“Yes, Sire.”
“Things are not going well, Degan. I’m considering action that could require as many as twenty men. I’ll leave the recruitment to you, but it must be done within a week. The loyalty of these people must be beyond question. The future of our government, perhaps even our civilization is at stake.”
“It will be done, Sire. See you on the other side.” Degan left, and went down the stairs to the transmission area.
A few minutes later, Dario Watt also descended the stairs to the narrow room below the control console. One wall glowed orange, then yellow as Watt walked up to it. He stood for a moment until the surface of the wall turned brilliant white with ripples of blue, and then he stepped into it and was gone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE PORTAL
When Eric got to Sparrow’s bay a cluster of men awaited him. Nutt was there with his clipboard. Flight Operations Chief Rob Hendricks was accompanied by two techs Eric hadn’t met, and there was a new man with a buzz cut. He wore fatigues, sleeves rolled up, captain’s bars on his collar. Hendricks introduced him to Eric.
“Eric, this is Captain Ted Dillon, our chief test pilot. He’s the one person who’s been able to get this bird off the ground. I’ve told him all about you.”
“Not everything, I hope. Captain, I have a few hundred questions for you.” Eric managed a friendly smile, and shook hands with the man.
“Sir. Colonel Davis said you might want to risk your neck in this thing.” Dillon patted Sparrow’s fuselage as he said it.
“Yes, I’d like a ride. I’m not a pilot, Captain. I just want to see what you can do with her.”
“Not much so far. Sparrow is VTOL and handles like a helicopter with too much load aft. The tricky part is getting her out of this bay.” Dillon pointed up at the ceiling. “After that it’s like flying a Harrier, nice and smooth, but I haven’t been able to push her past Mach 1. I have an opinion about this aircraft, sir, if you’d like to hear it.”
“I would,” said Eric.
“I think it’s a piece of junk, sir. Looks like stealth, but has a normal radar signature. It doesn’t seem to be equipped for fly-by-wire, but should be, especially for takeoff and landing. Flies like a bumblebee at low velocity. Weird design. Even the controls look like they’ve been cobbled together by a five-year-old, and most of them don’t do anything.”
“Eric found a use for some of those switches,” said Hendricks.
“Yeah, I heard,” said Dillon. “You were lucky, sir. In my business, randomly throwing a bunch of switches like that in a strange aircraft can get you killed before you leave the ground.”
“I agree with that, Captain. That’s why I want you there in the seat next to me when I try out a few ideas in flight. Do you know what we found inside Sparrow?”
“I told him what we have so far,” said Hendricks.
“He says you think this bird has two power plants,” said Dillon.
“One conventional, and one for space.”
“Space? No way, sir, not with that engine. Sluggish as hell, especially near Mach 1. I had to keep pushing the nose down.”
“Like there was too much mass aft?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“I’d like to see it first-hand, and run some tests. When can we do it?”
“Colonel Davis says it’s your call, but he wants a detailed briefing on any tests you want to make in flight. I’d like that too, sir.”
“I’ll have it tomorrow. Will you take me up?”
“It’s part of my job, sir. Another part is being cautious enough to bring us back alive. I’m in charge up there.”
“Understood, Captain, as long as you’re willing to take some risks.”
Dillon chuckled. “Just being in that thing is a risk, sir.”
Eric slapped the man’s shoulder, then, “let’s take a look at that cockpit, and I’ll show you what I found.”
The two of them climbed up onto the stubby wing of Sparrow and squeezed together into the cockpit. Dillon was a small man compared to Eric, but their shoulders were pressed tightly against each other. Dillon smiled at him. “They put guys like you in bombers.”
“Not if I can help it. I prefer my feet on the ground. Brief me on the controls you use. I want to make a diagram.”
Dillon showed him what he’d used in powered flight: startup sequence, VTOL, landing gear, transition, pitch, yaw and trim, all of it without computer. All controls occupied the left half of the cockpit. Eric went through the overhead switch sequence, opened up Sparrow behind them, and closed it again. He wrote everything down, showed it to Dillon.
“Not much,” said Eric. “Two-thirds of these controls are for other things, and the manual tells us nothing about them. This one, for example.”
Eric flipped a switch by his left knee. There was a thud, and five rows of red lights flared right in front of him.
“Jesus,” said Dillon.
“Oops,” said Eric. “Well, we’re still here.”
“Don’t do that again, sir. Better turn the switch off again.”
“Wait a minute. Only this one panel lit up.” Eric drew a quick picture in his notes. “Everything here must work together. There are glyphs by each switch.” Eric wrote each of them down, unfamiliar markings like ancient runes. As he did it, his mind seemed to wander for an instant, his hand moving as if by habit, without the slightest hesitation or sense of caution. He threw the first switch in each of four rows, and all lights on the panel went from red to green. Sparrow shuddered for one instant, and there was a high-pitched whine, either low in intensity or at the edge of the range of human hearing.
“Hey, what are you guys doing in there? The whole aircraft just shook!” called Hendricks from outside.
“Found something new,” said Eric. “Keep your eyes open.”
“Are you nuts?” growled Dillon.”
“Not with a green board in front of me.”
One switch on the panel remained unlit, and Eric threw it. There was a metallic creak from behind them, and a single light glowed green on another panel by Eric’s right knee. He wrote something else down while Dillon watched him, ashen-faced.
“Something’s happening out here,” cried Hendricks. “You’d better take a look at it.”
“Just tell us,” said Dillon. “We’re busy in here.”
“The plane is heating up! There’s heat radiating from the aft section of the fuselage, and the metal is getting hotter by the second!”
Dillon looked angrily at Eric. “Well, what now?”
Again no hesitation, some kind of strange instinct guiding him when Eric said, “This is as far as we can go on the ground. We’ll have to do the rest in flight.” He reached out and began throwing the same switches again, in reverse order. The lights went from green to red, then off.
“And you really expect me to fly with you when you do crazy shit like this? Sir!”
“You’re the test pilot, Captain. Are you telling me you don’t want to see what’ll happen when we go through the rest of this?”
“Okay, it’s cooling down out here!” yelled Hendricks.
Dillon let out a breath of air through pursed lips. “Not if it kills me. But this isn’t luck, is it. I watched you close, and you’ve been told what to do, I’m sure of it. You didn’t even flinch.”
“Maybe,” said Eric, and remembered what Brown had said to him. It had all seemed natural, rehearsed, a task repeated a thousand times, and he knew why. It was a startup sequence to power Sparrow into space, the initiation of a power plant only hinted at in the bowels of the craft. He’d been right to shut down when he did; to go further would have unleashed a terrible power in the closed bay. The sequence to follow was in his head, a panel of switches by his right knee, a handle at the top, a quarter turn, and then—what? It ended there, for the moment, but he knew it would have to be done in flight, and high in the atmosphere.