said ‘supports’,” Mike pointed out. “Don’t let GE out of the woods yet.”

  “Not a chance,” Stimson looked as if he might grind it into the rep’s face with a boot heel instead.

  Miranda turned from the screen as if it held no further interest.

  “We have an indication that the aircraft was still flying and responsive to control at time of impact. Andi insists that it isn’t pilot error.”

  Andi and Stimson were both nodding their heads.

  “Their postulation is supported by the pilot’s actions of advancing the throttle and changing the flight path even if it had too little effect on the final result. This leaves something that I believe Andi has already discovered.”

  Andi groaned.

  Everyone else had twisted around to stare at her.

  She did whisper, barely loud enough for even him to hear right next to her.

  “The impossible.”

  41

  Andi was not going to fold.

  Not in front of her former commander—not a second time anyway. She took a deep breath, clasped her hands, and rested them on the edge of the table just as Miranda did, and focused on their texture.

  Better to focus there than on the image inside her head.

  So s
he watched her hands and let her voice come from some other space that wasn’t quite herself. There was safety in distance.

  “Remember what I said about our navigation. Four layers. Radar and the DAS Direct Aperture System are both real-time views of the terrain. Far more sensitive than mere eyesight in most cases, and obviously at night. It has many other uses actually, but none matter for this moment in the flight.”

  “I really want to hear about the DAS at some point,” Jeremy jumped in. “I mean, I’ve been reading about it since the first videos came out in 2008. And—”

  “What were you, twelve?” Holly snarked at him.

  “Uh, yes. It was before my birthday in November,” Jeremy rolled right on. “The detection of incoming fire, launch point locater, intelligent aircraft ID both friendly and foreign. I’ve always wanted to…”

  He trailed off and looked around.

  “Sorry. …If you’re willing to talk to me…about that.”

  He ended up staring down at the table.

  Andi shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be? You have the clearance.”

  He looked up enough to squint at her as if he didn’t believe her, but didn’t speak.

  “Whatever,” Andi focused back on the systems. “There’s one system of inertial navigation. Its main purpose is to come into play in case the GPS gets spoofed. If someone tampers with the GPS signal, it will suddenly not match the inertial nav system.”

  “What’s the current drift rate of the S-97 Raider’s MEMS chip?”

  “Three meters per minute without a recalibration point,” she answered before she could stop her surprise at Jeremy’s question. He did know his details.

  “Still? I thought they were ganging them in blocks now to fix that.”

  “That is ganged in arrays of ten. Max drift, not average.”

  “Still!” Jeremy looked personally offended.

  Andi knew he was the team geek, but he…this whole team was operating on some other level.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  “You’re about to tell us about the fourth system’s purpose,” Miranda said without hesitation.

  At her surety, Andi did her best to stop thinking and did.

  “That pre-programmed terrain map I mentioned before does one thing no other system can do. It lets you see the future.”

  Of them all, only Miranda and Colonel Stimson weren’t looking puzzled.

  “Technically,” Miranda half-nodded her head, “it’s showing you a past view of your future. The map was programmed in the past, so it’s actually not warping time. Rather it is showing you what should be around the corner. Clearly it didn’t in this case. That would point to pilot error as the cause because he was hugging the cliff too tightly for not having a clear view of what was around that corner.”

  “No,” Andi slapped a hand on the table. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Mike rested a calming hand on her arm. She slapped it aside.

  “Could definitely get to like you,” Holly was snickering as Mike shook out his hand in surprise.

  “Why not?” Miranda’s voice was perfectly steady, as if she really didn’t have any ego on the line about her statement.

  It forced Andi to answer in kind—calm and precise. “Because the system would never be missing such a significant landform.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Put me in a helo, pull up that map, and we’ll fly the route together.”

  Miranda turned to General Thomas. “Helen, could you please prepare your helicopter for flight?”

  Thomas just shook her head. “Nobody issued that system to me. Mine is just a transport bird for a lowly Air Force one-star general.”

  “There’s a second S-97 Raider for eval in the hangar,” Stimson pulled out his phone and called. “Prep Number Two for flight…No, that’s an order. Get it done, soldier.”

  Andi’s palms began to sweat. Except for the flight to and from the crash site, she, very purposefully, hadn’t been in a rotorcraft since the one Ken had died in. And she didn’t remember the return flight from the crash site at all.

  Stimson must have spotted her panic. “I’m your copilot, Wu. I still know how to fly a goddamn bird after all these years.”

  “Sir,” Andi barely managed to acknowledge.

