Nerve Center Read online

  HIS LUNGS FROSTED WITH EACH BREATH, THE COLD morning air poking icy fingers inside his chest as he ran. Bastian struggled onward, flexing his shoulders and pushing his calf muscles deliberately, trying to flex his muscles to the max. It wasn’t the cold so much as fatigue that dogged him as he ran the perimeter track; his body moved like a car tire breaking through a pile of icy sludge, each joint crackling and complaining. He’d gotten less than two hours sleep and his body wasn’t about to let him forget it.

  Dog was thinking about shutting his workout down at the three-mile mark—ordinarily he did five—when a lithe figure poked out of the shadows ahead. The runner trotted in place a second, still trying to get limber in the cold air.

  “You’re up early,” said Jennifer Gleason, falling in alongside him as Dog drew up. He’d recognized her from her bright-red watch cap, which this morning was augmented by a set of blue ear muffs. Gleason was a serious runner, and wore a nylon shell workout suit over what seemed to be several layers of T’s and sweats.

  “So’re you,” grunted Bastian. He turned to follow the left fork of the path, even though that meant he’d be stretching his workout to six miles.

  “Did you shut everything down when you left?” she asked.

  “I did, Doc. I did.”

  Their running shoes slapped in unison against the macadam, a steady rap that paced their hearts. They ran in silence for nearly a mile. They crested a small hill overlooking the boneyard beyond Dreamland’s above-ground hangars. The fuselages of ancient Cold War warriors and failed experiments lay exposed in the distance, sheltered only by the lingering shadows of the night.

  Seeing the hulking outlines of the planes always spurred Dog on; he couldn’t help but think of the inevitableness of time and decay. How many other commanders had run—or perhaps walked—across this very spot, their minds consumed by the problems of the day? The A-12 had done some testing here. Northrop’s Flying Wing had pulled more than a few turns around the airspace. It wasn’t Dreamland then; it wasn’t even a base, just a long expanse of open land far from prying eyes.

  Some of the Cheetah sleds, earlier variants of the hopped-up Eagle demonstrator, lay in the bone pile. At least one DreamStar mock-up sat beneath a wind-tattered tarp. It was a 707 whose nose had grown fangs, the early test bed for the forward airfoil of the plane destined to succeed the F-22. Or rather, the plane that had been intended to succeed the F-22. The fiasco that had brought Bastian to Dreamland had shelved DreamStar. And ANTARES, though obviously not for good.

  “Let me ask you a question,” said Dog, pulling up suddenly and putting his hand out in front of Jennifer.

  His hand caught the soft looseness of her chest. In the dim light he saw surprise in her eyes.

  “ANTARES,” said Dog, dropping his hand awkwardly. “What do you—tell me what you think about it.”

  “What do you mean?” Her voice was thin and low, out of breath.

  Dog leaned his body forward and fell back into an easy jog. “Your opinion on it.”

  “It was never my project per se,” said Gleason, quickly catching up. “Bio-cyber connections aren’t my thing.”

  “What about Nerve Center?”

  “Some thing. It’s part of ANTARES. It is ANTARES. No one here spoke of them separately.”

  “You say that like you don’t like it.”

  “No. Not at all. I mean, eventually fluid organic interfaces will be part of the mix. It’s inevitable. You’ve heard about the experiments that have brought sight to people with certain types of blindness.”

  “Sure.”

  She picked up the pace. Dog felt himself starting to strain now to keep up. Gleason’s words came almost in staccato, pushed out with her breaths.

  “That sort of thing—of course it’s not as advanced as AN-TARES. Well, ANTARES is a different model altogether technically.”

  Her voice either trailed off or her words were swallowed in a hard breath of air. Dog waited for her to continue or explain, but she didn’t.

  “Can ANTARES work?” They were really running now; Bastian had to struggle to get the words out.

  “It did.”

  “For the Flighthawks?”

  “Of course.”

  They took a turn to follow the fence. One of the security team’s black SUVs approached slowly on its rounds. Dog waved, then realized he was falling behind. He tried lengthening his stride, pushing to catch up.

