Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  “Watch what the pods do,” he told Lee.

  The frame that said lift, he changed to lifting body. The pods were already tilted forward at about fifty degrees. They swung forward and in until they were riding almost straight ahead on their booms. The leading wedge only tilted up about five degrees. The surge forward was impressive but Alonso pulled the stick back and traded speed for climb until it dropped and held steady at Mach point six-five.

  When he passed thirty thousand meters Lee was grinning from ear to ear at the view and the darkening sky. Then Alonso jammed the stick forward.

  “Whaa-whooooo!” Lee cried at the roller coaster plunge.

  All of a sudden, the chisel tops on the pods made sense. As they went through the Mach it vibrated briefly and the sound got different. Alonso increased the angle of dive at full power until their airspeed read Mach 1.36. The car was riding inside the shock cone from the leading pods, doing a little hula, the nose wanting to wander side to side. Alonso corrected something on his board that stopped it. Then he eased back both power and angle. The pods swung slightly into negative lift so the nose came up until their belly was outside the shock cone from the forward pods and acting like a big speed brake. It felt like a ground car on gravel and their speed plummeted. That wasn’t all that plummeted. The sky quickly looked normal again and their speed was Mach .72 and falling. The ground below was displaying a lot more detail of rivers and roads again.

  “Not bad. Not bad at all,” he said smugly. “As far as I know you own the first transonic aircar. If the Earthies ever made one it’s never been in the trade literature.”

  “Hot damn. I accept it all over again. What did you fiddle with back there to make it stop wiggling?” she demanded.

  “I turned the leading edge of the wedges on the front pods up a couple of degrees on the outside corner,” Alonso said. He demonstrated it with his hands held flat.

  “What does that do?” Lee asked mystified.

  “It’s like a ground car. If you set the front wheels straight ahead it will drive you nuts wandering all over the road at the slightest breeze or variation in the pavement. You need to toe the wheels in a couple of degrees at the front and it wants to go straight then. Don’t worry, it will retain that setting now that it is entered. You should know if you exceed the Mach it will lay a shockwave along your flight path. The lower you are the greater the overpressure will be. It’s beyond anything my software could design to attenuate it.”

  When they got back and the hangar came into view as they descended, eight bright orange safety cones were sitting around the dollies they’d left behind.

  “Oh great, the grounds manager is going to yell at me for leaving a traffic hazard.”

  “If they fine you, let me know. I’ll pay it,” Lee offered.

  * * *

  In the short time that Alonso and Lee were gone, Sam got two alerts from his new camera. A Human showed up and removed the tie-downs on a single-seater parked in the open behind Alonso’s hangar. After removing a cover from the windows, he did a walk-around. Once he climbed in and the propeller came alive, he taxied past the camera with a buzzing sound to take off. He was able to fast forward through most of that action to see nothing was concurrently happening with his target.

  The second alert was triggered by a utility cart driven by a Derf stopping in front of Alonso’s business. The driver got out removing a stack of bright safety cones from a box on the rear and positioning them around something on the pavement in front of the hangar.

  With the distortion from the fisheye lens, Sam hadn’t even noticed the dollies. They could have been a dip or oil spot on the pavement. He tried the zoom feature and got a better look. Sure enough, they were three-wheel dollies. Similar to what you’d use to move heavy furniture, like a grand piano. Other than the fact that suggested they’d pushed the aircar out rather than taxi it, that didn’t really tell him much of anything. A plane taxied past with a loud turbine whine, and then the worker drove away.

  The third alert in such a short time made Sam wonder if this surveillance was more trouble than it was worth. Until he opened it up to find the aircar setting down gently on the dollies and the hangar door going up. Nobody got out right away and the car sat there for several minutes. He zoomed the camera in for a good tight view. Bizarrely, it changed color on the top part several times while the bottom stayed pale blue. It finally turned solid red all over. Alonso and Lee finally got out and rolled it inside. Alonso came back out and gathered the safety cones into a single stack and left them outside his office door.

