Drone

by M. L. Buchman

  No! Don’t look yet! Don’t conjecture! Start with the facts. Yes, remembering that, she felt better.

  “Miranda Chase,” the general read aloud as if doing so might make her ID less authentic. “National Transportation Safety Board, Two-C. What’s Two-C?”

  “I-I-C. It’s not a Roman numeral. Investigator-in-charge.”

  “What’s the NTSB doing here?”

  “I was on a flight from LA to DC, but my plane was turned around. Only a top priority request to the NTSB would cause this. Your helicopter also arrived to meet me. I must conjecture that the two events have a similar root cause. If the order wasn’t yours, I don’t know whose it was. I’ll start now.” There. That was taken care of. She stepped up to the general’s Humvee and placed her knapsack on the hood.

  Miranda extracted and donned her vest. Across the back it announced NTSB in shoulder-wide bright yellow letters. Even the smallest standard-issue vest was too large on her so she’d had one custom made—someday her country would understand that women now worked for a living. As she didn’t expect it to happen soon, she erased the thought as a waste of mental focus.

  The numerous front pockets were already pre-filled with recorders (she always carried two plus spare batteries), flashlights, gloves, evidence bags in four sizes, and, in an oversized pocket, a tablet computer enabled for precise L5 band GPS tagging of every image she took with a localization accuracy of thirty centimeters. Four markers and three pens—arranged in order by increasing wavelength of their color—and a paper notebook. She could always trust paper.

  “What time did it come down?” She didn’t like saying the word crash—too sharp, as if it had points like a medieval mace. Its late Middle English origin was particularly appropriate for the metaphor, which pleased her.

  The general growled before answering, “At 0507 hours and 19 seconds.”

  “Good.” Thirty-three minutes before sunrise and now it had been just two hours and eight minutes since the impact. That was better than most impact events—some of which she couldn’t reach in days, or sometimes weeks for planes downed and lost in a wilderness area.

  It was also an atypical degree of precision that she appreciated and her team would confirm when they recovered the FDR—assuming the airframe wasn’t so old that it didn’t carry a flight data recorder. Typically, the military installed black boxes on their aircraft only during service-extension upgrades when they changed over to digital cockpits.

  Even then, the recorders were often set to auto-wipe in the event of a crash so that the information couldn’t fall into enemy hands. Pilots were supposed to disable the erase function for service over friendly soil, but bitter experience with an F-22 Raptor, a crash that she’d never been able to properly resolve the causes for, had taught her that didn’t always happen.

  3

  The general seemed reluctant to return her ID.

  Miranda had to reacquire it with a bit of a yank so that she could hang it from the front of her vest. By having everything in precisely the right place, she would bring a minimum of her own entropy to the severely entropic nature of an airplane crash—the ultimate state of disorder.

  She checked. Everything present and accounted for.

  She started to check again, but caught her right hand with her left and pushed it down to her side. It really was a foolish habit, but she was having trouble breaking it.

  “Could you see that the rest of my team joins me as soon as they get in?”

  “You are not authorized for this area. You and your kind don’t belong here. Now turn your pretty little ass around and—”

  “I’m one of the three IICs in the whole agency cleared to top secret sites such as Groom Lake—a fact you can clearly see on my CAC.” She once again removed her ID wallet from her vest and pointed to the Common Access Card on the other side. He inspected it as if it was a bomb that might go off in his hands.

  While he read it, she mulled over the reference to her “pretty little ass.” It had no more relevance to the investigation than her being five-four and having brunette hair. She never understood why men had so much trouble focusing on what was important—like the debris field behind her.

  A class at the NTSB had included statements of what constituted sexual harassment. Had he grabbed her ass, she’d definitely know what was going on. But the phrase, with no contributing tonal or expression shifts (he still had narrowly squinted eyes), didn’t appear to be about her sexuality or lack of it.

  Perhaps he was the one who should have taken the class and not her.

  He pulled out a phone and flashed the barcode across the bottom of her card. He glanced at his display, then the card, then back to his screen without actually looking at her—which she appreciated.

  “Fine.” He practically threw her ID wallet at her. “Go ahead. Do your worst.”

  She returned her ID to the front of her vest so that her NTSB ID faced outward, and was careful to keep her other hand firmly at her side. Now, with everything in place, she could finally begin.

  “Spheres,” she set her starting point.

  “What was that?” the general snapped.

  “Musica universalis,” she explained. When his scowl shifted, apparently to confusion, she ignored him. She supposed that confusion was an improvement over aggression.

  The Music of the Spheres—the Music of the Universe.

  Terence had suggested that she find her own formula for approaching a crash site. She wasn’t one to take it all in big gulps the way her mentor did. He would look at a thousand yards of wreckage and, nine times out of ten, focus right in on the problem.

  But the other ten percent, where the details had him stumped, was where she shone. Details had a certain beauty to them. Minute details fit together like a mosaic, slowly interconnecting until they formed a complete picture—a wholeness that had great internal beauty, even when it was a shattered aircraft.

