The Always War (9 page)

The whole plane shuddered again.

“It’s a … buffalo? A moose?” Tessa guessed. She tried to remember pictures she’d seen in books. “Bison?”

The plane lurched forward, the engine grinding louder.

“Prepare for takeoff!” Dek screamed from the front.

Tessa grabbed the rim of the window, holding on as well as she could. The plane zigzagged, and Tessa got a better glimpse of the creature behind them.

“Definitely a moose!” she cried. “I see antlers!”

Gideon dived toward her, pressing his face against the glass too.

“So the enemy is using animatronic robots, disguised as ordinary wildlife,” he muttered. “Could their robotics program be that far ahead of ours? I have to get back to HQ to tell them this!”

“I don’t know,” Tessa said doubtfully. “It looks real.”

“Exactly,” Gideon said.

“I mean …,” Tessa began, then gave up.

The plane lifted as it lurched forward, and the creature raised its head to watch. Tessa would have liked to just stand there and stare. The moose, if that’s what it was, was so majestic, so …
extravagant
… the immense antlers unfurling so gracefully on either side of his head. This was a creature that wasn’t afraid to take up a lot of space—in fact, it didn’t seem to be afraid of anything.

Gideon shoved Tessa down, away from the window.

“They’ll be shooting at us soon,” he muttered. He turned his head toward Dek at the front of the plane. “
Please
tell me you’ve got the antiaircraft defense shields up!”

“Of course!” Dek snarled back at him. “
I
never disabled anything but the engine, and as you can hear, it’s working now. You disabled, what? Forty separate systems? Fifty?”

“Only the ones that had your bosses’ tracking codes embedded in them,” Gideon muttered. “They must not trust you much, to have that much backup. What’s the system—every time they sell a plane, you stow away, make it look like it’s broken, and then steal it back?”

Tessa expected Dek to deny this, but she only shrugged.

“Usually the buyers are so rich and so drunk, it’s kind of a safety precaution, getting the plane away from them,” she said. “It’s my way of making sure all the rich drunk guys stay alive so they can keep buying things from my bosses.”

She sounded distracted, huddled over the instrument panel. She slammed her hand against her seat.

“Come on, cameras—now! We need you!”

The plane lurched to the side—automatically dodging antiaircraft fire? Automatically dodging something else? Or just … by mistake? Tessa didn’t know enough about flying to be able to tell.

“You should let me take the controls,” Gideon said, inching along the floor toward the pilot’s seat. “To keep us all alive.”

Dek didn’t even look at him.

“In an emergency the rule is you let the most experienced pilot fly,” she said. “And in this plane that’s me. I’ve got hundreds of flying hours.
Real
flying hours.”

Tessa expected Gideon to argue, but he didn’t.

“You went to the military academy too,” he said, watching Dek’s scrawny hands dance over the instrument panel.

“Wrong,” Dek corrected him. “I was
selected
for the military academy. Didn’t go. There’s a difference.”

Gideon gasped.

“It’s not a choice,” he said. “You’re selected to go, you go. Or else—”

“Or else you cease to exist,” Dek finished for him. “So I ceased to exist. In the official records.”

Tessa supposed she should feel good that both of the people on the plane with her were such geniuses that they’d been
selected for the military academy. But it just made her feel even more dull and witless than usual.

And then she forgot all her inadequacies, because her body felt so weird. The plane rocked with the force of speeding faster, soaring higher, fighting the pull of gravity. Maybe Dek wasn’t using the standard, approved method for taking off. Even more than the night before, Tessa felt plastered to the floor, tugged backward and down.

“Yes!” Dek shrieked. “The cameras are coming back on … right … now! So we’ll see …” Suddenly she gasped. “What’s that?”

Gideon and Tessa both struggled toward the front of the plane, toward Dek and the computer screen. Gideon got there first, but Tessa wasn’t far behind.

Tessa pulled herself up on the side of the pilot’s seat and squinted at the screen. It took her a moment to figure out what she was seeing. She was braced for a view of squadron after squadron of fighter planes circling them, firing off one shot after the other. But she saw no other planes around them at all.

