Sleeper Seven (33 page)

"It is DONE! And it is fuckin' GREAT!" he shouted into the phone, turning away and plugging his free ear as the ship sailed low in front of him, lighting up the forest and sending a jagged three-foot section of pole careening into the dirt with a heavy thud, just a few feet in front of the van.

"Give her thirty seconds, then it's go time!" he shouted over the din, and throwing the phone on the dash, leaned back and cackled with glee.

Reaching the end of the run, Jess rose up and arced the ship back over the van as her signal — in case the flying telephone poles weren't enough of a hint — before bringing it to a spot a safe distance away. She knew Roper had already called it in, and since they didn't know she was physically onboard — they never would have issued the kill command if they did — she needed to get off the ship ASAP.

~ 69 ~

S
ag sat at the children's rolltop desk, an unlit joint balanced in his ashtray.
That will be for later, if all goes well,
he thought,
or if it doesn't, for that matter
. Twenty minutes earlier, he heard the Guantanamo signal drop, and had overpowered the station with his hacked recording of the numbers lady redirecting the ships to his alternate frequency. The next step was to anxiously await the call from Roper confirming the destruction of the Clam Lake array. He had the script for the custom kill transmission already typed in, and his finger nervously hovered over the Enter key when the phone finally rang. After hanging up with Roper, he paused for a moment to consider Jess.
But she's in Cali, it's just her etheric onboard,
he reassured himself, before jamming the key down.

~ 70 ~

J
ess felt uneasy. Although confident the command wouldn't detonate the ship — that just seemed a bit too dramatic — still, she felt like she needed to get out, pronto. Whizzing over the treetops, she searched in vain for a suitable clearing, but finding none, put the ship in a hover and opened the hatch.

Unbuckling herself, she ran towards the opening and scrambled down. Reaching the final rung, she gripped it tightly with one hand as she lowered her body outside the ship, where it floated in zero-g ten feet above the treetops. If she let go and drifted too far down, outside the influence of the ring, she would drop like a rock.

Distracted by a glow from above, she glanced up to discover the hull of the ship completely shredded. The exquisite Niobium alloy panels were buckled and twisted from the pressure and violence of her undersea adventures, and the rounded corners housing the thrusters had completely collapsed in upon themselves. All of this was easy to see, as a pure white light issued from behind every mangled seam.

Turning her attention back to terra firma, Jess was scouting for a nearby branch to drop onto when the kill signal hit. The lights inside the ship darkened as the red glow of emergency lighting lit her from above, and hearing a whoosh, she felt a shooting pain as she looked up to find the hatch had closed on her forearm. Her piercing screams drowned out the grinding noise issuing from the hatch mechanism, which, eventually realizing it wasn't fully closed, opened back up. Jess pulled her arm out just before the hatch re-engaged, closing fully this time, and her body spun upside down before she was able to steady herself by catching the sharp curl of a buckled panel with the toe of one shoe.

Worse than the pain in her arm, however, was the sound of the hum rising from within the ship as the treetops below began to slip away — it was leaving. Still caught within the ring's field, however, she floated along below the ship as it continued to accelerate. Unwilling to hang around and discover what floating in a plasma field would feel like, she planted her other shoe on the hull and launched herself into the forest below.

~ 71 ~

R
oper had been watching the ship as it pulled around, over, and past him, finally stopping to hover a quarter-mile away. The thing looked all tore-up, the skin all mangled and all three corners completely collapsed; there were even some long strands of seaweed hanging from several jagged panels. Expecting it to either detonate, drop the ground, or do nothing, he was surprised when instead a figure emerged from one of the lower hatches.
Jess must be crazy to hijack a manned ship!
he thought to himself, as he exited the truck and began to run toward the ship.

A few moments later when it sped off, he expected to find a severely injured — or dead — pilot when he arrived at the scene. Finding nothing, he heard instead the crackling of tree limbs above him. Looking up, he watched Jess slowly descend from the boughs of a tall Pine tree with one arm, cradling the other against her chest.

"Jess!" Roper yelled between heaving breaths, after running a quarter mile for the first time in a quarter century. "You... Alright?"

