Patent mine hummingbird.., p.1
Patent Mine (Hummingbird series), page 1
Patent Mine
by TR Nowry
Patent Mine, by TR Nowry
Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2008 by TR Nowry
All Rights Reserved
Published By TR Nowry
All 'Art' By TR Nowry
The characters in this book are entirely fictional and rightly belong in the fiction section. Any resemblance to real people, places, countries or religions is completely unintentional. As with all copyright books, copies (physical and digital) are restricted to what is legally defined as fair use. No other use is expressed or implied and all other uses are reserved. Think of 'fair use' like Tivo. You can Tivo movies, TV shows, and the NFL (that's making a copy!) You can even convert them so you can watch them on your iPod (at work when the boss isn't looking!). But you can't put them on YouTube, sell them on the corner as DVDs, or put stills on T Shirts. These same principles apply to Ebooks. Even the free copies given out from time to time should NOT be redistributed, much like it's improper to distribute copies of 'The Office' just because it was recorded over the 'free' air. Basically, don't hand it out like candy, print dozens of copies, email it to all your friends, post it on servers or web sites and everything will be fine.
Starve the beast and feed the artist. This book is brought to you 100% free from the tyranny of traditional editors and publishers as an independent novel. Future titles depend entirely on your support. Thank you for keeping prices low by not distributing copies! If you received a copy without paying for it, please, do the right thing and purchase a copy (from Smashwords!) and give it to a friend!
The Art of the Houdini Scientist... is a prequel to The Hummingbird Series which includes, Patent Mine, Hell from a Well, The Heredity of Hummingbirds, and Mourning after Dawn. (And the HHOPP Engine, but it's more of a footnote) This series was written/published Mourning, Heredity, Hell, and Patent so they can be read in any order.
The Twisted Timeline Trilogy is Personal Space, Older than Dirt, and The Bottle tossed across the sky.
And if you've got a few hours to kill, be sure to check out my Free short story, The Wandering Island Factory.
Patent Mine
By TR Nowry
He woke to the rumble of a train bearing down on him. When he unzipped the opening to the tent, a black and white cat bolted out and ran toward the house.
"Come back here, Max!" he shouted, fumbling with his clothes.
The leaves on the trees rustled with anticipation amidst this clear morning sky.
"It's nothing to be afraid of!"
The train sounded louder.
He searched the sky while reaching inside the tent for his—
BOOOMMMMM!!!
It passed at treetop level, flinging his tent into the woods and stripping him of his shirt. Water from the pond soaked him in a fine spray.
The whine of the chase jets just a few seconds later were nowhere near as impressive.
Yearly combat training was one of the benefits of living in such a desolate place. F-16s and Raptors were commonplace to him. The one in the lead, the one sounding like a train was new. Well, not new to him. Versions of it had practiced for years in these mountains. It was tiny and black on the top, sky blue on the bottom, teardrop shaped with no visible cockpit. No windows at all.
He wiped his face, then looked for his tent.
Ah, more important than the tent was the camcorder he reached for.
Scratched, but it wasn't damaged.
He turned it on and aimed to the sky. To date, he had nearly four hours of video of this plane. That represented years of viewing. He made a few hundred to a few thousand for every clip he sold to UFO conspiracy web sites and military tech people. They paid well for cutting edge, even out of focus.
But he kept the best stills for himself.
It was seamless. A near perfect creation of speed and agility.
He searched for the chase planes, then focused ahead of them.
Got it! Blending with the sky, it was hard to see from the ground.
As soon as the chase planes lined up for the shot, it pulled a near right angle and slipped into the valley.
There were less than a hundred homes within this mountain range. The nearest town was over thirty miles away, and the nearest city was a two-hour drive. The people who lived here strongly objected to a base being built. They protested the loudest about the sound, but in private, they simply hated everything military, much like his parents.
Hippies.
His parents had struck it rich very young. They had a chain of restaurants in California, but the taxes were killing them. The first offer they got for the chain, they took, just to get out of there. They moved to these isolated mountains and planned on retiring at the ripe old age of thirty. Without the stress of managing the chain, they planned to start a family.
Things didn't work out.
When he was ten, his parents found out that they didn't like gardening as much as they had thought. That living off the land was hard, buying food at the store was easy. They had moved with these lofty ideals that they could find harmony with nature, almost expecting chickens to pluck themselves before climbing into the pot and choking on a garnish.
He held the camera near his side as he scanned the sky again. He wanted to review what he already got, but that risked missing— if he had only woken sooner, he could have gotten the best shot of his life! It passed so close he thought he could touch it.
He could hear the echoes in the valley. They were coming back.
He held the camera to his eye. Bingo!
These were the money shots.
The mystery plane just pulled another impossible maneuver. Without having the chase planes and the treetops in frame to confirm a steady camera hand, nobody would believe a plane could put itself into a flat spin, fly backwards, bank up and strafe the tops of two chase planes in under a second.
