THE MEASURE OF A MAN
A TIPOTS Story
By Mike Kozlowski
27 FEB 2015
EOR STATION
RUNWAY 04R
RAF COLTISHALL, UK
0238 LOCAL
Captain Steven Dwyer, USAF, looked back at his flight, lined up in perfect order at the End Of Runway station. The loaders were scooting frantically around the three aircraft, pulling safety pins and making last minute checks for leaks, damage, or anything else that might delay an on-time takeoff and annoy the Wing Commander. Colonel Holcomb had a fetish for competing with the SAC guys on the other end of the ramp, and woe unto the flight leader who didn’t get off exactly on the dime.
There was a POP in Dwyer’s helmet as the EOR Super plugged into the external comm system and called, “Sir, EOR Super, all clear.”
“Copy, EOR Super, all clear. Thank you.”
There were two clicks on the system and the Super unplugged. Dwyer could see the loaders scuttling back to the hardened shelter that served as their workplace and office, and that meant they were on their own. He shot a quick look at the clock on the panel – 0239, one minute to sit here before the tower gave them the word to roll. Dwyer hated waiting. It gave him time to think.
“What is it with you, Dwyer?” The squadron commander didn’t bother using his call sign, a sure sign that he was good and pissed.
“Not a damn thing, sir. I was under the impression I was a pretty good pilot.”
“You’re a damned good one. But right now, you aren’t serving as a pilot. You’re a babysitter. No, worse than that – you’re not doing any more than playing a video game. You’re watching machines do the job you – WE – are supposed to do.”
Dwyer looked behind him at the squat black shape that was barely visible in the broken English moonlight, and an identical shape almost invisible just behind that. His own bird, a sleek Boeing F-124 Grizzly, was almost twice the size of the other ships even though it was the smallest combat aircraft in USAF service.
Correction, he thought. Manned combat aircraft.
“Quite frankly, Captain, if it was up to me, I’d deny this.” The squadron commander threw the AF Form 10 back across the desk at Dwyer, who caught it almost by reflex. “But I’m not allowed to. Some son of a bitch made you a deal, and I have to keep it.”
Dwyer had learned to hate this part even more than the wait, but it was part of the drill. The flight would launch whether he did it or not, but Wing Safety monitored the calls and the last thing he needed now was a safety writeup.
“Zombie Flight, Zombie Lead.” If I ever find the bastard who assigned us those call signs, I’ll personally feed him into an afterburner. “Sound off.”
The voices that came back were precise, clear, and perfectly modulated. They spoke with a pleasant, steady cadence that could almost make you believe they were human.
“Lead, this is Two. Ready.”
“Lead, this is Three. Ready, although Number One EGT Delta is point six two eight degrees below nominal –“
Cripes. “Copy, Three. Disregard.”
“Acknowledged, Lead. Three ready.”
There was a gentle tone in Dwyer’s ears as the tower came online. “Zombie Flight, Coltishall Tower, you are cleared for takeoff, stand by.”
“Copy tower. Holding at EOR.”
“You’re going to discover that flying with humans requires a great deal more skill than doing this.”[/i]
“Yes, sir.”
The squadron commander’s eyes practically drilled right through him. Motioning towards the Form 10, his voice was nearly a snarl. “And you are going to find out that the measure of a fighter pilot – the measure of a man, Captain – is much more than sitting in your airplane watching robots kill people.
“Get out of my sight.”
When all was said and done, Dwyer had his transfer to Langley, which was an all-human outfit. He’d jump over several other pilots with more hours and become a flight leader immediately, and a Major on the next promotion cycle. Ninety-nine out of one hundred pilots loathed the unmanned ships and wouldn’t have anything to do with them, and that caused a problem: When Congress approved the unmanneds, they insisted that they be under “immediate human influence” – the UMs were fully autonomous, and were capable of making any decision in combat that a human could, but the politicians had an irrational fear that one of them would take off on its own and start killing everything it saw. The USAF’s response had been to start building ground control centers, but the Congresscritters stuck their noses in again and said that a human pilot had to be on every UM mission, able to override them at any time.
So needless to say it was hard to find pilots who wanted anything to do with the machines that would put them out of a job. Some mercenary soul came up with a brilliant idea – any pilot who would volunteer to fly with the UMs would get all his flight hours with them credited as double hours. And since making flight leader and therefore further rank depended on your flying hours, that was considered an irresistible lure. The USAF, of course, was stunned to discover just how resistible it was. Barely enough pilots volunteered for the program to keep it running, and their fellow pilots shunned those that did.
Those like Steve Dwyer.
