Nerve Center (15 page)

But Madrone felt no pain on reaching Theta; it was all rush. He went from the Stage One tests to Stage Three on his second day. He was ready for the primitive simulator sequences the next afternoon; that afternoon, he told Geraldo he wanted to work with C3, the Flighthawk controller. When she told him the programming updates needed for the gateway link between ANTARES and C3 hadn’t been completed, Madrone suggested he could help by working with the gear.

Overjoyed at their unprecedented progress, Geraldo called in the scientist working on the gateway software—Jennifer Gleason. The beautiful, ravishing Jennifer Gleason, who with his help completed it in two sessions.

Three days later, he was ready to fly for real. They moved to the Flighthawk command bunker, where with Zen as a backup, he got ready for a ground takeoff.

The plane nearly broke him in half.

He’d spent the night before chanting the procedure for takeoff and the flight plan, committing it all to memory—military thrust, brakes off, roll, speed to 130 indicated, back on the stick, maintain power, climb, clear gear, alpha to eight, 250 knots, indicator check, level flight at bearing 136, orbit twice. Walking into Bunker B that morning, he felt confident, as sure of himself as he had ever been. Someone asked him if he wanted a cigarette and he laughed. Someone else—Zen—remarked that he’d gained weight. Kevin nodded confidently, ready to nail this sucker down.

But in the control chair, full ANTARES flight helmet strapped on, sweat oozed upward from his spine to his neck. As he practiced changing the visor image from the forward video feed to the synthetic IR view, a fist grew inside his brain, knotting the inside of his head and then punching the top of his skull. Bile rose in his throat and he screamed—red and purple flares flew across his eyes, and then blackness as he lost the link.

They tried again. Nearly the same thing happened, this time even quicker. Kevin fought to hold the link. A spear of ice pounded into his ear, tearing a hole in his skull as he held on. He tried pushing the ice away, but couldn’t reach it. Then he tried closing the hole. He went out of Theta and lost the link.

The rest of them wanted to take a break. Madrone said no. He’d already flown the plane on the simulator, and knew this was merely a kind of performance anxiety, the sort of thing that might happen to a star second baseman who thought too much about the throw to first. To get into Theta, he had to relax and let the process take over, walk blindly into the night.

And to fly the plane, he had to let the computer take over, let the data come to him—not as thoughts exactly, more as waves of feeling, the kind of thing you felt as you rode a bicycle into the wind on a mountain road. The computer knew how to fly—the key to ANTARES was to accept the knowledge the computer gave him, to learn to trust what seemed to his mind instincts. For when he was in Theta, the computer’s knowledge became his instincts.

They began again. He warmed his head as soon as the jungle appeared, pulling the sun through the trees around him. The Flighthawk came to him gently, pulling itself over his consciousness like a warm mitten over a cold hand. He took his hand off the control stick and closed his eyes.

The image from the visor screen stayed in his brain, projected there by C3, working through ANTARES. As he relaxed, he realized he could see much more in his head than with the visor—with the computer’s help, he could see the video, IR, and radar-enhanced views simultaneously, three-dimensional overlays around his head. Seeing wasn’t the right word—it was more like a new sense that had sprung into his mind.

To fly, he had only to release himself from the ground. The U/MF lifted off the runway perfectly. For the next three hours, he learned to fly for real.

Zen coached him through the com connection, but Kevin knew he didn’t need a teacher, not in the traditional sense. He had only to trust C3, to understand the way it spoke to him, to make his brain and the computer’s one. He learned that he was not to worry about the specific power setting or the compass heading or the rate of fuel burn. He could see those numbers if he wished; he could ask the computer to set them specifically if he wanted. But focusing on them made his head turn away from the front of his body, where it belonged; it was more natural to accept them, flowing within an ANTARES-tinged equilibrium.

He knew how to fly. He knew everything in the computer’s extensive library. C3 was part of him, his arms and legs. He became oblivious to the image in the control helmet; it was redundant. He didn’t bother to use the complicated joystick controls—thought was so much faster.

