“Lost power?” Murphy raised a hand; the colonel nodded in his direction. “You mean, he… his jet failed to respond to his controls?”
“I mean, Dr. Murphy, Capt. Binder’s aircraft lost all electrical power. Avionics, propulsion, telemetry, the works. He said it was if someone had pulled the plug. His plane went into a flat spin, and Binder was forced to manually eject from the cockpit.”
“I’ve heard of this happening before,” Meredith Cynthia Luna murmured. “A police officer in Florida had his car lose power when he encountered a spacecraft.”
“Did he eject?” Lt. Crawford asked.
Murphy slapped a hand over his mouth. Oh God, don’t laugh, don’t laugh… then he saw Ogilvy forcing a cough into his fist as he shot a look at his aide, and realized that he wasn’t the only rational person aboard this plane.
“It’s not funny!” Luna’s face was red with righteous indignation. “The poor officer suffered a terrible ordeal! He was held captive for twelve hours!” Then she turned to the colonel. “Tell me… did the pilot receive any psychic impressions when this occurred?”
Murphy jotted down a note in the margins of his binder: 100% loss of F-15 elec.—EMP?
Ogilvy ignored her. “Capt. O’Donnell, upon seeing his wingman lose control of his craft while in close proximity of the object, decided that hostile action had been taken by the object. Following Air Force rules of engagement, he fell back one thousand feet, then locked his AIM-9 Sidewinder missile onto the object.”
Luna was horrified. “Oh, no! He didn’t…”
“Yes, ma’am. After attempting one last time to establish radio contact with the object, Capt. O’Donnell launched his missile.”
Time unknown
“Hang on!” Metz shouted.
Franc barely had time to grab the armrest of the pilot’s chair before the timeship violently pitched sideways. Even so, he was hurled across the control room; his left shoulder slammed against a bulkhead and he slid to the deck.
“Did it hit?” he yelled.
“Detonated in the negmass field.” Metz was still buckled in his seat, hauling against the stick as he fought for control. He glanced up at the ship-status screen. “No hull damage. We’re lucky. But we’re still going down.”
Ignoring his bruised shoulder, Franc struggled to his hands and knees, crawled upward along the deck toward Metz’s chair. In the last moments before the timeship plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, the pilot had managed to reactivate Oberon’s gravity screen. If he hadn’t, the missile’s shockwave would have pulverized him against the bulkhead.
A small blessing. Oberon was plummeting through Earth’s lower atmosphere, less than nine thousand meters above the ground. They didn’t know when or where they were, or even how they got there, save that the wormhole had thrown them back toward Earth so quickly that the timeship’s negmass drive had drained most of its energy in order to make a safe reentry. The AI had stabilized the ship just enough to keep the crew from being roasted alive, yet the effort had severely drained its fusion cells.
If that wasn’t bad enough, two contemporary aircraft had spotted the timeship during its atmospheric entry. One made the mistake of flying within the electromagnetic field cast by Oberon a drive, causing the jet to lose power. Although its pilot had managed to escape, his partner apparently misinterpreted the accident as hostile action.
“Can you get us out of here?” The deck was tilting less sharply now as Metz began to level off the timeship. Grasping the armrest, Franc painfully clambered to his knees. “Maybe we can outrun that thing.”
“Any other time, no problem.” Clutching the stick, Metz stabbed at the console with his free hand. “But power’s down 47 percent and dropping, and the field’s getting weaker. If that jet launches another missile…”
“Understood.” The negmass field had effectively shielded the timeship from the missile, but they couldn’t count on the same luck again if the jet launched another one. “Hole generators?”
“Sure, I can open a hole.” Metz scowled as he punched at the flatpanels, trying to reroute more power to the drive. “If you want to blow an eighty-klick crater in the ground below us. That’ll screw up the world-line nice and proper, won’t it?”
“Forget I asked.” Stupid question; this was the very reason why timeships always departed from orbit. Franc glanced at a screen. The remaining jet had fallen back a little, but it was still dogging their every move. He tapped the mike he had snagged on his way out of the passenger compartment. “Lea? Got anything on that aircraft yet?”
Her voice came through the earpiece. “Library identifies it as a F-15C Eagle, circa late twentieth century US Air Force.” She began reading data from the library pedestal. “Single-seater… maximum speed Mach 2.5… ceiling 18,288 meters… range about 5,600 kilometers… armament includes 20mm cannon, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles…”
“Forget that! How do we dodge the thing?”
“Dammit, Franc, how should I know?”
“Tom,” Metz snapped, “what’s going on back there?”
“I’m working on it!” The last time Franc had seen Hoffman, the mission spec was on his hands and knees in the passenger compartment, his arms thrust deep into a service bay beneath the deck plates. “I’ve rerouted the gravity subsystem to the negmass, but I can’t access the main bus without… shit!”
The deck buffeted violently as the timeship hit heavy turbulence. Through the headset, Franc heard Hoffman curse as he pitched sideways once more; true to his word, he had cut off the gravity screen. Hanging onto the armrest, Franc glanced again at the porthole. The last skeins of cirrus clouds dissipated like smoke, revealing a countryside of rolling hills shadowed by the early morning sun. High country, dotted here and there by white spots and tiny irregular grids, sprawled below them: houses, small towns, farm fields. According to Lea, they were somewhere over Tennessee…
Franc glimpsed something that looked like two parallel black ribbons running through the hills—a highway, perhaps—then an irregular silver-blue surface swam into view. A large lake, its channels meandering past miles of sharp ridgetops…
“We can’t do this much longer,” Metz murmured. “I’m trying to lose that thing, but it’s…”
“Put it down,” he said softly.
“What?” Metz glanced over his shoulder at him, then followed his gaze to the porthole. “Down there?”
“Yeah, down there. Is the chameleon still operational?”
Metz glanced at his board. “If I divert 10 percent power, sure, but it won’t work unless we’re hugging the ground.”
“Not the ground. The lake.” Franc reached forward, punched up a close-up shot of the lake below them; two more taps on the panel projected a thermographic false-image. “There’s the deep end,” he said, pointing at a dark blue splotch within the lake’s widest area. “If you can get down there, do a water landing, maybe we can submerge, lose that thing once and for all.”