  The fence tucked to the left up a very slight rise. Bastian’s quarters were down a short road to the right. He goaded his legs to give him one last burst, but barely caught her as he reached the intersection. He slowed, walking, warming down; Jennifer circled back.

  “It does work, Colonel. No question about it,” she said, trotting backward in front of him as he walked, catching his breath. “Major Stockard already passed the first set of protocols and controlled one of the Phantoms using the Flight-hawk protocols.”

  “You have—” His breath caught. He stopped and leaned down, hands on hips. “You have reservations.”

  “Not about the concept. I’m not an expert,” she added.

  “You’ve worked on the gateway translation computers and you know as much about AI and computers as anyone on the base, including Rubeo.”

  “ANTARES isn’t a computer. That’s the difference.”

  She trotted back and forth, a colt eager to get on with her workout. Her body swayed—even in thick warm-up gear, she was beautiful. If he hadn’t been so exhausted from that sprint at the end, he might have grabbed her to him.

  Thank God for exhaustion then. She was just a kid, the age of his daughter.

  Ouch.

  “I’m not an expert,” she insisted. ‘The program was ready for the Flighthawks when it was shelved. Phase One testing with a Phantom was completed about a month before Major Stockard’s accident. Nerve Center would have been the next step. We rewrote some of the hooks into the flight-control computers and tested them. We dropped some of the code in C3 covering simultaneous flights for memory space, but with some of the changes we’ve made recently I doubt it would be a problem loading them back in.”

  “How long?”

  “How long are they?”

  “How long to load them back in?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Not long, if it’s a priority.”

  “It may be.”

  “Your call.”

  Her whole manner toward him had changed. Damn his clumsiness for grabbing her chest. Damn—he could kick himself for being such a klutz.

  “You don’t like ANTARES, do you?” he said.

  She started trotting away, resuming her workout. “Not my area of expertise.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I’m, uh, sorry.”

  “Sorry?” she called back.

  “The way I, uh, bumped you before.”

  If she answered, her words were muffled by the wind as it suddenly picked up.

  Dreamland

  Aggressor Project Hangar

  10 January, 0905

  TO MACK SMITH, THE PLANE LOOKED LIKE A BLACK shark with slightly misplaced fins.

  The MiG-29M/DE Dream Fulcrum, better known by its nickname “Sharkishki,” had a boxer’s stance. Her twin engines hung beneath a cobra cowl that melded seamlessly into her wings. Stock, the MiG-29 was a serious air-superiority fighter, not quite better than the F-16 or F/A-18, but close enough to cause a few beads of perspiration on an opponent’s brow. But Sharkishki was anything but stock. Dreamland power-plant specialists had worked over her RD-33K turbofans to the point that she had a third more thrust at full military power than even the uprated engines she had come with. They now put out 35,000 pounds in afterburner mode, a good sight better than the Pratt & Whitneys on an F-15C. As the plane remained several thousand pounds lighter than the average Eagle, she could easily outaccelerate one. With the help of new leading- and trailing-edge control surfaces, her already impressive roll rate had been considerably improved, and variable-geometry nozzles helped cut down her turning radius. The
notoriously bumpy MiG skin had been smoothed out by the Dreamland techies so that hardly a blemish remained.

  But it was in the cockpit that the Sharkishki’s improvements really shone. Her antiquated Russian avionics had been replaced with Dreamland’s finest microchips. Her HUD was slaved to a trial version of the F-22 radar and target-tracking units; her own reasonably competent infrared search and tracking (IRST) system had been replaced with a longer-range passive-detection system capable of detecting warm toast at twenty nautical miles in the rain. While not without bugs, the all-weather infrared system allowed Sharkishki to detect and engage enemy fighters before they knew they were being detected; its small size and radar-defeating paint meant the plane could generally not be scanned by fighter-borne radars until they were about fifteen nautical miles away. Granted, detection by AWACS was a different story, and a pilot who knew he was going up against the Sharkishki could employ tactics to neutralize the improvements—but he had to know what he was up against.

  Which was the point of the project. When she was finished, the MiG-29M/DE—DE stood for “Dreamland Enhanced”—would be turned over to an “aggressor” fighter squadron tasked with training exercises at nearby Nellis Air Base. Sharkishki would take the role of Russia’s next-generation fighter, helping groom Air Force Top Guns for the future.

