“We don’t need another war,” Elisabeth blurted out with a lot more emotion than Kyle figured she intended. “Especially one that isn’t forced on us by an invasion.”
“The enemy is the Kaerin,” Kemi replied in kind. The Jema Council member wrapped her hands around her baby bump. “My child will be born free. There are other children, millions on Chandra, who will be born into a life of servitude. Would you ask that we forget them? Now that we are safe?”
“We are not safe,” Elisabeth fired back. “The Kaerin could invade again, and we’ll stop them again. If earth figures out the portal technology, that’s an invasion that we wouldn’t survive.”
“These are all valid points,” Hank interjected, breaking the sudden tension in the room. “We aren’t going to make a decision here and now. For the moment, all we can do is pursue the technology; then we can decide where to employ it.” He turned directly to Kemi and Audy. “In the meantime, take the issue to your council, and let Jomra know that I’ll be free to brief him at his convenience. Some of our own council, and many of our people have expressed these same concerns, on both sides of the issue.”
“What was that all about?” Jake asked Kyle as the two of them stood with Carlos outside. They waved as Hank and Doc Jensen’s aircar lifted off. Elisabeth and Kemi stood just outside the community center’s entrance; their heads bowed in conversation.
“Elisabeth is starting to realize what it means to be married to a soldier.” Kyle looked over at their own aircar, piled high with camping gear. “She’s not a fan of what that may mean.”
“She’s not wrong, though.” Carlos shook his head. “We don’t need to go poking the bear.”
“They’re both right.” Kyle shook his head. “That’s the problem.”
“That’s how most wars start,” Jake intoned, and put in a dip of tobacco. “But I’m going to refuse to report for muster unless I get some serious fishing in first.”
*
Chapter 3
Earth, Somewhere over Nebraska
“I’ve got a visual.” Rich Bowden was leaning forward in his copilot’s seat, straining to see out the window above them.
The pilot of the stolen Osprey II, his wife Jennifer and former Army SF pilot was too busy keeping the twenty-ton beast in the air against the heavy turbulence they were trying to climb above to do anything other than grunt in acknowledgement. Somewhere above and ahead of them was a US Air Force refueling drone. They were down to thirty-five minutes of fuel and a long way from their destination. They needed that fuel.
“Initiating handshake,” he reported just before he activated the burst transmission from their aircraft to the drone. If they could get the drone to recognize the Osprey’s encrypted request for fuel, it would match speed and altitude and release its refueling boom. If it didn’t, they had a long walk ahead of them.
They didn’t have to wait long for an answer, and it didn’t come from the drone.
“Unauthorized aircraft at angels eighteen, heading two-eight-two, identify immediately.”
“Shit!” he and Jennifer blurted out in stereo.
“Plan B?” he asked.
“That’s not really a plan.” His wife shook her head, but she was grinning. They’d be fine, he thought. Jennifer was the best Osprey pilot he’d ever flown with. She’d logged more hours with the jet-powered version of the Osprey II as a test pilot before it had even gone on active duty, than anyone else had since.
“Unauthorized aircraft, this is Offut control tower, identify immediately.”
A pinging alarm went off in his headset as the Electronic Warfare board above his left knee on the control panel lit up.
“They just painted us.”
“Tell them to hang on,” Jennifer said calmly. He knew she didn’t mean the Air Force guys in the tower at Offut AFB.
He switched to the onboard intercom channel. “Everybody, buckle up tight. Refuel is a no-go, and they know we are driving a stolen vehicle.”
Jennifer waited a full ten seconds after his announcement before pulling back on the throttle and nosing the heavy transport over into a dive. He’d known it was coming, but even he had a moment of vertigo as he was hanging weightless in his straps. He thought of the passengers in the back; he figured Tom would be laughing alongside his children, who’d be cheering the ride. Brittany, their fearless leader and Tom’s wife, had probably already lost her lunch. The old man, Sir Geoff, would no doubt berate them afterwards, if there was an afterwards.
