Edward Lee - Operator B

The guard snapped to attention. “Yes, sir! Good afternoon, sir!”

“Fuck that good afternoon shit. Slap me in the face. Hard.”

The black-suited guard blinked. “Sir, I can’t strike an—”

“Do it!”

The guard lowered his M-17 4.4mm ACR rifle and—

CRACK!

—slapped Wentz across the face so hard he saw stars. “As you were,” he bumbled, shaking off the rest of his stupor. Wow, that hurt. He blinked out the bright spots, then paced briskly back to Jones and Ashton.

“All right,” he said. “My shit’s square and I’m good to go. Now…show me the inside of this bird.”

««—»»

They’d climbed aboard via a standard Air Force hull ladder. The OEV sported a circular hatch a yard wide, and next Wentz was stepping in, following Ashton down another ladder that clearly was not manufactured by the Air Force—the rungs and siderails of this ladder were thin as wire but supported Wentz’s weight without so much as bowing. Now Wentz stood at the bottom of a yard-wide tube, the same dull silver as the pre-painted hull. An airlock, he guessed. Red instructions had been stenciled:

CAUTION: SET DECOMPRESS

(30-SECONDS EGRESSION TIME)

ACTIVATE DETENT, THEN DEBARK

Wentz stepped through the airlock’s oval manway; Ashton stood waiting for him.

“Sweet Jesus,” Wentz murmured when he glanced forward, starboard and port.

The interior stood stark, smoothly featured. There were no signs of original flight controls in the “cockpit,” though several banks of indicators had been mounted by Air Force technicians, as were two high-tech flight chairs installed over two contoured humps that clearly were the pilot and co-pilot seats of the vehicle’s original operators. Wentz leaned over and peered through two prism-shaped windows beyond which he could see the maintenance scaffolds and the interior hangar. The small windows bore no indication of casements, seams, frames, or sealant—as if they’d somehow been grown into the front of the craft. Aside from the sparse man-made additions, everything inside was the same color as the outside, that dull, lusterless silver.

“I don’t know if I believe this,” Wentz said.

“Once you fly it, you will.”

He examined the aft section. Some supply compartments had been installed, a SNAP-4 nuclear battery and water cell, and an EVA rack, but he didn’t notice anything that might resemble an engine compartment, nor fuel stores.

“What’s the fuel source?” he asked the first logical question.

“Unknown. Our physicists believe it has something to do with gravity amplification synchronized with or against magnetic-pulse waves. We’re confident that the manner in which the vehicle harnesses available energy is unlimited.”

“Endless fuel source…”

“More than likely, yes,” Ashton concurred. She pointed to a cylindrical protrudement on the floor, molded into the coaming. It was no bigger than a Coke can. “We believe that is the gravity amplifier, or what you would think of as an engine. More than likely, other navigational and guidance components exist in the hull. The crew were oxygen/nitrogen breathers just like us. It’s more than likely that the air supply is also unlimited.”

“That’s a lot of ‘more than likely’s,’” Wentz posed. “I don’t want to be the driver at the stick when this thing runs out of gas.”

“I’ve been in it during many of Farrington’s para-orbital flights. So if I’m not worried about it, a big tough senior test like you shouldn’t be either.”

Wentz didn’t exactly appreciate Ashton’s rising snippiness, but he hardly cared.

“Top speed?” he asked.

“Unknown. Within the earth’s atmosphere we estimate a maximum forward velocity of about 50,000 miles per hour.”

“Impossible. The inertia would turn the pilot into ground chuck.”

Ashton’s slippy manner edged back. “General, this vehicle wasn’t built by Boeing or McDonnell-Douglas; it was built by alien engineers. You’re standing right in the middle of the proof. You have to modify your powers of belief. Once you get it in your head that this isn’t a balsa-wood plane with rubber-band propeller, we’ll all be better off.”

“All right, Colonel Smart Ass,” Wentz shot back. “Then you tell me how an aircraft can travel 50,000 knots and not smash the pilot’s brain against the inside of his skull, pop his eyeballs, squirt his spinal fluid out his ears, and blow all of his internal organs out his mouth and his asshole? ”

Ashton shrugged as if these considerations meant nothing. “General, we’re obviously dealing with a technological base that’s probably a thousand years ahead of us. It’s only logical that the OEV is fitted with some sort of integrated velotic envelope that counters forward inertia with reverse inertia, precisely in time with acceleration. Who cares how it works? It just does.”

“All right, fine. So how fast is it… out of the atmosphere?

“Again, unknown. All we do know is that the propulsion system is capable of producing velocities that seem to be exponentially faster than—”

“No, no! Don’t even say it!” Wentz nearly yelled.

“—the speed of light. Farrington’s longest range flight was to Alpha Centauri. It took him four days instead of four years.”

Shit, he thought. How could he object?

“Let me put it this way, General. Everything you’ve ever believed before today…is wrong.”

Frustrated, Wentz combed his gaze around the cockpit area. “Where are the controls? Where’s the stick?”

“Keep cranking that rubber band, sir. There’s no stick. This is a para-orbital, hyper-velotic, self-contained intragalactic transport unit. It’s founded on technologies that are virtually unknown to the human race.”

Wentz was getting pissed. “I don’t care if it’s a goddamn Good Humor truck! How do you fly it without controls?”

Ashton’s tone moderated. “The controls are…integrated.”

“Integrated with what?”

“With the operator—the pilot…”

Wentz squinted at her like a caveman glimpsing the ocean for the first time.

Ashton touched the brushed-silver surface of an angled ledge in front of the port-side flight chair.

A seamless panel hummed open.

“What in the holy hell?” Wentz asked.

The opened panel revealed two narrowly outlined indentations. Outlines like two bizarre hands possessing only two fingers and a thumb.

Ashton audibly gulped. “Those are the controls,” she said.

—

CHAPTER 8

“Those things,” Wentz said, “those outlines. They’re handprints, aren’t they?”

They’d left the hangar and now sat in a brightly lit in-briefing room, Jones behind a standard industrial-gray military desk, Wentz and Ashton in opposing armchairs.

“We don’t call them handprints, General,” Major Jones explained. “We call them operator detents.”

Ashton, then: “Synaptic activity in the brain is processed into and out of the detents by way of the median and ulnar nerves in the arms and the collateral nerve branches in the fingers.”

“You’re talking about thought, aren’t you?” Wentz figured. “I put my hands against those handprints, think, and the thing flies?”

Jones nodded yes. “That’s correct, General. It seems that thought conduction on the part of the operator is effectively converted to operational commands which are processed into the vehicle’s guidance system.”

“Fly-by-wire, only the pilot’s nerves are the wires…”

“Precisely,” said Ashton.

“And, hopefully, General, given what you’ve witnessed today, you’ll be canceling your retirement plans.”