They went from one plane to two planes on the third day. The day after that, they boarded Hawkmother—a specially modified 777 that housed ANTARES and C3—and air-launched two U/MFs. The only thing that took some getting used to was the sensation of the plane he was sitting in. It felt unsettling to bank sharply while he was controlling the Flighthawks in level flight. Zen had laughed when he told him about that later—after months of flying the Flighthawks from the belly of an EB-52, Stockard told him, he still couldn’t get used to that.

That made Kevin determined to beat it. By the third drop on the second day of trials, he had.

He amazed everyone with his progress. To Kevin, it seemed no more difficult than moving through the levels of a video game. He had merely to relax and feel the cues of the computer. And then he let his mind run, flying into the wide blueness. It made him hungry, it made him want to grow.

Geraldo had asked him yesterday if when he entered Theta he felt as if he’d become a Greek god. He’d laughed and said no. He couldn’t describe exactly what it felt like—as if he walked onto the threshold of a different kind of existence. Thoughts felt different, more like the sensation that accompanied tasting exotic food for the first time. His appetite grew every moment; once in Theta, he needed to explore more, to see and feel as far beyond himself as possible. Flying the U/ MFs, he felt, was merely a metaphor, a device he used to interpret the world. ANTARES demanded, and provoked, new metaphors—the rain forest, which had become the way he entered Theta; the world itself, a dark mass beyond his center core demanding to be explored.

It sounded like mumbo jumbo when he tried to explain it, even to Zen. So he didn’t. Watching Jeff’s eyes start to squint into a frown when he approached, he realized he’d already gone far beyond his friend; he’d gone far beyond everyone. He wouldn’t discuss it; he couldn’t. He’d just feel it.

Today, they would air-launch two Flighthawks and simulate a combat encounter with the MiG as an aggressor. It seemed laughably routine, even boring. Madrone knew he was ready for more—four, ten, twenty U/MFs. He could fly far beyond the petty, unambitious schedule they’d laid out. He could get beyond C3s limitations. He hungered for something beyond the small scope of the robot planes’ sensors.

It made him angry to be held back. He could see the emotion coming sometimes—the edge of his brain tinged with red. He thought about Glass Mountain and Los Alamos, about the bastards who had killed his daughter, Glavin especially, who was foolish enough to still think he had him fooled, pretending to be his friend by sending Christmas cards. He remembered the bastard doctors at Livermore, and how he’d been tricked into taking Christina to see them. They’d masqueraded as doctors with a radical new treatment for her cancer, but all they’d wanted to do was kill her more quickly, steal her last moments from him.

Sometimes he got so mad he almost lost Theta. He felt himself being pushed back to the edge of the forest. The jaguar roared, snapping at him from behind the trees.

Madrone fought against it, struggling to relax, concentrating on his breathing. He’d always been good at controlling his anger, keeping secrets; it was just a matter of focusing on what he wanted.

“Two minutes to launch sequence,” said a thick voice from the side. Zen, the mission boss, monitoring the flight from Raven. “Yo—you ready, Kevin?”

It seemed like such a chore to answer. Once he was in Theta, leaving the realm of his thoughts to do anything physical, even just to talk, felt like an imposition.

“Of course,” said Madrone.

“We’re ready,” concurred Geraldo, who was sitting nearby in the 777’s control bay.

“Hawkmother?” said Zen, talking to the Boeing’s pilot. “In the green, Gameboy. Let’s do it.”

The others on the circuit agreed. Hawkmother began to nose downward, preparing for the roller-coaster maneuver that helped separate the robot planes from her wings. Kevin felt the weightlessness and the rushing wind currents as the plane approached Alpha and the release point.

Go, he thought, go.

Hawk One plunked off the wing, followed a half second later by Hawk Two. They stuttered slightly, shuddering off the turbulent vortexes from the 777’s wings. The engines ramped quickly to full power. Madrone trimmed his control surfaces, felt his indicated airspeed move above three hundred knots, pass through 350. He shot upward, altitude-aboveground-level leaping to 5,232 feet for Hawk One, 5,145 feet for Two. He pushed harder and climbed through his first marker, notching eight thousand feet.

A leisurely stroll. He’d done this before. He wanted something new, something more challenging.