Denise, though, was pregnant. Both she and her husband, Derek, had been dead set against the idea of creative requisition regarding the aircraft. Sure, it was stolen, but they’d made it close to a thousand miles since. They’d hear about that, too. He watched the altimeter spinning crazily down, twelve thousand, eleven thousand. They were flying through a storm on the Great Plains, and the bottom of the cloud layer was uncomfortably close to the ground.
“Kill the drone link,” his wife ordered.
He’d done that as she initiated the dive.
“Done,” he said with gritted teeth.
“Relax, Rich.” She was smiling. “I got this.”
Eight thousand feet.
“Fuel?”
“Nine hundred seventy pounds to reserve.”
“Shit.” His wife shook her head.
“Stop saying that,” he pleaded.
Seven thousand feet . . . six . . . five.
“Three thousand AGL,” he intoned after a moment. He knew Jennifer could see the same numbers in her heads-up display as he could in his.
“Two thousand feet.” He was doing his job, just like Jennifer was doing hers.
“Stand by the drag chute.” Her voice was calm, which only added to the crazy he’d just heard.
“Pilot’s airplane,” she grunted as she started to rotate the engine nacelles at the ends of the Osprey’s thick wings. “Ready the chute, Rich.”
The tail chute on the Osprey was an afterthought of design, meant to help slow the craft as it rolled to a stop on a short runway. The Osprey could land like a normal airplane when it had a runway, short or otherwise, but its utility was the ability to land and take off from anywhere it could sit down. Coming out of their dive, they were going far too fast to deploy the chute. Jennifer knew that as well as he did. She had to have a plan.
“Ready.” He gripped the wholly mechanical handle down off the left edge of his seat.
The Osprey was at 800 hundred feet, its nose starting to edge out of its dive, and its jet turbines spinning up. “Now.”
He yanked up on the handle and heard the explosive bolts fire over the engines. They were both snapped forward against their restraints. He half expected the wings to snap off, but his weight against his straps lessened just as the G forces transitioned to squish him into the bottom of the seat, and as the ungainly beast pulled a full four Gs coming out of its dive. The maneuver would have been child’s play for any fighter or crop duster. The Osprey had more in common with an armored truck than either of its winged cousins, and 3.8 Gs was its rated maximum.
The drag chute had chopped 100 knots’ worth of speed and helped bring the nose up before its cable anchors had snapped. Without it, they’d be a smoking crater in the rolling hills of northwest Nebraska.
Jennifer was now in her element. The Osprey hugged the terrain at over 200 knots, as she dove the craft again through the bottom of some canyon land, engines screaming as she popped over the lip of the canyon, having bleed off more speed and moving at a sedate 100 knots, thirty feet off the ground.
“Fuel?”
“Five-minute reserve clock is on.” He’d congratulate her on her flying once they’d landed. At the moment, his jaw muscles would barely relax enough to answer her.
“Cattle on infrared,” he stated a minute later, glancing at the FLIR panel in front of him. “Officially the middle of nowhere.”
A structure in the middle of the rolling plain crept past them on the port side. Jennifer had gotten a better l
ook at it than he had. It was difficult to see anything in the rain-shrouded darkness.
“What was that?”
“Big hay barn,” she said as she flared the craft into a low banking turn.
“Landing gear coming down,” he reported, watching the indicator which seemed stalled on yellow.
“Gear down,” he shouted over the fuel alarm buzzing in both their headsets. They had less than thirty seconds until the engines flamed out.
Jennifer settled the Osprey down with a gentleness very much at odds with the last five minutes. A flash of lightning lit up the area around them, and they could see the metal roof of the hay barn, held up by steel girders fifty yards in front of them. The sound of heavy rain against the frame of the aircraft and off the windows replaced the noise of the engines, which had miraculously still been running as Jennifer shut them down.
“Honey?”
“Yeah, babe?” She looked over at him.