  Sam was irritated that the sound seemed to have died on the camera. He was looking for a function to run the gain up or down when a plane landed behind the camera with a squeak of tires and the roar of reversed engines. That was weird. The sound was working but the aircar hadn’t made any noise at all. Now that the action was over and it was inside, he backed the recording up a couple of minutes before the point where he’d come in. The car came into sight overhead but it was strange. It looked like a corrupted file or some sort of artifact. He backed it up and watched it three times before he was sure what he was seeing.

  The car wasn’t visible until it got low enough to see the side a little. If you knew where to look you could see some blurring and a random flicker of darker or lighter pixels around the engine pods earlier but it was really low before you suddenly saw the top curve of the canopy and the body behind it. The bottom half of the aircar wasn’t clearly visible until you were looking pretty much sideways at it.

  Sam called his partner Bill King in to look at the video.

  “Watch here.” Sam circled an area of the screen with a finger and started the recording.

  “Uh-huh, Uh-huh,” Bill said when the blue sky got splotchy and freckled.

  He watched it all the way through until the aircar was pushed inside.

  “Very nice. They have some serious high-end optical stealth there,” Bill King said. “I hope you didn’t place that camera yourself.”

  “No, I hired out spotting the cam, and yeah, I figured out that it’s an active stealth system. But it’s so quiet. I’ve seen really expensive aircars back home that had high-powered noise-canceling speakers. But the very best of them just reduced the roar to a level that wasn’t painful. How can they possibly do that?”

  “You’re missing the obvious. What kind of engine pods are those?” Bill asked.

  “How would I know? I’m no kind of aviation buff or a gear-head. They’re kind of skinny and long not fat and short like shrouded fans, so I’d guess they are turbines?” Sam said.

  Bill looked amused. “If they were turbines, I imagine the exhaust would have sent those dollies rolling all over the place and blown those safety cones away. They’re not filled with concrete you know.”

  “I can’t say as I’ve ever touched one, other than inadvertently running over a whole line of the damn things one time.” Sam saw Bill thought he was humorous now and regretted calling him in. He should have puzzled it out on his own first.

  “The give-away is both ends of those pods are sealed up. Believe me, you don’t flow enough air through one to lift that thing without a big hole we could easily see.”

  Sam looked at the video again and zoomed in.

  “It’s kind of a big deal then, isn’t it?”

  “More than I know how to tell you,” Bill King admitted. “We have to decide if we are going to report this or keep it to ourselves. It’s going to be disruptive. The question is. Do we want to be in the middle of it? If we report it, I’m sure it will be considered too important to leave it up to us to investigate. I have no illusions. We’re here because we’re considered part of the B team. They will send in a couple of young hot-shots. Right now, that would mean sending them through other nations at great expense.”

  “If they even believe us,” Sam said. “But we could still be yanked back home if they think we are nuts and don’t trust us in the field anymore.”

  “I hadn’t considered
that possibility, but you are right,” King said. “I’m surprised they haven’t terminated our mission and ordered us home yet. I’ve been dreading deciding what to do if they recall us.”

  “I have no desire to return to Earth in either case,” Sam said.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear again,” King said. “As long as we were just marking time to retirement and nothing big was happening there was no big decision to make. But if we fail to report this and they find out somehow it will be considered disloyalty. They’ll consider us compromised.”

  “Which we are, technically,” Sam said.

  Bill said nothing. Technically Bill was senior but as conspirators, they had to be equal.

  “Tell me this,” Sam asked. “If we did report it, what difference would it make? Are they going to steal the vehicle? Would they bring in a mercenary team to snatch it? Right now, unless somebody is lying to us, North America is pretty well cut off from access to space. They can’t project any force into the Derfhome system. Even if we somehow managed to steal the guts out of one of those pods. We could get information out but we don’t have any facilities to disassemble it or reverse engineer it to extract that information.”

