Source code, p.11
Source Code, page 11
Tamm’s hangar was quiet that morning, doors rolled closed. Raijinn would lock their own facility up the same way. While there was security available to keep the interested public from wandering in, Dad always said there wasn’t a substitute for physical barriers.
The guard waved her through the temporary access gate, and then she was back on the military side of things once more.
Emily was absent from her shelter; they’d moved her down into the static display area yesterday afternoon. The Storm Gryphons were there, however, their crew already busily preparing for their performance. Big acts like that always closed the air show out; they wouldn’t be flying until late afternoon.
The FQ-47s were unsettled, though, cawing and snapping at each other.
Past the fire station and the Army’s small helicopter facility was the first of the 121st’s hangars. This one was on the small side. Room for two MQ-9s to be parked, wingtip to wingtip, three if you got creative. When the Interdiction Squadron held events, dining-ins, or official ceremonies, this was typically the space where they did it. A huge version of the Gonzales Flag of 1835 hung on the back wall, the front profile of an MQ-9 in place of the usual cannon.
Today, however, the main doors were closed.
Daelia frowned as she approached, seeing that. The doors hadn’t been closed yesterday. The heritage flying team, the P-51 guys, had been stationed out of there. But all their equipment appeared to have been moved out to one of the outlying shade structures.
Her monocle pinged.
And pinged.
Like it was picking up a message.
Junk rolled by at the bottom of her monocle. Letters, numbers, none of it in any kind of sequence, no pattern she could pick out, no coding language that she knew.
It looked… Oh, shit, it looked like something eclosing.
Her monocle was struggling to condense the signal into the AR field. The best it could offer was a hazy light.
Coming from the hangar.
Huh.
Daelia headed over.
The main doors were closed, but the side entrance was propped open. Daelia considered this for a moment, but only a moment, and then headed inside.
The secondary hangar was relatively small. But the only thing in it at the moment was the object from Armand Bayou.
Daelia stared at it, frowning a little. The tapered, pitted rock looked different now, here in the daylight and bright illumination of high-powered LED lamps. It seemed terribly mundane.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing in my hangar?”
She turned. It was a pilot, another one. There was a frown on his blunt, dark features, and a distinct Southern drawl in his voice.
“What’re you doing in here, Marathon? You were off the schedule on Thursday.”
The pilot snorted. “Shit, Daelia. Don’t sneak around like that.”
She ignored it. Looked back at the object. “Why is this here?”
“Why are you here?”
“I thought something was trying to talk to me,” she said.
"If you think you can talk to this, more power to you. Brass wants to know what it is.” Marathon spread his hands. “It’s actually good to see you. We need to talk about this. Argo’s report said you were the first on the scene.”
“Sort of, I guess. We got there at the same time.”
He nodded at the door. “Let’s walk and talk. I’ve got a briefing to run in a few minutes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rover stood up the Emergency Management Cell. Lucky me, it’s my party to run.”
13
The sun was barely over the horizon, but Argo was already drenched with sweat.
This was one thing he missed about Nevada. As hot as it was there—and it was fucking hot—the place did cool down at night. When the sun went down, the empty desert landscape couldn’t hold on to the heat.
He’d enjoyed running in the mornings there. Cool shadows, brisk breeze. Like it had been at the Academy, but without the thin mountain air.
Ellington was already a sweat box, and it was only 0600.
Argo wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the humidity here.
Or the quiet.
His lack of sleep clawed at him.
He checked his watch. Crew rest requirements were no joke, but he’d been awake for at least half of his recommended eight-hour period. He probably shouldn’t have been flying, but then, he’d dealt with worse.
Argo was glad he hadn’t planned on going home last night. Rover had asked him to stay at the squadron, get a write-up done. Somebody in DC was probably pissing blood over the crash. Curiously, there had been nothing in the local news. Everything seemed to be proceeding down at the civilian end of the runway.
Strange.
Maybe it was because it was a Guard base.
Everyone in the unit—and there were way more people here right now than there should have been for a weekend—was calling it a meteor. JP had told him last night he thought it was some kind of missile that had misfired. But the pieces didn’t line up on that for Argo.
He’d had the misfortune of being at the Academy during the Five Days War. He remembered the way it had felt, even in the underground shelters, when Cheyenne Mountain had been hit. He remembered what the city had looked like three days later when the cadets were finally allowed to dig themselves out. The shock waves alone had…
There had been none of that last night. He’d been sleeping as well as it was possible to sleep in those damn issue cots, and then Rover had come in the room. Kicked one of the cot’s legs. Told him to get himself up, get dressed.
“I’m flying tomorrow,” he’d protested.
“Yeah, I know. Need you for something right the hell now, though.”
What had happened out at Armand Bayou?
There were no answers, not right now.
He just ran. On through the base.
Founded in the early days of military aviation, Joint Reserve Base Ellington had been operational for over a century. Few Air Force locations could boast that kind of history. Ellington, however, didn’t look very historical.