“Zombie Flight, Coltishall Tower, you are clear for takeoff.”
“Copy, Tower, Zombie Flight rolling.” Dwyer watched the digital display on the panel hit 0240 exactly and slammed the throttle through the gate to full burner. There was the familiar kick in the pants as the Grizzly’s nose dipped, and it began to move forward, followed by the UMs. The Grizzly at least looked like an airplane, but the UMs… They were officially called the AUM-10 Scorpion, and God knew they looked like one – flattened black diamonds with swept forward wings and an upswept vertical fin that made it look like one of those little black monsters that he’d had to watch out for back home in Phoenix. It could carry anything in the inventory, and was armed with a 30mm rocket-assisted cannon that could shred a destroyer or turn any aircraft on the planet into confetti. They could pull 15G turns, fly at near-bullet speed down a city street and turn a corner with all the smoothness of a Grand Prix racer, then return to base and deliver an exquisitely phrased AAR that could be read by a Shakespearean actor.
And it could do it all by itself.
No humans required.
Zombie Flight lifted smoothly off the runway at just about the halfway point and lanced into the night sky. The cloud deck enveloped them in seconds as Dwyer leveled off and headed east for their patrol area off the French coast. Before he even knew it, the UMs were in formation, one off each wing.
Couldn’t even talk to them, f’r God’s sake…
When the Jihad started to overrun two-thirds of Europe, America had been nearly disarmed. After all, when the Long War ended there would never be another, would there? Operation Longshanks, the desperate fight to keep the Jihad from overrunning the UK, had put a serious dent in what was left. It would take time to ramp up aircraft production and in the meantime, the Scorpions would have to hold the line. It had worked out better than anyone had hoped, and they kept the Jokers at bay until Armada could sail again. But for now, their job was to kill anything, ANYTHING headed west.
And there were a lot of things headed west. Occasionally a small raft or boat with a few refugees would get through, but usually the bad guys would get them before the RN could pull them out of the water. And every few days, you could be assured of a plane, helo, or small warship making some kind of suicide run. Could rack up a lot of kills that way, but the Scorpions usually dealt with it. The order was not to risk yourself unless you had to. That would come later, and the SAC troops were already twirling their piecutters like old West gunslingers with their .45s. When America saved Europe a fourth time, there were going to be a lot of glassed craters to warn the next generation of megalomaniacs.
Three thousand miles away, the Quarterdeck was just getting started for the day. The massive Atlantic Fleet command post, fifty feet beneath Norfolk Naval Base, controlled all the Fleet Reconsats that were up over the Atlantic, and as usual, things were a mess – a week or so earlier, the Jokers had managed to lob an old French IRBM with a huge conventional warhead loaded with scrap metal into LEO and killed Poseidon Nine, which meant that they were scrambling to keep coverage over the Channel. It hadn’t been easy, but they’d maneuvered Six into a higher orbit and managed to cover it. Not well, mind you, but at least it was something.
Six was doing its job with its usual precision when its sensors saw the first IR bloom. No human eyes ever could have spotted the blip unless they were right on top of it, and even then they might have missed it. But the robots rarely missed anything, and this morning was no different. When the operators confirmed there was something out there, they called the Ninth Air Force ops center in London, who in turn looked at their display boards to see who was closest.
Zombie Flight.
“Zombie Lead, this is Mako, copy.”
The E-9 was coming through clear as a bell tonight, the jamming from the other side almost nonexistent. A series of strikes over the last few days had seen to that. “Mako, Zombie Lead, go ahead.”
“Copy, proceed grid ref forty-nine Romeo, possible surface target. Investigate and destroy as necessary.”
“Copy and understood. Zombie out.”
The other problem everybody had with Steve Dwyer was that, as he even had to admit, he was more than willing to let the UMs do the work.
Whether they were right or not. The Brits had only just been able to repel the Jokers, and the rule was if in doubt, kill it. So, Dwyer would take his homicidal little friends out just like today, found whatever it was floating in the water or darting low across the wavetops, and let them kill it. A couple of times, the intel guys had suggested that he may have let them blow away refugees, but quite frankly, that wasn’t his problem. They’d had enough time to stop the Jokers before they took two thirds of Europe if they’d wanted to, but it had been easier to look the other way and now they were trying to escape from the Frankenstein they’d turned loose. Well, too damned bad. He just wanted his hours and to transfer out.
You could override a Scorpion if it was attacking something it shouldn’t – it was actually quite easy, Congress had made sure of that. All you had to do was go to the uncrackable maser comm circuit that connected the UM to the Grizzly and call, ‘32” – so named because doing so automatically resulted in an Article 32 hearing on possible charges of cowardice in the face of the enemy.
