The Hummingbird Series
By TR NoWry
The Hummingbird Series, by TR NoWry
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2009 by TR NoWry
All Rights Reserved
Published By TR NoWry
All 'Art' By TR NoWry
The characters in this book are entirely fictional and rightly belong in the fiction section. Any resemblance to real people, places, countries or religions is completely unintentional. As with all copyright books, copies (physical and digital) are restricted to what is legally defined as fair use. No other use is expressed or implied and all other uses are reserved.
Starve the beast and feed the artist. This book is brought to you 100% free from the tyranny of editors and publishers as an independent novel. Future titles are dependent entirely on your support. Thank you for keeping prices low by not copying!
The Hummingbird Series consists of, at this printing, Patent Mine, Hell from a Well, The Heredity of Hummingbirds, and Mourning after Dawn.
I use brackets to make finding [chapters] easier. Searching for [] will get you to the next book faster.
Patent Mine
By TR NoWry
He woke to the rumble of a train bearing down on him. He unzipped the opening to the tent, and a black and white cat bolted out and ran toward the house.
"Come back here, Max!" he shouted, fumbling with his clothes.
The leaves on the trees rustled with anticipation amidst this clear morning sky.
"It's nothing to be afraid of!"
The train sounded louder.
He searched the sky while reaching inside the tent for his—
BOOOMMMMM!!!
It passed at treetop level, flinging his tent into the woods and stripping him of his shirt. Water from the pond soaked him in a fine spray.
The whine of the chase jets just a few seconds later were nowhere near as impressive.
Yearly combat training was one of the benefits of living in such a desolate place. F-16s and Raptors were commonplace to him. The one in the lead, the one sounding like a train was new. Well, not new to him. He had seen versions of it for years in these mountains. It was tiny and black on the top, sky blue on the bottom. It was teardrop shaped with no visible cockpit. No windows at all.
He wiped his face, then looked for his tent.
Ah, more important than the tent was the camcorder he had reached for.
It was scratched, but not damaged.
He turned it on and aimed to the sky. To date, he had nearly four hours of video of this plane. That represented years of viewing. He made a few hundred to a few thousand for every clip he sold to UFO conspiracy web sites and military tech people. They paid well for cutting edge, even if it was out of focus.
He had kept the best stills for himself.
It was seamless. A near perfect creation of speed and agility.
He searched for the chase planes, then focused ahead of them.
Got it! It was hard to see from the ground.
As soon as the chase planes lined up for the shot, it pulled a near right angle and slipped into the valley.
There were less than a hundred homes within this mountain range. The nearest town was over thirty miles away, and the nearest city was a two-hour drive. The people who lived here strongly objected to a base being built. They protested the loudest about the sound, but in private, they simply hated everything military, much like his parents.
Hippies.
His parents had struck it rich very young. They had a chain of restaurants in California, but the taxes were killing them. The first offer they got for the chain, they took, just to get out of there. They moved to these isolated mountains and planned on retiring at the ripe old age of thirty. Without the stress of managing the chain, they planned to start a family.
Things didn't work out.
When he was ten, his parents found out that they didn't like gardening as much as they had thought. That living off the land was hard, buying food at the store was easy. They had moved with these lofty ideals that they could find harmony with nature, almost expecting chickens to pluck themselves before climbing into the pot and choking on a garnish.
He held the camera near his side as he scanned the sky again. He wanted to review what he already got, but that risked missing— if he had only woken sooner, he could have gotten the best shot of his life! It passed so close he thought he could touch it.
He could hear the echoes in the valley. They were coming back.
He held the camera to his eye. Bingo!
These were the money shots.
The mystery plane just pulled another impossible maneuver. Without having the chase planes and the treetops in frame to confirm a steady camera hand, nobody would believe a plane could put itself into a flat spin, fly backwards, bank up and strafe the tops of two chase planes in under a second.
What made these military maneuvers all the more impressive was they didn't always use sensors and lasers to score hits. For two weeks, twice every year, they used a kind of non-lethal live ammo. Basically a high-power paint ball. Those were the weeks that he taped.
This morning's match was over. The teardrop pilot had never been defeated; at least, not that he had ever taped.
The chase planes continued to pursue. He heard the whine of the turbines guzzling fuel, and he watched the extra heat distort the air behind them. But the teardrop just straightened, then slipped into sonic and disappeared. The boom was as distinctive as the train sound. It was odd, in a way. It was quieter above the speed of sound than it was below it. Yet, he had seen it pass overhead in complete silence too.
It made as little sense as— they were fighter planes, why in the world would it make the sound of a train?
It had puzzled him for years, and the best excuse he could come up with was it was perhaps a limiter or governor of some sort. Something like what they put on racecars to even the playing field.
The governor made the most sense. It was the fastest thing he had ever seen. He had never seen it fight one at a time. It was always two, three, or four against one.
He searched near the tent, picking up stray pieces of clothes, blanket, and a ruined packed breakfast. He unwrapped his telephoto lens, attached it to the camera, grabbed the tripod and ran to the spot on the far side of the pond.
There was only one spot, looking across the pond, that was clear of enough trees to see the mountaintop base several miles away. He focused, then waited.
His parents were horrified and outraged, like most of the original homeowners in this valley, when the military people shaved the top of the mountain off to make the base and landing strip. From the valley, you couldn't tell, but his home was just high enough to see it had received a harsh buzz cut.
He pressed record but didn't look through the lens, he stared with his eyes.
The first two to land were the conventional planes. They circled for a few minutes, lined up, then tracked for a normal landing. Hardly worth the tape.
He waited.