  King nodded. “All we could do would be give them a heads up that they have a new technology. That isn’t of much benefit with zero details. What I’m wondering, is, why would she put this in an aircar instead of a spaceship?”

  “Maybe it won’t work in a spaceship?” Sam suggested.

  “I doubt that. Physics is physics, everywhere.”

  “Maybe they are working on it for spaceships,” Sam said. “We’re not in any position to see what they are doing in orbit.”

  “In which case we’re way too late to make a difference if it’s already trickling down to lesser applications,” King said.

  “Then let’s agree to just continue watching,” Sam said. “I will keep everything we have on this tech isolated on one memory card.”

  “I agree. We’ll just sit on it unless something changes. Where will you keep it?” King asked. “I need to be able to find it if it needs to be wiped.”

  “In case I get run over by a bus?” Sam said.

  “One never knows. Though that’s an odd name for an irate Derf.”

  “See the big fern?” Sam pointed. “There’s a fertilizer stick in the pot. It’ll be under that. It looks normal for that to be disturbed.”

  * * *

  “Where are you going to keep your new aircar?” Alonso asked.

  Lee didn’t answer. She just had a surprised and embarrassed expression.

  “You didn’t think that far ahead,” Alonso guessed.

  “I live in a hotel. I guess people don’t keep them at the airport?”

  “The whole point of an aircar over a plane is being free of airports,” Alonso said. “I’ll take some blame for not asking. Most of my customers have owned aircraft before and are familiar with their care and keeping.”

  “Can I leave it here for now? I’d be happy to pay storage until I can find a place.”

  “For now. I’m into a couple of other long-term projects now but sometimes I need room for four vehicles. You need a fairly secure building. At least it’s so quiet that your coming and going won’t upset the neighbors.”

  “Maybe the hotel would let me keep it on the roof,” Lee said.

  Alonso shook his head. “It’s an old building. Even with no rotor wash pressing down on it the weight is too much for a roof that wasn’t designed as a landing pad. It’s all concentrated on four points too. Do you want it sitting out in the weather?”

  “No, I guess not,” Lee agreed. “The Mothers have a security man, Strangelove, in town. He’s assigned to guard Jeff Singh. I’ll ask him what assets he has to store it close to me. I haven’t told him or anybody what I’m building. I owe the Central people a full explanation of the tech in due time but only my guys at the university knew I was up to something”

  Alonso looked surprised. “Wouldn’t they have been a big help?”

  “Yeah, and they probably will be to develop it further. We have… other projects with them. I was about to reveal this to them and we almost had a falling out. Truthfully, I want to rub their noses in it a little bit that we can do development without them. I’ll share it fully after I walk them out unannounced and give them a ride in it. Do you have alarms in the shop? I suspect the first thing Strangelove is going to ask is how secure the car is. He has guys covering some of our other stuff.”

  “I have sensors that will call my pad. But I’m not a bank,” Alonso said. “I don’t have armed response hired. If you want to give me free professional security, I’ll welcome them and they can set up in the office and drink my coffee.”

  “You know what?” Lee decided. “I’ll call him right now before I leave. If he wants to send a couple of soldiers over, I won’t have to get back to you and arrange it.”

  “Soldiers?” Alonso’s attitude changed abruptly. “So, we’re talking military level security not just commercial? Yeah, let’s get that all ironed out for sure, right now.”

  * * *

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “Sam, I hate it when you say something like that out loud and then expect me to beg to know what has you upset. Can’t you just go ahead and tell me?” Bill asked.

  “I’m sorry. Lee stayed at the hangar rather long. I expected her to head home. She waited to leave until a couple of Red Tree soldiers showed up in full gear. They had duffels and some equipment cases like they aren’t just paying a visit and they appear to be putting cameras and sensors out.”

  “You probably precipitated that,” Bill King speculated.

