“Yeah, well, you’ll nail them if I don’t.”
“Stand by for a bearing.”
30
Rubeo propped up his head on his fists, staring at the computer screen as the DNA coding was read into the encryption formula, trying to unlock it. They had plenty of transmission to work with — the two Sabres were “talking” to each other, using their distributive computing power to decide what to do about the planes pursuing them. But Rubeo’s team hadn’t been able to get past the changed encryption, let alone get deep enough into the systems to figure out how to take them back over.
With all the computing power at his disposal, it was still taking minutes to grind through the damn thing.
Had Braxton done this? There were so many damn possibilities.
The screen blinked, then flashed with a new message: WORKING.
They’d found the encryption key. Now all they had to do was get into the Sabre programming, examine it, then rewrite it.
Like climbing Mount Everest in shorts and sneakers in the middle of the winter, and setting a world’s record for the hundred yard dash along the way.
Rubeo thought back to the earliest days of the Flighthawk program. There was always a fear that the planes would take off on their own.
It seemed silly now, as if they’d all watched I, Robot or 2001 a few too many times.
But they’d put in a knockoff code that reset everything. Jennifer had come up with it, joking it was an S&M “safe phrase.”
He’d been so sheltered he’d had to ask what the hell that was.
What the hell was it?
“Ray, we have some sequences ready,” said Kristen Morgan, back in New Mexico.
“Stand by,” he told her. “Captain Mako, I will have a transmission for you to try,” he said, punching in the connection. “We will start with the basics, a simple recall. I don’t expect that to work,” added Rubeo. “We will then have it initiate a response and a data dump. You will receive a great deal of telemetry. You’ll be best off flying by hand as it transmits, to avoid any error induced by processing delays.”
“That’s how I always fly,” responded Turk.
“Good for you,” responded Rubeo dryly, though for once he wasn’t being sarcastic.
Breanna got up from her station, ostensibly to refill her coffee cup, but actually just to walk off some of her excess energy. At times like this she really missed flying. The effect of all the übertechnology in the room ultimately reminded her how far from the action she was.
She wanted to be the one in the danger seat, not Turk. She hoped she was not sending him to his grave.
She’d done that already. It wasn’t really fair to him that he had to go through it again.
And there was her father, standing like a statue near Rubeo at the back, arms folded, looking not awed, not even old, but exactly as he’d once looked in the Dreamland situation room, waiting and watching as his people were on a mission. He’d sent them into danger countless times — often, he was right there with them.
At the time, she’d questioned whether he should be out there. Even a colonel — his rank when he first arrived and for a considerable time afterward, though he was surely doing the work of a general, and one with more than one star — was expected to command from a distance, not duck fire at the front. Leading from the front didn’t mean making yourself the spearhead, which her father often was.
But now she understood why he’d done it. Ordering someone to risk their life was a hell of a lot harder if you were sitting in a bunker yourself.
Her father glanced over and saw her.
“Nice place you got here,” he said.
Then he smiled. She hadn’t seen that smile in a long, long time. It felt enormously good.
“Thanks,” she told him. “We had a good model.”
31
The Sabres ignored the AMRAAM until the missiles began searching for them.
Then they got pissed off.
“We got their attention,” Turk told Cowboy. “They’re coming back for us and they’re getting the lead out.”
“I’m seeing them up on radar now,” said Cowboy.
“Do a one eighty. Head back from where you came. Don’t be slow. I’ll pick them up.”
“You don’t really think a Marine’s gonna run away from battle, do you?”
“It’s what I need you to do. I have to fly with them long enough to give commands. Or shoot them down.”
“Roger,” said Cowboy, clearly reluctant.
The Sabres had a standard maneuver to change direction quickly, climbing and flipping their wings as they topped into a loop. The variable control surfaces and wing-in-body design — not to mention the lack of a pilot — allowed them to withstand g forces that would shatter a normal aircraft, and so they could change direction in far less space. They couldn’t defy physical laws, however — it was impossible to transfer all their energy and momentum to the new direction. That gave Turk a little bit of a breather. He flew at them, transmitting his “takeover” code, the command which would normally retrieve Sabres into escort mode.
The planes ignored it.
He tried a verbal command and then decided he would have to treat them like hostiles: he told his weapons radar to target them.
The Sabres didn’t react.
“I need your attention,” he said, pressing the trigger of the gun.
Three rounds shot out in the Sabres’ direction. He was way too far to get a hit, but the Sabres’ control computer realized he was trying to kill them. They talked it over between themselves and decided there was only one reason that could be — surely this enemy had found a way to spoof their mother plane’s silhouette. That decision overrode the safety protocol that kept them from targeting him, and they promptly began tracking him as an enemy.
In a traditional dogfight, a two-on-one advantage is not insurmountable, especially if the single aircraft is flown by a superior pilot who understands the limitations and advantages not just of his plane, but of his opponents’. Still, a numerical advantage in the air is just as potent as one on the ground. The enemy must be approached with skill and savvy. All things being equal, a head-on attack is usually not advised.
Which was one of the reasons Turk undertook it. The other was that he needed to play for time to let Cowboy get away.
The Sabres were flying a so-called “loose deuce,” a time-honored side-by-side formation that allowed either (or both) planes to go on the attack as well as support each other. The distance between them was roughly the same as their average turning radius; whichever plane Turk focused on, the other aircraft could get on his tail with an easy maneuver.
Rather than aiming for one or the other, he beelined toward the area between them. This forced the Sabres to decide on a strategy; Sabre One turned to meet him, while Sabre Two tucked into a dive but stayed on course.
Besides calculating counters to his move, the artificial intelligence that flew the planes was also evaluating his tactics and, in an effort to predict what he would do — his intelligence or stupidity — though it didn’t use these terms. The fact that he had gone after two planes head-on didn’t win him points in the IQ department, but the AI had to consider whether this might not be a trick — to put it crassly, was the move so dumb that something was going on that the computer didn’t know?
In the next few moments Turk gave the Sabres every reason to think that was true. Rather than continuing the course to take on Sabre One, or tucking his wing left and going after Sabre Two — or, more prudently, getting the hell out of there while he still could make a clean break — he pulled his nose up and aimed for the sun. This necessarily slowed him down, and made him a dandy target for Sabre One.