What made these military maneuvers all the more impressive was they didn't always use sensors and lasers to score hits. For two weeks, twice every year, they used a kind of non-lethal live ammo. Basically a high-power paint ball. Those were the weeks that he always taped.
This morning's match was over. The teardrop pilot had never been defeated; at least, not that he had ever seen.
The chase planes continued to pursue. He heard the whine of the turbines guzzling fuel, and he watched the extra heat distort the air behind them. But the teardrop just straightened, then slipped into sonic and disappeared. The boom was as distinctive as the train sound. It was odd, in a way. It was quieter above the speed of sound than it was below it. Yet, he had seen it pass overhead in complete silence too.
It made as little sense as— they were fighter planes, why in the world would it make the sound of a train?
It had puzzled him for years, and the best excuse he could come up with was perhaps a limiter or governor of some sort. Something like what they put on race cars to even the playing field.
The fastest thing he had ever seen, the governor made the most sense. He had never seen it fight one at a time. It was always two, three, or four against one.
He searched near the tent, picking up stray pieces of clothes, blanket, and a ruined packed breakfast. He unwrapped his telephoto lens, attached it to the camera, grabbed the tripod and ran to the spot on the far side of the pond.
There was only one spot, looking across the pond, that was clear of enough trees to see the mountaintop base several miles away. He focused, then waited.
His parents were horrified and outraged, like most of the original homeowners in this valley, when the military people shaved the top of the mountain off to make the base and landing strip. From the valley, you couldn't tell, but his home was just high enough to see it had received a harsh buzz cut.
He pressed record but didn't look through the lens, he stared with his eyes.
The first two to land were the conventional planes. They circled for a few minutes, lined up, then tracked for a normal landing. Hardly worth the tape.
He waited.
"Max!"
He worried about that damn cat. It was perfectly capable of taking care of itself, but, he worried.
He laughed. That cat didn't take crap from nothing. But it didn't realize that a hawk or an owl could just swoop down and snatch it up.
He looked through the camera.
It came screaming in, top speed, then did this belly flop to come to a stop. It seemed to hover, if just for a second, then float the last few feet like a leaf falling from a tree.
He had bought the telephoto to try to catch better photos. His house was on the backside of the base and rarely saw a display this close. But the lens proved problematic. At such extreme distances, he couldn't keep it steady. He could get a few good frames, but that was mostly luck.
However, he got some of his best shots with the tripod, holding fast just above the landing strip. It was a lot like trying to snatch a picture of a hummingbird. It's frustrating and blurry to try to catch them in flight, so you set the camera on a tripod and focus on the feeder.
He packed up his video equipment, then looked for the rest of his stuff.
His parents had done one thing right. He cast the line into the pond. It was man-made and one of the main reasons why his parents had picked this spot. One side was lined with three trucks of concrete, and it slowly filled with rain over the next two years. About when he turned six, his father stocked it with catfish, trout, bluegills, bass, carp, and dozens of other varieties they
He pulled in the line.
Nothing, but the worm was gone.
He set another, then cast again.
This time, the bite was immediate.
Catfish. His personal favorite. He bashed it against a rock, recovered the hook, then tossed the catch up shore. He lit a fire and started cooking.
Before it was done, his black and white cat had returned.
"So, Fraidy Cat, what brings you back?" he said, flipping the fish with a spatula.
The cat grabbed his knee with its front feet, looked him in the face, licked its lips, then jumped onto his lap.
"You think you deserve some of that, do you?"
The cat put its front feet on his forearm so it could get a better sniff of the fish.
He pulled the cat back to his lap and looked over the pile of fish guts. The cat had bypassed it entirely. He picked a chunk near the tail and placed it on his knee. "My Fraidy Cat, to the Max."
Max chewed away while the rest cooked a little longer.
Max liked catfish too.
He had a short hike to the house. It wasn't a very big house, just two bedrooms, but it was his most of the time. Because of the base, it was difficult to sell when his parents divorced. His mother got a place in the city, two hours away. His father was always away on 'business'. At sixteen, he had the house alone, most of the time.
He adjusted the camera bag when he got into the clearing around the house. He'd have to mow the lawn soon. Like most teens, he hated that. The grass around the solar panel would be the first to go. The panel was turned into one of the shed walls where the mower was parked, among other stuff. But to him, it was a constant reminder of how intertwined mowing and solar were.
His father read every do-it-yourself hippie thing out there. And tried to do half of them, often with disastrous results. The solar thing was the only one that halfway worked.
Max ran to the front door and started to scratch.
"Alright, I'm coming," he said, to which Max scratched with more impatience.
He let the cat in.
He had online classes to take anyway.
With the entire valley so spread out, it didn't make sense to send a bus around to pick them all up. Internet, satellite, and phone to the rescue. When his mother was living at home, she home-schooled him, supplemented with online stuff. But high school was done without her.