“Tell me you knew the chute would help bring our nose up?”
“OK.” She bit her bottom lip for a second before smiling. “I knew the chute would bring our nose up.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, I was praying really hard.”
Tom Souza’s oversized frame filled the cockpit’s bulkhead.
“Hey, I heard something break in the back,” he said, looking a little green. “What’d you guys do?”
“Where are we?” Brittany’s voice reached them; she was somewhere behind her husband on the narrow set of stairs leading up to the cockpit.
“Northwest Nebraska,” he shouted back.
“What’s close by?”
He shared a look with his wife, who just shrugged in response.
“Wyoming?”
*
Brittany, officer in charge of their small gang of fugitives, looked over to where her two children, twin boys, were asleep atop bales of hay stacked within the massive barn. Each of them was curled up on his own bale like it was an exotic pull-away bed and they were on vacation. They weren’t, and she was less than amused at their current predicament. She didn’t know how long they had before the Osprey was spotted from the air. Once that happened, their freedom would be measured in hours.
“Truck coming,” Tom, her husband, yelled down at them. He was atop the haystack within the roofed-in, open-sided structure. He was playing lookout.
“Looks like the owner to me, just the driver.” He wasn’t quite shouting; his voice echoed off the corrugated metal roof.
“Great . . .” Jennifer Bowden mumbled to her side. Their pilot had done an amazing job, stealing the Osprey from the Army airfield and then getting them this far in one piece. It was her parking job that was an issue. The twenty tons of metal belonging to the Kentucky National Guard was sitting in the middle of an oblivious cattle herd. It wasn’t going to be explained away.
“What now?” Derek Mills whispered from where he lay a few feet away. His very pregnant wife was still sleeping next to him.
“Our best chance is with the locals.” Sir Geoff startled her from behind. “If he has a farm implement of some sort, maybe he can pull the aircraft inside here.”
She glanced over at Jennifer. “Would that work?”
“Sure, you mean like a tractor?” Jennifer asked Sir Geoff, who had aged significantly in the last year.
“Whatever it’s called,” Sir Geoff grunted. “Better a tractor than his telephone, I’m thinking.” The old man was looking at her in question. Eighty years old or not, there wasn’t anything wrong with his mind.
“Tom, come down here; you go talk to him. You grew up on a farm.”
Sir Geoff coughed once politely into his hand. She’d spent enough time with him by this point to know that meant he had something to add.
“What?”
“Might I suggest we send out Mrs. Mills and the children with him. Your husband alone does not inspire trust at first sight.”
She had to admit Sir Geoff had a point. Tom looked like the soldier he was. At six foot four and 250 solid pounds, he wasn’t going to instill a lot of trust.
“I’ll go.” Denise sat up and looked around, blinking. “But I really need to pee first.”
“Alright.” She nodded at her husband, who had just climbed back down to the level of the loft floor. “I’ll wake the boys. Try to play it straight with the guy. But if he so much as twitches wrong . . .”
“I know.” Tom shrugged.
They all watched the old, half-rusted-out, flatbed truck circle the Osprey once before it stopped and disgorged its single occupant. The rancher looked to be about sixty years old, whipcord thin, and was wearing knee-high rubber boots and a faded baseball cap.
The man stood at his truck’s open door and glanced between the Osprey and his barn before beginning to walk towards them. He stopped just outside the perimeter of the structure, peering within.
“I saw your boot prints in the mud!” the man yelled. “You still in there?”
Tom stepped out from behind one of the smaller stacks of bales on the concrete floor, his M4 hanging loose from its front-mounted sling.
The farmer just looked at him for a moment, noting the rifle, and took his own baseball cap off for a moment to scratch his head.
“Car trouble?” he shouted.
“You might say that,” Tom said loudly, walking up to the farmer. The twins stepped out from behind the hay and followed him at a distance.
“We ran out of gas.”