Nobody had ever overridden a Scorpion.
The display from Mako was on Dwyer’s central CRT display, and was also being uploaded to each of the Scorpions, embedding itself on each silicon brain. Before Dwyer could even decide how to go about it, Two spoke up.
“Lead, this is Two. May I recommend a high/low approach with myself flying the actual –
“Two, Lead. However you want to do it is fine, just let me get a visual.”
“Lead, Two. Copy sir, but I would like to point out that visual ID is not required under the present ROE.”
I swear, when we land, I am actually going to slap that goddamned machine.
“Understood, Two.”
There was a pause while Two absorbed this, then asked, “Lead, do you feel well? My voice sensors indicate you may be under some stress – perhaps increasing your O2 volume to –“
“Shaddap, Two!!”
“Copy, Lead, shutting up.”
Dwyer’s desire for a visual was no sudden surge of concern for his target but rather wanting to make sure that he was indeed hitting the right target – even in wartime, the English Channel was a crowded place, and it was amazing how far out some of the Brit fishermen managed to get without the Jokers doing so much as throwing something at them.
As they headed eastward, Dwyer set the Grizzly’s TFR for ‘hard’ – the laser-guided system would keep the bird at a constant seven hundred knots exactly twenty meters above the water. At that altitude, no radar on earth could pick them up against the heavy winter swells of the English Channel. It could be nerve-wracking, even with the Grizzly’s own computers keeping him at a safe, constant altitude and reacting faster than he ever could. And on either side of him, silent, unfeeling and obedient, were the UMs.
The UM flight leaders were nicknamed ‘the Zombie Masters’, and not jokingly, either. The use of that nickname to one’s face usually led to a fight. Rumor had it that in the USN, use of that name was a court-martial offense, though that was to be expected from people who insisted that they were aviators, not pilots.
And Steve Dwyer was known as the Lord High Zombie Master of the 48th Fighter Wing. His Scorpions had killed more than forty aircraft, ranging from Mach 2 Ouragan fighters to battered little private planes that were for some reason racing westward. Whether or not they were headed for suicide missions or were trying to escape mattered not to Captain Dwyer: the ROE said kill them, and he did. Dozens of small craft, from powerboats to improvised rafts had also found themselves resting on the Channel floor alongside a thousand years of wreckage from other wars. Steve Dwyer did not count the score nor did he consider it – all he counted was the hours he was racking up, all he considered was his own benefit. If a pile of RAM, silicon, and hydraulic fluid could get him a slot at Langley faster, so be it.
Ninth AF Ops was getting a better picture now from the Poseidon, and whatever it was, it was moving pretty quickly from what had once been an Aeronavale base. The universal finding was that it was a helo – possibly trying to insert sleepers, maybe on a suicide mission, or out after the fishing fleet or off to commune with freaking Allah or Allan, but whatever it was, it would have a short, exciting life.
“Zombie Lead, Mako, be advised inbound is believed to be a helo. DNR.”
Dwyer gave two clicks on the mike as he tweaked the HUD a bit better. He had a tiny green star, showing about thirty miles away. The MUSKETEER sensors read the subtle vibrations sent out by the helo’s rotors, and then confirmed 9AF’s call.
Of course, the UM’s had already done that.
“Lead, this is Three. MUSKETEER confirms, inbound is a helo, likely a Tigre gunship with an untuned number three rotor.” All Dwyer could do was mutter under his breath as he lined up the attack. They had less than a minute now, and the dot was growing larger, flying in a straight line without any attempt at evasion. Made sense, Dwyer thought, most of what they had flying had zero functioning avionics, and that meant no RWRs. Fine with him. Opening up the secure comm channel, Dwyer pulled back on the stick and zoomed upwards as his FLIR remained locked onto the UM’s. “Okay guys,” Dwyer said with all the emotion of a man squashing a bug. “Whack ‘em.” As Dwyer leveled out and brought the Grizzly back around, he saw the UMs slide towards each other and join in so tightly that they looked almost as if the were joined at the wingtips.
The Scorpions raced in towards the helo, which didn’t seem to be making the slightest effort to evade, and that spurred a small tickle of doubt in Dwyer’s mind, but not enough to call it off. But more out of idle curiosity than anything else, he switched to the direct video feed from Two. Okay, he thought, looking at the green-tinted FLIR feed. An old French gunship, one hotspot – One? – Yep, one, where the stick actuator should be, but no gunner. Part of Dwyer’s mind thought that this was a bit odd, but the rest overrode it. One more sortie, one more target, one day closer to getting out of here. Cruising back towards the intercept point, Dwyer sat back to watch the fun.