  Pythagoras had formulated the musica universalis while contemplating the harmonies of motion demonstrated by the sun, moon, planets, and stars—each celestial object attached to a successive crystalline sphere, centered upon the Earth, to explain their separate motions across the sky.

  Miranda had found it far more useful to turn it inward. Instead of looking up at the motion of the stars, she had tunneled it inward to forge her own method of crash investigation. She supposed that made her methodology into a meta of a meta. Though Pythagoras’ imagination had cast his spheres as real and concrete as the marble columns of the ancient Athens Agora marketplace. So she’d made an inward meta of an outward misguided conclusion which…

  Time to begin.

  Environment Sphere (the outermost layer): They were well inside the high-security border of the NTTR. It made missile attack unlikely. A collision or training accident was a possibility, but her initial inspection from the air only indicated a single aircraft. A lone aircraft—mechanical failure or pilot error was the most likely cause. Which was conjecture, but each model had its uses in guiding the investigation as long as she was careful not to allow such models to bias her observations.

  Observational clarity superseded methodology superseded conjecture.

  Intriguingly, it constituted science in reverse. Science had started with a theory of powered flight and, after centuries of struggle, eventually achieved it.

  But when that flight lay shattered upon the ground like this poor aircraft, the scientific process became reversed. Evidence of destruction, observed, then reverse-engineered through a variety of modeling systems, could create a theory of what had happened.

  Proof first, then theory later in so many respects.

  She noted that thought down on the back page of her personal notebook. She hadn’t considered it that way previously and wanted to preserve the concept for the next time she lectured at the NTSB Training Center.

  Weather Sphere: Clear sky.

  Miranda glanced around, but no members of her NTSB Go Team had arrived yet. She’d want a full assessment from a
weather specialist but for now she pulled a handheld weather station from its pocket and held the device aloft for thirty seconds before pressing hold and checking the readings. Four thousand four hundred and three feet above sea level, plus or minus thirty feet. She’d learned to round such numbers off to ease communications with others less concerned about precision—four thousand four hundred feet…plus.

  Ambient temperature eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, hot for early June at two hours and—she checked her watch—seventeen minutes after sunrise, but not out of the normal range.

  Wind speed, at least here at the surface, light and variable averaging eight-point-three knots.

  She noted down the humidity though it was rarely relevant.

  None of which excluded possible wind shear or other events at altitude, it was simply a data point. She eyed the few puffy altocumulus clouds in the ten- to twenty-thousand-foot levels, moving lazily across the sky. Weather—unlikely cause.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened?” The general was looking over her shoulder and she did her best to pretend he wasn’t there.

  “If you knew what happened, I wouldn’t be here.” It had to be something truly exceptional and unknown for her to be called, yet somehow that simple logic escaped the general.

  The general harrumphed but didn’t speak again.

  Terrain Sphere: They stood on a slight rise that offered a good view of the area. It explained why the general had parked here.

  Groom Lake lay in the distance, barely visible as a patch of salt white in the vast brown of central Nevada. Tiny boxes were clustered near midfield, which would be the massive hangars and facilities of the military base. The hills here were soft rolls rather than hard humps or even sharp ridges that she’d previously observed during her two prior NTTR investigations, both near Yucca Mountain to the southwest.

  From the arriving helicopter, she’d made note of the most obvious debris radius—atypically small.

  The C-130 at the Cannon Fire had left a five-hundred-foot impact zone where the wings had come down and burned and a seven-hundred-and-twenty-foot debris field where the inverted fuselage had descended. And that had been a constrained spread for that class of aircraft, its expanse limited by the forest and rough terrain of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  The debris field here appeared to be little longer than the aircraft itself. It implied a steep angle of impact that would contain the crash rather than spreading it over vast stretches of desert. No high terrain; in fact, most of the area astern was a wide pass between low hills. Terrain—unlikely cause.

  The Overview Sphere. This was a difficult step in her system. It was her first real look at the crash, but the amount of hidden information was overwhelming.

  She needed the details to see the big picture, but this was the big picture without the details. She tried squinting her eyes, which did seem to decrease the flow of information and allowed her to observe more overall.

  Jagged shards of jet were strewn beneath the hot desert sun. Twists of metal that had once been wings.

  The hull caved in down its entire length, again the image of the giant’s foot crushing it flat. (The giant from Jack and the Beanstalk had given her terrible nightmares as a little girl and it seemed he wasn’t done with her yet.)

  No sign of any cargo. Her first impression from the air had been correct—as unusual as it might be, the single upright engine was indeed the highest point remaining. She made a note for Tony to do a soils analysis when he arrived to help estimate angle and force of impact.

  Head down against a sudden blast of wind, she began photographing the site from this small rise. The wind built hard and fast, soon backed by the hard whine of a Lycoming T53 turboshaft—probably a UH-1Y Huey helo—but she didn’t want to look toward the approaching aircraft and inaccurately overlap her images.