  “Then why not right after my visit?” Sam asked.

  “Fair point. But maybe they would have been lax without anybody nosing around. The way you described it the aircar was just a shell at that point. You said it was up on stands. I bet it didn’t have the pods mounted yet, did it?”

  “No. I can’t say I ever saw them sitting around either,” Sam admitted.

  “Well, in any case, now they have a functional vehicle, with whatever is in those pods to make it go,” Bill said. “You may assume the chassis you saw before is nothing special so it wasn’t worth guarding. Be happy you didn’t go snooping around and get caught by Red Tree’s Finest instead of an irate mechanic. I doubt they’d let you go as easily.”

  “I can’t argue that. These boys looked hardcore. I’ve been trying to think how we could use this locally instead of reporting it home and everything I come up with is simply too dangerous.”

  “Keep thinking that way. And warn me if you suddenly get crazy brave because I don’t want to be anywhere around when you start juggling this time bomb.”

  “No, I won’t do anything stupid,” Sam promised. “It’s just frustrating. We’ve been here years and when we finally start getting some important intelligence everything has changed so it’s pretty much useless to us.”

  “It’s of a great deal of use to us in this way,” Bill said. “Earth was already behind Central and the far worlds in technology. That was a big part of why we didn’t want to go back. Our idiot masters seem oblivious to reality and determined to continue belligerence with these folks. It would appear to me that besides having better jump drives they are now going to have reactionless non-quantum drives. If they provoke the Spacers again it’s going to be a lot safer here than back on Earth. And I mean anywhere on Earth. I’m thus doubly sure we want to be on this side of any exchange. I’m more convinced than ever that we have to avoid returning at any cost.”

  “I’m still with you on that,” Sam agreed.

  * * *

  “Thank you for calling me, no matter how late in the game,” Strangelove said when Lee was back home. “Alonso went home for the day and my guys are comfortable there.”

  Lee waited a moment for more but it wasn’t forthcoming.

  “That’s all? You aren’t going to yell at me for not telling you about the project?”


  “I’ve found a small measure of wisdom from experience,” Strangelove asserted. “If you yell at people about security matters, they are even less likely to be forthcoming the next time there is a problem. It’s not so difficult with one’s subordinates. I stopped trying to make my men follow instructions. At our safe-house, if a soldier wrote down the password to the security system it took me on the average about five minutes to find it taped to the bottom of the mouse, incorporated in the name of a file on screen, or in one case on a stapler the fellow always had out as if he used it frequently. Now, I simply send the miscreant back to Red Tree and request another fellow to be sent for me to test.

  “Would you like to guess how many transfers it took to get someone who would follow orders?” Strangelove asked.

  “You can’t have that many qualified to post there,” Lee reasoned. “Four?”

  “Six,” Strangelove said. “And yes, I was running out of candidates for city duty.”

  “Did the bad boys get demoted?” Lee wondered.

  “They are perfectly good soldiers for other purposes. If I ordered them to run headlong into live fire, I’m sure they would jump to it. But they expect to be called upon to be brave. They can’t see the purpose of my silly security rules. I might as well ask them to stop and turn around three times each time they enter the house and expect them to obey. So, no, they suffered no demotion in rank or privilege. I just have a note in their records that they aren’t suited to high-security work and why. My successor may need that data.”

  “It may surprise you to know that makes so much sense to me that I’m going to make a note of it in a journal I keep,” Lee said. “I’m trying to keep all the gems I’ve learned about command. Most of them are from Gordon but a few like this are from others.”

  “Then add this to your notes,” Strangelove suggested. “This pruning works well down the chain of command. However, when dealing with one’s superiors that option doesn’t exist to discard them until you find one more to your liking.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” Lee said. “I’ve been reading a history about Earth governments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It seems a lot of countries had serial coups with the military seizing power from the civilian government and ruling for a period and then installing another administration. Sometimes the same one, which seems crazy to me.”