The UMs, of course, had no concept of fun, nor even of duty. They knew only the cold, crystalline logic of programming and input as they absorbed data, processed it, and then followed it. There was a target. It was hostile.
Kill it.
The UM’s, however, were creatures of routine and habit. One of their habits was that they could not fire their cannon when the target was below a certain altitude, and for a brief instant, a rogue wave narrowed the distance between the gunship and the water to less than that which was permitted. The UM’s, of course, knew neither frustration nor anger. They simply aborted the pass and went around again.
They had all the time in the world.
Dwyer frowned as the UM’s told him what had happened, not from concern over the mission but more to the fact that it would take that much longer to get this over and done with. The Scorpions had throttled back considerably, now making a leisurely circle back to the helo, which was still bucketing along just over the wavetops. Dwyer hadn’t throttled back, and he would reach the helo first and with some seconds to spare. His finger idly tapped the gun trigger – at this range, the Sidewinders were far too close, and might just sail right into the back chaos of the English Channel anyways.
Okay, Dwyer thought, why not? One squeeze and they could go home. The rocket-assisted 25mm rounds could turn the helo into nothing more than a bad memory with kinetic energy alone. Dwyer hit the CANNON ARM switch, and the holographic HUD fluttered into view a few inches away from his face and showed a perfect, blue tinted picture of the Tigre as it wallowed through the wind and spray. The reticle settled down on the engine fairing and Dwyer started to squeeze the trigger, knowing the HUD would instantly dim to shield his vision from the laser-like burst and the gust-shredded explosion that would instantly follow. Nobody on that chopper would even know what hit them, not even that kid –
KID –
Dwyer yanked up on the stick and shot over the helo, his throttle hand scrambling to get the HUD replay activated. In a flash and sputter of static, there it was – @#%$ it, GODDAMMIT, there was a kid and more kids in there, maybe a dozen, screaming and waving until they vanished off the bottom of the screen. Dwyer’s finger mashed the replay button again, because his mind was just barely registering one more thing – he saw it, and hit the FREEZE button so hard it almost stuck.
One of the kids, a little – oh hell, who could tell what it was – was holding an American flag. It wasn’t a good one; there might have been ten stripes instead of thirteen, and just a few stars instead of fifty-five, but it was a flag, without any possible doubt. Captain Steven Dwyer had just tripped over a helo full of kids being ferried out of God-awful Land across the water, and he’d almost blown them out of the sky. It was only then that he realized he hadn’t taken a breath in a minute or so, and he inhaled great gulps of cold, crisp O2 as he wheeled around once more. Holy Christ, he panted to himself, you almost killed some kids you almost killed some kids you almost killed some kids gotta call Mako and get CSAR out here and as Dwyer started to call the AWACS, he heard the quiet, measured tone that turned his blood to icewater.
“Lead, this is Two.”
“In hot.”
Dwyer’s jaw dropped in horror as he looked at the CRT and saw the Scorpions lancing towards the helo, moving so fast now that they were actually kicking up a shockwave as they shot over the water. The helo seemed to be moving almost in slow motion, and Dwyer knew in the pit of his stomach that whoever was flying the chopper didn’t even know he was being stalked. Dwyer swallowed hard, not knowing what to do, knowing he was about to watch a bunch of kids – and the dumb sonofabitch who was trying to get them out – get turned into hamburger.
He knew what to do, he knew what to do –
“THIRTYTWOTHIRTYTWOTHIRTYTWO!!!!!” Dwyer bellowed, not caring what he sounded like to the flight recorders, and praying with all his heart that somebody somewhere would understand what he’d just done. Sure enough, he heard Mako call back almost instantly: “Zombie Lead, Mako Super, confirm you care calling a thirty-two??”
“Copy Mako, there’s refugees aboard the helo!” As the helo came into view down out the right side of the canopy, Dwyer’s brain registered everything that followed in slow motion, as if it was all being slowed down so he could be horrified for every nightmarish second. First, Two acknowledging, in those quiet, almost Mister Rogers-like tones, “Copy, Lead, thirty-“ as it pulled up directly into the bright red streak that suddenly bloomed from Three the @#%$ thing OPENED FIRE, oh @#%$ it opened fire and the thirty mil round seemed to ricochet off Two in a shower of sparks as it whirled crazily into the water and Two seemed ready to follow it, skidding past and astern of the helo, almost flipping into the water then righting itself, wobbling off into a slow turn with tongues of flame and smoke as Three said “Lead, there has been a blue on blue. I have accidentally fired upon and hit Two. Acknowledging your thirty-two and aborting attack.” Three pulled up so tightly that vapor trails pulsated and luminesced as it knifed upwards into the cloud deck, and Dwyer pulled the Grizzly around to get alongside it. “Two, this is Lead, acknowledge!”