"Max!"
He worried about that damn cat. It was perfectly capable of taking care of itself, but, he worried.
He laughed. That cat didn't take crap from nothing. But it didn't realize that a hawk or an owl could just swoop down and snatch it up.
He looked through the camera.
It came screaming in, top speed, then did this belly flop to come to a stop. It seemed to hover, if just for a second, then float the last few feet like a leaf falling from a tree.
He had bought the telephoto to try to catch better photos. His house was on the backside of the base and rarely saw a display this close. But the lens proved problematic. At such extreme distances, he couldn't keep it steady. He could get a few good frames, but that was mostly just luck.
However, he got some of his best shots with the tripod, holding fast just above the landing strip. It was a lot like trying to snatch a picture of a hummingbird. It's frustrating and blurry to try to catch them in flight, so you set the camera up on a tripod and focus on the feeder.
He packed up his equipment, then looked for the rest of his stuff.
His parents had done one thing right. He cast the line into the pond. It was manmade and one of the main reasons why his parents had picked this spot. One side of it was lined with three trucks of concrete, and it slowly filled with rain over the next two years. About when he turned six, his father stocked it with catfish, trout, bluegills, bass, carp, and dozens of other varieties they had caught on various fishing trips. It spanned maybe ten acres and was deep enough to swim in, but not drown. At sixteen, it had only two spots that were deeper than his shoulders.
He pulled the line back in.
Nothing, but the worm was gone.
He set another, then cast it again.
This time, the bite was immediate.
Catfish. His personal favorite. He bashed it against a rock, recovered the hook, then tossed the catch up shore. He lit a fire and started cooking.
Before it was done, his black and white cat had returned.
"So, Fraidy Cat, what brings you back?" he said, flipping the fish with a spatula.
The cat grabbed his knee with its front feet, looked him in the face, licked its lips, then jumped onto his lap.
"You think you deserve some of that, do you?"
The cat put its two front feet out onto his forearm so it could get a better sniff of the fish.
He pulled the cat back to his lap. He looked over at the pile of fish guts. The cat had bypassed it entirely. He picked a chunk near the tail and placed it on his knee. "My Fraidy Cat, to the Max."
Max chewed away while the rest cooked a little longer.
Max liked catfish too.
He had a short hike to the house. It wasn't a very big house, just two bedrooms, but it was his most of the time. Because of the base, it was difficult to sell when his parents divorced. His mother got a place in the city, two hours away. His father was always away on 'business'. At sixteen, he had the house alone, most of the time.
He adjusted the camera bag when he got into the clearing around the house. He would have to mow the lawn soon. He hated that. The grass around the solar panel would be the first to go. The panel was turned into one of the shed walls where the mower was parked, among other stuff.
His father read every do-it-yourself hippie thing out there. And tried to do half of them, often with disastrous results. The solar thing was the only one that halfway worked.
Max ran to the front door and started to scratch.
"Alright, I'm coming," he said, to which Max scratched with more impatience.
He let the cat in.
He had online classes to take anyway.
With the entire valley so spread out, it didn't make sense to send a bus around to pick them all up. Internet, satellite, and phone to the rescue. When his mother was living at home, she home-schooled him, supplemented with online stuff. High school was done without her.
It was boring. His mom had given him a solid education; she had wanted to be a teacher when she was young and attacked it enthusiastically. She had blackboard paint on one wall, an overhead projector, and even got a formal student desk he now kept in his room. He was in the top of his class (of fifteen students) and he hardly had to do any homework. Class had become a lesson in attendance. If he wasn't online by 9am, they called his mom and dad instantly, at their work numbers. It wasn't worth the hassle. He usually played a video game during class on a second laptop (earphones) anyway. Why not sit 'in class' too. It would be too hot after school to cut the grass, so, he'd have to put it off until tomorrow, again.
Did-Dump. "Argo, watd you get for number 16?" the IM read.
He didn't bother looking it up, he simply sent the entire exercise as an attachment. "You still at your mother's?" he added in the text.
Did-Dump. "Dad."
"He home today?"
Did-Dump. "Shouldn't be back till tonight. Want to hang?"
He smiled, then added the symbol to the text.
Dara was a cute girl, a little on the heavy side, but still cute. She lived closer to the valley, about a twenty-minute dirt-bike ride down the road. But she was always worth it.
He skipped the rest of the game, after the zombies clobbered him in an ambush, and started uploading his camera into the computer where he could clip and cut and go frame by frame. It was slow and painstaking, but no worse than online school.
This was his junior year, what did they expect?
Argo pulled the sheets off, tossed the condom in the trash, then started putting on his clothes.
Dara pulled the sheets to her chest, self-consciously, "Dad's not coming home tonight, he call—"
"I still have to go." Argo stood and zipped his pants.
"But, you can stay."
He started to laugh, but covered for it, "I'd love to, but, I've got to be down at the pond for the morning show." He never kissed her on the lips after, so he pecked her on the cheek as he walked out her bedroom door.
She dragged the sheets down the hall after him.
He stopped at her front door, "Besides, I left Max locked up in the house, and nobody wants that cat getting anxious in their house."
She listened as he started the bike and raced away.
He wound up the alarm clock, pulled the camera off the charger, then checked everything in the bag.
Max jumped onto the bed, then stared into the bag too.
"You coming, or staying?"
Max scratched at the box of fishing hooks.
"You know, you can fish some too."
And on the word fish, Max clawed.
"Ok, that's enough." Argo moved the cat to the center of the bed, then zipped up the backpack. He considered taking the laptop, but didn't. Its WiFi reached down to the pond, but the batteries would only last a few hours. The path was nearly impossible to navigate without full daylight, and you never wanted to stray too far from the path.