  Kicking their butts was more the way Mack thought of it.

  “Typical Russian piece of tin shit,” groused Chief Master Sergeant “Greasy Hands” Parsons behind him on the runway, joining Mack and the crew chief on the preflight walk-around. Parsons had a large ceramic bowl of coffee in his twisted fingers, and a thick stub of a cigar in his mouth. “We ready to go, Alan?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” said the chief, with considerably more snap and starch than he directed toward Mack. Parsons grunted. Then he spat some of his cigar juice out and took a swag of coffee. Shaking his head, he stepped close to the plane, frowning as he looked into the modified air intakes. The original Russian grates, intended to keep out rocks and debris on poor runways, had been replaced with an interior baffle system that acted like a turbo-booster at high speed.

  “Something wrong, Sergeant?” Mack asked.

  “Piece of Commie tin-shit garbage. You sure you want to fly this crate, Major?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  Parsons didn’t answer, moving instead to the leading edge of the wing, where he pointed his cigar at the gap and demanded that the chief have it checked. A crewman ran up with a micrometer; the gap was shown to be within tolerances. That hardly suited Greasy Hands, who growled and continued around the aircraft. He soon had five men making last-second adjustments and checks, none of which were warranted, in Mack’s opinion.

  “This plane is more than ready,” said Knife finally. “Ground crew did a hell of a job.”

  Parsons ducked out from under the fuselage, where he’d been inspecting the landing gear.

  “You got a problem with me, Major?”

  “Hell, no,” said Mack. “Just lighten up. The ground crew kicked butt here.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Parsons.

  “I said the ground crew kicked butt,” Mack shouted.

  “Well, thank you, Major,” said the chief master sergeant, breaking into a wide grin. “Nice to hear an officer say that.” He stepped so close to Mack that his breath nearly knocked the pilot over. “Now don’t fuckin’ break my plane.”

  Mack’s mood didn’t lift until he slid the throttle to takeoff power and kicked Sharkishki into the air nearly a half hour later. He cleaned the underside of the MiG, pulling in the landing gear, and yanked the stick back, taking the MiG in a steep climb that made him forget all about sergeants and their typical bullshit.

  Knife hit his marks and leveled off, vectoring toward the range where the day’s test was scheduled. He keyed into the shared frequency that would be used by all of the players in the exercise. Ringmaster—actually Army Captain Kevin Ma-drone, who was flying in an E-3 AWACS above, monitoring the test—acknowledged, then quickly reminded everyone of the ground rules: no hitting, no spitting, and no talking back.

  The helicopters and the secure weapons links and com systems were the most important part of the exercise, but other systems were being tested as well: the MiG, an Army ground-point air-defense radar, and the Flighthawks. Zen was still learning to control four planes simultaneously, apparently a lot harder than it looked.

  “Two minutes,” said Ringmaster.

  Mack hit his way-point at the edge of the range and prepared to attack.

  Dreamland Security Office

  10 January, 1015

  DANNY FREAH FELT HIS EYELIDS TOUCH BOTTOM, AND only barely managed to keep from dropping the phone onto his desk as the conference call droned on. He’d gotten up at four this morning to talk to his wife on the phone. A college professor, she’d returned to New York a week ago for the new semester and he missed her badly. They’d burned three hours on the phone line, and even then he’d felt frustrated as soon as he’d hung up.

  Not to mention dead tired, since he hadn’t managed to get to sleep until a little after midnight. The day’s schedule precluded any catnaps, and he’d already gone through the thermos of coffee he’d brought into the office to take the secure—and uninterruptible—conference call on security matters.

  Fortunately, these briefings were held on the telephone; none of the three-dozen other participants in the conference call could see him prop his head up with his elbow.

  Getting regular heads-up briefings from the special FBI unit on terrorism and espionage was a good idea. But like many good ideas, it had morphed into something bad. Originally intended to alert certain top security officials to possible activities directed against them, it now included a briefing from the State Department, and even reports on foreign diplomats traveling in “areas of interest,” the definition of which seemed to have been gradually expanded to include all of North America.