The only reply over the comm circuit was – well, it sure as hell wasn’t what he was used to hearing. Dwyer flashed back to when he was a kid and he’d dropped the CD player he’d gotten for his birthday, and all it would play was some sort of stuttering, wobbling gibberish, and that was exactly what Two was sending back, wallowing and semi-stalling as it tried to level out. Nobody had yet to lay a glove on a UM, and Dwyer had no freaking idea what to expect. Okay, he thought, stay calm. Let’s see if you can get it back. Dwyer checked the panel – the maser was still connected and getting data, but it was a mess. Cripes…bad enough he had to call a 32, now he was going to lose a UM. Just freaking beautiful. It took a second for him to realize that Mako was calling him again.
“Zombie Lead, Mako, do you copy?”
“Go, Mako.”
“Rog, what happened?”
“One of the UMs blue-twoed the other.”
There was a pause before Mako asked, “Zombie Lead, what is it doing?”
Dwyer looked up to hear/see the UM give a deranged electronic scream, then turn on a wingtip back towards the helo, with a single thirty mil round streaking from its cannon muzzle and scorch past the helo’s cockpit. It took a heartbeat for Dwyer’s mind to process the single intelligible phrase that abruptly surfaced from the stream of electronic trash pouring from the comm link:
“In hot.”
The Reflex Activation Training used by the various branches of the US military is among its most classified secrets, but what little is known about it boils down to this: by the time it is finished, the greenest sailor can react almost instantaneously and perfectly to any shipboard emergency, a green replacement in a Heavy Infantry company can take on and destroy ten enemy, and one Marine…well, not even the Marines discuss with outsiders what an X-Suited grunt can do to an enemy. But pilots – they are another matter. They increasingly face threats that not only react with robotic speed and efficiency, they are robots. And Steve Dwyer was up against the Mother of All Goddamned Robots, and he knew it.
The Reflex, though…the Reflex overrode everything else.
In one swift, fluid movement, Dwyer chopped the throttle, deployed the speedbrakes, and stood the Grizzly on its left wingtip. Sheer kinetic energy and the massive Packard turbojet engine kept the fighter moving forward, the computers did the rest. An observer would have thought that the plane’s wings were coming apart as they seemed to flex and change shape, but that was the computers changing the shape and geometry of their very structure, from short and almost straight to a cranked gull-wing shape that enabled the Grizzly to literally pivot nearly ninety degrees on the left wingtip, the airframe groaning as it did. Dwyer felt his heart suddenly constrict under almost 14G’s, the computer controlled speed jeans inflating with brutal suddenness and forcing the blood back up into his torso and skull. The world went from the blue/green of the HoloHUD to gray, then an angry red before his brain settled down to function on what little blood was actually reaching it. Any normal man would have submitted to the harsh discipline of gravity and physics, but Dwyer was trained in Reflex, and Reflex could trump even the most debilitating physical restraints. His eye still followed the moving pip, his finger still clamped down convulsively on the trigger. He sensed, more than felt or heard, the thirty mil bark out four rounds in swift succession, and his brain only dimly registered that they shot past Two, the glow of their rocket motors disappearing into the blackness of the channel.
As the turn loosened and his body began to function normally again, Dwyer saw the chopper zip past beneath him, and he had no idea how he’d brought the plane up high enough to avoid colliding with it. On the other hand, he wasn’t inclined to analyze it right now. The Grizzly snapped back to level and Dwyer’s head snapped to the left, the last place he’d seen Two – the UM’s were capable of turning on a literal dime, and if the little bastard had come back on him -
“In hot-“
Dwyer would always remember what came next as a ferocious orange/red glow that reared up from his left, and the head-rattling impact of a thirty millimeter round on the Plexisteel canopy. As the forward third of the canopy blew apart into golden shards that caught the faint moonlight and tore his right shoulder into skittering tendrils of cloth and blood, tearing the tough rubber of his oxygen mask and his helmet followed by a dragon’s breath and the roar of colliding slipstreams as Two raced over the shattered canopy in full burner.