"Yeah, well it hurts like a mother, but I'll make it," she uttered between clenched teeth. Helping her down from the last bough, Roper turned around so she could drop onto his back.

"Surprised you didn't break a leg too on the way down," he said, trudging back toward the truck with his new burden.

"Yeah, well, I guess I was still 'under the influence' — I dropped slow enough to grab onto a branch. Then all my weight came back with a vengeance."

"Speaking of the ship, what the hell you doing on it! And I thought it was supposed to be a brand-new Gen III — what in Sam Hill did you take?"

"Uh...what do you mean?"

"That jalopy was all beat to hell, young lady. Looked like she'd been stored underwater for about twenty years, too."

"Well it
was
brand new when I got it about forty
minutes
ago," she explained between agonized breaths. "But, you know,
shit happens
."

"Well if this is how you deliver the goods, maybe we'll be passing on your offer," Roper joked. "So, why are you here, like, in your body, anyway? It's supposed to be in Cali right now."

"Yeah, well, I couldn't navigate well enough without my body, so I had to pick myself up. Sorry, but I couldn't tell you guys — you wouldn't have sent the kill signal if you knew. So I guess the signal just locks the ship down and returns it to home base. Which makes sense; I knew they weren't going to brick a multi-billion dollar piece of hardware. Kind of a bummer for us though, huh."

"Yeah, you don't get to land this one in Soldier's Field or whatever the hell you wanted to do with it. Well, honestly it wasn't that bad of a day — you got the rig here taken out real good — but do ya always gotta be this dramatic about it?" Roper said, as he gently stepped over a section of splintered telephone pole. "Ya almost took my head off with that one," he added, pointing to the particularly nasty shard rising from the ground in front of the van.

"By the way," Jess said, "Did you call Sag to have him send the kill signal to the rest of the fleet? It's safe enough I guess, as long as you aren't dangling beneath 'em."

"Let's get you situated first, priorities now," Roper replied, as he opened the van's sliding door and gently set her down on the carpet inside. "Can you move your hand?"

Jess wiggled her fingers. "Yeah, but ow...shit!" A purple bruise had formed on her forearm, which had already swollen considerably. "Hey, I look like Popeye," she joked, with tears welling in her eyes from the throbbing pain.

"Probably not a break then, but still pretty nasty. Let's have Star look at ya back home. Used to be an EMT ya know. Meantime there's some ice in the mini fridge, let's get a pack made up for ya."

"Call Sag first," she pleaded.

He grabbed the phone from the dash and dialed. "Yeah, she did it. Got her fool-ass on board though. Yeah her
real
ass. I have her here now. Ship went lockdown and got the hell outta here, home we guess. She totalled the damn thing anyway..." he added, smiling at her.

"...yeah, so probably back home to either Texas or Cali if they updated it...seems safe enough, no fallout up here! Sky still dark, yup! Yeah but what's the point now if they just go back home...oh yeah, didn't think of that. OK. Welp, you have yourself a damn pleasant morning, we'll meet up with you over breakfast I suppose — yeah four hours out. Bah."

"So what's the plan?" Jess asked, as Roper threw the phone on the dash and headed back to the fridge.

"He's gonna send the fleet-wide signal. Very least, it'll interrupt whatever missions they got going on now, and let them know they're no longer secure, but prolly they already know that, right?" he said, winking at her. "In any case, it'll keep 'em tied up and they'll ground the fleet temporarily — Gen III's at least — for some retrofitting to fix it."

Ice pack in place, they were only a few minutes down the road when they got a return call from Sag. "Heya...you did? Any chatter? Still got it...cool...Where's she now? ...
Robust
...yeah...she's doing fine, a real trooper...yeah took one for the team on this. Dumb though, but that's these youngsters for ya — such thrill seekers. 'YOLO' and all. No damn sense. Yeah alright, see ya."

Jess leaned her head against the shaggy van wall and closed her eyes, in a futile attempt to Zen her way out of the throbbing pain, which was tempered only slightly by the ice packs. Giving up, she groaned aloud.

"Oh shit, I forgot, you wanna aspirin?" Roper reached over to the glove compartment, and after rifling through it, pulled out a bottle and threw it back where it landed at her feet.

"Umm, Pamprin?
Really?
" she complained.