The cat followed him out the door.
Camping outside had its dangers. There were cats much bigger than Max in these woods, not to mention bears and dogs. He checked the pistol before the fire went out. One round chambered, safety off, hammer down. Squeeze the trigger and it would fire, but the trigger would need to be squeezed very hard. He was never sure what that was called, single action or double? Max could give almost anything pause. In a weird way, he felt safer with Max in the tent than the gun, but only the gun was truly lethal.
When he was thirteen, a wild dog was bearing down on him along the path to the house. He was exhausted and couldn't run anymore, so he stopped.
The dog was seconds from pouncing when Max jumped between them, stood on his hind legs, hissed with claws drawn and a fluffed tail, and the dog stopped in its tracks. Max lunged toward it, and the snarling dog backed up. Max lunged four more times before the dog just ran off.
It was like the coolest Jedi mind trick he had ever seen. A black and white cat, standing on its hind feet no taller than his knee, scared away a sixty-pound dog.
Max was a ferocious cat, when he wanted to be.
At least, Max looked ferocious.
A single bite, maybe two bites at most from the dog would have ended any fight with Max. The problem was neither the dog nor Max seemed to know that.
He turned on his radio and its little nightlight, rolled out the sleeping bag, then climbed in. "Inside, or out?" He held open the bag.
The cat put its nose in, then backed out again.
"You sure?"
The cat curled on the outside of the bag instead.
Argo folded a corner to cover the cat. It got cold at night, even for the fiercest of creatures.
BZZZZZZ!!!
He turned off the alarm clock. Max was already at the door. He unzipped it and the cat shot out. Max used litter boxes, if he must, but preferred to go outside. It probably had something to do with marking territory or something, but he didn't presume to know the mind of a Jedi master.
He readied the camera, then looked up. Crap. Too much fog.
He heard the train, but couldn't see anything. He caught a glimpse of four— No, make that six chase planes this time, all Raptors. He aimed the camera, but the lens fogged immediately.
Raptors used thrust vectoring to increase maneuverability. Whatever the teardrop used, it was superior to even that. It slid into a flat spin, stabilized with the left wing as the leading edge, then open fired on the Raptor to its side. It was flying sideways! It shifted to a belly-flop brake, then reversed course. It could perform maneuvers that would rip the wings off any other plane. They disappeared into the clouds.
This morning's fight would have been spectacular, had it not been obscured by clouds. He wanted to toss the camera into the pond out of frustration, but didn't. He continued to watch for the little glimpses he could get.
The remaining five were dispatched in less than a minute and were now lining up on the base.
It was over. He looked for worms, then unfolded his pocket fisherman.
At least Max wouldn't be disappointed.
[Chapter 2]
"Oh, God, I hate this part!" Dana said from the pilot seat.
"Breathe, and hold," the co-pilot said from the back.
They both took a breath, then the plane belly flopped from the sky. It threw both back into the seats. Hard.
The autopilot, like those on the chase planes, prevented crashes and monitored pilots for blackout, so it was a perfectly safe maneuver. It just hurt like hell, but was all part of the training.
The HB-4 was designed to land anywhere, and to land under fire. The best way to avoid getting hit was to never fly slow. Belly flop landings were a key part of the training, and Dana had to get it right, without the autopilot kicking in, or help from the back seat.
"Good job, Dana," the co-pilot said. The gauge read 12.4gs, painful, but, the way the plane was designed, 20gs was the real blackout range. "Float the leaf."
Dana worked the controls and landed on the elevator doors with a feather touch.
The tires braked, engines throttled down, and the floor lowered them down into the mountain. The canopy shifted with the changing of light as they descended into the darker hangar below. Infrared, UV, X-ray, backscatter radar. It had it all, and projected it seamlessly onto the inside of the canopy, superimposed over optically enhanced images. A user controlled fish-eye disappeared with a switch. It had superimposed a zoomed image in the direction of travel, required for super and hypersonic speeds. When it takes ten miles to swerve, you need to see twenty miles out. It was a little like flying through a sniper scope, and it took a lot to get used to. The periphery was compressed to include a 360-degree look behind. Objects were targeted and highlighted, automatically.
People were now being highlighted through twenty feet of solid concrete and steel. Desks and planes outlined, ordinance counting up on each plane and tallied into threat assessments assigned to every object. Dana shut down those systems too, leaving on only the optics and infrared.
The elevator reached the bottom, and the taxi-car locked to the front tire and towed it to its slot.
The seals leaked with a hiss as the hatch opened and the two climbed out.
"What were the readings on the MHD drives?" the co-pilot asked.
Dana checked the readings projected inside her helmet. "A peak of 15mw, left, 45 right side."
"I knew those retards didn't put it back together right. They should both be well over 50."
Dana checked the log. "The rails read offline anyway, not that they work with dummy rounds. The potassium carbonate tank is empty, so, the wash was getting a good mix."
"It isn't your fault, Dana, they take the damn thing apart every day, trying to figure out how it works, and they never put it back right." She inspected the gun ports. "These paint rounds keep breaking early." She wiped the sprayed paint from around the barrels.
"You use caseless—"
"Stop defending them. Just because they—"
"Me, defending them? Me?" Dana removed her helmet. "Seriously?"
The co-pilot removed her helmet too. "No, I, I'm just—"
"Pissed because they suspended you from participating in combat this—"
"It's my damn plane, Dana. Mine. Every inch of it."
Dana just nodded. "I know, Darling."
