“Can’t you shut that off?” Rodriguez asked her.
“You stop hearing it after the first hundred times,” Bunny replied. The virtual-reality visor in front of her eyes had her full focus. Through the nose camera on the drone and the picture it was throwing up on Rodriguez’s 2D tactical screen, the cave entrance looked impossibly small.
The main reason Bunny was co-located under the Rock was to teach the drone AI how to take off, but more importantly, how to land a Fantom at sea level through a hole in a cliff face. It wasn’t a flight maneuver you could code, in fact, the act of flying straight at a hole in a solid wall at sea level was something the AI had been taught specifically not to do. The Fantom’s prototype AI was a learning system, but it needed to be taught and Bunny was the teacher.
The engineers had looked at various ways to try to hide the water level cave entrance, but in the end, they decided that as it had been there for hundreds of years, it would arouse more suspicion if it suddenly disappeared. So they had made do with widening the diameter enough that it was two Fantom wingspans, or about 120 feet wide. They had blasted away about four feet of the floor at the mouth of the cave but they were worried about the integrity of the rock above if they went too hard, so the water at the cave entrance was too shallow to take the impact of a Fantom landing on skis.
So what Bunny had to do, what she’d spent all that simulator time practicing and had managed to do for real on a couple of test flights before the Cat was taken off line, was to glide the Fantom into the maw of the cave, float it over the rock ledge at the entrance to the Slot just above a stall, and then drop it hard into the water so that it had almost as much downward velocity as forward, and hope it wouldn’t dig in a ski and go cartwheeling across the Pond to explode in a hydrogen-fuelled fireball. The drone automatically dropped a small drogue into the water on landing to stop it from yawing and to provide extra drag — so if she did it right, the two hundred feet of water in the Pond should be more than enough to pull up in. She had reverse thrusters if she needed to pull up fast, but they were just as likely to send the Fantom ass-first to the bottom if she hit them too hard.
This would be her fourth real-life landing. The software engineers had told her the AI would need to sample from a hundred landings in order to be able to take over the job itself. And the occasional non-terminal screw-up would actually also be useful, so they didn’t want her being too careful. Which was another thing that made Bunny just perfect for her job.
As the Slot loomed closer on Bunny’s simulated cockpit view, Rodriguez knew better than to disturb her again. Even if it did look like she was bringing the Fantom in a little…
“Low and slow dammit,” Bunny said to herself, her left hand pushing forward a little on the throttle. “Come on baby. Time to come home.” She hit a key combination. “Skis down and locked.”
Rodriguez pulled her eyes away from the screens inside the trailer and fixed them on the grey-white Slot on the other side of the Pond through which the Fantom was about to appear.
It was after dawn now, and the outside light was getting brighter. Inside the cave, they had switched on the low-intensity green light emitting diode or LED lighting that was used for landing. Anything else caused the cameras on the drone to flare, and the pilot risked losing orientation as they adjusted for white balance. The low luminosity of the green LEDs meant that if all went well, Bunny saw a brief half-circle of complete black, and then the green wall lighting of the Pond and the dock sprang into view ahead of her. If all went well.
“That’s it mate,” Bunny was purring to herself now, as though she was coaxing a racehorse into a starting gate. “Don’t be scared.”
Then Rodriguez saw the silhouette of the Fantom framed in the circle of light two hundred feet away and before she could react it was thumping down onto the water, hydraulic cushioned skids jumping as they soaked up the energy of the landing. Too fast! Bunny popped her air brakes, tapped a key to give the drone just a touch of reverse thrust, and it dipped its nose alarmingly, but not enough that it risked what Bunny called ‘a face plant’.
From the back of the drone, a drogue parachute exploded, acting like the sea anchor on a yacht in heavy seas and pulling it up so sharply it slowed it to a stop with fifty feet of Pond to spare. Bunny cut the engines, pulled off her helmet and leaned back in her chair, hands on her head, looking at the Fantom through the trailer windows like she couldn’t actually believe she had really landed it.
As she watched her green shirted crew get the recovery crane and sling rolling to lift the drone off the water and into a recycling bay, Rodriguez could see that every human-piloted landing on this base was going to be two parts art, one part terror.
“Someone needs to buy me a damn beer,” Bunny said, turning around. “If I do say so myself, ma’am.”
Rodriguez smiled, “How about breakfast, Lieutenant? Once we’ve got that Fantom squared away.”
“You have a deal, Lieutenant Commander,” Bunny said, standing and stretching her compact frame. “Got to stay sober anyway. So I can pull the logs and write up the mission report, doing justice to how totally awesome I was.”
In her quarters that night, Rodriguez lay on her bunk staring at the raw rock ceiling. Above her was a hundred thousand tons of rock and bird droppings. She should be basking in the afterglow of their first successful combat exercise, but instead she lay on her back in the dark, going over the hundred small things that could have gone better. She hated this side of herself but knew she had no hope of changing it. It was how she had earned her handle — “Hammer” — early in her career, from chewing out subordinates for the smallest mistakes. She had no doubt her people called her less complimentary names, but it was her attention to detail and obsession with being the best that had got her this commission. “They are giving you two years to do what should rightly take four,” her CO on USS Trump had told her. “Someone wants that facility ready for World War Three in a hurry,” he said, “And the only thing that gives me peace of mind about that, is they’re putting you in charge.”
World War Three? Their catapult software was still acting up, their complement of regular Navy aviators hadn’t been assigned, a stiff wind could block the Slot with ice and they weren’t even ready to put two birds in the air in rapid succession, let alone six. Forget World War Three; right now, they couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
She drifted off to a fitful sleep, dreaming of storm clouds rolling toward her.
A RUN IN THE SNOW
While Alicia ‘The Hammer’ Rodriguez was dreaming of storm clouds, Yevgeny Bondarev was freezing his ass off in the melting snow of a Khabarovsk Autumn. He’d asked for a few minutes of General Lukin’s time and had been told he could meet with him at 0630 when the General was taking his morning run.
Fifty-nine years old and he was still taking a morning run in the subarctic temperatures of Khabarovsk? Bondarev sincerely hoped he would be dead before he had to even think about keeping up that kind of discipline himself.
He waited outside the General’s quarters in his running gear, hopping from one leg to the other to keep warm. He knew it was dumb at these temperatures to blow warm air into his mittens, because it would condense, turn to water and freeze his fingers. Same for the balaclava around his face — blowing warm air into the mouth and neck would be as self-defeating as pissing in his pants to keep warm. There was nothing for it but to keep moving, but he also knew Lukin was the type who thought five minutes early was already late, so he wasn’t too worried he’d be kept waiting.