The place was a collection of low-slung stucco and brick buildings, painted in a drab color somewhere between terra-cotta and beige. Algae clung heavily to their sides, and the grass grew fast, giving the place an air of abandonment. Things were maintained, of course—the air-conditioning worked, the roads were free of debris—but beyond that, the place seemed to be left to its own devices.
According to the in-brief Argo had gotten on Wednesday—a monthly thing for newcomers, only attended by a handful of people—there had been big plans back in the OEF days. The DOD had been flush with cash, the Wing’s mission vital and its location attractive, and plans had been laid to build the place up.
Land had been purchased. Contracts had been signed.
While it was impossible to expand south, Ellington had pushed north, swallowing up vacant land, petroleum storage, even a county golf course. The golf course had been downsized to nine holes, the other nine used as a site for a munitions storage facility. That was state of the art, he realized as he reached the road that ran along its fence. The security system was completely analog, mechanical with no digital components of any kind.
Necessary, on a base with so many damn abiota.
Argo ran along the munitions yard fence, heading west for a little way into the empty sections of the base.
New roads had been laid in here, utilities, even a few foundations. Old facilities had been demoed out to make room for new ones that had never come.
The road dead-ended, and he doubled back to the last T-intersection, heading south now, back into the main area of the base. There was the Army building and there was the chow hall. There was Medical and over there were the vehicle maintenance yards.
Heading south, on the west side of the base, was the only completed project from the OEF days. A cluster of ugly, boxy buildings. This was what the other pilots derisively called the Sinkhole. It housed the 121st Interdiction Wing headquarters, as well as Cyber Services, Civil Engineering, Force Support, and whatnot. Most of the base’s administrative and support functions were here, crammed in.
Those had all been intended as temporary structures apparently, prefab stuff installed to allow for continuation of operations.
After the Five Days War, a lot of the DOD’s capital expenditures here were halted.
A lot of things had stopped after the Five Days War.
Near the south boundary of the base, where the base’s ordered decay gave way to the enthusiastic private investment on the civilian side of the airfield, the road curved again, making a neat loop around the undersized BX. A bigger one lay half-finished at the far west end of the base, up against Highway 3.
Ellington’s best days, he thought, were far behind it.
Argo picked up the pace as he turned north again, back onto the airfield frontage road. Bellona Robotics was just outside the gate there, as was Tamm Astronautics. The Army had a few assets out here, but by and large, this was Operations Group territory.
It was 0635 by the time he made it to the southside patio of the squadron, jogging in through the parking lot. A mixed group of officers and enlisted were out that morning, doing some kind of interval workout, laughing over the top of the classic rock that was blaring out of somebody’s old-school disc player.
Something about it was jarringly informal.
“Argo!” somebody called as he walked up. Bumper. Dammit. “Why don’t you get over here and work up a real sweat?”
Laughter followed, and Argo looked down at himself. He was drenched. “I think I’ve had enough for one morning, Bumper.”
“What’d you do, go for a swim in the retention pond?”
More laughter. Argo tried to ignore it. “That, somebody actually warned me about,” he replied loudly, over the music.
There was still laughter for that, but it was more nervous than amused. Argo held back the sigh; everyone had probably heard about it by now, then.
“Emily was on a tear yesterday,” the DO said. The next round of exercises started up, but Bumper came over. “She’s always on edge during air show week. But nothing happened, so you’re okay.”
“You call that nothing?”
“Hey, for an orcinus-class who’s tried to hack into the armory more than once, that was restraint from her,” Bumper replied. “But don’t worry about it. Flights aren’t normally that bad with her, and you’ll get used to her. Everybody does.”
“I’m not pissed about some fuckin’ emergent taking me for a ride,” Argo said, heading into the building. The cold air inside was a punch in the gut. “But it doesn’t seem safe to not warn me that she’s willing to deviate so far outside of—”
“This is not an issue with her being emergent,” Bumper said, a little heated now. “The suicidal ones brick themselves immediately. She’s not going to push her airframe beyond tolerances. She was fucking with you.”
“You’re the one who suggested the virch.”
“Did I tell you that you had to use it?” Bumper shot back, and at Argo’s glare, smiled. “Like it or not, Irvington, you’re in the Air Guard now. Air Combat Command, in its infinite wisdom, decided a decade ago to dump all their emergent aircraft on us and keep the nice comfy predictives for the federal active-duty side. Which you are not on anymore. So you either figure out how to fly what we’ve got here, or we can find you a job up at Harry Hines.”
“Harry Hines?”
Bumper’s smile widened. “Texas Military Department headquarters. Dallas.”
That was a threat. A direct one. On active duty, headquarters assignments were where good careers went to die. Argo had no reason to believe it was different in the Guard. “I’m here for family,” Argo said.
“Well, that’s certainly going to keep you on the flying schedule,” Bumper replied sarcastically. “You’re off the hook for the moment, though. Highlander’s going to take you through another orientation flight today. Emily’s parked for the show. We’ll have Splatto out doing the cap. He’s equine-class, much easier to manage.”