Aggressor Flight checked in.

Come for me, baby.

Madrone wanted more planes, more challenges. How far could his mind really go? What if it turned inward, examined the nooks and crannies of the interface and the ANTARES computer? What rooms were there?

A video camera had been rigged in the nose of Hawk-mother to record the mission. The video was recorded onto a hard drive and could be accessed through the C3 controls, where the techies had made use of a physical bus and a series of unused interrupts to get easy control of the device. That let them run a log coordinating all of the flight records—Hawkmother’s as well as the Flighthawks’ and ANTARES—off the same time scale.

It was also a connection he could squeeze down, providing the gateway let him. His brain could slither in, like a kid slinking through a subway turnstile. Once inside, he’d have control.

C3 gave him an error message, a slight buzz of confusion poking against his temple. His wandering thoughts had confused it.

But he could see the video. It was part of him.

Pain. Great pain.

Stay in your head. Maintain discipline.

He could partition his brain. That was the trick to AN-TARES. Lock off different parts. Just as he’d locked off Christina.

The interface tried to suck everything out of you.

Kevin moved the Flighthawks into a combat spread 3,500 feet apart. He nudged Two upward slightly, offset three hundred feet higher than One’s twelve thousand AGL.

A brown-red blanket of desert lay at his feet; clear blue surrounded his head. Instruments were green.

The MiG would appear dead ahead. He would close with Two, flushing his enemy, who could only choose to dive or run past. Either way, Mack Smith and his Sharkishki would be nailed.

The tactics were basic and simple. Change the distances, which were really just a function of the engines, and the formation and procedures for engaging the enemy would be familiar to Baron von Richtofen.

Too simple a task to waste his thoughts on.

Madrone was invincible with these planes. Why had it taken so long for him to arrive at this point? He’d wasted every moment of his life until now.

“Keep your separation,” warned Zen.

“Hawk Leader,” he snapped, acknowledging the petty and tedious reminder.

Aboard Raven
8 February, 1123

ZEN FROWNED AS HE STARED AT THE MAIN MONITOR display at his station. The sitrep or God’s-eye-view projected the exercise in sharp, color-coded lines, depicting actual positions in solid against the briefed courses in dash. Everything matched, even the reds showing Mack in Sharkishki, which had just taken off en route to Area Two over the mountains.

So what the hell was bugging him?

The U/MFs had come off the wings a second too soon. Kevin had taken them from him, even though Zen had assigned himself the launch.

Maybe. Kevin had definitely come in before the planned handoff, which was supposed to be ten seconds after the launch, when the Flighthawks were well beyond the vortices. Whether he’d had control on the wing and actually initiated the release was difficult to tell, because in either case C3 handled the actual sequence.

The flight computer did nearly everything under AN-TARES, or could. That was the way the designers wanted it—the computer was more efficient.

Jeff resented that, even though C3 made it possible for him to fly as well. But he was angry about something else, even though he couldn’t precisely define it. Something about Kevin—his attitude seemed more dismissive.

Jeff realized he might be hypersensitive. Maybe Geraldo was right; maybe he was just jealous. Madrone was flying his planes, after all.

There was one other thing. The 777 had been nicknamed “Hawkmother.” It was natural, a prosaic if utilitarian name for the plane. But it also happened to be the call sign Zen had used the day of the accident that cost him his legs.

He’d thought of suggesting something different, but decided it would seem trivial or worse—superstitious.

“Dream Tower is requesting we change the scenario a bit,” said Bree, punching the interphone circuit that restricted the communications to inside the plane.

Zen acknowledged, then flipped into the control circuit to find out what was going on. A live-fire exercise was taking longer than expected, the controller explained, and they wanted to maintain a suitable margin of error. The new area for the Aggressor drill was well to the southwest, over another stretch of empty desert at the edge of the mountains.

“Yeah, okay, we can do that. Gameboy acknowledges,” said Zen. He went back on the shared line to tell Madrone and the others about the change.

“Already have the course plotted,” said Kevin before he could say anything.

Zen went through the instructions anyway.

Madrone was doing a great job. Why did that bug Jeff so much?