If the rancher was confused to see the Osprey sitting in his back forty, the appearance of the two nine-year-old boys really threw him.
“I see . . .”
“Apologize for landing here, but in the storm, we were just looking for someplace flat.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My name’s Tom.”
The farmer just stared over his shoulder as Denise Mills walked slowly out, a protective arm draped over her baby bump.
“Well . . . Tom?” the rancher said slowly. “How about you start by telling me what the hell is going on. While you’re at it, why don’t you pretend I’m somebody that hasn’t spent his whole life on this ranch. In fact, don’t pretend. When I was a Marine these things had propellers.”
“What do I call you?”
“Name’s Pete, but right now, I’m just real curious.”
Denise had walked up to join him, and she reached out to shake the rancher’s hand.
“I’m Denise,” she said. “We could really use your help.”
“Ma’am.” Pete touched the bill of his cap with one hand and shook with his other, taking in her figure. “Are you . . .?”
“I’ve got another couple of months.”
Tom couldn’t help but smile at the look of obvious relief on the rancher’s face.
“I wasn’t lying, Pete.” Tom pointed to the Osprey. “We ran out of gas. But there’s people looking for us. We need to hide the bird.”
Pete’s eyebrows scrunched up in confusion, and he again took in the twin boys, who were for once, quiet.
“What people?”
“The Army,” Tom answered. Then he shook his head. “And the Air Force. The ISS will be giving the orders.”
Pete just looked at them all again, and nodded towards his hay barn. “How many of you in there?”
“Nine of us all together, three couples, my boys, and . . . their grandfather.”
“So, this isn’t one of them family-day familiarization flights, gone bad?”
“No, Pete.” Tom shook his head. “We stole the bird.”
Pete’s face was unreadable for a moment until a slow grin broke out, and he glanced at Denise for confirmation. “No shit?”
“No shit, sir,” she answered.
“Don’t matter where you hide it,” Pete said. “They’ll just follow its transponder, or hell, its IFF transmitter will work just as well for that.”
“We disabled those,” Denise said. “It’s just software at the end of the day.”
“I see,” Pet
e said before kicking at the mud of the Great Plains that was already starting to dry out.
“Look, I can’t afford no trouble with the ISS; we just got rid of them assholes. There was a good bit of fighting down around Scottsbluff a couple of months past. To hear the stories, a lot of people just disappeared.”
“Trust us, we understand. It’s why we need to hide that aircraft, Pete. As much to protect you as to save our asses. Do you have a tractor? We could pull it under the barn.”
“Mister, do you have any idea what you’re asking?”
“I do, and I can’t apologize enough. We probably don’t have a lot of time.”
“What happens to me and my family if I help you? Can you answer that?”
Tom knew in his heart there didn’t exist an explanation that the ISS would accept.
“I can’t,” Tom answered. “Not without lying to you.”
“And if I say, ‘I can’t risk it,’ what then?”
“Then we steal your truck and phone, and sometime over the next day or so, an ISR drone or a satellite will see the bird. You’ll have to hope the truth you tell them satisfies the ISS.”
Tom watched the emotions play across Pete’s weathered face. All of them just various shades of anger.
“I can radio my boy. He can have the tractor out here in thirty minutes.”
Tom let out a breath in relief, feeling like an asshole as he did it.
*
Pete was happy to learn that these criminals weren’t afraid of work. It took all of them to chain up the Osprey and lift its nose gear out of the mud using the limited amount of lift the tractor had on its PTO forks. They’d been designed to spear and lift rolls of hay, not military aircraft. His tractor could lift the weight, but it could only raise the nose of the craft about eight inches at a time. By the time they’d had the nose wheel of the Osprey set on even ground, the process had seen all of them at the ends of shovel handles. They’d had to dig, lift the craft eight inches or so, pile rocks underneath the wheels, detach, drop the PTO, reattach, and repeat the process. After that, pulling it under the cover of the massive hay barn had been easy.
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 3
