Sleeper Seven (32 page)

Beginning to panic, Jess was about to engage the thrusters, when suddenly, as the indicator passed one percent, a calm came over her. Deep within, she heard the same soothing voice, or remembrance — she couldn't be sure which — but it said to her:
Run into the fear
. Removing her hands from the console, she sat back in the captain's chair, tightened her harness, and took a deep breath.

The warning chimes increased in frequency until they merged into a constant tone, before ceasing entirely. A boom suddenly rocked the ship, and Jess scanned her console to find not only all of her thrusters, but those on the other ships as well, firing wide open, slowing their descent. This maneuver, executed beyond human control, was from the ship's own systems, coordinating amongst themselves in a last ditch attempt at self-preservation. They had come to the consensus opinion that the human pilots, abandoning their responsibilities, had intended to self-expire.

"
No.
" Jess calmly stated. Reaching forward, she shut down her engines one by one, before cutting power to the ring itself. Solidifying around her, the thickening silvery mass instantly became a tremendous anchor, inexorably pulling the trio downward. The seawater flew past the panels as they sank like a stone into the darkness.

The algorithms of the chase ships, taking into account this unexpected new variable in their equation, furiously recalculated contingency b-tree pathways for a total of seven-hundred and nine milliseconds, before shutting down their six remaining thrusters. Even the machines, now, had accepted their combined fate.

~ 67 ~

A
s the envelope indicator reached zero percent, it became eerily quiet — the eye of the hurricane. Jess continued to breathe deeply, no longer concerned with the chase ships. Sixteen seconds later, the envelope collapsed completely.

The seawater smacked into the hulls with a thunderous crack, rocking the ships. The chase ship's pilots, who were also now dead in the water, hurriedly init'ed their ship's systems into single-user recovery mode using a red USB key at each Captain's console. Back up and running, they detached from Jess' ship with two loud
clunks,
and manually blowing their thrusters, ascended towards the surface.

As for Jess, she sat quietly as her ship, free now, sank further down. Deep groans and concussive metallic pops rocked the cabin from all sides. The fore and aft cameras were the first to go, screens frozen on the last green pixellated image captured before their lenses collapsed. Heavy thuds issued from the left rear of the ship, as one of the thrusters went dark on the console. Additional thuds from the other corners indicated the remaining thrusters had met their fate as well.

A final jolt, accompanied by a terrible, metallic ripping sound, reverberated through the cabin as the viewing panels turned from jet black to light gray. The ambient lighting faded as the red dots of emergency lighting appeared on the floor, and the darkness allowed Jess to witness millions of previously invisible, tiny particles streaking upwards against the viewing panels. After a minute of detached fascination, her zen-master spell was broken, as she realized with horror that the ship had breached the seafloor, yet continued to sink with alarming speed deep into the silt.

Turning her attention back to the console, Jess found the ring still operable, and brought it back online. As it spun up, the reassuring low hum returned to the ship, as did the ambient lighting, greatly calming her nerves. The engine console, though, was toast — the thrusters were not only all offline, but no longer even appeared on the display. Same for the camo console. The hull seemed to be intact as Jess detected no obvious leaks, but the majority of the subsystems were critically impaired.

The powerup of the ring had halted any further downward movement, but the ship wasn't rising either, and without any thrusters, she was stuck. Out of ideas, and knowing that time was short, she decided to escape, leaving her body behind. Placing her head on the console, she exited, wondering with trepidation if this would be the final resting place for her physical form.

Once out, she called the image of Big Mama to her mind, pulling herself to it until the ship resolved around her. Star, hunched over a console, glanced up with a start.

"Oh, shit!" she exclaimed, rushing over to search the area. Jess, confused, moved away from her to the far side of the cabin. Halting her search, Star looked up, confused, until sighting Jess again.

"Who is that!" she barked.

Utilizing her parlor trick, Jess shot a jolt of electricity through her nervous system, giving Star a quick glimpse of her form.

"Holy Guacamole! Jess! You scared the piss outta me, I thought there was a fire. Anyway, neat trick, girl! But hey, what's up? Something gone wrong?"

