Dale Brown - Dreamland

“Oh, that’s just a drone taking off,” said the captain. “Unpiloted Green Phantom doing IR testing. Pretty straightforward. It’s got a JSF suit on. It has to catch another drone.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel. There are two Phantoms. One’s just a stock drone. The other, Green Phantom, has some wing baffles and a few other mods to stimulate the F-119 flight characteristics. They’re controlled out of the Flighthawk hangar. We’re running checks on the nitrogen-cooling system for the gear in the IR’s eye. It has to be kept at a constant temperature or –”

“You think Green Phantom could rendezvous with Fort Two?”

Colgan blinked. “Well, if the F-119 can’t do it, that old Phanton, I mean, it’s at least as bad a flier as the JSF itself.”

“Who’s the pilot?” asked Bastian

“That would be Major Stockard, sir.” Colgan seemed to bristle a bit. “They, uh, they’re trying to get him back into the swing of things.”

“How good a pilot is he?”

“Sir?”

“I mean with the drone.”

“Well, before his accident, there was no one near as good as him,” said Colgan. “But …”

“But what?”

“I don’t know if he’s back up to speed, Colonel. And he, uh, he’s in a wheelchair.”

“What’s the frequency to the Flighthawk bunker? Said Bastian, moving back to the com panel.

To say he’d flown the QF-4 drone ten thousand times wasn’t an exaggeration; Zen had learned to control the Flighthawks with the exact airplanes he was flying. He’d gotten so he could work them with his eyes closed before moving up to the much-more-difficult-to-control Flighthawks.

He closed his eyes now in frustration. The gig was simple – all he had to do was fly Green Phantom behind Phantom One-Zero-Mike at fifteen thousand feet with three miles of separation. Piece of cake.

Except his heart was pounding and there was sweat pouring from his wrists, and if it weren’t for the automated flight computer fail-safe, he would have smacked Green Phantom into the ground on takeoff.

Things had gone badly yesterday, but that at least could be attributed to rust; he’d gotten better as the exercises wore on.

He wasn’t sure what to blame this on. Maybe the F-119 mods. JSF wasn’t exactly the world’s most flyable plane, and Green Phantom was a pig’s pig.

It was easier to handle than two Flighthawks at supersonic speed, though. So what was he sweating like a bull being chases by toreadors?

If he couldn’t make this simple intercept, how could be ever control the U/MFs?

Zen rolled his neck around on his spine, the vertebrae cracking. He’d forgotten how heavy the control helmet was. He could actually take it off, since the console he was sitting at in Hangar B was basically a flight simulator on steroids. Arranged like a cockpit and developed for the Flighthawk, its standard multi-use displays were augmented by dedicated control and sensor displays, along with banks of specific system overrides and data collectors. They’d nicknamed it Frankenstein’s Control Pod.

But if he was going to get back in the program, he had to do it right, and that meant using the helmet and the Flighthawk flight sticks. It meant sucking it up and hanging in there, kinks, sweat, and all.

Zen checked the altitude on Green Phantom, nudging up to 15,500 feet. He was five miles away, closing on One-Zero-Mike’s left wing. Though he had his left hand rapped around Mike’s control stick, the computer was actually flying the plane in its preprogrammed orbit. Zen nudged his right hand back slightly, gently climbing.

Piece of cake. Two miles to go. He moved his thumb to the center of the stick’s oval top, keying the view screen from optical to FLIR input. The view at the top of his screen changed to a greenish tint, the world shading according to heat sources.

“Zen?”

“What?” he snapped over the headset.

“I have Colonel Bastian on the circuit,” replied Fred Remington, one of his civilians helping run the tests. “Something’s up.”

“Yeah, okay.” Zen’s pinkie stretched to click down the lever at the front base of his right stick; it automatically engaged computer control for Green Phantom. “Let me talk to him.”

“Major Stockard, do you think you can do me a favor?” said Bastian as soon as the line snapped open.

“Colonel?”

“I wonder if you have enough fuel in Green Phantom to try a rendezvous with Fort Two on Range F. we’d like to see if you can get close enough for a refuel.”

Zen glanced at the gauge. The Phantom had plenty of fuel.

But getting close to a Megafortress was not exactly easy. Even the Flighthawks had trouble.

A Phantom with JSF mods? Ha.

And forget about the plane – he’d just blown an easy run at a drone.

Zen didn’t know what to say. “You’re looking for that to happen right now?”

“Can you do it?”

“Green Phantom simulates the F-119.”

“That’s exactly the point. We want to mock up a refuel off a Megafortress. Mack Smith had some trouble,” added the colonel. “I’d like a second opinion.”

“I’m on it,” snapped Zen.

Breanna took Fort Two out of its orbit at 25,000 feet, gliding gently on its left wing to twenty thousand smack in the middle of the range where the new exercise would take place. She pushed the big plane into place, gingerly nudging its nose so it slotted exactly along the three-dimensional flight line the computer was projecting in the HUD navigation screen. They were mimicking a standard tanker track, flying a long oval in the sky as if they were a KC-10 Extender or a KC-135 Stratotanker on its anchor near a war zone, waiting for attack planes and fighter returning from action. Neither Chris nor Major Cheshire had said anything since the colonel ordered the new trial.

Zen had said exactly four words over the radio, but the tension in his voice practically drilled a hole through her skull.

“Green Phantom, we have you at eighteen thousand feet, on beam, closure rate at two hundred knots,” Cheshire told Jeff.

The robot Phantom was going approximately a hundred miles an hour faster than it should have been. Breanna flipped her HUD plot that showed the plane approaching behind them. its speed abruptly slowed, but Green Phantom was still flying too fast to get into the refueling cone. She resisted the temptation to hit the gas, knowing that would only make things more confusing for Zen.

“Three miles,” Cheshire said. “He’s not going to make it.”

Breanna could feel Chris staring at her. She continued to hold her position.

Green Phantom just wouldn’t slow down. Zen nudged the throttle push-bar on the underside of the one-handed stick control. The thrust-indicator graph at the right side of the screen obstinately refused to budge.

He could tell the computer to lower power. He could tell it precisely how many pounds of thrust to produce – or, for that matter, what indicated airspeed he wanted. But using verbal commands, relying on the computer – it seemed like giving up. And he wasn’t giving up. He was doing this, and he was doing it himself.

Partly because Smith had failed. And partly just because.

He tapped the glider with his finger. Finally the robot’s speed began to drop, but it was too late.

“Breakaway, breakaway, breakaway,” Zen said calmly o the interplane frequency. The ‘breakaway,” Zen said mandated full military throttle and an immediate one-thousand-foot climb by the tanker aircraft, and idle power and a one-thousand-foot descent by the receiver. Zen purposely used a calm tone of voice instead of an excited one to communicate to Bree and Cheshire that there was no imminent danger. When he was level, he said. “Let me try another shot.”