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.

20,000 Feet

“Green Five, this is Tactical. We register catastrophic AI failure. Confirm?”

Kailey pulled the fighter into a long banking turn, blinking to clear the smoke from her eyes. The grit burned at her eyes, even shielded as they were behind the helmet’s visor, and behind the contact-lens-like optical screens. Unfortunately, like contact lenses, they trapped irritants, no matter how teary-eyed she got.

“Tactical, Green Actual, AI is.. Uh.. Offline. Engaging using manual subsystems.” She coughed on the smoke still lingering in the cockpit. She’d have to talk with the maintenance crew about the extinguishers and scrubbers.

“Green Actual, we register no hits on your craft. Can you confirm?”

“Tactical, if you keep chattering, you’ll be registering a whole lot of hits on the craft. Shut up and let me fly.”

Twin flashes along the horizon, sunlight off the chromed outer shells of the training drones. Kailey blinked furiously, angling her fighter off to the left of the two drones. Stupid AI, wanting to tackle them head-on. They’d be shot down in about ten seconds that way.

“Green Actual,” a different voice crackled over her headset — she actually wore a headset under the helmet. They at least realized that she needed the full bandwidth spectrum to pull down all the data pouring into the fighter craft, and didn’t clutter it up with a lot of audio-chatter. Telemetry, tacticals, firing solutions. And now piloting feedback and procedures, Kailey thought with a grimace.

“Green Actual, this is Project Command,” the voice growled, a sound like gravelly sand. “Kailey, please tell me you didn’t pull the AI’s plug.”

“No sir, I did not pull it,” Kailey said, her voice straining as she pulled the fighter around in another turn. The radar-reflective skin was holding up, the drones hadn’t detected her yet, but the closer she got, the better chance they’d get to “see” her.

“I cut it, sir, along with the fly-by-wire feeds and the fire-control subsystems. All due respect, sir, the AI’s tactical assessment was crap.”

“Winters, you are there to babysit, to observe and take over if something should go wrong. You are not to judge—”

“Sir, I am a pretty good babysitter. I don’t let babies run out into traffic or get themselves shot to pieces at 20,000 feet. I’m just doing what you told me to do. Entering engagement proximity, and engaging radio silence, per exercise protocols. If it’s a dire emergency, then tap the feed to Guenevere. Green Actual out.”

She reached over and flipped the radio receiver off.

Then she gave the afterburners a squirt, sucking in a deep breath as the G’s forced her back into the seat.

Guenevere chimed in her ear — or rather, in her audio cortex. “Piloting feedback compiling complete. Standing by to run Dogfighter.”

“Stack Dogfighter, Ace of Aces, rename Red Baron.” Kailey said. Guenevere chimed in response.

She could almost hear the boys in the War Room. They thought all the time they were playing flight simulators with her were for relaxation, that the aerial combat video games were all fun and games. The commander would be furious.

He could be as furious as he wanted. It wasn’t his butt in the pilot’s seat, cruising at Mach 5.

“Compiling complete. Standing by to run Red Baron.”

“Red Baron, go,” Kailey said, and braced for the brief tingling thrill through the carbon-filament nervous system as the program calibrated itself to her muscles. The shiver came and went, the information buzzing in her head like a tune she couldn’t quite remember fully.

* * * * *

Kailey’s teeth rattled as the fighter cut sharply to the right, the nose aligning with the rightmost of the two drones. She felt the fighter’s undercarriage thrum as the electron throwers spat bursts of static at the drone.

The two of them cut right and left, arcing back and away from her. Splitting up. Kailey was inclined to go with the rightmost drone, and apparently the Red Baron’s tactical assessment was the same, as her hand jerked itself to the right, pulling the fighter around in a hard turn. Kailey bit back the gasp, as her leg muscles spasmed, forcing the blood back up towards her head, working better than any pressure suit. The wonders of modern science, she thought drily.

She chased the drone through the clouds, dodging and weaving with it, giving it enough space that she’d be able to compensate if it did anything rash. Not that it would, the drones never did. The same team that programmed them had programmed the experimental fighter’s AI.

“Proximiy alarm. Chrome-2 inbound at 3 o’clock high.” Guenevere flashed a rear-camera shot into Kailey’s short term memory. Eyes in the back of my head, too, she thought. She’d have to thank the Wizard for that trick when she made it back to the ground.

“Okay,” she muttered to herself, “let’s play with glide control.” She flipped two switches on one of the control panels, saw two green lights flicker on above them.

Antigrav pods and directional thrusters. This was an experimental space-superiority fighter. She pulled back on the stick, wondering just how loud the boys in tactical were shouting. Orbital controls weren’t supposed to be used inside the atmosphere — they weren’t even supposed to be online yet. They’d better hide the coding a little better, next time, she thought.

The figher kept going on its chase-trajectory after Chrome-1, but the air-breathing engine had cut out. The nose of the craft flipped up and over, until the cockpit was facing the New Mexico desert, 20,000 feet below.

Kailey pulled the trigger, sending electrons streaming at the incoming drone. They sparked off its nose and cockpit, scorching the plating. The craft gave a jolt, then banked away. Kill-shots. Their onboard computers would direct them to land if they took hits to certain parts of the frame.

Guenevere pinged in Kailey’s audio center. “Chrome-2 down, onboard AI redirecting to White Sands.”

Kailey yanked the stick again, turning the fighter the rest of the way around.

“Le’t’s give them a thrill in Tactical,” she said to Guenevere. She killed the two orbital systems, but held down the engine choke switch.

Green Five began to drop.

Guenevere pinged, but the voice in her head this time was the commander.

“Winters, you bring that aircraft back online this instant. What the HELL do you think you’re doing? You—”

There was a white flash, the whole sky going blindingly bright. The audio feed burst into static.

Kailey’s optic screens darkened immediately. The Master alarm was blaring. She had no visuals — the optic screens had no feed from the cameras to paint into her retinas.

She jerked her thumb off the engine choke, then pushed it two or three times. Nothing.

The fightercraft’s engines weren’t restarting, and Guenevere was screaming in her head.