Recalling what Terry had taught her, she attempted to form some etheric speech organs. "Bottom," she croaked out. "Water... Stuck... Help."

"What? Your bottom-water's stuck? Jess, honey, I can't hear you, it's all garbled."

Jess, for her part, felt like Lassie all of a sudden. Smacking her etheric head, she slid over to the Captain's console and began typing.

"STUCK EMBEDDED IN SEAFLOOR UNDER PACIFIC ENGINES GONE HELP WHAT DO I DO"

Star, hearing beeps from her console, ran over and read her message.

"OK. Slow down first. Are the thrusters out?"

"YES NOT EVEN ON SCREEN"

"OK, that's bad honey. Is the ring online?"

"YES STUCK IN SILT BUT STOPPED SINKING"

"All right, now that's not so bad. Now remember what I said, with that one, you can use the ring all by itself. Spin it up, then adjust the flow pattern inside using the nozzle icon, it should propel you out. Oh crap — but you don't have the envelope, do you?"

"NO"

"Well, it's gonna be slow going, just make your way out best you can. Listen, gonna be honest, I don't know how much time I have here, I already see a patrol on the way, so I can't say how long I can hold out here before they scramble a coupl'a ships. Good luck, honey."

"THANKS" Jess replied, before returning to the tunnel. Back on her ship, she lifted her head, and wiping the drool away from her mouth, spun the ring up to one-hundred percent. When the hum stabilized, she touched the nozzle icon Star had mentioned, shifting her to a new screen showing a circular animated graphic of the tube. By touching different parts of the animation, she was able to distort the flow pattern. Rapidly swiping it, Jess put a strong spin on the material, causing the ring's hum to degrade into an ear-splitting
Wah-Wah-Wah
pattern, like a clothes washer out of balance. Settling down, the steady hum returned, but at a significantly lower ring speed. More importantly, the directional momentum had shifted, jostling the ship free, but sending it sliding further down into the muck.

Spinning the ring up again, she reversed the flow distortion, sending the ship sliding upwards in response. Giggling, Jess clapped her hands and did a celebratory butt-dance in her chair. Following the pattern of power-up, then flow disruption, she agonizingly pulled herself upwards through the seafloor, as though rocking a car out of a snowdrift, until she reached the inky darkness of the seawater again.

Fearful of losing her momentum, she continued the rising maneuvers until she heard a
plunck
sound, signifying the envelope re-forming around the ship again. Feeling safer, she reoriented the ship to horizontal and experimented with different flow patterns to find the most optimal maneuver. As the envelope expanded, each disruption became more effective, and upon reaching three thousand meters, she flew through the water without any resistance whatsoever.

A sizzling white pinprick, like a fourth of July sparkler, appeared on the surface of the dark Pacific, swiftly dilating into a hundred-meter-wide circular void ringed with luminous white flame. Propelled through the opening, the ship silently launched into the night sky, as the empty cavity contracted behind it.

Although the nav console couldn't auto-pilot the ship due to the loss of the thrusters, it still displayed her relative location. Working with different flow pattern adjustments, Jess was able to rise above air traffic level and set a course eastward before finally leaning back for a break. After a few minutes of idly watching her progress across the continent, the ship issued an electronic grunt and shifted slightly downward. Thinking she may have hit something, Jess scanned across the various consoles but found nothing. A few seconds later, it happened again, and then again.

Confused, she looked down through the floor panels toward a small cluster of lights below. According to the nav map, that was supposed to be Salt Lake City, but to Jess the entire metro area appeared tiny. Checking the nav console, she found her current altitude to be one-hundred kilometers above sea level. After some quick math, she discovered with a shock that she was sixty-two miles up. With no auto-pilot, she had neglected to follow the curvature of the Earth and had been bumping up against the edge of space like a stone skipping across a pond. As she angled the ship downward, she wondered if these truly were 'starships', as Star and her gang assumed, or simply terrestrial ships, restricted by policy, physics, or both, to operation within Earth's atmosphere.
If that was the case, what else were they mistaken about?
she wondered.

