“Talent, man,” the other guy answered smugly. He turned out to have it stashed in the waistband of his jeans. It wasn’t the kind of shit mechanical bloodhounds could find, the way they sniffed out crank or Superoxy or coke nuevo. Pablo happily pressed a little cardboardy square to his temple. Even more happily, he forgot real and got Real.
The only way the jailer could have been more bored would have been to die day before yesterday. He stopped in front of the holding tank. “Ramirez, Pablo!” he sang out. “Come forward for your hearing.”
Nobody came forward. One of the men in the cell pointed to a guy who was lying there not looking at anything under this sun. “I think that is him,” the prisoner said in a singsong Indian accent.
Ramirez wasn’t the only one who’d ridden the express away from the material world, either. The bastard who looked like an murderball frontman was down for the count, too.
“Well, fuck me.” The jailer wasn’t bored any more—he was pissed off instead. “How’d they get the shit? Where’d it come from?”
Nobody said a word. The conscious assholes in the holding tank all radiated ignorance and innocence. As far as they were concerned, the mothers who’d got Real must’ve picked up their shit a mile beyond the moon. The jailer swore in weary resignation. Maybe the surveillance video would show something.
“You sorry suckers,” the jailer told the conscious prisoners. “It could be you next time.”
He knew that was a mistake as soon as he said it. Too late, of course. You always realized shit like that too late. None of the losers in the cell let out a peep, even now. But every goddamn one of them looked like he wanted it to be him next time.
Pounding the crap out of Catalina and the other Channel Islands should have been a piece of cake. After all, the islands were within artillery range of the American mainland. By rights, even cruise missiles should have been overkill. Manned fighters should have been ridiculously over the top.
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Major Dmitri Gomez muttered as he climbed into the cockpit of his F-27 at Edwards Air Force base, up in the high-desert country north of L.A. Things had a way of going wrong when the United States tangled with China. If that weren’t true, the damned Chinese wouldn’t hold the Channel Islands in the first place. Their casinos in Avalon wouldn’t be draining trillions of dollars out of an American economy that couldn’t begin to afford it. Vampires, that’s what they were, sucking what little was left of the USA’s blood right on out of it.
As for getting Real ... Major Gomez muttered to himself. He hoped the armorers and techs who serviced the Strike Peregrine didn’t waste their off-duty time with little squares of brightly colored cardboardy stuff. He hoped, yeah, but he wouldn’t have bet more than a grand on it. And you couldn’t buy a cup of coffee for a thousand bucks.
One of the noncoms on the ground gave him a thumbs-up. Gomez returned the gesture from the cockpit. Hagopian was a good guy. The Air Force needed more like him. What it needed and what it had were two different critters.
Methodically, Gomez went over the preflight checklist with the F-27’s AI. The USA’s latest air-superiority fighter had started coming off the assembly line back in the 2050s. It had been a worldbeater back then. Ever since, it had got upgrades to the weaponry and the avionics and to its stealthiness. It was a much more capable warplane now than it had been when it was new.
But was it capable enough to go up against all the goodies the Chinese could throw at it? The last time American fighter-bombers tried to plaster the Channel Islands, hardly any of them came back. Gomez’s Strike Peregrine carried some Ukrainian biocores the USA hadn’t known about during the last skirmish. Now if only China had stood still...
“Check completed. All systems green. Aircraft ready for takeoff,” the AI told Dmitri. The voice was female and highly competent—it was as if you were getting a clean bill of health from a doctor.
“Another stupid mission. You know you’re toast.” That was a female voice, too—a female voice right out of a porn vid. The F-27’s cockpit emphatically did not have room for two. It barely had room for one. The avatar that materialized there solved the problem by sitting on Gomez’s lap and wiggling. He could feel her, too. It was like ... having a girl sit on your lap and wiggle. It was distracting as hell, or maybe a skosh worse than that.
Dmitri didn’t understand how avatars worked. Nobody on the American mainland—except maybe a few Chinese spies—did. They violated most of the known laws of physics. Which proved ... what, exactly? That Americans didn’t know enough laws of physics, it looked like, and some of the ones they thought they did know weren’t so.
“Get lost,” Gomez told the avatar.
“You’re cute,” she answered. “Wanna get ... Real?”
“No! Jesus Christ, no!” Wouldn’t that be just what he needed?—getting doped out of his skull when he was supposed to be flying a combat mission. Even the hottest Ukrainian biocores couldn’t save a plane from a fucked-up pilot.
The avatar pouted. “Spoilsport,” she said, and winked out. Dmitri breathed an enormous sigh of relief. It wasn’t just that he could see the HUD again, though that sure didn’t hurt. But if avatars could show up in fighter cockpits, where couldn’t they?
Anywhere?
A dozen F-27s roared down the airstrip. They sprang into the cool night sky one after another. With afterburner and strap-on rocket packs, a Strike Peregrine could climb to the edge of space. They’d be making this attack run at treetop height, maybe lower. That would keep Chinese radar from picking them up.
Of course, their updated stealth materials were supposed to do the same thing. Engineers claimed an F-27 had a radar profile about the size of a starling’s. Dmitri wasn’t sure he believed that—how many starlings could break Mach 1 in low-level flight? Still, the profile had to be pretty goddamn small. In that case, why was everybody so tight-assed about staying low, low, low?
Or maybe the question should have been, why didn’t the F-27s that hit the Channel Islands the last time come back to Edwards? Maybe the Chinese weren’t using radar. If they weren’t, whatever they used instead worked even better.
Dmitri tried to shove that cheery thought out of his mind. He’d just about succeeded when the avatar appeared in the cockpit again.
It had to be impossible, even though it was happening. He knew that made no sense. But nothing made any sense. He was doing umpty-hundred knots and jinking like a butterfly with turbofans. No projection could get in here, let alone stay in here. No way, nohow.
Except the avatar did. “Wanna ... get Real?”
“No!” he yelled again. Laughing one hell of a sexy laugh, the avatar reached under his flight helmet—which should have been impossible squared—and put something on his right temple. “No!” he screamed one more time. He couldn’t see the little cardboard square, but you didn’t need to see everything, did you? Nope. Some things, you could take on faith.
He was a great horned owl, gliding over the landscape looking for mice. He could feel the wind whistling through his flight feathers, feel his powerful breast muscles work, wingbeat after effortless wingbeat. His eyes drank in even the tiniest sip of light. When he turned his head, he could almost—almost—twist it straight back. Every so often, he did. What a cool way to check six, he thought ... owlishly.
His ears, though, his ears were really something. If you could imagine hearing in color, in high definition ... He’d never imagined anything like that before. But then, he’d never been an owl before. Had he?