Instead Dek was pointing to something on the ground, a huge U-shaped arc of metal that curved across a mighty river and had somehow cut a swath through a vast forest on the other side.

Now Gideon was gasping, too.

“It’s the Santl Arch,” he said. “It’s … down?”

“Yes, down,” Dek repeated. “Of course it’s down! We’re up, it’s down—but what is it?”

Gideon seemed a little dazed.

“It was one of the enemy’s most impressive feats of architecture,” he said. “This must have just happened, that it fell. Last night before we got here or … I don’t know. That was always a goal for fighter pilots, that if you did something great, you were allowed to fly through the arch….”

“You mean, that thing used to be up in the air?” Tessa asked, because surely she wasn’t understanding right.

“It was,” Gideon said. “I flew through the center of it twice, as my victory lap, the night I ki—well, you know what I did.”

Tessa was staring at the metal arch that looped below them with such awe that she almost missed noticing the way Gideon had said that. He’d stopped himself from saying the word “killed.” Was he too ashamed? Or was he just trying not to remind Dek what he was capable of?

“You mean you flew through it twice
by remote
,” Dek said scornfully. “You personally were hundreds of miles away. It was like you were flying a
toy.
”

“Not a toy,” Gideon said softly.

He was staring down at the computer screen with an expression Tessa couldn’t read.

“So what’s the military significance of knocking down that arch?” Dek said. “I’m guessing you think it was some of your fellow flyboys who did that.”

“Yeah …,” Gideon said vaguely. He shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “Destruction of an enemy’s beloved
landmarks can have an intense psychological impact,” he said, as if quoting. He kind of looked like the Santl Arch had been one of his beloved landmarks too. “And I’m sure there was a significant loss of life when it fell on … wait a minute! There wasn’t a forest across the river from the arch! It was houses, factories, offices—buildings. Lots of buildings.”

He reached down and enlarged the scene across the river, zooming in close.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

He began flipping through images all across the screen, zooming in, zooming out. Dek started to reach forward to stop him, but then she seemed to change her mind.

“Doesn’t look right … No, not that …,” Gideon mumbled. “But the river’s right! That
is
the Mighty Mysip! It’s got to be! And the arch, only down …”

“Things look different when you’re flying over them for
real
,” Dek said smugly.

“But—,” Gideon began.

Tessa didn’t want the two of them getting into an argument.

“Um, could we maybe just focus on making sure no one’s going to be shooting us?” Tessa asked nervously. “Could we plan how we’re going to get out of here safely?”

“Oh, the shields are up,” Dek said, almost sounding carefree.

“And no one from the enemy’s forces is flying anywhere near us,” Gideon said. He zoomed out even more than before, revealing a blue sky as far as the eye could see, above the ribbon of river winding through miles and miles of forest. “Now, how can that be?” he mumbled. “How is it that they didn’t
see us? That we can’t see any of
them
? Where are they?”

“Maybe the enemy has replaced all its planes with hundreds of animatronic, robotic
trees
,” Dek said. She giggled.

Gideon ignored her.

“This is all wrong,” he murmured. “Really, really wrong.” He furrowed his brows. “Let’s fly to the north.”

“Why?” Dek challenged.

“Well, for one thing, if you don’t, we’re going to run into the flight paths for
our
military’s planes and spy satellites,” Gideon said. “And, right now, in this aircraft, they wouldn’t take to us any more kindly than the enemy would.”

“Good point,” Dek said. She made a couple adjustments, and the plane veered to the left.

Tessa felt the surge in speed in the pit of her stomach. For that matter her stomach also seemed sensitive to the sudden turn, to the tension between Gideon and Dek, and to the strain of thinking they were going to be shot any minute.

Dek began digging under the pilot’s seat. She brought up a plastic-wrapped brown square and handed it to Tessa.

“Eat,” Dek said. “It’s never a good idea to fly on an empty stomach, though I bet fake-flyboy over there didn’t know enough to tell you that.” She tossed one toward Gideon as well, as if to soften the insult. “They’re nutri-squares. Mass produced. They kind of taste like cardboard, but it’s better than throwing up.”