It was dwarfed by nearly every other plane in the massive underground hangar. Its assigned slot was sized for a Raptor, which made it look like a bike parked in a car slot. They made their way to the closest door out of the hangar and into the central halls. Most of the base was underground.
At the first corner, three boys jumped Dana and slammed her into the nearest block wall.
She blindly swung the helmet and it made a satisfying crack and anguished cry behind her.
Kick! Kick! Pummel and kick!
Dana was flattened to the floor as they pounded her more.
"Damn cheating dyke!" one of the boys yelled at Dana's co-pilot as they dragged her halfway through a door, then repeatedly slammed it on her leg.
The leader of the boys knelt by Dana's bleeding face, "Let's see you do that again." He ground his heal into her hand, then left down the hall.
"You've set the leg, right?"
"Broken in two places—"
"X-ray it again, and schedule an MRI—"
"An MRI sounds excessive—"
"I didn't ask you if it sounded excessive, Doctor, I told you to schedule one. What's in that girl's head is worth a—"
"The attack seems focused on her leg, not her—"
"Check for blood clots too, Doctor."
"I don't get why I was flown in for this, has child services been notified?"
"Doctor, you are our specialist on call. We pay an enormous amount of money to have you on retainer. It isn't easy to find qualified doctors who have the level of clearance you do. If you forget the password to your email, it is an inconvenience. If she has a small stroke and forgets the password to her plane, it may cost billions. She may look like a child, but she is not. You will use your full expertise on this girl, and you will take every possibility into consideration. Do your job."
"Nurse, where is your X-ray and MRI?"
They rolled the girl down the hall as Dana watched from her bed.
"What's the patient's name, Nurse?"
"I'm not sure you are cleared for that, Doctor."
Dana knew her name. They had grown up together, more or less her entire life. They even shared the same room for the last few years. Shadona. She was perhaps the best and only friend she had left in this place.
A broken leg would keep her from being in a plane, any plane. Broken bones didn't take to Gs very well.
Five years back, at the ripe old age of twelve, Shadona had grown tired of the limitations of Raptors and referred to it as an archaic, obsolete platform, to three of the lead engineers on the Raptor project. Within the year, the HB-1 was born. Nearly identical to the HB-4 they flew today, it lacked armaments and a few refinements, but was the basic platform. The first three were destroyed because the base engineers dismantled it religiously in an attempt to understand how it was made, and, lacking even the basic understanding of how it worked, they often put back critical components incorrectly. Two test pilots died trying to figure out how to fly it.
The XO walked to Dana's bed. "What were the activation codes?"
"F38G94S," Dana said, "But you know that's useless to you. It flashes a sign, she gives the counter sign. She does the math in her head and just tells me the numbers. And no, I don't know the formula she uses, she knows not to tell me."
He looked frustrated. "We will figure it out, one day." He started walking away.
"Sure, you're much smarter than her. It should be easy. She estimated it would take a supercomputer 22,954 days to crack the code, if that helps."
Shadona tested as very high functioning autistic as an infant, then she dropped to perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. Without the code, the entire operating system of the plane ceased to function. Enter a close, but wrong code, and the plane would fly for a brief period, then lock. Shadona could do complex math in her head faster than any other human, probably on the planet. You had only a few seconds to enter the code, not long enough to look it up in a book. Dana knew that it was a basic formula, heavy math, but beyond that, she didn't want to know.
"Good luck!" she said as he left the room.
"F38G94S" the XO repeated to the crew working on the plane.
One entered it. "Nothing. But it helps."
"She said 22,954 days on a supercomputer."
The tech at the laptop looked up, "That sounds about right."
"We caught something on the mike about the MHD drive being off. 50mw was the range she said it should have been operating at. That's helpful. Her numbers match the hidden camera—"
The tech officer just finished reviewing the entire flight tape, "They both knew the camera was there, they even waved to it."
The XO looked down the gun-ports, "We need this nut cracked. This is the foremost air superiority weapon on the planet. It's a one of a kind, and we can't have it stay that way, Gentlemen."
"Every flight, every time we tear it down, we learn something new, XO."
"We any closer to how she made the skin?"
"No Sir. But we think these optic ducts inside the engine are a part of a weapons system that has never been activated."
"Something on top of railguns?"
"Possibly a beam weapon. It looks like some of the stuff they use at the national fusion project—"
"A fusion powered weap—"
"No Sir. But the fusion project uses focused lasers to create the pressure instead of intense magnetics. If her 50mw complaint is accurate, the MHD drives should operate within those scaled down confinement ranges too. If fusion was her goal, it seems unlikely that she wouldn't save space and weight and reuse those MHD coils. This seems like something else. It's definitely something she hasn't used yet."
"Keep working on it. Review those dismantling tapes, take it back up top, tether it, and see if you can get 50mw from them. You can get the engines working without accurate codes, right?"
"Yes Sir, briefly."
When the XO left, they looked at each other. The tech in charge asked, "Do we have a cable strong enough to tether this thing, throttled that hard?"
"I don't think he gets how strong this little thing is."
"We have more than one cable—"
"See if we can borrow some from the cable arresting system on the mockup carrier deck. I'd like to use more than one anchor too."
"Has anyone done the math on operating two, free venting, 50mw MHDs on the ground? Is that even safe to do on the—"
"Just do it!" the rest of the team yelled, mocking the XO.
The nurse returned to Dana's bed, "Bruised, but nothing broken. I'll just check your tape and you can lea—"
"When are they bringing Shadona back?"
"I can't tell you that."
"I'm not leaving until I see her."