The Channel sky, arctic-cold and rainy, battered Dwyer so hard that he was being thrown from side to side in his harness as he convulsively pushed the Grizzly to the right to try and follow it – and was rewarded with the electronic scream of a Sidewinder’s tracker picking up Two’s heat signature. Dwyer felt cold rain seeping in through his lacerated mask and helmet as he grinned like a man in a bar fight who’d just caught his opponent unawares. Okay, you bastard –
And with the same suddenness with which it appeared, the seeker tone vanished before Dwyer could even uncage the missile. The HoloHUD had come back up, flickering in gray and black and white like an old TV set, and for brief instants fuzzing out into a cloud of static, but at least it showed Two –
- coming back at HIM –
Dwyer reacted with the most basic training of a fighter pilot – point your nose at the enemy and shoot something, fer Gawd’s sake – and his right thumb popped the safety cover on the Sidewinder trigger and mashed it almost into the stick, while holding the cannon trigger down as well. Two, however, was acting on pure reflex as well, and fired its own cannon. Speed and physics met at roughly two thousand yards away from the two aircraft, and physics won. One of Two’s cannon rounds impacted solidly on the missile, and at nearly three times the speed of sound, not even Sidewinder’s elegant aerodynamics could survive suddenly being turned into garbage – and the shock of impact was more than sufficient to detonate the fragmentation warhead in to a glowing cloud of metal bits, each one more than sufficient to mortally wound either aircraft. Two, however, had turned hard right and executed a split-S, headed for where it had last seen Dwyer before the cloud of fragments had momentarily erased its vision.
Had it still been functioning properly, Two might have been mildly surprised to not see Zombie Lead where he was supposed to have been.
All hell had broken out aboard Mako as the Senior Controller tried to get a grasp on what was happening. One controller was bellowing Dwyer’s call sign into her mike, while another was calmly feeding everything down to 9th Air Force – which , in turn, was peppering them with questions they couldn’t possibly answer. One thing they did have though was a picture, provided by the massive multiband radar that spun at one revolution per minute twenty feet above their heads – and it showed a bizarre minuet at altitudes so low that occasionally the transponder signals were drowned out entirely in the returns from the Channel itself. And now, somebody had just let go what looked like a Fox Two, and Zombie Lead just wasn’t freaking there.
At 9th Air Force, where they were watching the direct feed from Mako on the God Box, nobody knew what to do next – the Scorpions were infallible, the regs and the ROE said so, and therefore the light Colonel who was the DO knew his duty: Wake up Ripsaw.
What was left of Two’s silicon brain was now functioning at a level roughly one tenth of what it had been before it had been damaged. But like the humans it was born to replace, it only used about ten percent of its processing capability. That ten percent was light years beyond even the abilities of the men and women who’d designed it, and that made it remarkably dangerous. The damage it had taken, however, kept it from recognizing everything that was going on around it.
Two’s sensors were doing their best to try and find Dwyer, whom it now regarded as a target in the most simple, kill-or-be-killed sense. There was no hatred, no fear – not even the cold, emotionless calm that some pilots could cultivate. Simply the cool, logical movement of electrons across circuit boards and teraquads of bubble memory. But now the circuit boards were fractured, spider webs of cracks laced across them, the memory canisters leaking from gaping holes. Without them, the sensor suite was almost useless unless Dwyer was right in front of him, and he wasn’t. Dwyer had taken advantage of the cover from the Sidewinder’s warhead burst to roll inverted and go vertical, rolling out and pointing the Grizzly back down where Two was supposed to be. Trouble was, Two wasn’t there either. Dwyer snapped his head around trying to find the little bastard, feeling water and blood and God alone knew what else run along his face when he caught a brief glimpse of arcing current – Two had turned right, then left again and was heading for the chopper once more, blissfully unaware that there could be more than one target in all of creation.
Ripsaw – aka CINC9AF Advanced Echelon – came thumping at full gallop into the CP, pushing his headset down over his ears and getting the live feed from Mako. It only took a few moments for him to get a handle on the situation, and it became obvious within a second or two that the situation, frankly, had gone to hell in a rocket-assisted handbasket. A Scorpion – a goddamned Scorpion – had gone renegade on them. Ripsaw watched Zombie suddenly appear on the screen again and dart downwards after something they couldn’t see as the Northrop tech rep skidded to a halt beside him, his jaw almost dragging on the floor in utter, total disbelief. “Son of a bitch,” the rep breathed, “that’s impossible!!” Ripsaw just looked at the rep with disdain and snapped, “Tell that to your f*cking machine. You got any suggestions?”
The rep licked her lips in nervous terror, aware that every eye in the place was locked on her, waiting for some kind of answer. That was one of their own out there, Zombie Master or not, and they wanted an answer that would save him. Shaking his head, almost in tears of sudden frustration, the rep said, “General, I don’t know of anything that would…that can shut a Scorpion off right now! Did he try a 32?” Ripsaw looked up at an ops officer in the gallery, who nodded his head in silent despair. “Yeah,” Ripsaw growled. “The damned thing is still shooting.” The rep’s mouth was moving soundlessly as she tried to think of something, anything that might shut this living breathing nightmare off.