Splatto. It was ridiculous. But then, emergents named themselves.
“Surveillance?”
“Awareness and assessment,” Bumper corrected. “We don’t do surveillance over Texan soil.”
“You mean US soil?”
Bumper shrugged. “I said what I said.”
“Right,” Argo muttered, and shook his head. His sweat was drying now, his skin starting to prickle. “I haven’t done much domestic support in my career.”
“Welcome to the Guard. Texans helping Texas,” Bumper said emotionlessly, and nodded. “You’ll get used to it. Now go take a shower. I don’t want you stinking up my cockpit.”
Argo watched his squadron DO head back outside.
“It’s not just you. He’s always a dick, in case you were wondering.”
He turned. It was that older female sergeant, one of the full-timers, who seemed to have a permanent scowl on her face, red-faced, hair still wet but uniform impeccable. Done with her own shower for the morning, then.
“He’s also a major, Senior Brandel,” he replied, irritated at her informality.
She rolled her eyes. “You active-duty boys always take so long to lighten the fuck up,” she grumbled, and pushed past him.
Argo rubbed a hand through his sweat-drenched hair and headed for the locker room.
This Guard shit was going to take some getting used to.
The in-brief for today’s flying op was at 0930.
Argo had some free time on his hands.
Time he decided to spend talking to Emily.
His attempt at a conversation hadn’t gone well the day before. Emily had pretty much just laughed at him, called him a pathetic little human, and kicked him out of her AR field.
But two different people in his chain of command had jumped on him about this now. They obviously expected it. And besides, that had been no idle threat from Bumper.
Argo was the new guy in the unit. Expendable. They might not send him to Dallas. but if a deployment order came down, a tasking for a pilot to be physically on site at Clark or Yokota or Changi, he had no doubt they’d send him first. And if they did send him to Dallas…Argo did not want to spend the rest of his years in uniform pushing papers at Texas Military Department headquarters.
Emily, however, had been moved earlier this morning. Away from her shade structure at the north end of the runway. Down into the air show static display section. So he had to walk all the way back down there.
But he wasn’t halfway to the temporary gate when Ho showed up in the squadron’s UTV.
“Argo? Jesus, been looking all over for you.”
“What’s going on?” Argo frowned at his watch. “We’ve got another hour before our shift starts, right?”
“EMC meeting,” Ho said. “Marathon wants us there.”
“When’s it start?”
“Five minutes ago. Come on.”
14
The Emergency Management Cell had been set up in the squadron’s main training room, a wide, windowless room. The classified briefing lights over the main door weren’t lit, indicating that nothing classified was being discussed in there, but white noise generators still blasted their sound-killing wash into the hallway outside. The door wasn’t locked. Ho and Argo slipped in.
Inside, whiteboards in various states of cleanliness wrapped three walls, with a visual projector casting a slideshow on the fourth. There was no permanent furniture in here; both the tables and chairs were on rollers. A rough horseshoe of tables took up the center of the room, thick with computers, printers, and cabling. Little signs sat in front of each station, identifying the job performed there.
Everything ran back to a self-enclosed rack near the front of the room. A military-issue AR projection suite sat on top of that, probably for integrating any abiota that might need to participate in whatever this was, but for the moment, it was powered off.
A few people looked at them as they came in. Argo didn’t recognize many of them. Shoulder patches indicated half a dozen units from across the Wing, as well as an Army representative from the 290th. Daelia was there too, leaning against one of the back walls, and refused to meet his eye. Argo was a little surprised to see her. She looked a hell of a lot better than he did, after their little midnight jaunt.
Marathon, the B-Flight commander, had the projector remote and coffee in hand, body half-turned toward the slides on the screen behind him.
“The Texas Military Department has asked us to keep this shit quiet, and… Argo, Ho, how nice of you two to finally show up.”
“The gate is insane, sir,” Ho replied.
“Wake up earlier next time,” Marathon said, eliciting a few chuckles from the room, and waved them in. “Come on in. I don’t want to brief Ops separately. Waste of time.”
“What do you mean by quiet, sir?” one of the younger enlisted troops asked from his station.
“I mean we’ve notified everybody on the federal side we’re legally required to notify, and that’s fucking it. TMD wants to keep a lid on this for right now. It’s not a bomb, near as we can tell, but there’s no use in scaring everybody.”
“What are we talking about?” Ho asked.
Marathon stared at him, like he couldn’t believe how stupid the question was, and then flipped slides. Up came a photo of the object. “We’re talking about this object. The thing that struck Armand Bayou last night, 2352 local time.”
Argo frowned. “Is it in one of our hangars?”
“Preliminary analysis revealed that it’s not radioactive or biological in nature—”
Marathon was interrupted again, this time by the sergeant at the comm station. “Do we even have a Geiger counter at this base?”
More laughter.
Marathon sighed. “We’ve got a CBRNE detection package in the EMC gear. State requirement. We pulled it out of storage when this happened. But yes, we’ve got a team coming down from Dallas today to give it a more thorough examination for explosives.”