The nurse sat on the bed, then looked around. "Honey, you know they're going to use this as an excuse to—"
"I'm not leaving until I see her."
"They aren't going to let you stay. That isn't how they—"
"It could be worse than what was written on your pad."
The nurse frowned as she looked at the papers.
Dana bit into her own cheek, then coughed a little blood.
The nurse added some notes to the page, then left the room.
Dana would wait until her friend returned, however long that took.
"Wait a minute, XO, you want to spare no expense on a broken leg, but it's suddenly fine to sedate her and pump her full of high doses of psychotropic drugs so you can question her?"
"Doctor, you are to administer and monitor—"
"I'll tell you right now, you will damage her brain. Long-term and short-term memory loss is almost certain. Especially in combination with everything else—"
"Doctor, we get these opportunities so rarely, we must take full advantage of—"
"Look, I get the gist of it. Broken legs are not my specialty, brain damage is. Right now, I'm suspecting she's not the one that needs the most critical examination around here." The doctor stared straight at the XO.
The nurse interrupted, "Sir, the doctor is right. I looked up the combinations when I pulled the pharmaceuticals from the stores. It comes with a strongly worded warning. I tried looking up combinations of lesser, but similar drugs, but they combined with bad results as well. They just don't combine well with the painkillers and blood thinners."
"Well, take her off it, then," the XO said.
"It stays—" the nurse started.
"It stays in her system for at least a week." The doctor finished.
The XO stared at their patient, unconscious on the bed with an IV in her arm. "There has to be a way to capitalize on this accident. Can't we adjust the painkillers to keep her loopy and question her then?"
The doctor checked the chart, "I don't know how effective that will be, but I can—"
"Then do it. I'll send my best interrogator in. You'll be working with him."
The questioning didn't work. Loopy enough to get her to answer resulted in hours of gibberish, most of it in foreign languages. They taped the session, just to be safe, and had it sent to their linguistic department in case it wasn't gibberish. But the number of languages she was proficient in made deciphering it a tall task indeed.
Beep. . . Beep. . . Beep. . .
"They put you into restraints to keep you from pulling the IV out," Dana said as she unbuckled her friend.
Shadona held her hand out, waving it slowly in front of her face. She was still loopy. She moved her hand to the IV, but Dana grabbed her hand instead.
"You missed it. They bolted down your plane on the airfield, throttled it, then did a full power test of the HMD drives."
Shadona smiled, but was looking past Dana's shoulder to where the emergency lights were still on.
"It blew out the main power when the wash shorted to ground." Dana nodded at the two beds on the far end, "Two tech guys got burned trying to make their way to the plane to shut it down. They had to let it burn through a quarter tank of fuel. Ripped up the entire field. One of the cables broke and it spun like a rabid dog on a leash. The wash blew out every window up top, kicked over walls, ripped every leaf off the trees. They say it looks like a tornado landed up top and hung around for an hour. People kept pouring in with cuts from broken glass."
Shadona's hand shook left and right as her eyes closed.
"They broke your leg, Hon, and tore up your favorite toy. Cracked the frame, from what I understand, and broke the tip off the wing."
The beeping continued.
As darkness slowly descended, the XO surveyed the damage topside.
"You want to explain this to me? You are engineers, from MIT, top of your class. And a plane built by a teenage girl is too complex for your entire team to figure out. It's almost like the more degrees you put on it, the dumber you all look. Not only that, but you take a simple task and turn it into a million dollars worth of destruction to my base and rip the wing off of a priceless possession of The State!"
The engineers looked at their feet, two with their arms bandaged and slung, most with singed hair.
"Did you at least get anything worth all this destruction?"
" . . . 600mw," one said.
"That's 500mw better than she—"
"No Sir, it was 600mw, each."
The XO stared at the wrecked plane as it was being towed on skids to the elevator, landing gear destroyed.
"Are you sure this isn't another grievous mistake exemplifying your inability to add simple numbers?"
"No Sir. It was hooked to base dynamos, and the onboard gauges confirmed it. For two minutes, it was pumping out more power than a nuke. We expected it to be in that range, Sir, at least half of us did. That keeps it in line with how the railguns were constructed. It also falls in line with the top speeds projected for it. See, a hypersonic fighter would have to fire bullets that fly twice as fast as the plane itself, or risk running into its own ordnance. To push a thousand 300-grain rounds a second would take a little under 500mw, each bank." He paused, checking his math one more time before he put his foot in it again. "It should exit the barrel at mach 22. That matched the estimated thrust and the breaking tension of the cables—"
"What was its top speed?" the XO asked.
"Well, factoring the wind tunnel, mach 10. . . "
"Mach 10?"
". . . Plus."
The XO stepped back. "Plus?"
"Yeah, see, it's a multi-fuel platform and we—"
"Filled it with the cheap stuff."
"It's rather ingenious, Sir, she's tied the bullet speed into the ship's speed times roughly two by powering it directly off the engines." They followed the XO as he walked with the wreckage to the elevators. "You see, Sir, she's really the only one who knows how to work the thing. We just got lucky, the code your man radioed back seemed to unlock the engines this time. I think we were getting near full power, you know, considering the grade of fuel. It's set up like a conventional fighter, but the systems customize through the code response; since the instrument cluster is just a projection, it can simulate any plane. We think we know what she did, just not how to undo it. See—"
The XO stopped the tech, "Look, I just want to know three things.
One, how long is it going to take to fix this one?
Two, how fast can we expect your team to reverse engineer this thing?
Three, have you learned anything about how it handles the high Gs yet?"