Ripsaw, on the other hand, didn’t have the time to wait for a miracle. Without taking his eyes off the God Box, Ripsaw snapped, “Ops!”
“Sir!”
“Get every – and I mean every alert bird we have into the air, and bring that Scorpion down. I am declaring it hostile and am ordering a Buster – got it?”
There was a pause – far too long for Ripsaw’s liking – before Ops replied, with a nervous tremor, “Rog copy, Ripsaw, declaring an Alert Emergency Launch, Buster on the hostile.” The room suddenly went red with emergency lights as map locations all over England lit up and voices filled the room receiving and giving orders, all of which now thoroughly frightened the rep, who whipped her head around to ask Ripsaw, “What the hell’s a Buster?”
Ripsaw never turned from the God Box as he watched the base displays go from yellow to red, small blue semi-circles appearing as the alert birds got into the air. His voice was as calm and neutral as if he was lecturing to a class at the Air War College. “A Buster, you dumb s*it, is an order to shoot down the nearest enemy aircraft at all costs. All aircrew are considered expendable if need be.” The rep quivered in literal horror, gasping, “How-how many pilots are you sending out there??”
“Sixty or so.” Ripsaw turned and locked his eyes on her. “And so help me God, if just one dies trying to take that thing down, I will personally send you to join them.”
The wind hit Dwyer through the howling slipstream, swatting him back and forth in the harness as he wrestled the Grizzly back in behind the UM. The plane bounced badly as it got down into the ground effect, and Dwyer’s heart sank as the HoloHUD flickered, snapped, and vanished. Oh, goody, he thought. Okay, I can still see it, and if I can see it I can kill it. No problem.
Right.
The Grizzly was low enough that it was actually kicking up a shockwave on the water, and Dwyer looked hard for the blue/silver sparks that were popping from inside the beast’s lacerated innards –
There-
Reflex took over, his hand and eye moving almost as accurately as the fighter’s own systems, but it wasn’t quite enough as another four-round burst hissed past the UM and into the water beyond it. A miss, yes, but it had the effect of rattling the chopper’s pilot badly enough that he hauled the stick back and to the left and he was now headed for the cliffs of Dover, tantalizingly close just a few miles away. It also had the effect of letting the Scorpion know that it had another playmate again, and the EM spun deftly on one wingtip, pointing directly at Dwyer.
In what was left of its brain, the Scorpion was becoming – well, angry. It wasn’t entirely sure what this was trying to harm it, but it vaguely knew that it had tried to deal with it before, and failed. This would not do. Deploying crescent-shaped speed brakes, the Scorpion slowed dramatically and locked its remaining sensors in on Dwyer, and began rapping out single rounds of cannon fire at the oncoming fighter as quickly as it’s damaged feed mechanisms would let it. Somewhere in it’s programming, the Scorpion knew that at this range all it needed to do was operate its…something…and the target would die.
-Track laser –
-And the Zombie was now the Master.
Dwyer flinched involuntarily as a 30mm round whipped past him to the right, then winced in pain as a red glare filled his eyes. He’s lasing me, Dwyer thought, the little bastard’s lasing me –
-CANNON-
Dwyer’s brain gave him just enough warning to convulsively jerk the stick to the left before a round thumped into the right wing with a violent slam that rattled the entire plane. Dwyer didn’t have time to check the damage, and he didn’t have to – it was terminal, no matter what. He had a minute or so before the wing came off, and that would be that. The flight computers would get him clear, but he knew his survival time in the Channel would be less than five minutes. Checkmate.
Sh*t, Dwyer thought. Okay, so this is where I get it. The thought didn’t really bother him all that much as the fact that it would be at the hands of one of his – HIS – zombies. Okay. Fine. Without even being conscious of it, Dwyer twitched the stick so that he would fly right into the little bastard. It would be fast and it would be final, for both of them.
- And the Sidewinder’s lock-on sounded, a hissing, staticky rattle in his helmet that fired a burst of adrenalin through his aching body. Dwyer only knew that his body would respond unthinkingly, and it did, with his thumb almost pushing the switch through the grip as the missile left the rail and he pulled the plane up -
The last round was in the cannon’s breech when the Scorpion’s sensors registered the thermal bloom ahead of it. At that distance, there was no time for anything except one last diagnostic asking how this had happened. And in the last milliseconds of its life, the Scorpion realized what had gone wrong, how the target had managed to get a missile off at it. The Scorpion felt the soft, invisible light of the missile's laser proximity fuse caress it, and it knew no regret or sadness. It had never really known life, so it could not feel anguish at dying. But in the time it had, it watched the explosion approach, thousands of tiny fragments hurtling white-hot towards it...and knew respect for an adversary that could have accomplished it.
