John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

A black flag, grayed by the blowing desert dust, snapped and yanked at the pole at the Ontario, Oregon, airfield. From the rear cockpit of her Stearman biplane, barely five feet behind the roaring engine, Bambi Castro couldn’t hear the cracking and booming of the flag in the wind, but even a quarter mile above, she could see the way the flag bent the pole. It would have been a scary landing, but now she wouldn’t be landing.

The black flag meant CONTAMINATED FUEL HERE, DO NOT LAND. The biotes that had spoiled the aviation fuel on the ground at Ontario were as contagious to avgas as refrigerator mold was to cucumbers. The most common strains of biote could turn the fuel in the Stearman’s tank to yellow-orange vinegar, lumpy green goo that resembled baby diarrhea, or brown sludge that reeked of cheese, but there were thousands of one-off biote strains that might do something equally bad. If any biote contaminated the Stearman, the whole fuel system and engine would have to be pulled out, boiled, and reinstalled, taking one of the last dozen working airplanes in the United States out of service for weeks.

Bambi banked right and pulled the stick back, putting the Stearman into a circling climb. Coming around to the west, the propeller and engine roared even louder at the hard work against the wind. Didn’t even get a chance to warm up, she thought; even in July, she needed a couple of sweaters, gloves, helmet, and scarf at cruising altitude, a mile and a half above the high desert and with the plane’s propeller and motion putting a hundred-mile-an-hour wind always in her face. Well, nothing to be done for it; she couldn’t land here and she needed to get above and upwind as quickly as she could. I’ll need to drain and check at Baker City. Gah. One more thing between me and dinner and bed.

Holding the stick with her knees to keep the Stearman spiraling upward, Bambi dragged the Ontario mailbag from the front cockpit and rested it on her lap, tearing it out of its paper grocery bag.

Mostly Athens bureaucrats bashing antlers with Olympia bureaucrats, but the mail must go through.

She pointed the nose north to cross west, to the windward, of the field. With the stick between her knees and her feet steady on the rudder pedals, she gripped the eyebolt that protruded from the concrete-filled tin can in her right hand, and balanced the mailbag and streamer on her left. She whipped the weight downward in a seated slam dunk and tossed the mailbag and streamer across her body over the side.

The mailbag rig cleared the stabilizer; the weight pulled the rope to the mailbag taut, and the red streamer unfolded behind, fluttering down onto the former golf course by the airfield.

Ontario was screwed . All the fuel on the ground would have to be burned, and the tanks, pipes, and hoses scoured with boiling water and disinfectant, and then there would be a three-month quarantine to confirm that exposed fuel was no longer becoming infected. Their mail would have to wait for a train that had a decontamination car—perhaps twice a month, because there just weren’t enough steam locomotives.

Actually, I could give a shit about the nice folks in Ontario. I’m about up to my own ass in trouble.

Bambi had pushed hard to reach Ontario today—taken off from Pueblo as early as she could get the ground crew to forgive her for, and then flown all the way to Ogden, Utah, on the first hop; on the way she’d dropped mail to Rangely, Vernal, and Provo, but she’d elected not to land because that exposed the Stearman to the dangers of biotes and nanoswarm. She had planned to land only at Ontario, with Baker City as her only Plan B.

Oh shit. If Ontario’s infected, what about Baker City? Baker was even more exposed to the wind off the desert; from here to the coast there were dozens of gas stations whose abandoned tanks seeped foul-smelling goo, thousands of houses where vinyl siding had decayed into slime, and tens of thousands of abandoned cars and trucks sitting on their rotted tires, their fuel tanks reeking of vinegar, refrigerator mold, or spoiled milk. A single spore from any of those could bring ruin, as one probably had for Ontario.

Well, I can’t fix yesterday’s poor planning now. At eight thousand feet she leveled off and throttled up; the little plane shook with the effort of flying into the wind. Below her, the brown scrub and dirt of midsummer late afternoon sent up unpredictable thermals, and swirled with thin gold and gray dust; to her right, big piles of cumulonimbus roiled above the mountains. Late-summer afternoons out here were a nightmare for a tiny powered kite like the Stearman.

She rechecked instruments. Oil pressure, temp, tach, airspeed all fine, altimeter and compass as they should be. The little tank of lye solution that sprayed the alternator and spark coil, preventing nanoswarm from taking hold, was low.

The fuel gauge said Make Baker soon.

Half an hour later, ten miles out of Baker City, she dared go no closer; the storm squatted over the little desert town like a Rottweiler guarding his bowl. She turned ninety degrees right, heading northeast. If some clear sky opened to her left, soon, maybe she could get around the north edge of the storm and follow it in to land behind it.