by Mark Howard
"THANKS" Jess replied, before returning to the tunnel. Back on her ship, she lifted her head, and wiping the drool away from her mouth, spun the ring up to one-hundred percent. When the hum stabilized, she touched the nozzle icon Star had mentioned, shifting her to a new screen showing a circular animated graphic of the tube. By touching different parts of the animation, she was able to distort the flow pattern. Rapidly swiping it, Jess put a strong spin on the material, causing the ring's hum to degrade into an ear-splitting Wah-Wah-Wah pattern, like a clothes washer out of balance. Settling down, the steady hum returned, but at a significantly lower ring speed. More importantly, the directional momentum had shifted, jostling the ship free, but sending it sliding further down into the muck.
Spinning the ring up again, she reversed the flow distortion, sending the ship sliding upwards in response. Giggling, Jess clapped her hands and did a celebratory butt-dance in her chair. Following the pattern of power-up, then flow disruption, she agonizingly pulled herself upwards through the seafloor, as though rocking a car out of a snowdrift, until she reached the inky darkness of the seawater again.
Fearful of losing her momentum, she continued the rising maneuvers until she heard a plunck sound, signifying the envelope re-forming around the ship again. Feeling safer, she reoriented the ship to horizontal and experimented with different flow patterns to find the most optimal maneuver. As the envelope expanded, each disruption became more effective, and upon reaching three thousand meters, she flew through the water without any resistance whatsoever.
A sizzling white pinprick, like a fourth of July sparkler, appeared on the surface of the dark Pacific, swiftly dilating into a hundred-meter-wide circular void ringed with luminous white flame. Propelled through the opening, the ship silently launched into the night sky, as the empty cavity contracted behind it.
Although the nav console couldn't auto-pilot the ship due to the loss of the thrusters, it still displayed her relative location. Working with different flow pattern adjustments, Jess was able to rise above air traffic level and set a course eastward before finally leaning back for a break. After a few minutes of idly watching her progress across the continent, the ship issued an electronic grunt and shifted slightly downward. Thinking she may have hit something, Jess scanned across the various consoles but found nothing. A few seconds later, it happened again, and then again.
Confused, she looked down through the floor panels toward a small cluster of lights below. According to the nav map, that was supposed to be Salt Lake City, but to Jess the entire metro area appeared tiny. Checking the nav console, she found her current altitude to be one-hundred kilometers above sea level. After some quick math, she discovered with a shock that she was sixty-two miles up. With no auto-pilot, she had neglected to follow the curvature of the Earth and had been bumping up against the edge of space like a stone skipping across a pond. As she angled the ship downward, she wondered if these truly were 'starships', as Star and her gang assumed, or simply terrestrial ships, restricted by policy, physics, or both, to operation within Earth's atmosphere. If that was the case, what else were they mistaken about? she wondered.
While pondering this, Jess was distracted by a light from above. It was a glowing white orb, the size of a basketball, which had caught up to and kept pace with her ship. Two more came into view below, a bright red one and a blue one the color of a stove burner.
Instead of feeling alarm at the appearance of these objects — some type of weapon or tracking device was not out of the realm of possibility — she, oddly, felt no anxiety whatsoever. Perhaps it was the way they moved — their personality — that seemed so non-threatening: they seemed to simply fly along with her, bobbing and weaving, like dolphins in her wake. She kept her attention on them as she continued to descend, but after a few moments they slowed, and trailing above her, soon disappeared.
~ 68 ~
Roper had been sitting in the van all night, and his coffee thermos was almost empty. He had Truckin' blasting on the eight track, yet his head continued drooping and rising, like one of those drinking bird toys. Shaking himself awake, he thought back to the early nineties, when last he had been here. That time, he had a chainsaw. He shut down the entire array for two days, a small but potent success, which raised the visibility of the secret project in the backwoods of northern Wisconsin, and prompted local residents to question the purpose — and long-term health effects — of pumping all that energy into the ground.
