Patrick concentrated as hard as he could on the image of the instrument panel. He had managed to slide the image of the intercom channel off to the left, but the rest of the panel was blank. Like a television screen with nothing but snow across it.
Okay. Aircraft attitude was important. Maintain control. Keep the airplane flying.
Instantly an oval drew itself on the upper half of the cockpit image. It was sitting horizontal across the windscreen, a deep white line bisecting it, forming a horizon. In the exact center of the oval was a wide T, representing the aircraft.
“Release me,” McLanahan said.
The T jumped up and to the right just as Carmichael said, “You’re moving.”
Patrick concentrated on keeping the T in the center of the oval. Slowly the T moved back in the center.
“Good start at least, now where the hell am I going?”
The oval disappeared, replaced by the image of a long ribbonlike street on the upper portion of the screen. The street was straight for a distance, but Patrick could see a few gentle twists and turns in the distance. At the bottom of the screen was a tiny picture of a jet fighter plane — it appeared to be resting right on the road.
“Hey, I’ve got the flight-plan depiction.”
“Good,” Carmichael said. “That’s a major flight image. Follow it as long as you can. How’s the headache?”
“It went to splitting migraine long ago, Doc, but as long as I keep my mind off the pain it’ll be okay.”
Keeping the simulator flying upright was more difficult without the artificial horizon, but no amount of mental effort would bring it back, so Patrick used the visual cues on the road itself — the recommended altitude was to surface on the road itself, which also represented the proper pitch and bank to follow; as long as he kept the little fighter model on the road he would be following the computer’s recommended flight path. The road’s curbs represented the allowable lateral flight corridor to follow, and tiny signposts represented planned turn-points and recommended altitude-changeover points.
As long as the “road” was straight and flat, the ride went well. But after a few moments the road began to make small left and right turns, and the going got much tougher. The tiny fighter icon penetrated through the road several times, porpoising up and down through the recommended altitude block, and Patrick had to apply harder and faster corrections to keep the plane steady.
“Stabilize, Patrick,” he heard from J. C. Powell.
“I’m trying.” The fighter icon slid through the right wall of the road, skidded sideways, then entered an uncontrolled spin.
“Let the computer recover the plane,” Powell said. “Don’t try to fight it.”
Patrick forced himself to go along. He concentrated on the surface of the computer-generated road without thinking about the aircraft control. Suddenly he knew that ANTARES had placed both mission-adaptive wings in high-lift modes and deployed both dorsal and ventral sets of rudders to maximize directional control. The fighter icon dove through the right side of the flight path depiction, but by rapid lift, power and drag changes under precise computerized control, the fighter was soon out of its uncontrolled spin and stabilized in a steep dive. A few moments later the fighter slowly leveled out and returned to its desired flight path once again.
“Good recovery,” Carmichael said. “ANTARES will always try to save the aircraft whenever possible, but you still have to tell her where you want to go, even in an uncontrolled situation.”
After a few minutes of straight-and-level flight to get his confidence back, Patrick accomplished a few turns, with bank angles and altitude changes mixed in. “I think I’ve got the hang of it again,” Patrick said.
“Still have those headaches?”
“Now that you mention it, yes, but they seem to become less noticeable when I’m concentrating on something else.”
“Good. How about some formation flying? We can put up another fighter and let you fly off his wing for a while.”
“No, bring up a hostile.”
“Getting cocky now, aren’t we, sir?” Powell cut in. “Five minutes ago you couldn’t make a ten-degree turn without going out of control. Now you want to do some dogfighting.”
“That’s what the damned simulators are for, J.C. Bring up a high-performance model, too.”
“You got it.”
There was no change in the simulation after several long moments. He was going to ask if they had put up a hostile when he remembered — none of his fighter’s offensive or defensive systems had been activated—
But that realization was enough. Immediately a computer synthesized voice announced, “Attack radar activated … electronic countermeasures activated … tail warning systems activated.”
And there it was, a laser-projected image of a fighter in the upper right corner of the screen. Patrick immediately commanded the simulator’s laser-tracking system to lock onto the hostile aircraft, and deactivated the attack-radar as soon as the laser had illuminated the target. But it wasn’t fast enough. Flight data on the hostile aircraft showed that it had altered course and was on a head-on intercept course. The hostile had detected Patrick’s brief radar emission and had turned to start the fight.
As the two aircraft merged into a nose-to-nose flight path, Patrick was suddenly flooded with information. His laser-projection screen was filled with electronic depictions of dozens of options, only a few of which included a full head-on pass. There were so many options that he lost count. His headache had come back full-force now. Beads of sweat obscured his vision, blood pounded in his ears. He was conscious, his mind still sharp, but the pain, intermingled with hundreds of bits of data predicting the outcome of dozens of maneuvers by both aircraft soon overwhelmed him.
The ANTARES simulator suddenly went inverted and pulled a heart-stopping eight-G descent. The simulator had activated the all-aspect radar as it descended, and Patrick could easily “see” his pursuer descend with him. But that was what ANTARES had been expecting. The simulator continued its inverted loop, using its high-lift canards to pull the nose up through the horizon. The throttle went to max afterburner as he went through the vertical — and Patrick had no doubt that he would have been squashed like a grape if he had been in a real jet aircraft.
As the nose dove through the horizon once again he found that the pursuer had become the pursued. Whatever kind of aircraft they had put up against him, it couldn’t keep up with ANTARES. Patrick found himself directly behind his adversary. and ANTARES had already armed four laser-guided missiles and was waiting for orders to fire. Patrick issued those orders a split second later. Meanwhile, ANTARES had switched to the internal twenty-millimeter multibarrel cannon and was waiting for orders to fire as the simulator closed in on the hostile, but there was no need to open fire — all laser-guided hypervelocity missiles had hit their target.
“Ground position freeze,” Dr. Carmichael ordered. Patrick heard footsteps on the catwalk around the simulator’s cockpit as the cockpit indicators and the deluge of information in his head abruptly ceased. “Patrick, this is Alan Carmichael. Can you hear me?”
He found himself frozen in his seat, unable to move a muscle and barely able to move his lips … “Yes.”
“We’re going to disconnect ANTARES. Hold on.”
Even though the simulator had stopped, the pain inside Patrick’s head was steadily increasing. He could feel the fighter doing some lazy rolls and spins but didn’t have the strength to issue the orders to maintain straight and level flight.
“I … I’m losing it …”
“Let it go, Patrick,” Carmichael said. “You’re off the simulation. Relax. Don’t worry about the controls.”