It was boring. His mom had given him a solid education; she had wanted to be a teacher when she was young and attacked it enthusiastically. She had blackboard paint on one wall, an overhead projector, and even got a formal student desk he now kept in his room. He was in the top of his class (of fifteen students) and he hardly had to do any homework. Class had become a lesson in attendance. If he wasn't online by 9am, they called his mom and dad instantly, at their work numbers. It wasn't worth the hassle. He usually played a video game during class on a second laptop (earphones) anyway. Why not sit 'in class' too. It would be too hot after school to cut the grass, so, he'd have to put it off until tomorrow, again.
Did-Dump. "Argo, watd you get for number 16?" the IM read.
He didn't bother looking it up, he simply sent the entire exercise as an attachment. "You still at your mother's?" he added in the text.
Did-Dump. "Dad."
"He home today?"
Did-Dump. "Shouldn't be back till tonight. Want to hang?"
He smiled, then added the symbol to the text.
Dara was a cute girl, a little on the heavy side, but still cute. She lived closer to the valley, about a twenty-minute dirt-bike ride down the road. But she was always worth it.
He skipped the rest of the game, after the zombies clobbered him in an ambush, and started uploading his camera into the computer where he could clip and cut and go frame by frame. It was slow and painstaking, but no worse than online school.
This was his junior year, what did they expect?
Argo pulled the sheets off, tossed the condom in the trash, then started putting on his clothes.
Dara pulled the sheets to her chest, self-consciously, "Dad's not coming home tonight, he call—"
"I still have to go." Argo stood and zipped his pants.
"But, you can stay."
He started to laugh, but covered for it, "I'd love to, but, I've got to be down at the pond for the morning show." He never kissed her on the lips after, so he pecked her on the cheek as he walked out her bedroom door.
She dragged the sheets down the hall after him.
He stopped at her front door, "Besides, I left Max locked up in the house, and nobody wants that cat getting anxious in their house."
She listened as he started the bike and raced away.
He wound up the alarm clock, pulled the camera off the charger, then checked everything in the bag.
Max jumped onto the bed, then stared into the bag too.
"You coming, or staying?"
Max scratched at the box of fishing hooks.
"You know, you can fish some too."
And on the word fish, Max clawed.
"Ok, that's enough." Argo moved the cat to the center of the bed, then zipped up the backpack. He considered taking the laptop, but didn't. Its WiFi reached down to the pond, but the batteries would only last a few hours. The path was nearly impossible to navigate without full daylight, and it was never a good idea to stray too far from the path.
The cat followed him out the door.
Camping outside had its dangers. There were cats much bigger than Max in these woods, not to mention bears and dogs. He checked the pistol before the fire went out. One round chambered, safety off, hammer down. Squeeze the trigger and it would fire, but the trigger would need to be squeezed very hard. He was never sure what that was called, single action or double? It hardly mattered, Max could give almost anything pause. In a weird way, he felt safer with Max in the tent than the gun, but only the gun was truly lethal.
When he was thirteen, a wild dog was bearing down on him along the path to the house. He was exhausted and couldn't run anymore, so he stopped.
The dog was seconds from pouncing when Max jumped between them, stood on his hind legs, hissed with claws drawn and a fluffed tail, and the dog stopped in its tracks. Max lunged toward it, and the snarling dog backed up. Max lunged four more times before the dog just ran off.
It was like the coolest Jedi mind trick he had ever seen. A black and white cat, standing on its hind feet no taller than his knee, scared away a sixty-pound dog.
Max was a ferocious cat, when he wanted to be.
At least, Max looked ferocious.
A single bite, maybe two bites at most from the dog would have ended any fight with Max. The problem was neither the dog nor Max seemed to know that.
He turned on his radio and its little nightlight, rolled out the sleeping bag, then climbed in. "Inside, or out?" He held open the bag.
The cat put its nose in, then backed out again.
"You sure?"
The cat curled on the outside of the bag instead.
Argo folded a corner to cover the cat. It got cold at night, even for the fiercest of creatures.
BZZZZZZ!!!
He turned off the alarm clock. Max was already at the door. He unzipped it and the cat shot out. Max used litter boxes, if he must, but preferred to go outside. It probably had something to do with marking territory or something, but he didn't presume to know the mind of a Jedi master.
He readied the camera, then looked up. Crap. Too much fog.
He heard the train, but couldn't see anything. He caught a glimpse of four— No, make that six chase planes this time, all Raptors. He aimed the camera, but the lens fogged immediately.
Raptors used thrust vectoring to increase maneuverability. Whatever the teardrop used, it was superior even to that. It slid into a flat spin, stabilized with the left wing as the leading edge, then open fired on the Raptor to its side. It was flying sideways! It shifted to a belly-flop brake, then reversed course. It could perform maneuvers that would rip the wings off any other plane. They disappeared into the clouds.