The gates came up around the elevator as it slowly lowered. The head engineer consulted his team. "We can't fix the damaged wing. We can patch it with carbon fiber composite and fix the undercarriage, but its leading edge is damaged. It'll never handle the stresses again. The original is one piece. We have no way of replicating that, and may never. But with the state of the art carbon fiber stuff, we can make the airframe, max speed of mach 4 or 5. Nothing near— See, the one piece stuff, near as we can tell, not only adds incredible strength, but it also dissipates the heat, potentially to reentry levels. Nothing we know of can do that. You can hit it with a blowtorch for an hour, wait a second, and pick it up with your bare hand.
We think we can make mach 4 or 5 versions of this, conventionally. Faster than Raptors, much less than the original, about the price of a B-2.
One of my MIT colleagues is a psychology professor. These systems seem more like brainteasers than actual systems. Think of it like ornamental science that is nearly indistinguishable from the functioning science. It's really tough because it isn't just science.
She did the same thing with that hydraulic engine when she was six, remember? It had so many fancy, complex, intricate and important looking features that it took years to distinguish the functioning features from the distractions. And even then, we only really figured it out when it mysteriously got published on the web. Public domain."
"We can't let this hit public domain, none of it."
"This is a thousand times more complex, or at least, it looks that way. I suspect it's just as simple, but we just don't know the important parts. Beyond the skin." The elevator hit the bottom and the gates lowered into the floor. "As much of a disaster as this seems, we caught some very important breaks. We know how it handles the Gs, that's huge. We have accurate power levels, fuel levels, consumption rates, and corresponding thrust levels. We have some solid benchmarks, and that's really important to know."
The XO stopped the lead tech. "I've been thinking, just fix the easy stuff. The landing gear, stuff like that. Don't fix the hard stuff. We may yet be able to turn this into an advantage."
[Chapter 3]
"Dad, the solar thing is acting weird again," Argo said.
His father put down the beer. "Look, it isn't rocket science, Son, you ought to be able to figure it out, you've taken that dirt bike apart a dozen—"
"The bike has a normal motor, not some sort of Internet freaky thing. Isn't it placebo powered where it only works if you believe it can? Like Al Gore's car that is powered off his own limitless sense of self importance."
The father went to the kitchen where the port to the panel was, then plugged in the laptop and downloaded the logs. "It says you need to replace the rings and change the oil. Good God, Son, it's reading a reset every three minutes."
"Yeah, that sounds about right."
He closed the laptop, "Look, I even bought the book on this, it's on the shelf somewhere."
"No, Dad, you bought a book on the basic theory of the engine and how it goes into—"
"You're not a dumb kid—"
"I'm not an engineer, Dad. The thing works weird, off pressure differences and such, has that box of gauges, no spark plug, circulating pumps and— I just can't follow it, Dad."
"Unbelievable! It's just rubber rings and— Ugh!" The father yanked the plug from the wall and rolled up the cord. "Fine! I'll fix it, again."
He dragged his son along to watch, yet, the boy learned nothing. He just couldn't follow it.
Psss, hiss, slosh slosh, squi-squi, squi-squi. . . It was working normally again. It didn't even sound like a real engine. Argo got the standard lecture on the importance of preventative maintenance, but it just rolled in one ear and out the other. He didn't care how electricity was made, he just wanted it there when he turned on a light.
On the mountain, he had to budget for things. You couldn't turn on the microwave and the oven at the same time. You had to request hot water a full hour before you could take a shower, and you had to use a lot of power during that hour too. That made the least sense to him of the whole thing, but somehow it made electricity when it made hot water, or heated the house, but it used electricity to cool the house. It was a weird little thing, always making its silent squi-squi sounds. And it looked like a movie prop version of a pipe bomb consisting of two, long, parallel pipes connected with a series of short hoses.
In the kitchen, there were a few simple temperature and pressure gauges, and a chart beside it. You looked up the readings and the chart told how much power it had left. It could last almost a week on batteries, which didn't make any sense to him either. He had seen the battery, a single, deep-cycle marine battery just a little bigger than those found in cars. Totally incapable of powering a house for a week. Supposedly, according to his father, the battery just filled in the peaks, the real power was stored in a warm wall of concrete that never got over 250 degrees. It worked, that was all he wanted to know about it. Before you turned anything major on, you had to consult the chart.
Dara got her power from the grid and a normal backup generator. Stuff he could easily understand. She didn't have to take anything apart or budget her life like he did. His father loved this stuff, 'It's free energy, Man!' Free energy meant rationing, budgeting, and sweating the details. Free took a lot of work that seldom seemed worth it.
They stood in the kitchen as his father read the gauges and hooked the laptop back up. "See, this is how it's supposed to work." He pressed the request button. The light turned green in just a few seconds and the output gauge read 10. His father put dinner on the stove and microwaved some potatoes, then went to take a hot shower. Something he hadn't been able to do for the last three months.
"So, Dad, how long before your next meeting?" Argo said at the dinner table.
His father dragged the steak through the A1 sauce, then checked his PDA. "Next Thursday in Washington. It's a pain in the— You would think telling intelligent people how to do the right thing, and save money doing it, would be easier than this." He chewed, then pointed his empty fork at his son, "Never get into consulting. They don't want to know, they just want you to tell them that what they are already doing is good enough. They have no intention of improving anything."
"You'd be a better consultant if you lied—"
"I'd be the most popular damn consultant in the world, if I just told them they were doing everything right—" he sawed on another piece with the knife, "But I aint no cheerleader, Son. That wasn't what they hired me for."
Argo laughed, he knew how to work his Dad too well. "You should have been consulting on the base a few days ago. Looked like they set the whole top on fire, then tried to get a tornado started."