  “We have some diplomatic activity in San Francisco, where the Secretary of Defense is to address the Aerospace Convention today,” said Pete Francois, the FBI’s deputy director for EspTer, as they were calling the group. “I think we have a couple of sightings in Las Vegas as well. Debra, you want to handle that briefing?”

  “Brazilian attaché in Vegas. Usual suspects in San Francisco. Nothing to report yet,” said Debra Flanigan, the Special Agent in Charge who handled the area.

  Danny wanted to kiss her.

  “Just for the record,” intoned Francois, “there are defense officials from fifty countries in San Francisco. Per regs, etc., unusual contacts to be reported.”

  “In triplicate,” murmured Danny.

  “Excuse me?” said Francois.

  Freah nearly fell out of his chair. He hadn’t meant to actually say that. He opened his mouth to apologize, then realized it was better to stay silent—and anonymous.

  “I think someone said triplicate.” Flanigan laughed. “Personally, I think two copies will do. But remember to blind-copy all the e-mails, please.”

  Dreamland Range 2

  10 January, 1054

  WITH THE COMPUTER TEMPORARILY CONTROLLING THE two Flighthawks that had already launched from the Mega-fortress, Jeff took his hands off the controls and set them on the rests of his seat. He pressed down to lift his butt up, shifting around to get more comfortable.

  Once precarious, the airdrop of the robot planes from Raven was now routine, with the computer able to handle it completely. The EB-52’s pilot nudged the Megafortress into a shallow dive as the computer counted down the sequence, initiating a zero-alpha maneuver.

  “Five seconds,” said the pilot—Breanna, sitting in for Major Cheshire, who was away at a defense conference in San Francisco.

  Zen watched the instrument displays in his command helmet, power graphs at green, lift readings shifting from red diamonds—“no go”—to green upward arrows—“go.”

  The simple graphics of the lift readings belied the complexity of the forces acting
on the small robot planes strapped to the EB-52’s wings. The bomber’s airframe threw wicked vortices against the small craft; upon launch the robot’s complicated airfoil fought thirty-two different force vectors, all dependent on the mother ship’s specific speed, altitude, and angle of attack. Air temperature also played a role in some regimes, though the engineers were still debating exactly how significant the effect was. In any event, the computer handled the drudge work of setting the leading-edge foils and micro-adjusting the rear maneuvering thrusters as Raven reached launch point.

  “Away Three,” said Zen, without touching the controls, and Flighthawk Three knifed downward, right wing angling upward to cut against the wind. “Away Four,” he said, and Flighthawk Four launched, stumbling ever so slightly as the Megafortress momentarily bucked in her glide slope.

  “Sorry about that,” said Bree, but Zen wasn’t listening—he was in full-blown pilot mode now, the main display in his helmet giving him a pilot’s-eye view from the cockpit of Flighthawk One. The sitrep or God’s-eye view at the upper right showed all of the positions of the Flighthawks. It also marked out the other planes in the exercise. Pilots’ views from the other three robots were arrayed in a line next to it all the way across. A band at the bottom showed the instruments in the selected or “hot” Flighthawk. Though they had used it in combat, the interface remained a work in progress. Zen liked the helmet, since it came as close as possible to duplicating the in-the-cockpit experience. But the others on the team felt a dedicated console was preferable if more than one plane was to be controlled at a time, since the instrument readings for all of the planes could be displayed on different tubes, available at a glance. Today, Zen had the best of both worlds, flying with a scientist who monitored those displays at the next station. But the idea was for there to be eventually two different pilots, each with his own brood of robots.

  A preset exercise like this allowed Stockard to work up a full set of routines for the robot planes’ C’ flight-control and strategy computer, augmenting the preset instructions and flight patterns with courses and default strategies to be implemented on voice command. Even so, a rapidly evolving situation could overwhelm both pilot and computer. Simply jumping from cockpit to cockpit—in other words, changing which Flighthawk he had manual control of—could be disorienting. It somehow taxed his muscles as much as his mind, as if he were physically levering himself up and out of his control seat into each plane. Controlling a four-ship of Flighthawks was like trying to ride four busting broncos simultaneously.