  “So,” Mike was nodding. “That’s what’s impossible. That a piece of real terrain was missing from the map.”

  “No,” Andi managed to answer him. “What’s impossible is that the rock pillar wasn’t where the GPS and inertial system would have insisted that it was. It’s the only thing that fits what the two pilots said and the subsequent actions.”

  At her signal, Jeremy restarted the audio playback.

  Did you see that?

  “Morales saw something,” Andi narrated. “Maybe a rock that didn’t match between the terrain map and his radar or DAS view.”

  What?

  “Christianson missed it. As pilot-in-command, his duties would not have included closely monitoring the navigation display though he’d certainly be aware of it. Now the long six seconds until they see it again.”

  Saw that.

  “The error Morales observed is now confirmed by his commander. Another rock. A shape of cliff. Something wasn’t right. A minor shift or they would have noted it sooner.”

  The sound cut out.

  “He didn’t start his rollout with half a second to go—the amount of time the pillar would have been visible in his ‘present tense’ systems. I couldn’t make that work. A half second doesn’t make for a sixty-degree bank correction and a four-meter climb. But—”

  She ran the phantom controls under her hands once more just to be sure. It fit.

  “If he began the rollout to a less aggressive mode of flight from two seconds before the collision, it matches. Morales began the maneuver the instant that he and Christianson both saw the second occurrence. But it wasn’t enough because he was coming around that cliff too fast. The Raider was going forty-seven percent faster than the Little Bird he was used to. Something screwed up his GPS navigation. And without enough warning for him to decide to switch to the inertial guidance system.” She was guessing, but it was the only scenario that fit.

  One thing Andi knew for certain.

  “He never stood a chance.”

  42

  “You want me to what?”

  General Firat had escorted him, without Onur, to an empty conference room inside Siberkume. Metin hadn’t even known this underground level existed. By the way the armed guards inspected him, he wondered if they’d let him leave without the general at his side. He’d just be dogshit on their bootheels.

  For the length of two normal heartbeats, about ten at the moment, General Firat looked as if he might agree that it was a crazy test of his system.

  Then Firat’s military officiousness snapped into place.

  “This aircraft,” he placed a file folder on the table and opened it, but Metin couldn’t manage to look down.

  Firat thumped a finger on the folder’s contents.

  Metin did look down but couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.

  “In two hours it will fly into this mountain,” one more resounding finger thump that echoed off the carved stone walls. It wasn’t a conference room; it was a dressed-up dungeon.

  “But the people aboard. They—”

  “Are not your concern.”

  He waited, but the general didn’t add anything else.

  Metin was not a soldier. He was just a programmer at Siberkume.

  He’d earned his way in by unlocking a test site in only nine hours. He still held the Siberkume record by a factor of two. A detail he’d only briefly enjoyed having displayed on the main entry display screen. Few other than Onur would speak to him…even when they needed help.

  Every three months, a new secure site was created and given to the Siberkume coders to crack before it was moved to the applicant testing. Those results, too, were posted prominently. He still held top plac
e, and Onur had climbed from mid-pack to top three. Only the hard-bitten and homely Zehra stood between them, but she spoke to no one—ever.

  Besides, she was more interested in creating security.

  Metin only got seriously charged when he was breaking it back down.

  He looked at himself in Firat’s eyes.

  “I…am not…your…tool.” All the conviction he could muster barely reached the walls of the small underground conference room that felt as if it might become his tomb.

  “Oh, but you are.” Firat pulled out a second file folder.

  When he opened this one, Metin managed to focus on it.

  It was what the Americans would call a “rap sheet.”

  Not his, so he relaxed a little as he read it.

  It listed meetings, contacts, protest rally attendance, and actions there. It was a long list.

  Each event was documented in a style so lurid that even an innocent would be damned by the language alone. It was also incredibly detailed and in the first person. A single, tortured signature would turn it into a damning confession.

  People had been “disappeared” for less.

  He flipped through the pages, until he reached the final one.

  Asli was looking up at him.

  She was smiling, her teeth shining against her dusky, perfect skin. Her black eyes twinkled with the brightness of some prank she’d just witnessed, or more likely perpetrated.

  He and Onur were clearly visible as well; close enough to either side to be pressing their cheeks to hers. Also smiling.

  He rubbed a hand over his cheek. For the first time on seeing that photograph, he couldn’t remember the warmth of her skin brushing his.

  Firat slid the folder out from under his nerveless fingers.

  “Any questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  Firat closed the folder of the flight’s information and held it out.