"That's why I can't unload this thing. Your mother and her damn lawyer saddled me with this damn place—"
"Oh come on, they're quiet, most of the time. Like living next to a fireworks factory."
"We were here first, Son. Damn jarhead baby killers—"
"I think planes are air force, maybe navy, Dad. Gotta get your slurs right." He watched his father try to force a quick swallow so he could pop off a rapid-fire comeback. "You should have seen the catfish we've been catching this spring. The pond has been really jumping. Literally, you can hear them flopping out. Now that's the kind of farming even I can get behind."
His father had been trying for nearly a decade to get a good garden going. They would have some limited success, some promising starts, but without fail, one night it would get plundered by a herd of animals. They bought tillers, a small tractor, fertilizers, and a wall of books with no results. Animals would get nearly ninety percent of anything they grew, except for that pond. The pond was solid gold.
The father shrugged, "If I could get a little work out of my son once in a while, I might have gotten—"
"Mom was asking about you last week," Argo changed the subject quickly, "I think she broke up with that dude and, I mean, she sounded like she was considering—"
The father laughed, "What the— She takes all the cash, most of the stocks, and leaves me with nothing but this land I can't even give away— Now I've got to spend half of my time living out of hotel rooms—"
"I'm just saying, it sounds like she's rethinking things, that's all."
The father pointed his fork at his son, "We should go fishing tomorrow, just me and—"
"Got school tomorrow, but Saturday is—"
"After school, Son, after."
Argo took his plate and glass to the kitchen sink. But got attacked on his leg. "Oh, sorry Max, forgot all about you." He set his plate on the floor to the delight of his perpetually starving cat. He knelt, "Is tomorrow at the pond ok with you?" then lavished some affection onto the top of Max's head. He returned to the table.
"They still doing that lightning research?" the father asked.
"You know, now that you mention it, I think since they blew the top off the mountain, they stopped."
"Good. Maybe I'll get some sleep here after all."
Max returned from the kitchen, plate clean, and stared up at the father while impatiently licking his lips.
"Thought you were hiding from me, Cat." The father scarfed the rest, then handed the plate over for the cat to lick clean. "Don't want you getting too anxious, again."
Argo laughed, "It's been years since Max had an accident, Dad."
"It don't take but one."
They sat in folding chairs by the pond, poles in the water as the sun slowly went down. "This is why we came here, Son." He reeled in his line, then cast it again. The constant chirps of insects and frogs chimed in.
Argo tugged on his line, trying to tempt the lurking dinner onto his hook. Sometimes it took hours. Sometimes it took less than a minute. But, it was always fishing.
Max pounced at the water's edge, put something into his mouth, then crunched his way further around the pond.
"What the hell is your cat getting into," the father asked.
"I'm not sure. He'll eat anything. I'm guessing bugs, but it could be—"
"Bugs don't crunch that loud, Son."
The father handed off his pole and went to investigate.
"It looks like crawfish are finally taking hold, Son."
Argo looked disappointed, "You mean those mini lobster looking things? Is that what he's eating? He can have them!"
The father brought back the remains of a tail and a claw. "They're good—"
"If you catch a bushel of them."
He tossed the scraps into the water. "Well, I'm thrilled. I brought back a cooler full from that job I did in Louisiana, remember? It took forever to get them shipped, live, on the plane. When I added them in, I had that sinking feeling that I had just bought some really expensive fish food. I'd love to see just a few, every now and then. You know, proof that their population is strong and stable."
"I don't know, Dad, I never liked them that much. They always tasted like slightly bitter shrimp. I mean, when you got catfish, what do you need—"
"Well, I'm happy to see them." The father took back the pole and gave the line a couple quick tugs. "Oh, got a nibble." One swift jerk and he reeled it in.
"Perch! About three pounds, right?" Argo said, looking at it splash out of the water as it fought the reel. "You don't get crawfish that big." He elbowed his dad, "Last week, I caught a catfish that had to be fifteen, twenty pounds or so. I think we still have some of it in the freezer."
"It isn't the meat, Son, it's the fishing."
On that, they both agreed.
The splashing even brought back Max.
They made their way home before dark. They had caught ten fish, but returned with only the perch.
While his father checked the greenhouse off the kitchen, Argo opened the pantry. They had a large store of canned food, but an even bigger stock of dried peas, corn, rice, flour, beans and other such staples in sealed five gallon buckets stacked floor to ceiling. It reminded him of a bomb shelter, but it was totally practical. The closest store was an hour away, and the store with reasonable prices was two hours away. They bought in bulk, like the restaurant entrepreneur he was, once a year.
Argo refilled the bottom of his quart containers with the dried food, then went to the kitchen sink to fill them with water. Dried foods had to soak for days, usually a week, before they returned to the supple seeds and were suitable for cooking. He put them on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.
His father was a good chef. Not the head chef of any of the restaurants, but not bad either. The greenhouse was good for year-round tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers and such. Today, they had steamed asparagus, fried perch with a rich tomato sauce, and mashed potatoes with corn and lima beans. It was a fine meal.
"Mom wanted me to stay there this summer," Argo said, waiting to gauge his father's response. "I told her I'd rather stay here this year too, like I did last year."
His father smiled, "You know, you can stay there, too."
"I know, but, I just, Max likes it here. He's out of place in a city. You can't let him go loose outside, he'll get lost, so you have to walk him on a leash. He hates that. He hides under the bed for the first week, anyway."
"He was just a stray you picked up outside the house, Son. He would be fine if you left him outside the house all summer. He doesn't have to be an inside cat."
