Брюс Бетке - Expendables

"That's why we developed the Valkyrie. Think of it as a reusable cruise missile. We launch it like a cruise missile; it runs to target like a cruise missile; if the mission demands it we can expend it like a cruise missile. But if the mission doesn't demand it, the Valkyrie can deliver munitions like a tactical aircraft and come back."

"Doctor Klein," the Senator drawled, "I think what Sally was trying to say was, we are all familiar with the A-42 Fury." Meredith noted that both corporate vice-presidents blanched. "If I may ask, how does the Valkyrie differ from what one of my colleagues has properly termed, 'that overpriced disaster'?"

"For one thing, it works," Klein shot back. "For ano—"

"Also, I would like to know why it bears such a remarkable resemblance to the A-42 Type E aircraft which my Procurement Committee rejected over two years ago?"

"The Fury and the Valkyrie are built on the same airframe," Klein admitted. Sally gasped as if this were a major revelation. The corporate vice-presidents tried to shrink and hide beneath their seats. "But," Klein continued, overriding whatever it was the Senator was composing himself to deliver, "but the flight electronics are completely different. And the control concept is completely different. The Fury system tried to mimic human control of an aircraft in an enhanced fly-by-wire system. The Valkyrie is a quantum leap beyond that!"

One of the corporate vice-presidents jumped up and turned to the Senator.

"Sir?" Meredith thought it a pity men no longer wore hats; the VP looked as if he wanted to hold his cap in his hands and tug his forelock as he spoke to the Senator. "Sir, Doctor Klein has been under a lot of stress lately and his choice of words may—"

The Senator waved a hand to hush the VP. "Let Klein talk," he said. "I am finding it quite educational." The VP turned to Klein, shot him a glance that clearly meant Watch your ass ! and sat down. "You were saying, Dr. Klein?" the Senator prompted.

The interruption had defused Klein's stridency. "The Valkyrie is a distributed-processing system. The vehicles carry their basic flight-control and survival programming on-board, which eliminates the Fury's response-time problems and frees up the command processor for macro-tactical processing. All we need to do is tell it where we want to deploy and when, and service the delivery vehicles. The system plans the mission, selects the objectives, and controls the birds."

The officer in the front row rumbled something.

"No, sir," Klein said, "we don't use that term. If anything, we say it's A.N.V.I. — artificial, but not very intelligent."

"It seems to me," the Senator said, "that you people claimed the Fury was artificially intelligent."

The obsequious vice-president jumped up and blurted out, "The person responsible for that is no longer with the company, sir." Then he looked embarrassed and sat down.

"That concept had some flaws," Klein added, but just then the co-pilot's bland, midwestern voice came over the intercom and cut off further discussion.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the co-pilot said, "we have reached the target zone and are cruising at an altitude of 20,000 feet. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, with only a few widely-scattered cumulus clouds, so if you look out the right-side windows you should be able to make out the target just north of the junction of the Molopo and Nossoh rivers." The observers left their seats and began crowding around the windows. The plane banked into a gentle right turn. "Don't all look at once," the co-pilot said, "you'll tip the plane over. Ha ha, just kidding, folks."

Meredith buried his face in his hands and wondered why nice, likable people always turned into amateur comedians when they got hold of microphones.

"We'll be circling the target zone for the duration of the test," the co-pilot continued. "Upington reports the weather is clear and all 15 birds are go for launch, so you can start whenever you're ready. Have a nice day." The intercom clicked off.

After a minute or two, Meredith got everyone back into their seats and dimmed the cabin lights. Klein turned up the brightness on the projection TV until everyone could see the 15 cartoon aircraft on the screen. "This screen echoes the main operator's terminal," Klein said. "As you can see, the interface uses a friendly, graphics-oriented approach that can be understood by anyone with third-grade reading skills." Klein pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and began pointing things out on the screen. "The brain icon means that the on-board computer checks out; the map icon means the navigational parameters have been downloaded and verified; I think you can guess what the gas tank and bomb icons mean." Klein put the pen back in his pocket and put his hand on the intercom phone. "Any more questions before we start?"

No one spoke, so he lifted the phone and said, "It's a go." In ripples of three, the cartoon aircraft zipped off the of the screen. The piano player struck up "Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder," and Meredith changed his mind about tipping him. When the last of the aircraft were gone, the screen switched to display a cluster of tiny red arrows crawling across a map.

The co-pilot's voice crackled over the intercom. "Upington reports all 15 birds away smooth as silk. ETA over target, three minutes 15 seconds."

Silently, everyone watched the red arrows close in on the target.

Meredith found the first minute quite tolerable.

During the second minute, the steady hiss of the cabin air system began to get on his nerves.

By the end of the third minute, the whine of the engines felt like dentist's drills going into his ears. "Is this it?" Sally asked in a loud, bored whisper.

"There they are!" someone at a window shouted. Everyone rushed to the windows again, so Meredith looked at the video screen instead. It had switched from a scrolling map to a 3-D graphic plot of the target zone.

Hawking arrowheads chased frantic targets across the gridded landscape and erased them. Klein stood alongside the screen, hoping someone would ask him a question. Meredith caught his eye; they exchanged shrugs and what-are-we-doing-here ? smiles.

After a few minutes the view out the window got boring, so the observers began turning to the video screen. Meredith slipped over to a window and looked down; it wasn't hard to spot the target. Spider legs of white phosphorus still hung in the air over it; the first two attack wings had surrounded the target with a cross-hatch border of orange napalm and then dropped willy pete in the middle. Thick black smoke was already rising from the fires, as tiny dark specks darted around the target like a swarm of midges. One of them apparently disgorged a load of M-77's; a ripple of fire walked down a hill and across the center of the target, ending in the expanding bubble of a high-explosive shock wave.

Meredith tasted bile in the back of his throat. An HE shock wave, and out of the corner of his eye the rising roman candle of a SAM, then the canopy shattered and he was punching out on pure instinct and Otis….

Meredith found a vacant seat and sat down, blinking away tears and fighting down nausea.

The Valkyries took all the programmed targets within five minutes and moved on to targets of opportunity. Within ten minutes they'd completely neutralized the site; within 15 they were safely snared in the landing webs at Upington and Airborne Command was en route back to Joburg. Three hours after launch, Meredith and Klein were sitting in the hotel bar, celebrating.

They'd started with vodka and lime, which got them talking about Russians, then switched to gin and tonics, which steered the conversation around to the Brits and NATO. Eventually they got around to Bloody Marys by the pitcherful and Great Moments in Field Testing. Quite a lot of Bloody Marys had come and gone.