Although suspended twenty feet up on poles, at each terminus of the twenty-six mile long span the wires bored hundreds of feet deep into the bedrock of the Superior Upland Shield, which is exposed at the surface in this geologically interesting part of the country. This ingenious hack of an antenna design utilized the earth's own mantle as a radiating body; without it, the copper wire itself would have needed to be hundreds of miles long in order to produce the necessary long-wave frequencies, where each cycle can be as vast as a quarter of the earth's diameter.
The eventual shutdown of the ELF array was a true success story — rare in Roper's field of work — in that it was operational for less than two decades: from the late eighties through 2004 when it was "officially" decommissioned. Of course, it helped that the cold war had ended just as the site had begun transmitting, and when the public learned the transmissions were not for defensive purposes, but mainly for nuclear first-strike capability, the resistance was emboldened and the project further demonized. Between these factors, and the concurrent Congressional scrutiny of this and other DOD boondoggles, Project ELF was not long for this world.
When the hoopla had died down a few years later, however, the shuttered operations buildings were re-opened for limited use — 'environmental assessments', they called it. But Roper heard word through their internal grapevine that the real purpose was the new fleet management capabilities, including the kill signals, over the ELF channel — the only radio waves able to carry low-bitrate data transmissions through the magnetic field of the ships. The security of the channel was ensured: it was a multi-million dollar antenna array highly unlikely to be copied by anyone else. Even the Russians, with their competing ZEVS system transmitting out of Murmansk on 82Hz, couldn't interfere with the U.S. ELF array without massive reconfiguration.
The upgrade to provide clearway transmissions came later, after a near miss between an Alpha version Gen III and a United Airlines Boeing 727 over North Dakota in 2006. After that incident, clearway transmissions became mandatory, with missions strictly limited to late night and pre-dawn hours, minimizing the risk of further incidents with commercial traffic.
All this, of course, was generally unknown since it was funded by black operations budgets, which are by definition exempt from any congressional oversight. But Roper knew. If Jess was able to take out the entire array, the Feds wouldn't have the political capital to build it again — anywhere. If they lost the kill channel and the clearways, well, that would severely hamper their operational capabilities going forward.
Roper heard the tapping before waking completely. In a dream-state, he imagined it to be a tinsmith fashioning an old Roman warrior helmet on an anvil — but instead of silver, the helmet was matte black. Roper lifted his head from his chest as the sound grew into successive echoing booms, puncturing the night air like the concussive fireworks they always save until the end of the show — the pure white balls of light that you can feel like a punch to the chest.
The glow of the ship appeared over a hill on the right-of-way a few miles distant. Roper watched the ship take out the telephone poles like toothpicks — they were cleaving away from the hull as if it were a twenty-one thousand ton snowplow — before hearing the echoing thuds several seconds later. Raising his phone to his ear, a smile crossed his face as he dialed Sag. This had been a long time coming, and it felt good.
"It is DONE! And it is fuckin' GREAT!" he shouted into the phone, turning away and plugging his free ear as the ship sailed low in front of him, lighting up the forest and sending
a jagged three-foot section of pole careening into the dirt with a heavy thud, just a few feet in front of the van.
"Give her thirty seconds, then it's go time!" he shouted over the din, and throwing the phone on the dash, leaned back and cackled with glee.
Reaching the end of the run, Jess rose up and arced the ship back over the van as her signal — in case the flying telephone poles weren't enough of a hint — before bringing it to a spot a safe distance away. She knew Roper had already called it in, and since they didn't know she was physically onboard — they never would have issued the kill command if they did — she needed to get off the ship ASAP.
~ 69 ~
Sag sat at the children's rolltop desk, an unlit joint balanced in his ashtray. That will be for later, if all goes well, he thought, or if it doesn't, for that matter. Twenty minutes earlier, he heard the Guantanamo signal drop, and had overpowered the station with his hacked recording of the numbers lady redirecting the ships to his alternate frequency. The next step was to anxiously await the call from Roper confirming the destruction of the Clam Lake array. He had the script for the custom kill transmission already typed in, and his finger nervously hovered over the Enter key when the phone finally rang. After hanging up with Roper, he paused for a moment to consider Jess. But she's in Cali, it's just her etheric onboard, he reassured himself, before jamming the key down.