"No way, Dad. I'm not going to just leave him to the mercies—"
"I'll let him in every time I come home, Son."
"No way. You haven't seen the anger in his eyes if I leave him in the house just to go down to get the mail."
"Yeah, look, don't use your cat as an excuse not to spend time with your mom. Just because she bled me dry doesn't make her not your mom. Besides that, I don't want to hear from her lawyer that I'm poising your mind against her."
Argo sat back in the chair, a fresh, flaky bun still in his hand. "You want me to go?"
"No, not really," the father said, "but you should. She is your mom."
Max was not going to like this at all.
A clap of thunder broke the silence of night.
Argo went to the window facing the base. They couldn't see the base from the house, only the pond had enough cleared trees to see it, but he could still see the sky above it.
Not a cloud in view; yet a perfect line of brilliant blue throbbed for a solid second, perhaps even two, straight into the base.
It faded to a light blue, then a pink as it blended wider into the sky. The colors drifted as the line smudged with the wind.
He waited another minute.
The bolt drew itself again. He waited for the—
Boommmbbb!
He was packed for his mom's.
[Chapter 4]
The engineer entered the XO's office. "The harvester is back online. We're making power again, and the trunklines back to the city are up and running at capacity."
"Good. What about your plane skin experiment?"
The engineer looked uncomfortable, "Well, Sir, it wasn't as successful. We have the room she made the plane in, exactly as she left it. We know how she powered the equipment, we even have a ballpark of the energy requirements. . . but, the equipment she used destroys itself, intentionally, in the production of the skin. So, it's like trying to figure out how to build a bomb by studying the crater."
"Are you any closer?"
He handed the XO a twisted, lumpy piece that was a far cry from the smooth as glass skin. ". . . We are, I think."
"What is your ballpark, each attempt?"
"It uses about one million dollars worth of electricity, in about twenty seconds, per piece."
"And the cost of equipment?"
"Another two or three hundred thousand. Some of it can be rebuilt."
"We can't afford for you to keep experimenting like this. She got it right in the first attempt."
"Well, then, put her on it, Sir."
The XO banged his fist into the polished oak desk.
"Sorry, Sir. I'm just frustrated too. My whole team is."
The XO looked down, ran his fingers through his receding, buzzed hair, then looked up. "We can't ask her, we spent four years training her to resist torture and build a tolerance against drugs—"
"And the magnetic pulse burned out all the cameras in the room before she pulled the rabbit from the hat. The tapes are no good, Sir. I've spent weeks going over every frame. She knew where they were, and she can act."
The XO was pissed. The plane was vital to national security. It was like an alien crash-landed and they recovered the plane, intact. Then found that the pilot spoke perfect English and was the inventor, but was hell bent on keeping every screw and nut of it a secret.
"I've only been here three years, Sir, but she came up with the harvester too, didn't she?"
The XO looked like it was a state secret. He looked down at the desk, then nodded.
"I thought so. You can't make the skin without access to those levels of power. A facility capable of making sustained bolts of lighting could easily harvest them as well. If our calculations are right, it's a pulse equal to about 2,000 more power plants than are currently in the US grid. If I could see the details on that, it may help. I think it's all a part of the same—"
"I can't show you that." The XO leaned back, then stared at the closed office door. He sighed. "You worked on the MHD system on the plane, right? Well, it's a lot bigger." The XO looked very uncomfortable, but knew the engineer had the needed clearance. "The bolt is caught in a dirty snowball. Super-conducting powder leaves a contrail as it is shot a few miles up, like a reverse comet. That triggers a bolt almost any time we want, and the dust ensures—"
"Makes sure nothing is lost to the resistance of air." The engineer sat in front of the desk, then leaned in, "I've guessed that much, but what's happening under the ground?" He tapped his finger on the desk, "No capacitors in the world can store that level of power, you could fill this valley with batteries and not come anywhere near this, let alone charge them all in a second."
"The pulse, the bolt, passes through a conductive fluid, in the presence of a powerful magnetic field—"
The engineer stood, steadied himself against the back of the chair, then walked toward the door. His hand on his chin, he walked back to the desk. "Moving, rivers of fluid? It would take miles of tunnels, millions of gallons moving hundreds of miles per—"
"It does, and there is. All inside this mountain."
The engineer sat, "Of course, it's so simple. It's just like the MHD drives that take a fast moving particle in the jet wash and turns it into a massive pulse that the railguns turn back into an even faster moving bullet. Motion to electric pulse, to motion again."
The XO got up and walked around the desk, "It started as a way to buy and store off-peak power from the coal plant, as a part of that hippy green nonsense the country was mired in, then sell it back during peak hours to the city. But, it quickly turned into more—"
The engineer stood, "When those amounts wouldn't make the skin, she showed you how to catch lightning. Thank you, Sir. This helps a lot." He left to meet with his team. They had work to do.
The engineer looked over the photocopied notebooks. It was in the girl's own handwriting. He knew what he was looking at, he had been taught by the brightest professors MIT had to offer. Top of his class. He had seen the girl in the videos, just an unimposing, teen girl. He followed the first book exactly, because it looked so convincingly correct. Yet, a simple diode was drawn backwards, easily overlooked, and that one mistake destroyed the entire board and weeks worth of work. She knew the notebooks would be read. She added mistakes, intentionally, in easily overlooked places that could do the maximum damage. It was like they were encrypted. Booby-trapped. Even CAD software couldn't catch the mistakes. Slipperier than lawyers debating what the meaning of is is. He suspected entire systems were added only for their potential self-destructive effect.