Islamic allies were not stopped, the Hindus would be crushed.
Chen Lo Fann stood on the bridge as the storm lashed against the lass and rocked the long boat mercilessly. He had always understood that, as necessary as they were, the Americans were not, at heart, their brothers. When their interests did not coincide, they would betray his country — as Nixon had shown a generation earlier, bringing the criminals into the UN.
Lao Tze had spoken of this.
Now, his government was making him the straw dog. He needed leverage.
The American Megafortress had been shot down; undoubtedly its crew was dead. Americans were charmingly emotional about remains; a body or two, handled with the proper military honors. Even an arm or leg. Such could be found and prepared if the authentic article were not available.
Two of his ships were in the area. As soon as the storm abated, they would begin the search. After a short interval, they would find what they were looking for, one way or another.
Meanwhile, he would sail for Taiwan, as ordered.
Or perhaps not.
“Not there, Jen,” Zen told her.
“I’m working on it.”
Jennifer jammed the function keys on her IBM laptop, trying to get the requested program data to reload, Zen tapped anxiously on the small ledge below his flight controls. He was usually very good at corralling his frustration — to survive as a test pilot you had to — but today he was starting to fray.
Of course he was. If it was Tecumseh instead of Breanna down there, she’d be twenty times worse.
This ought to work — the program simply needed to know what frequency to try, that was
It had accepted the array — she knew it had because when she looked at her dump of the variables, they were all filled.
So what the hell was the screwup?
Shit damn fuck and shit again.
“Dreamland Command — hey, Ray,” she said, banging her mile button on. “What the hell could be locking me out?”
“The list is exhaustive,” replied the scientist.
“Yeah, but what the hell could be locking me out?”
“You’re not being locked out,” he said. “The connection gets made. The handoff just isn’t completed.”
She picked up one of the two small laptops from the floor of the plane, sitting it over the big IMBer in her lap. It was wired into the circuit and set to show the results of the coding inquiries. Data was definitely flowing back and forth; something was keeping it from feeding into the Flighthawk control system.
The security protocols of C? maybe? The system had a whole series of protocols and traps to keep out invaders. Even though the UMB plug-ins were being recognized as “native,” it was possible that, somewhere along the way, they weren’t kicking over the right flag.
She’d put them in after C? was up. Maybe if she started from scratch.
Right?
Maybe.
But, God, that would take forever.
Kill the Flighthawk. They wouldn’t use it anyway, right?
That would save shitloads of time.
“Jeff, I’m going to try something, but to do it, I have to knock the Flighthawks off-line. You won’t be able to launch it.”
“Do it.”
“I guess I should check with Major Alou in case, you knot, it interferes with her mission.”
“Just do it.”
She guessed he’d be angry, but she went ahead and talked to Alou anyway.
“We won’t need the Flighthawk,” Alou told her. “Go ahead.”
“We’re doing an adequate job from here,” said Rubeo when she told him what she had in mind. “We’re already over the Pacific.”
“I think this might work.”
“You still have to take the computer off-line, enter new code, then reboot it. Twenty minutes from now, you’ll still be in diagnostic mode.”
“I’ll skip the test.”
“How will you know you load right?”
“It’ll work or it won’t. If it doesn’t, what have I lost?”
She found an error in one of the vector lines before taking the system down. She fixed it, then began the lengthy-procedure.
“Want a soda?” Zen asked, pulling his helmet.
“Love one, but—”
“I got it,” he said. he undid his restraints, pulled over his wheelchair — it was custom-strapped nearby — and then maneuvered himself into it. She’d seen him do this before, but never in the air. He looked awkward, vulnerable.
Would she have the guts to do that if she’d been paralyzed?
“We got Pepsi, Pepsi, and more Pepsi. All diet. Which do you want? Asked Zen.
“Pepsi.”
“Good choice.”
Ten minute later, C? gave her a series of beeps — at one point she’d wanted the program in “Yankee Doodle” as the “I’m up” signal, but Rubeo had insisted — and then filled the screens with its wake-up test pattern.
Two minutes later, Zen shouted so loud she didn’t need the interphone.
“I’m in. I’m there. I have a view.” He worked the keyboard in front of the joystick. “Wow. All right. This is going to work. I can select the still camera, and I have a synthesized radar. At least that’s what it says.”
She glanced over and saw his hand working the joystick. “Woo — this is good.”
“Magnification on mini-KH Eye?” asked Jennifer. She couldn’t dupe the optical feed on her screen yet — she had to get the feedback through Dreamland’s circuit — but she didn’t have a control window with the raw numbers showing whether it was focused.
Rubeo was cursing over the Dreamland circuit, using words she’d never heard from his mouth before.
“Ray?”
“I’ve lost the visual feed, the synthetic radar, everything. Damn it, we’re blind here.”
“I can see,” said Zen.
“Well, we can’t,” insisted Rubeo. “Jennifer, kill the program now.”
“Hold on,” said Colonel Bastian over the circuit. “Major Stockard, do you have control of the aircraft?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can override it here,” said Rubeo.
“Jeff, we’ll back you up, but you’re the one I want on the line.”
“Colonel, I don’t believe that’s necessary,” said Rubeo.
“I want a pilot in the plane,” said Colonel Bastian. Jennifer recognized the words — they were the Colonel’s mantra in his debates with Rubeo over the future of air warfare.
“He’s not
“Close enough,” said Dog.
The blur coalesced into lumps of reality, like the precipitate in a test-tube solution. The lumps had shiny edges, crystalline pieces — her head pounding in her helmet, a body pulling off the side of the raft, the waves