~ 70 ~
Jess felt uneasy. Although confident the command wouldn't detonate the ship — that just seemed a bit too dramatic — still, she felt like she needed to get out, pronto. Whizzing over the treetops, she searched in vain for a suitable clearing, but finding none, put the ship in a hover and opened the hatch.
Unbuckling herself, she ran towards the opening and scrambled down. Reaching the final rung, she gripped it tightly with one hand as she lowered her body outside the ship, where it floated in zero-g ten feet above the treetops. If she let go and drifted too far down, outside the influence of the ring, she would drop like a rock.
Distracted by a glow from above, she glanced up to discover the hull of the ship completely shredded. The exquisite Niobium alloy panels were buckled and twisted from the pressure and violence of her undersea adventures, and the rounded corners housing the thrusters had completely collapsed in upon themselves. All of this was easy to see, as a pure white light issued from behind every mangled seam.
Turning her attention back to terra firma, Jess was scouting for a nearby branch to drop onto when the kill signal hit. The lights inside the ship darkened as the red glow of emergency lighting lit her from above, and hearing a whoosh, she felt a shooting pain as she looked up to find the hatch had closed on her forearm. Her piercing screams drowned out the grinding noise issuing from the hatch mechanism, which, eventually realizing it wasn't fully closed, opened back up. Jess pulled her arm out just before the hatch re-engaged, closing fully this time, and her body spun upside down before she was able to steady herself by catching the sharp curl of a buckled panel with the toe of one shoe.
Worse than the pain in her arm, however, was the sound of the hum rising from within the ship as the treetops below began to slip away — it was leaving. Still caught within the ring's field, however, she floated along below the ship as it continued to accelerate. Unwilling to hang around and discover what floating in a plasma field would feel like, she planted her other shoe on the hull and launched herself into the forest below.
~ 71 ~
Roper had been watching the ship as it pulled around, over, and past him, finally stopping to hover a quarter-mile away. The thing looked all tore-up, the skin all mangled and all three corners completely collapsed; there were even some long strands of seaweed hanging from several jagged panels. Expecting it to either detonate, drop the ground, or do nothing, he was surprised when instead a figure emerged from one of the lower hatches. Jess must be crazy to hijack a manned ship! he thought to himself, as he exited the truck and began to run toward the ship.
A few moments later when it sped off, he expected to find a severely injured — or dead — pilot when he arrived at the scene. Finding nothing, he heard instead the crackling of tree limbs above him. Looking up, he watched Jess slowly descend from the boughs of a tall Pine tree with one arm, cradling the other against her chest.
"Jess!" Roper yelled between heaving breaths, after running a quarter mile for the first time in a quarter century. "You... Alright?"
"Yeah, well it hurts like a mother, but I'll make it," she uttered between clenched teeth. Helping her down from the last bough, Roper turned around so she could drop onto his back.
"Surprised you didn't break a leg too on the way down," he said, trudging back toward the truck with his new burden.
"Yeah, well, I guess I was still 'under the influence' — I dropped slow enough to grab onto a branch. Then all my weight came back with a vengeance."
"Speaking of the ship, what the hell you doing on it! And I thought it was supposed to be a brand-new Gen III — what in Sam Hill did you take?"
"Uh...what do you mean?"
"That jalopy was all beat to hell, young lady. Looked like she'd been stored underwater for about twenty years, too."
"Well it was brand new when I got it about forty minutes ago," she explained between agonized breaths. "But, you know, shit happens."
"Well if this is how you deliver the goods, maybe we'll be passing on your offer," Roper joked. "So, why are you here, like, in your body, anyway? It's supposed to be in Cali right now."
