Freefall

There was nothing but darkness in her eyes, but inside her head, everything was a bright and shining white, as if someone had lit an arc welder behind her eyes.

The warble of the Master Alarm was nothing to the shriek of data streaming through her audio cortex. It was like listening to one of those ancient modems as the data crawled along the copper wiring. But a dozen times louder.

Guenevere! she shouted in her head. Guenevere, bypass all audio subsystems. Go to visual.

The screaming whine died in her head, as static bloomed before her eyes. She squinted, trying to see through the snow. The sky was spinning.

The static died and her vision cleared. She watched code — too small to read— scroll rapidly up through her field of view.

Guenevere was rebooting.

**Intercept alert — firewalls 1-4 compromised. Intruder flushed after forced reboot. BODY-ROM BIOS uncompromised. Barriers secure. Encryption secure. Set to WHISPER protocol.**

The words flared across her eyes in high-contrast lettering. A hack attempt at 20,000 feet?

She hit the choke button one last time, and the engines sputtered to life.

Orient, she thought, and Guenevere superimposed a horizon in her vision. Thankfully, the aircraft was still pointed the right direction — meaning, not at the ground. She nudged the stick a few times, righting the craft.

**Intercept alert — Chrome 1 & 2 inbound. Mass drivers online.**

“Green Actual to Tactical,” Kailey said. The headset didn’t even return static. “Green Actual to Command. Come in, Command.”

**Intercept alert — communications carrier signal scrambled. Chrome 1 & 2 jamming.**

What the hell were combat drones doing jamming communications? Or coming back online with weapons hot, for that matter?

“Guenevere, rerun Red Baron,” Kailey said.

** Program not found **

A cold sweat broke out down Kailey’s back. “Download piloting feedback and response from Sensei mainframe.”

** WHISPER protocols prohibit data reception while communications are compromised **

“Dammit,” she said. Neither of the two drones were showing up in her mirrors. She looked up, didn’t see the gleam of them above her. “Storage stack inventory,” she told the computer.

** Fleur de Lune, Swan Lake, Street Fight Combos IV **

Two dances and a library of fighting-game finishing moves.

“Crosslink to onboard AI, plunder fly-bys,” she said, thinking quickly. Hopefully Guenevere could make sense of the AI’s flight controls, and link them to the appropriate muscle commands.

** Compiling **

** Proximity alert — Chrome 1 & 2 inbound. Contact in 30 seconds **

** Warning — fly-by commands corrupted. Aborting compile. **

Kailey gritted her teeth, then pulled the fighter up, climbing to give herself plenty of room to fall. The two drones were bright streaks.

“Emergency action,” Kailey said, trying to remember the right sequence of codes. “Alpha. Echo. 3-5-5-7 Sierra. Repeat, emergency action alpha-echo-3-5-5-7-sierra. Request weapons hot. Beacon active.”

Guenevere piped the information to the figher’s comms system. There was a brief hum and then a muffled “whump!” as a small buoy ejected from the underside of the plane.

Something must have gotten through, as there was a thrum and rattle from the underside of the airframe.

**JERICHO protocols confirmed. Mass drivers online **

Kailey breathed as steadily as she could. Blind and lame, but at least now she had some teeth.

* * * * *

The two drones passed through her airspace, completely ignoring her. She jerked the stick, bringing the fighter around in pursuit.

“Guenevere, trajectory, heading. Target tally.”

** NNW, no military presence. Civilian objectives probable **

Kailey punched the afterburners, gritting her teeth. On the horizon, the mountains were leveling out, and a town was visible. The drones were streaking towards it.

She opened up the throttle, buzzing between the drones, praying that whatever had hacked them would recognize that her weapons systems were online.

She pulled into a long, gentle banking curve, and sure enough, one of the drones peeled off in her wake.

The plane bucked and rattled around her, and she bit her tongue. The drone’s mass driver rounds chewed through the atmosphere around her.

Kailey peeled away from its cone of fire, twisting the stick and throttling back, then back up as the chrome-plated drone shot by below her.

She pulled the triggers, and rather than the thrumming shudder of the electron guns, the mass drivers gave the plane solid jolts as they threw pellets the size of BBs along magnetic rails. Small as they were, they carried immense kinetic energies, and she watched the drone’s plating buckle as she scored two solid hits. The wing snapped off as it tried to bank left. The craft smoked as it spun Earthward.

** Proximity Alert **

The other drone must have followed when it saw her engage its twin. There was a hard shudder along the figherplane’s left flank. Kailey mashed down on one of the pedals, twisting around to the right, out of the line of fire.

She climbed, and saw the twinkle in the mirror as the drone followed her up.

“Okay, you want to play?” she asked it. “Let’s see how well you dance.”

She flipped the glide controls, and the aircraft gave a little jolt as the gravity pods thrummed to life.

She twisted the nose of the craft back round, picturing herself back on stage.

The drone kept coming at her, but she spun away, the fighter spinning along its nose, engines skyward.

Kailey rolled the plane away and behind her dance partner, her feet working the pedals, turning dance steps on the stage into an even more beautiful dance among the clouds.

The drone slewed back around for another charge. Stupid, simple-minded machine. It was falling back on its preprogrammed engagement protocols.

She let it come towards her, meeting its charge. At the last moment, she tromped the pedals, her thumb spinning the gimbal controls she wasn’t supposed to know about. She shifted the plane’s center of gravity up to the nosecone, pulling the engines up and over, cartwheeling over the top of the drone.

She pulled the triggers in the split second it passed under her, and watched glowing holes open up along the craft’s hull.

She pushed back on the throttle at the last second, remembering that the thing was very likely to explode, and the plane sprang back from its target, arcing away as the drone did indeed go to pieces in a blaze of avionics and jet fuel. Her fighter shook with the force of the blast, and she heard debris pinging off the hull.

** Airframe compromised. Seek immediate landing **

Kailey blinked, leveling the plane out and reengaging the conventional engines.

The Master Alarm was singing again.

But she also had radio static in her ears.

“— son Air Traffic Control, I repeat, identify yourself. United States Air Force fighter planes are on an intercept course.”

“Green Five,” a voice cut in on another channel. “This is Lieutenant Danz, of the Joint Projects Command. Good to see you back on the screens. We’re here to escort you back to White Sands.”

“Hiya Skywalker,” Kailey said, using the Lieutenant’s callsign. “I won’t make it back to the Sands. I need to park this thing now.”

“Commander’s going to have your skin for this,” the other pilot said. Kailey saw the two figher planes streak by from the south.

“Local air traffic,” Kailey said, on the emergency channels. “This is Joint Projects Command Fightercraft XG - 5 requesting immediate nearest airfield clearance.”

The engines coughed, and smoke began to billow from one of the engines.

“XG— Holy cow,” came the air traffic controller’s voice. “It’s an honor sir — uh, ma’am! We can clear you on runway—”

“The airport is too far away. I can see a hospital, though. Clear me through to their rooftop.”

“But that’s for helicopters!” the voice squawked.

“No, it’s for VTOL-rated aircraft below 26 tons.”

“But—”

“I can land it, or it can fall out of the sky, your call,” Kailey barked.

“RIght. Uh… We’re clearing you now…. You have clearance to land at Memorial Medical,” the voice said. “And can I say again, it is an honor to—”

“Thank you,” Kailey said, and switched off the radio.

She’d need the radio silence to concentrate on the landing. She knew there was at least one good reason to keep the AI online.

It was a lot better at landings than she was.