Anthology - From the Street

"This is Clio. She's our navigator and my gunner." Johnny gestured to the woman on the right. She said nothing but simply nodded curtly. Ice queen personality, so it would seem.

I jerked my thumb back towards Angelfire. "When do you want me to start loading up the cargo?"

"Soon. We take off at dusk."

"Hey! Jo-girl!" shouted Phil from inside the Banshee. "You finished with that pre-flight check? Clio's screaming at me over the radio!"

"OK! OK! I'll be there as soon as I finish checking the sensor dome," I hollered back. Once I closed the inspection hatch over the dome, I walked to one side and climbed the handholds leading up to the pilot's hatch.

As I was strapping on the flight helmet, the engines of Johnny's Banshee purred to life as he began warming up his t-bird. Thanks to the built-in hearing protection, however, what would normally be the Banshee's deafening signature scream came across as merely a muffled whine.

I swung my legs down the hatch and lowered myself into the pilot's seat. It was a very tight squeeze, as I contorted my body around the various instrument panels and control banks. I pulled the hatch above closed tight, entombing myself deep in the belly of the bird.

Engulfed in near-total darkness with illumination from only a few monitors, I connected the datacord from the flight helmet into the primary control panel at my right hand. A myriad of colors washed over the cabin, as the simsense module activated and ran through its startup routine. The darkness of the cabin dissolved into a panoramic view of the quarry outside. A number of virtual controls appeared at my fingertips, floating in midair above my lap. I keyed the communications "panel" and brought up the internal intercom. "Phil, JC here. How do you read me?"

"Gotcha Lima Charlie, Jo-girl," replied a disembodied voice; Phil's flight lingo told me he heard me loud and clear. I keyed the panel again and selected radio comms. "Speedy Delivery, this is Angelfire," I said, using my own callsign. "Commo check, over."

Johnny's voice crackled in my head. "Lima Charlie, Angelfire. You take off first and provide overwatch, over."

"Wilco, out," I replied in compliance. I concentrated and visualized a red sphere before me. The sphere expanded rapidly until it consumed my view. A few moments later, the field of red dissolved into a panoramic display of the outside environment, as the full simsense interface came on line.

Currently my virtual body was crouched on the ground. I imagined myself crawling away from Johnny's Banshee on my hands and knees, and in the distance I could feel a slight nudge as the t-bird responded in real time. Once I was halfway around the rim of the quarry, I turned to face the center and looked up, to make a final check for aerial observers before taking off. I saw nothing except a hazy red and green glow to the northwest, residual emissions coming from the Metroplex in the distance.

With a sudden burst of motion, I launched forward, like a sprinter out of the blocks at the crack of the starter pistol. I sprinted at breakneck speed, the ground passing rapidly beneath the t-bird. As the opposite edge of the quarry loomed before me, I took a tremendous leap upwards, and the t-bird pulled up, while the walls of the quarry fell away.

Spreading my arms to my sides, I twisted upward, and the t-bird climbed higher and banked right in a slow and lazy arc. I watched below as Johnny's Banshee made its takeoff from the quarry. As the Banshee rose level with me in the sky, Clio's dispassionate voice came over the radio. "Angelfire, this is Starchild. Set your autonav to waypoint one at this time."

"Wilco, Starchild. Angelfire out." With the glimmer of a thought I relayed Clio's order to the t-bird's autonavigation system. In the darkness to the south, a single green dot flashed in my sight, indicating the point we were flying to. A series of numbers and hatch marks floated above my eyes, indicating the azimuth and heading. I watched Johnny's Banshee bank right towards the dot, before turning myself to fall in behind and to the left of Johnny, as we sped quickly into the evening twlight.

We reached our first waypoint, Mt. Rainier, about an hour later. I sprinted ahead of Johnny to clear the way, then swung in a lazy circle around the volcano. The mountain, dormant until Howling Coyote conjured his Great Ghost Dance some forty-odd years ago, glowed burgundy red on the thermographic overlay; however, radar and low-light scanning indicated nothing else out of the ordinary.

I continued my lazy swing around Rainier as Johnny approached the waypoint. As I spread the arms of my virtual body slightly, the throttle of the t-bird eased, allowing me to complete the circle and fall back in position on Johnny's wing. Our t-birds banked in synchronicity around the same curve I had traced previously. As we passed the arc's southern crest, Johnny and I slingshot eastwards, flying headlong like a discus leaving its thrower's hands.

From the corner of my eye I thought I saw something moving behind us. As I turned my head to look back, the visual scanners panned accordingly, until I was watching Mt. Rainier fade into the night. My vision was awash in color, as the orange haze of my own jetwash mixed with the umber glow of the mountain, but I nevertheless spotted what my intuition had caught: a heat signature rising from the mountain's base and settling into the trail directly behind us.

"Hey, Phil, heads up," I warned on the intercom. "We got company. He's using background heat from the mountain to mask his presence from us."

"Yeah, I see it." Phil's disembodied voice fell momentarily silent. "It's not magical, whatever it is. I just did an astral scan."

"Gotcha." I mentally keyed the radio. "Speedy Delivery, this is Angelfire. I've got an unknown behind us, Johnny. Bearing two-six-four, on a direct intercept from behind. Over."

"Roger, Josie, I see him," replied Johnny. "Let's see if we can-"

"Break, break, break," interrupted Phil into our conversation. "Ghost Rider here. We got another two contacts, flying behind the first in V-formation. They're flanking by a couple hundred of meters, looks like. Over."

Two more contacts? I broke my attention and took another look back. I couldn't see anything at first, so I cranked up the Low-Light amplification on the video. As the night sky brightened into an artificial green, I saw three specks in the distance where there used to be one. White boxes began to form over them, as the sensor's target recognition software began processing the telemetry for tracking.

"This is Angelfire, that's an affirmative on the new contacts," I reported. "Signature analysis indicates the lead bogey to be an Aztechnology Liebre pursuit UAV. The other two look like Wandjina combat drones. Wait… " I zoomed the visual display, until I could get a good look at all three. "… Visual confirmation on a set of ATGMs on each Wandjina. My guess is Outlaw Block IIs. Looks like they're t-bird hunting, Johnny."

"Copy, Josie. Those drones don't have good range, so let's try to outrun-" A high-pitched whine interrupted Johnny's broadcast, as the SWR screamed bloody murder. "Drek! We got painted! Break off, Angelfire, and splash those three bandits."

"Wilco, Speedy Delivery, out." I closed the communications window and mentally rearranged the simsense display for combat configuration. "Hang tight, Phil, time to go to work."

Doing a backwards somersault with my virtual body, I commanded the t-bird's thrusters to kick into reverse. The aircraft jerked suddenly and momentarily lost altitude as the jets worked to halt the craft's forward motion. Within a few seconds, the t-bird was hurtling at full speed in reverse. Meanwhile the three drones, apparently intent on bagging Johnny's Banshee, continued flying forward and passed straight over me.