Dwyer was operating on autopilot, trying to keep the plane steady, but it wasn't going to work, every alarm and warning was going off and he had been SO damned close please God I'm almost there and with a horrifying sound the right wing tore away from the fuselage, and the Grizzly snaprolled towards the blackness, once, twice...and then a blinding yellow glare surrounded him, enveloped him, and made him one with the Dark.
"Dwyer."
I'm dead, he thought. No, I can't be dead. I hurt.
"Dwyer."
The voice was a bit more strident now, and Dwyer opened one eye to see Colonel Carolyn Holcomb, the 48th's wing commander, standing at the end of a hospital bed. His hospital bed.
"About time you woke up. Nobody else is sleeping right now, no reason why you should be any different."
Dwyer was having a hard time snapping out of it - he hurt like hell, and he felt like his brain was wrapped in cotton. All he could do was try to focus on Colonel Holcomb and ask thickly, "I'm alive?..."
Holcomb shook her head in amazement. "Yes, you're alive, and you have no idea what kind of a shitstorm you've missed. Politicians, tech reps, and just about every species of military idiot on the planet is trying to figure out what the hell happened." Dwyer shook his head slowly. "Blue on blue...goddamned Zombies shot each other."
Holcomb looked at him with an expression that would have withered a fully conscious man. "Thank you, Captain Obvious. We know that, now we're trying to find out why. Best guess now is that weird low altitude FCS algorithm hiccupped at the wrong time - they've grounded the whole fleet to get the software upgraded. In the meantime, everybody back home is going nuts - House Armed Services is screaming about taking 'em out of service permanently, which frankly wouldn't break my heart. By the way, it took 'em a day or so to figure out how you killed it. They think the heater picked up the heat bloom from its cannon muzzle - those rocket guns put out a LOT of heat, it seems."
Dwyer processed this for a second...and realized it wouldn't break his heart either. He could never go back out there with an EM again. They could upgrade and improve and tweak all they wanted, but in the end the absolute trust in the machine was gone, wrecked beyond hope. He'd be looking over his shoulder at the damn thing every second and he'd be the one who missed a threat and died, while they went blissfully home.
Screw it.
-Wait-
"Chopper?..."
Holcomb looked at him blankly for a moment, then realized what he was talking about. "Oh, yeah - the chopper made it. Set down in a schoolyard, of all places. Had something like a minute of fuel left. You made it because when you pulled up, you were only a mile or so from the beach. When the bird broke up, it kicked you out and you came down a few yards from the cliffs." All Dwyer could do was think about this for a moment and mumble, "Oh."
Holcomb looked at Dwyer skeptically. "Man, I hope you give briefings with more clarity. Anyways, the docs say you're down here for a few days, then at least thirty DNF, like I can afford to have any of my pilots down that long. So enjoy your vacation." With that, Holcomb turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway and turned. "By the way," she said quietly, "the leadership wants me to write you up for the Medal." It took Dwyer a second to figure out what she meant, and then it sank in. The Medal. THE Medal. Major Steven Dwyer, USAF. He began to smile, then stopped himself. No, he thought. Not for this. Dwyer tried to get it out, but all that came through was a near mumble. "No...just..job. That's all."
Holcomb nodded at this and replied, "A man's job. Which you measured up to just fine.You saved a bunch of people who were trying to make a run for freedom, and in the end that's the best thing any of us could ever ask to do. If they give it to you, you take it. If not for you, for the other guys who are still out there in the Channel. Good night, Captain." Another pause, a half turn, and another stop. "One more thing - your orders came through."
Now that Dwyer could smile about. "Langley...nice."
Holcomb's grin was positively wolfen. "Oh, they canexed your orders to Langley. You're going to Tonopah." That sank in fast enough; for all its reputation it was considered a desert hellhole with not a single redeeming feature for a fighter driver. Screwing up his lips, Dwyer growled, "Why....why f*cking Tonopah...?"
Holcomb's expression was kindness itself. "Well, you're the first pilot - as far as we know - to take on a Scorpion and win. They want you to go out there and teach our guys how to do it too."
"Can't...was lucky."
"Exactly. Something a machine can't be." This time Holcomb strode out the door, which closed with a metallic CLICK behind her.