Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

For now though the bigger question was, What do we do?

Androv was still busy talking to Petra, issuing commands. Vance realized they were assuming a vector north by northeast, out over the ocean. They also were probably going to stay on the deck to avoid radar tracking, with only passive systems so that no EM emissions would betray their heading.

He glanced up at the screens and realized he was half right. They were over the ocean now, at a breathtaking altitude of only five hundred meters, but Androv had just switched the phased-array radar altimeter over to start hopping frequencies, using "squirt" emissions. Pure Stealth technology. No conventional radar lock could track it.

"Dr. Vance, I am giving you one more opportunity to reconsider." Tanzan Mino's voice sounded through the headphones. He was still standing at the main Flight Control console, though his image was finally starting to roll and break up. "You must return to base. The consequences of this folly could well be incalculable."

"Why don't you take that up with the pilot?" Vance answered into his helmet mike.

"His receiver has been turned off. It's impossible to communicate with him. He's clearly gone mad. I will give you another sixty seconds before I order the on-board guidance computer switched over to the AI mode. Flight Control here will override the on-board systems and just bring the vehicle back and land it."

Again Vance wondered if he really could.

Then a screen flashed, an emergency strobe, and Petra was speaking. The Russian was simple enough he could decipher it.

Systems advisory. You are too low. Pull up. Acknowledge. Pull up.

Androv tapped the sidestick lightly and boosted their altitude a hundred meters.

"Michael," the voice was Eva's coming through his headphones. "She-it-whoever, said-"

"I figured it out. But did you hear the other news? Mino-san just advised he's going to override Petra. We're about to find out who's really flying this baby."

"No." Androv was raising his flight helmet and gesturing, his wounded arm urging at something in his right pocket. "Please take. Do it quickly. And then…"

Vance unstrapped his G-seat harness, rose, and moved over to the central console. Androv had raised his hydraulic helmet all the way up now and was trying to unzip the right side of his flight suit. Vance reached down and helped him, not sure exactly what he needed.

"There." Yuri was trying to point. "The radio. Please, you must…" The English began to fail him again.

"What's this?" Vance took out the transmitter, the size and shape of a small calculator.

The answer was in Russian, complex and garbled. Something about computer.

"He's wired something into the on-board computer, Michael," Eva began translating. "The radio will perform brain surgery on Petra, disabling her AI functions. It's supposed to prevent Flight Control from overriding… I didn't quite get it. But he wants you to help."

Vance glanced up at the line of video screens. Daedalus was now skimming rapidly over the straits, banking in the direction of the archipelago known as the Kurile Islands, and the image of Tanzan Mino was breaking up, almost gone. Had he heard? Maybe it didn't matter. The allotted sixty seconds was ticking away and he could just make out the image of Tanzan Mino, holding a microphone, preparing to give orders.

By the clock on the screens he saw that forty-one seconds had already passed.

"Dr. Vance, we are preparing to initiate total systems override." The CEO's voice sounded through his headphones. "You have fifteen seconds remaining to acknowledge."

"The code," Androv was saying. "It is one-nine-nine-nine."

Vance stared at the small device in his flight glove. It had a number keypad and a liquid crystal display.

"You have ten seconds," Tanzan Mino said. The image was ghostly, but the voice still rang loud and clear.

He began fumbling with the device, but the numbers kept eluding him, slipping around the thick fingers of his gloves. Finally he caught the 1. Above him the screens were still scrolling. Eight seconds.

Suddenly the cockpit seemed to sway, an air pocket that even the Daedalus' advanced structural mode control system couldn't damp out entirely. Now Androv was talking to Petra, going for a sliver more altitude. Seven seconds.

"Michael." Eva was watching, her face still drawn from the acceleration. "Is it-?"

"It's the gloves. The damned gloves. I'm…" Then he punched in the first 9.

In the back of his mind he noted that the cockpit was adjusting as Daedalus rotated, increasing attitude…

He got another 9. But his grip on the "calculator" was slipping, pressing toward the floor as the G-forces of acceleration weighed against him. He checked the screens again and saw that three seconds remained.

Now Androv was grappling to keep control of the throttle, while issuing instructions to Petra.

Am I about to disable her? he wondered. If I do, can he manage this nightmare manually? What if Mino was only bluffing?

Two seconds.

A final, bright green 9 appeared on the liquid crystal readout.

“Alert. AI system malfunction.” It was the toneless voice of Petra. She sounded vaguely annoyed.

Something had happened. Two of the screens on the wall above had just gone blank, but Daedalus continued to climb.

"Dr. Vance, we are now going to recall the plane. We have ordered a wing of fighter-interceptors scrambled from the Dolinsk airbase on Sakhalin. They will escort you back."

Whoops. So that was what he was telling the Soviet brass to do. Get up some hardware fast. This could well be the shortest flight since the Wright brothers'.

Then he heard Androv's helmet mike click on.

"This is Daedalus I. Do you copy me?"

"Major, you-" Mino began.

"Copy this, you bastard. Fuck you. Repeat. Fuck you. I've disabled your fucking AI module."

"You disabled it?"

"That's a roger. Do you read me, you murdering son-of-a-bitch? FUCK YOU!" He clicked off his mike

Vance was moving slowly across the cockpit, headed back to his own G-seat. As he settled himself and reached for the straps, he glanced up at the screens to check their flight data-altitude, speed, vector, G-force, fuel consumption. They were still on the deck, with an airspeed just under a thousand knots, about eleven hundred miles per hour. Not quite Mach 2, but already it was risky. And their vector was 085, with coordinates of 46 degrees latitude, 143 degrees longitude.

What now? Daedalus had all the active radar systems known to modern avionics. Looking at the screens he saw forward-looking radar, sideways-looking radar, a four-beam multimode pulse-Doppler look-down radar, terrain-following radar, radar altimeter, mapping and navigational radar, and a host of high-powered ECM jammers. The problem was, they all emitted EM, electromagnetic radiation. Switch on any of those and they'd become a flying radio beacon, broadcasting their position.

The next row of screens, however, provided readouts of their passive, non-emitting receivers and analyzers. That clearly was what they would have to use to monitor the threat from Sakhalin, scooping up any EM for lightning-fast computer processing. Surely Petra could spit out a fingerprint of everything in the skies. To begin with, there were the basic Radar Warning Receivers (RWRs) located aft, on the tailplanes, as well as infrared warning receivers (IRWRs) positioned high on the outboard stabilizers. The screens showed she could analyze basic frequency, operating mode, pulse repetition frequency, amplitude of pulse, time of arrival, direction of arrival-the full menu.

"If it's true they've scrambled the base at Dolinsk, it probably means the new MiG 31s." Androv was now busy switching on all the passive systems, just the way Vance figured he would. "We have to decide what to do. But first I want to take her up and do a quick recon. Buckle in."