While pondering this, Jess was distracted by a light from above. It was a glowing white orb, the size of a basketball, which had caught up to and kept pace with her ship. Two more came into view below, a bright red one and a blue one the color of a stove burner.

Instead of feeling alarm at the appearance of these objects — some type of weapon or tracking device was not out of the realm of possibility — she, oddly, felt no anxiety whatsoever. Perhaps it was the way they moved — their personality — that seemed so non-threatening: they seemed to simply fly along with her, bobbing and weaving, like dolphins in her wake. She kept her attention on them as she continued to descend, but after a few moments they slowed, and trailing above her, soon disappeared.

~ 68 ~

R
oper had been sitting in the van all night, and his coffee thermos was almost empty. He had
Truckin'
blasting on the eight track, yet his head continued drooping and rising, like one of those drinking bird toys. Shaking himself awake, he thought back to the early nineties, when last he had been here. That time, he had a chainsaw. He shut down the entire array for two days, a small but potent success, which raised the visibility of the secret project in the backwoods of northern Wisconsin, and prompted local residents to question the purpose — and long-term health effects — of pumping all that energy into the ground.

Although suspended twenty feet up on poles, at each terminus of the twenty-six mile long span the wires bored hundreds of feet deep into the bedrock of the Superior Upland Shield, which is exposed at the surface in this geologically interesting part of the country. This ingenious hack of an antenna design utilized the earth's own mantle as a radiating body; without it, the copper wire itself would have needed to be hundreds of miles long in order to produce the necessary long-wave frequencies, where each cycle can be as vast as a quarter of the earth's diameter.

The eventual shutdown of the ELF array was a true success story — rare in Roper's field of work — in that it was operational for less than two decades: from the late eighties through 2004 when it was "officially" decommissioned. Of course, it helped that the cold war had ended just as the site had begun transmitting, and when the public learned the transmissions were not for defensive purposes, but mainly for nuclear first-strike capability, the resistance was emboldened and the project further demonized. Between these factors, and the concurrent Congressional scrutiny of this and other DOD boondoggles, Project ELF was not long for this world.

When the hoopla had died down a few years later, however, the shuttered operations buildings were re-opened for limited use — 'environmental assessments', they called it. But Roper heard word through their internal grapevine that the real purpose was the new fleet management capabilities, including the kill signals, over the ELF channel — the only radio waves able to carry low-bitrate data transmissions through the magnetic field of the ships. The security of the channel was ensured: it was a multi-million dollar antenna array highly unlikely to be copied by anyone else. Even the Russians, with their competing ZEVS system transmitting out of Murmansk on 82Hz, couldn't interfere with the U.S. ELF array without massive reconfiguration.

The upgrade to provide clearway transmissions came later, after a near miss between an Alpha version Gen III and a United Airlines Boeing 727 over North Dakota in 2006. After that incident, clearway transmissions became mandatory, with missions strictly limited to late night and pre-dawn hours, minimizing the risk of further incidents with commercial traffic.

All this, of course, was generally unknown since it was funded by black operations budgets, which are by definition exempt from any congressional oversight. But Roper knew. If Jess was able to take out the entire array, the Feds wouldn't have the political capital to build it again — anywhere. If they lost the kill channel and the clearways, well, that would severely hamper their operational capabilities going forward.

Roper heard the tapping before waking completely. In a dream-state, he imagined it to be a tinsmith fashioning an old Roman warrior helmet on an anvil — but instead of silver, the helmet was matte black. Roper lifted his head from his chest as the sound grew into successive echoing booms, puncturing the night air like the concussive fireworks they always save until the end of the show — the pure white balls of light that you can feel like a punch to the chest.

The glow of the ship appeared over a hill on the right-of-way a few miles distant. Roper watched the ship take out the telephone poles like toothpicks — they were cleaving away from the hull as if it were a twenty-one thousand ton snowplow — before hearing the echoing thuds several seconds later. Raising his phone to his ear, a smile crossed his face as he dialed Sag. This had been a long time coming, and it felt good.