  “Goddamn it! No photographs.” The general shouted at her over the roar of the landing helicopter. If it was still flying, it wasn’t her problem.

  She ignored both the helicopter and the general until she’d completed her first series. Only then did she see his shadow beside her feet on the soil—with his handgun raised shoulder high and pointed at the back of her head.

  Apparently he had reverted to aggression.

  How curious. Like Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, the allegory that shouldn’t be able to actually affect her.

  At least her mind was curious; her body couldn’t seem to recall how to breathe as the adrenaline slammed into her system.

  4

  Miranda turned very slowly; she’d never faced a weapon before.

  She could shoot one well enough, though she’d never enjoyed it particularly. Living in a very isolated area as she did between assignments, it was occasionally necessary to put down an injured animal herself. It still made her cry every time. So beautiful and free in life, then—bang!—gone forever. Just like every victim in a plane crash she’d been unable to prevent.

  “I said no goddamn photographs. Now give me that thing.” He tipped the weapon slightly to indicate her tablet.

  The pumping adrenaline made her even more hyperaware of details than normal. Every bit of grit shifting under the sole of her boots was a moment of individual assessment until she came face-to-face with the tiny black hole at the end of the barrel, which seemed to expand until it filled the world.

  Now her heartrate was escalating toward panic and her palm went sweaty holding the tablet.

  She glanced over the barrel at the scowling general’s face. This time when her eyes refocused on the tip of the barrel, the black hole had returned to its normal size—small, black, and utterly void of feeling.

  Before she could decide on the best course of action, a tall blonde came toward them from the landed helicopter—slightly behind the general’s field of view. She could have blindsided him easily. Instead, she scuffed her boot loudly by kicking a thorny scrub brush.

  The general flinched and redirected his aim at the newcomer, which caused the blonde to do little more than arch an eyebrow.

  “Now isn’t this just so interesting.” Her accent was thickly Australian. She remained at perfect ease as she circled around to stand close beside Miranda.

  The handgun tracked her closely.

  “Now general, I don’t want to be telling you your job, but is this really the best course of action? First, if you do manage to shoot me, there will be a whole mess of paperwork just pilin’ up higher than Uluru—that’s the big red rock at the center of Australia, by the by, just in case you’re not from around about there—which is a lot of paperwork. Shooting a civilian is very bad form. Even worse, firing on the IIC of the NTSB Go Team investigating your crash would make your motivations appear maybe a tiny bit suspect to people. People you probably don’t want suspecting things about you. However, far more importantly, me former mates in the SAS—that’s the Australian Special Air Service, not my Brit brethren—would be sorely disappointed if I was to let either of those scenarios happen.” She stood as casually as if she was chatting with a friend.

  Miranda inspected her more closely.

  She was five-ten and looked remarkably fit. Which would be fitting for the SAS. Australian Special Operations might not be Delta Force, but they were very elite military. Miranda had no idea what she was doing here, but the woman appeared far better prepared to deal with a weapon-bearing general than she herself was.

  Her hands—Miranda always noticed hands—were strong and had a wide variety of calluses. The most prominent were on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. Miranda tried flexing her own hand through several positions that different tasks might require, but none of them seemed likely to create such a mark. Unless…

  Miranda formed her hand as if she was firing a pistol. Yes, each shot would make the weapon buck against the webbing between thumb and forefinger, which matched the observed data. Just how much did someone have to shoot to create a callus there? Obviously, this woman could answer the question.

  �
�So, mate. I’m asking myself, ‘Holly’—that’s my name, so it’s how I typically address myself—‘Holly, should you break one or both of the general’s hands as you take his weapon?’ For the moment, you may consider that an idle question while you consider the next part. As an extra add-on service, I’d be glad to shoot you with it after I rip it from your bleeding fingers. Just a graze, mind you, so that you could claim you struggled manfully before a Sheila took away your personal weapon and spanked you with it.”

  The general’s expressions shifted through a wide range during Holly’s speech. The anger appeared to dissipate, replaced by suspicion and several other emotions that Miranda couldn’t identify. But at Holly’s final threat, the anger had definitely returned.

  Miranda looked at her watch.

  Her motion had the general returning his aim to her own chest.

  Not her best move.

  But she saw that they’d already wasted eleven minutes since she should have started her investigation—which would never do. She pushed the barrel aside and stepped into his personal space. He stumbled back.

  She’d have to remember this tactic.

  He snapped off the safety with a sharp click as if that was somehow more threatening than the black hole at the end of the barrel.

  It was.

  She began swallowing compulsively.

  Maybe this wasn’t her best idea after all.

  But, damn it, there had to be limits. She ignored the weapon and followed through with the initial impetus that had sent her forward. Bending down, she photographed an object that she’d spotted when looking down at her watch. It had been partly under the general’s boot.

  “What’s that?” He didn’t lower his aim, so it was now pointed where her head had been. Failure to track her as a target? Reverting once more from aggression to confusion. She really didn’t understand people. Or perhaps he was just a pile of inconsistencies, shifting before she could analyze one moment from the next.