"All I got...Sorry," he said as she glared at him. "Crap on a cracker," he exclaimed, realizing she wasn't in any condition to open a tamper-proof pill bottle. Pulling the van over, he climbed back to her and explained the situation as he twisted the cap open.

"Well, he sent the signal. He still had control over the frequency too. Some patrols came out after Star, but they just observed her with spotlights for awhile, didn't fire on her or anything, had no idea what to do, I guess. Eventually someone high up was notified 'cause a coupl'a helos were scrambled. She outran 'em no problemo, of course. Anyways, you get some rest now, got a long drive ahead. Just think about the tremendous breakfast gonna be waitin' for us as you head off to dreamland. And if the Pamprin ain't doing it for ya, remember I got the herbal medicine..."

"Yeah between this and your driving I may need it."

After taking three pills, she folded her arms across her chest like a mummy and lay down on the floor of the van, while Roper climbed back in the captain's seat and set off down the bumpy forest service road.

~ 72 ~

R
oper was right about the food; they arrived at 9:30 A.M. to a veritable feast awaiting them. Victor had prepared Belgian waffles with whipped cream and fresh strawberries, with sides of smoked salmon, sausage and scrambled eggs. Before partaking, however, Jess took a long hot shower upstairs. Her bruised arm had turned a lovely shade of greenish-purple, but the swelling had gone down some in the last few hours, and doubling up on the Pamprin kept the pain at bay. She got dressed and enjoyed the wafting smell of fresh coffee for a moment before heading back downstairs.

At the dining room table, she found Sag and Star already eating, though they looked equally worn out from their own late night adventures. They greeted her with congratulatory, yet delicate, hugs.

"So I assume Roper told you the whole story?"

Star reprimanded her. "Yes, and we agree yer a dern fool. You coulda just let me know, we woulda figured something out." Then, softening her tone, "But we've all been young and stupid, I guess." She glanced at Roper. "Some of us are old and
still
stupid, and it usually works out in the end anyway."

Victor pulled out a chair for her and they sat down to eat. Jess had several questions, but needed to get some coffee and waffles into her. Priorities.

"So what happened?" she asked Sag, after downing a few savory mouthfuls. "Were you able to send the fleet-wide kill signal before Star had to skedaddle?"

"We sure did, and it was close — she had some company come by, so she scooted out of there, but I had already broadcast it."

"So what do you think happened? Did it affect their fleet at all?"

"Well we're waiting for Noly and our other contacts inside, but obviously they may be occupied right now — probably tired as hell after being debriefed all night in post-mortem incident meetings with some pissed-off higher-ups."

Star jumped in. "Yeah, we think probably it just locked down any ships they had out and returned them to their home bases, so that's something, but certainly not what we'd hoped for in terms of a permanent grounding."

Victor emerged from the kitchen, stirring a bowl of waffle batter while holding a cordless phone to his ear. Passing them by, he walked quickly into the living room. As they all looked at eachother curiously, they heard the click of the old T.V. turning on.

"Team meeting in the living room," Victor called out.

A cacophony of chairs scraping the hardwood floor filled the air as they all shuffled into the living room. A local station out of Dubuque was airing a live CNN feed from Wichita, Kansas, where a large crowd had gathered in the middle of a freshly planted bean field. Jess was wondering why the heck they were stomping all over those fresh plantings, when they cut to a news reporter interviewing a man clad in a green John Deere shirt.

"...and when did you first notice this?"

"Came out this mornin' to feed the pigs and saw this thang just a settin' there. Tain't moved an inch in the last three hours."

"And what do you think it is?"

"I don't know
what
in the hell it is. We all was a hopin'
you
would!"

The screen cut to a wide shot of the field, where just a few hundred feet over the rows of freshly planted bean sprouts sat a pristine Gen III ship, silently suspended as if bolted to the sky.

~ 73 ~

A
n audible gasp arose from the crowded living room.

"What the fuck!" Jess shouted, as Sag took off running up the stairs.

The broadcast then cut to a split-screen of the reporter in the lower left-hand corner, along with the wider shot of the ship over the field. The reporter seemed to be receiving word of something in his earpiece when they cut back to the main studio.