Tessa watched Gideon to see if he thought it was safe to take food from Dek. He absentmindedly peeled back the plastic and began chewing, so Tessa did the same. But Gideon was staring so fixedly at the computer screen that maybe he’d eat cardboard and never notice.

“Can’t be,” he murmured. “No … where’s S-fiel? Pee-ore? Where are the houses? The farms? The people?”

“Can’t see people when you’re this high up,” Dek told him.

“I know, I just …” Gideon scrunched up his face and went back to staring at the screen.

An alarm started buzzing from the instrument panel.

“Fuel supplies at critical levels,” a mechanical voice spoke. “Locking in route toward nearest fueling source.”

“No!” both Gideon and Dek screamed together. For a moment it almost seemed like they were working as a team, each of them stabbing at the controls and crying out, “Try the auto—”

“No, won’t work. What about—”

“Still disabled—”

“Then—”

“That won’t work either!”

It was like neither one of them needed to finish a sentence for the other to understand.

Tessa stood off to the side, feeling useless.

Then Dek let out a shriek, and Gideon moaned, and Tessa understood too.

They were going down.

“We’re going to crash!” Tessa screamed.

“Emergency non-pilot-controlled landing,” Dek said, still with just a bit of swagger in her voice. “Not
quite
the same thing.” She hit Gideon’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you check the fuel gauge when I told you to?”

“Because
you
insisted on taking off without going through any preflight check!” Gideon snarled back at her. “Remember?”

He was still stabbing at the controls, trying to get the plane to do something different.

“Hello? We were under attack!” Dek spat back. “If
you
hadn’t turned off the external cameras—”

“Yeah, well, I would have thought
you
would have checked the computerized fuel gauge once we were in the air—”

“You disabled that, too, remember?”

“Would you two just shut up?” Tessa screamed. “What can we do
now
to get ready?”

Dek looked back at her and seemed to realize that Tessa was just holding on to the pilot’s seat with her bare hands, even as the plane dipped and bucked.

“Strap in,” Dek said. She shoved Gideon’s backpack out of the copilot’s seat and jerked Tessa down into position. Tessa heard the seat belt click together before she fully understood what was going on.

“What about—Gideon?” Tessa asked.

“That’s up to him,” Dek said, shrugging. “Seems like he wanted to die before, so …”

Tessa was glad to see that Gideon had pulled a rope from somewhere and was tying himself to the column behind the seats. He was still watching the computer screen too.

“No!” he suddenly screamed. “No! The autopilot’s putting us down in Shargo!”

“What’s Shargo?” Tessa shouted.

Gideon didn’t answer her. Now he was yanking the rope back off again, and diving toward the control panel.

“Override!” he screamed. “Override!”

“It won’t override now!” Dek screamed back at him.

“What’s Shargo?” Tessa yelled again.

Gideon slumped to the floor. He wasn’t even trying to protect himself now.

“It’s the largest city in the war zone,” he said. “There are nine million people there who hate us. And—it’s the enemy’s military headquarters.”

Tessa didn’t know what a normal landing was supposed to feel like. But she was pretty sure this wasn’t right. The plane rocked violently, side to side. More than once it seemed to be on the verge of completely rolling over. And then when it righted itself, just when Tessa was thinking,
Okay, survived that,
it would jump suddenly, as if hit by a brutal gust of wind.

Dek patted Tessa’s hand.

“Sorry!” she yelled, over the noise that sounded like the whole plane was being torn apart. “This old tub wasn’t meant to carry passengers. When my bosses retrofitted it for human transport, they weren’t exactly trying for comfort, you know?”

She took a close look at Tessa’s face, then dug down under the pilot’s seat and produced a paper sack.

“Airsickness bag, okay?” Dek said, handing it to Tessa. “Use it if you need to.”

Tessa shook her head. She didn’t think she was in danger of throwing up. It felt more like her throat had closed over, like she wouldn’t even be able to squeeze out the words to ask,
Are we all going to die? Please … I don’t want to die.

Gideon leaned over Tessa’s seat from behind and yanked the bag from her grasp.

“Give her—another—,” he choked out.

And then he was gagging and retching into the bag.

Dek laughed.

“Still think you’re so high and mighty, Mr. Military Pilot?” she taunted, even as she reached for another bag for Tessa.