"Yeah, well, I couldn't navigate well enough without my body, so I had to pick myself up. Sorry, but I couldn't tell you guys — you wouldn't have sent the kill signal if you knew. So I guess the signal just locks the ship down and returns it to home base. Which makes sense; I knew they weren't going to brick a multi-billion dollar piece of hardware. Kind of a bummer for us though, huh."
"Yeah, you don't get to land this one in Soldier's Field or whatever the hell you wanted to do with it. Well, honestly it wasn't that bad of a day — you got the rig here taken out real good — but do ya always gotta be this dramatic about it?" Roper said, as he gently stepped over a section of splintered telephone pole. "Ya almost took my head off with that one," he added, pointing to the particularly nasty shard rising from the ground in front of the van.
"By the way," Jess said, "Did you call Sag to have him send the kill signal to the rest of the fleet? It's safe enough I guess, as long as you aren't dangling beneath 'em."
"Let's get you situated first, priorities now," Roper replied, as he opened the van's sliding door and gently set her down on the carpet inside. "Can you move your hand?"
Jess wiggled her fingers. "Yeah, but ow...shit!" A purple bruise had formed on her forearm, which had already swollen considerably. "Hey, I look like Popeye," she joked, with tears welling in her eyes from the throbbing pain.
"Probably not a break then, but still pretty nasty. Let's have Star look at ya back home. Used to be an EMT ya know. Meantime there's some ice in the mini fridge, let's get a pack made up for ya."
"Call Sag first," she pleaded.
He grabbed the phone from the dash and dialed. "Yeah, she did it. Got her fool-ass on board though. Yeah her real ass. I have her here now. Ship went lockdown and got the hell outta here, home we guess. She totalled the damn thing anyway..." he added, smiling at her.
"...yeah, so probably back home to either Texas or Cali if they updated it...seems safe enough, no fallout up here! Sky still dark, yup! Yeah but what's the point now if they just go back home...oh yeah, didn't think of that. OK. Welp, you have yourself a damn pleasant morning, we'll meet up with you over breakfast I suppose — yeah four hours out. Bah."
"So what's the plan?" Jess asked, as Roper threw the phone on the dash and headed back to the fridge.
"He's gonna send the fleet-wide signal. Very least, it'll interrupt whatever missions they got going on now, and let them know they're no longer secure, but prolly they already know that, right?" he said, winking at her. "In any case, it'll ke
ep 'em tied up and they'll ground the fleet temporarily — Gen III's at least — for some retrofitting to fix it."
Ice pack in place, they were only a few minutes down the road when they got a return call from Sag. "Heya...you did? Any chatter? Still got it...cool...Where's she now? ...Robust...yeah...she's doing fine, a real trooper...yeah took one for the team on this. Dumb though, but that's these youngsters for ya — such thrill seekers. 'YOLO' and all. No damn sense. Yeah alright, see ya."
Jess leaned her head against the shaggy van wall and closed her eyes, in a futile attempt to Zen her way out of the throbbing pain, which was tempered only slightly by the ice packs. Giving up, she groaned aloud.
"Oh shit, I forgot, you wanna aspirin?" Roper reached over to the glove compartment, and after rifling through it, pulled out a bottle and threw it back where it landed at her feet.
"Umm, Pamprin? Really?" she complained.
"All I got...Sorry," he said as she glared at him. "Crap on a cracker," he exclaimed, realizing she wasn't in any condition to open a tamper-proof pill bottle. Pulling the van over, he climbed back to her and explained the situation as he twisted the cap open.
"Well, he sent the signal. He still had control over the frequency too. Some patrols came out after Star, but they just observed her with spotlights for awhile, didn't fire on her or anything, had no idea what to do, I guess. Eventually someone high up was notified 'cause a coupl'a helos were scrambled. She outran 'em no problemo, of course. Anyways, you get some rest now, got a long drive ahead. Just think about the tremendous breakfast gonna be waitin' for us as you head off to dreamland. And if the Pamprin ain't doing it for ya, remember I got the herbal medicine..."
