Nerve Center

Hawk One streaked at the armored car, slashing in front of her. The vehicle slowed, but did not stop.

Crash into it.

No. Not yet. Only if necessary.

An access ramp paralleled the runway. It was wide and would be long enough for him to take off, but only if he started from the begi

He couldn’t turn and keep the Boeing on the ramp. He’d have to back up.

Reverse thrust.

Hawkmother didn’t like the sudden change of momentum. She rumbled as the engines tried to follow his commands. Slowly, she stopped moving forward. Then, trembling, she inched backward on the narrow pathway.

Hawk One and Two danced before the armored car and a sedan. The armored car finally stopped. A police car reached the runway and began driving parallel to him.

The armored car began moving again.

The runway. They thought he would use it and were trying to block it off, ignoring the ramp. Good.

He had it now. He jumped back into the Flighthawks, harassed a knot of men piling off a pickup truck, sending them to the ground.

He looked left. He was in Hawkmother.

Full throttle. Go. Go.

The fuel truck exploded. Though it was by now several hundred yards away, the shock wave nearly pushed Hawk-mother off the narrow ramp. Her right wheels nudged the soft dirt.

He pulled back on the stick. The 777, not yet at eighty knots, far too slow to take off, hesitated. The safety protocols screamed.

He swept them away with his hand, demanded more thrust. The armored car began to fire its ca

Now, he told the plane, and she lifted into the sky.

Dreamland

19 February, 1705 local

JEFF UNDID HIS RESTRAINTS AND LEANED BACK IN HIS seat as Raven rolled toward her hangar. The day had been impossibly long, and he’d had nothing to eat beyond the sludge from Ong’s zero-gravity Mr. Coffee. But the way his stomach was roiling, Zen was glad it was empty.

They had found and retrieved the copilot with help of SAR assets from Nellis, working at long distance. But the storm over the mountains had whipped into a fury as they worked, hampering even Raven and its sophisticated sensors. The pilot and Madrone were still missing, and no one had found the wreckage of Hawkmother or the Flighthawks.

“Major, you need a hand?” asked Ong behind him.

Poor egghead looked like he was ready to fall down on the deck and sleep there.

“Nah,” Jeff told him, swinging his chair out from its mounting. “I’m fine.”

“Tight squeeze,” said Ong.

“Yeah. You should see me trying to get into a phone booth.” He leaned forward, then levered his arms against the low-slung seat rests, maneuvering his fa

Colonel Bastian was waiting on the tarmac. “So?”

“Dalton and Madrone are still missing. We think we have the area narrowed down,” said Jeff.

“McMa

Zen nodded. “The infrareds didn’t find anything there. They were going to wait until morning to send some PJs down unless there’s a radio transmission. Bitchin’ terrain.”

Bastian nodded. “No use going out in this weather in the dark.”

“Crew’s beat,” agreed Zen, even though he and the others had debated going back out.

“Dr. Geraldo tells me you want to rejoin ANTARES.”

“Technically, I never left,” said Jeff.

“It’s a tight schedule until we get another Flighthawk pilot.”

“I realize that,” Jeff told him.

Bastian nodded, but the silence remained awkward.

“I thought I’d go downstairs and see if they made anything out from the mission data,” said Jeff. “See if we can turn up anything. I had Ong transmit the data when we were inbound.”

“Yeah, okay. Look, Zen …”

Bastian touched his shoulder, but didn’t say anything. In the dim morning twilight he suddenly looked very old.

“I’m okay, Dad,” he told his father-in-law.

Bastian nodded, then took his hand away. Zen gripped the top of his wheels.

“Dad?” said Dog, slightly bemused. Jeff had never called Bastian “Dad” before.

“Don’t get used to it, Colonel.”

“I don’t know that I’d want to.” Bastian gave him a tired smile, and waved him on.

Computer Lab

19 February, 1715

JENNIFER GLEASON SPREAD THE PRINTOUTS ACROSS the black lab tables, trying to see if there was a pattern to gibberish that had inserted itself into C3’s resource-allocation data.

Of course there was a pattern; there had to be a pattern. But what was it? Her diagnostic routines hadn’t a clue. Baffled, she decided to get them all on a printout in one place, mark them, and see if anything occurred to her. Scrounging tape and a marker, she laid out the pages of the printout, then began the laborious process of highlighting the interesting sections.

Following their usual protocol, the entire test session had been recorded on the diagnostic computers. The flight computer’s different functions were logged as they were monitored in real time, tracking flight commands and the U/MF’s responses. She also had a hard record of C3’s processing and memory allocations, which corresponded with the various instructions and inputs on the log. Specific commands—takeoff, for example—always resulted in a certain pattern of resource allocations, in the same way human brain waves corresponded to certain actions.

The correspondences were all there, a perfect set of fingerprints showing that C3 and the Flighthawks had worked flawlessly, at least until the point when Raven lost its link with Hawkmother over the Sierra Nevadas.

But the diagnostic program that she’d run to check for the correspondences had discovered a large number of anomalies in the allocations. Sparse at first, they’d increased dramatically by the time contact was lost.

They were short too, and didn’t correspond to actual or virtual addresses in the memory or processing units. But they were definitely there—as her yellow marker attested. Je

“Hey, Jen,” said Zen, rolling in.

“Hi,” she said, continuing to mark the sheets.

“What are you doing on the table?”

“Cramming for the test,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Just a joke.” She lifted her knees carefully and slid off the table.

“Some view,” said Zen.

“If I’d have known you were coming I would have worn a miniskirt,” she said.

“Seriously, what are you doing?”

“Something strange happened with the Flighthawk control computer,” she said, explaining about the allocations.

“Maybe it’s just a transmission problem.”

“No way. We’ve done this a million times without anything like this showing up.”

“Not with ANTARES.”

“True.”

“This related to the crash?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

Je

“Kulpin thought the flight computer on the Boeing whacked out and somehow took over.”

“Hmmmph.”

“Possible?”

What if the gibberish were code from the Boeing’s computer pilot?

“Well?” asked Jeff.

“I uh, well, probably not,” she said. “We’ve never had that kind of problem with the autopilot before. It’s basically a subset of the systems we’ve used in the Megafortress.”