“We’ve got tankers here, yes.”
“What other aircraft do you have here?”
“You haven’t spoken with anyone from wing headquarters yet?”
“Well… I did run into General Furness in town a little while ago, but we didn’t really talk.”
Patrick’s eyebrows raised in question at that. “I thought you two knew each other.”
“It wasn’t a good time to chat,” Daren said, stumbling. He was thankful to see McLanahan nod, apparently willing to let it drop. “I just arrived tonight. My report date isn’t until next week, but I decided to show early. I didn’t imagine in-processing would only take ten minutes.”
“Now I see why you’re in the dark,” McLanahan said with a slight smile. “You haven’t had the nickel tour yet. I think I’ll leave that up to General Furness or Colonel Long.”
“What are you doing out here tonight, General?”
“Trying to nail down all the interface parameters between my virtual cockpit and my plane,” he replied, “but we’re missing something. We can’t find it in the VC, I can’t find it out here. It must be in the plane, but we still can’t isolate it.”
“What plane are you talking about, General?” Daren asked. “I haven’t seen any planes here yet. And why in hell are you—”
“Shh. Not so loud — and watch your French.” Patrick motioned with his head to his right, and Daren saw a small boy in a sleeping bag, lying on an inflatable mattress.
“Is… is that your son, General?” Daren whispered incredulously.
Patrick nodded. “Bradley James. I’ve been so busy the last several days, I haven’t been with him very much. I couldn’t stand being away from him any longer, so I told him we were going on a camping trip. I know it’s forecast to go below freezing tonight, and he’s got school, but I did it anyway. We cooked hot dogs and macaroni and cheese — his favorite comfort foods — we looked at the stars through a telescope, and he conked out.”
“You took your son out to the desert while you’re working on a project?”
“Couldn’t think of anything else to do,” Patrick said. He looked at his son and sighed. “I always wanted to take him out camping, but his mother didn’t relish the idea. He has a rough night if we do something that we used to do together, so camping seemed to kill two birds”—he swallowed a bit, then corrected himself—“I mean, it seemed to fit the bill nicely.”
Daren had heard something about some great tragedy in McLanahan’s life, but no one had laid it out for him, out of respect for the man. It obviously had something to do with his wife, Bradley’s mother. This was a very surreal scene: a young commanding general, personally monitoring a major project being conducted in his high-tech unit, but concerned — disturbed? — enough to bring his son out to the site in a sleeping bag. How weird was this?
“Anything I can help you with, sir?”
“I hope so. That’s why I got you assigned here from the Pentagon,” Patrick said. He ran his hands wearily over his face and his short-cropped hair. “This is not an official wing project, Daren. I’ve got no budget — not one dime. I’m stealing fuel and flight hours from the wing already as it is. But I promised the chief that I’d have something to show him.”
“I don’t get it, sir,” Daren commented. “Aren’t you the commanding officer here?”
“Officially, Daren, I don’t exist here,” McLanahan admitted. “The First Air Battle Force was stood up here, but we don’t have a mission. It’s my job to build one. The One-eleventh Wing is the only official unit here. My funding runs out September thirtieth of this year. I talked the chief and SECDEF into bringing them here to see if we can integrate them into a deployable force, but I don’t have a staff or a budget. When the money runs out, it closes down.”
“Excuse me, sir, but what exactly are you working on?” Daren asked.
McLanahan finished typing notes, got up, checked on Bradley to make sure he was warm enough, then motioned to Daren. “Come with me, Colonel.”
Daren followed McLanahan out of the tent. He immediately saw the tall, android-looking figure standing nearby, now carrying a huge futuristic-looking weapon. “Excuse me, sir, but what in hell is that?”
“You mean ‘who,’ “ Patrick corrected him. “Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Wilde, Air Battle Force ground operations,” Patrick replied.
“Ground operations? You mean, combat ground operations?”
“That’s the idea.”
“What’s he wearing? What’s he carrying?”
“He’s wearing electronic battle armor; he’s carrying an electromagnetic rail gun.”
“A what …?”
“I’ll explain later.” They stepped quickly over to the steel trailer. McLanahan unlocked the door by pressing his thumb on a pad; the door opened with a hiss of pressurized air. Inside the tightly packed trailer were two seats facing simple consoles with two hand controllers; on either side of the seats were computer terminals; on the leftmost side, facing the front of the trailer, was a fifth console with three computer monitors, manned by a technician furiously entering commands into a computer keyboard. The inside of the trailer was so loud from the sound of the air-conditioning that the tech had to wear hearing protectors. But all this occupied only about a third of the trailer. The rest was jam-packed with electronics, circuit-board racks, power supplies, communications equipment, and air-conditioning units.
Daren recognized it all instantly: “It’s a virtual-cockpit trailer,” he said, surprise in his voice. “It’s a lot bigger than I thought.”
“How much bigger?” Patrick McLanahan asked.
“Global Hawk’s entire control suite could fit in the back of a Humvee,” Daren said.
“This is definitely first generation,” McLanahan said. “We developed this trailer at Dreamland five years ago, and it was amazing that we fitted it all in here. I just flew the trailer out here today, but there’s some snafu in the satellite link.”
“The satellite link was the simplest part of the Global Hawk system,” Daren said. “It’s normally bulletproof. We had a simple satellite-phone hookup relaying instructions back and forth from the aircraft and control station.” He went over to the middle left seat. It was obviously the pilot’s seat, with a left-hand throttle control and a right-hand flight-control stick, but there were no other instruments visible — not even a computer screen. “What are you trying to control anyway?”
“Sit down and take a look,” Patrick said. After Daren was seated, Patrick handed him a headset; it looked like standard aviation issue except for some strange protuberances on the crossband. When Daren tried to adjust the small, sharp probes that dug into his scalp from those arms, Patrick said, “No, don’t touch those. You’ll get used to them.”
Daren sat with the strange-looking headset on his head and waited — and suddenly he was standing outside the tent, in the desert, in broad daylight, looking out across the runway! Superimposed on the image were all sorts of electronic data and symbology floating in space: magnetic heading, range readouts, a set of crosshairs, and flashing pointers. He whipped off the headset in complete shock, and the image instantly disappeared. “What in hell…? That was no projected image or hologram — I saw those images, just as clearly as I’m looking at you right now! How did you do that?”
“An outgrowth of the ANTARES technology we developed about seven years ago,” Patrick replied. “ANTARES stands for—”
“I know: Advanced Neural Transfer and Response System,” Daren interjected. “Zen Stockard is a good friend of mine. I know he was spearheading the resurrected program a few years back. I applied for it myself.” Jeff “Zen” Stockard was a flight test pilot at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center; along with the man standing before him, Patrick McLanahan, Stockard was one of the few people alive who had fully mastered the ANTARES thought-control system. Daren had applied for the ANTARES research program at Dreamland several times, thinking that surely the Pentagon would relish the idea of squirreling him away at that supersecret desert facility — but, like most of his requests for choice assignments, it was denied.