Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Thirty seconds later, the Jeep skids to a stop on the apron that flanks the main north-south runway. The two Tomcats sit just outside the hangar doors, one with its canopy up, the other, Manny, suited and helmeted at the controls, already closing down. Throwing off her Kevlar vest and field gear as she runs, Maggie snatches her helmet from the waiting tech sergeant, slaps it on her head and scrambles up the ladder into the front cockpit of her craft. She straps in one-handed, fixing her oxygen mask in place, punching in the sequence for the automated systems checks that would normally occupy a quarter hour. Today they will run exactly as long as it takes her to get into position for takeoff. The green and red LED’s dance across the small screen, but the only figures that matter are the ones that tell her that she’s taking off fuel tanks topped off and the readout that confirms the ready status of the missiles that bristle along the undersides of her wings. It comes to her that this may be the last time that she will ever fly, that she has nothing to gain and only time to lose, but habit is too strong, and she continues to follow the check-list even as she shuts down her lexan bubble. The numbers still flickering in front of her, she revs her engines and begins her taxi to the north end of the strip.

She has beaten it into her student pilots’ heads for a decade and a half. If you’re going to fly, you don’t have options. Do it right. Do it right the first time.

Do it right the last time, too.

With a wave of her hand, she motions Manny into position at her left wing, just to one side and behind. As she turns to make her run, a rocket tears into the tarmac just behind her, and she opens the throttle, no time now for gradually gathering speed, and hurtles down the runway, pulling G’s before she ever reaches the end, Manny streaking along beside her, keeping pace. Then she pulls the nose up, feeling the lift of air beneath her wings and is airborne, climbing almost straight up into the sun.

At 10,000 feet she levels off, scraps of cloud like drifting feathers beneath her where she hangs in silence over the folded valleys and greening fields below. Sun glints off the nose of her plane, catching the edge of the lexan bubble as she banks to sweep in a wide arc south and west. Below her she can make out the rectilinear grid that is Rapid City and the dark ribbon of the highway where they made their stand against the droids a day, a lifetime, ago. She levels her wings and swings back toward Ellsworth, punching the display from the copilot’s monitor forward to her own screen. The radar might not be able to pick up the enemy, but the cameras should be able to find them. Even if the damned metalheads have found some way to shield themselves from long-wave frequencies, even if they can make themselves effectively invisible, they can’t make themselves transparent. If she can find the anomalies, she can bomb them.

And put an end to them once for all.

Far to the east, the sun strikes fire from a streaking silver shape that must be Manny’s Tomcat, turning as she is now to quarter the land beneath them. The gorges and ancient lava flows that spread out between the Base and the Black Hills ripple away beneath her, their shapes flowing across the screen. The camera’s lens, powerful enough to show a single buttercup growing in the summer meadows, singles out nothing of interest. No armored columns, no grinding mass of titanium canon fodder.

The blip appears on her screen without warning, something rising toward her from a winding gorge branching off from the Cheyenne’s south fork. She kicks up the Tomcat’s nose, and a Sparrow air-to-air missile streaks from beneath the left wing, locking onto its target as Maggie climbs and rolls away, sweeping back toward its launch point and punching coordinates into the laser guidance system that will drop 500 pounds of high explosive on the enemy. The offending blip disappears from her readout a half-second before she sends the bomb on its way. With luck, it will take out a whole nest, but it is luck she cannot count on. Neither can she afford to be free-handed with her payload.

Another ground-to-air rocket rises up as she loops back toward Ellsworth from the north, and she dispatches it, and its launcher, as easily as she did the first. There is still no sign of the android force that appeared around the base earlier that morning; the only indication that they were not an hallucination or some weird sort of image projection is the artillery fire that pours down on her ground forces even as she seeks out their operators, and even then, they are evidence of no more than one operator apiece.

What if . . ..?

But that is a fantasy. They have to be here somewhere. Have to be.

If I were a mule, where would I go to get lost? If I were a metal killing machine with printed circuits for brains and copper wire for nerves, where would I go to jam radar and avoid detection by conventional means?

Maggie sweeps low to obtain a clearer image of a line of vehicles on a farm road, but they are only more of the ever-present wreckage of the first days of the uprising. Putting on speed, she climbs again, sweeping up through wispy clouds to the relative safety of the sky. Beneath her, the land rises steadily, from black bedrock deposited by volcanoes when the northern prairies lay beneath an inland sea into the uplift of the Black Hills themselves, sacred ground to the Lakota from time before time.

Where would I go?

There’s gold in them thar hills.

Gold.

Not gold. Uranium. Vanadium. All of it lying exposed to the sky in the tiers of the huge strip mines gouged out of the earth at the turn of the century, shut down by treaties renegotiated by the Oglala and Northern Cheyenne less than a decade ago and never remdiated.

Radioactive ore, huge masses of it, busily throwing off electrons on its own bandwidths. It has been a sore spot with local citizens for years, disrupting the endlessly running talk radio stations, reducing cell phones to sputtering static, interfering with transmissions from civilian aircraft. How much? Maybe enough to mask the output from lesser masses and scramble incoming locator signals, even the special military frequencies.

That’s where I’d go if I were a droid.

Turning south again, she lays down a pattern of sweeps that covers the expanse of more hospitable terrain between the Black Hills and the Badlands to the south and east. Flying with one hand and only half her brain, the years, the decades, of practice more ingrained now even than instinct, she scans the ground beneath her, zooming the camera in on every outcrop she does not recognize, every glint of sun off twisted metal or the rippled surface of a stock tank.

For twenty minutes she flies low and slow. The camera shows her cows grazing, a stallion running with his mares, a coyote arcing up out of the tall grass in pursuit of something invisible beneath its green stalks, one human with a gun who stands transfixed as she passes, not even bothering to run for cover. The mines themselves stand deserted, great open wounds in the Mother’s body, their tiers descending into the earth like the narrowing circles of Dante’s hell. There is no sign of the droids.

Disappointment washes through her, leaving the taste of acid in her mouth. The damned things might as well be invisible. Maybe they are invisible. Maybe her brain has shorted out under the stress of the last several weeks.

Maybe Hart was right. She is not command material, never was.

Maybe she’s not even a goddamned decent pilot.

Banking one more time over the snaking canyons of the badlands, she follows the twisted paths of dry rivers among the bare rock where the relics of eons past lie open to the sun that stands now halfway down from noon, raking the landscape with harsh sidelight. The rocks stand forth like nightmares out of legend; giants turned to stone, Lot’s wife, looking back toward her burning city, transformed to a pillar of salt. Now blindingly bright, now running in shadow, streams that feed into the White River wind through them, the sun striking upward from their surfaces in sheets of light.