Emile and the Dutchman (5 page)

II

A klick below, the grounds of the Thousand Worlds Naval Academy were white, green, and gold, clusters of low granite buildings spread out over the grass, cupping the sandy beach of New Haven harbor.

I eased over the cyclic and gave it a bit more throttle as I banked the Hummingbird for a better look.

And instantly caught a buzz on the comset.

new haven control flashed on the heads-up display.

"VNYC 401, we show you as deviating from your logged flightpath. Is it a wind gust, or are you having, ahem, 'autopilot difficulty'?" the firm contralto said, the voice carefully larded with just the slightest bit of sympathy, as well as the sarcasm.

"Negative, Long Wharf. No problem."

I switched off my throat mike and allowed myself a light chuckle. She must have been a pilot, too, and understood that I wasn't having any kind of difficulty at all. One minute after I'd taken off from Koch, the moment that radar showed that I was safely outside the cluttered VNYC approaches, I'd set the deadman on the yoke, then toed the bandit switch and put the copter on full manual, not the so-called "computer-assisted" version that only lets you think you're flying.

I like fly-by-wire—as long as there's sufficient feedback to the stick—but copters don't need all that computerized stabilization gunk the way frontswept airframes or variwings do.

Even if real flight was illegal, it wasn't really unsafe, no matter what the regs said. If, say, I suffered a stroke or heart attack—and never mind how an eighteen-year-old in perfect health is going to suffer a stroke or a heart attack—my hand would slip off the yoke, popping the deadman and bringing the Hummingbird's flight computer back fully online.

In any case, as long as I didn't deviate too much from the flight path or exceed speed limits by too much, I'd be unlikely to be called on it. Even if I was, so what? I was reporting as a cadet candidate at the CS Naval Academy, and from the moment I'd left Graz I had been officially under TW military discipline; I wasn't subject to the laws of the North America Federation, and neither the NAFAA, the NAFBI, nor the local police could touch me; all they could do would be report me. The Navy would be unlikely to want to punish a pilot for insisting on really flying.

Hmm . . . the ATC sounded nice; if she was as pretty as she sounded, it might be worthwhile to get her phone code.

I turned the mike back on. "I repeat, negative, no problem. Just a wind gust," I said, damning myself as my voice cracked, and dropping the idea of asking for her code. I was eighteen, dammit—that was supposed to have stopped.

I toed the bandit switch off, then thumbed the GCA on. I don't have anything against computers—for one thing, they handle final approaches in traffic much more safely than humans can.

I thumbed the mike again. "Request landing vector."

As I let my hand come off the deadman, both the cyclic and collective went dead on me while the pedals retracted.

The Hummingbird took a slight lurch to starboard, away from the field; I dropped my hands and looked out the window.

A thousand meters away, the regular VNYC noon copter was already down, its front-and-back rotors grinding down into visibility. I gave the von du Mark eagle on its broad side a halfhearted salute. I have never liked Sikorsky Whales, but then I've never had the chance to really fly one—inspections for larger craft are both more frequent and more severe than for small ones, and being a biological backup for a computer has never excited me.

Besides, you can't do a really hot landing with a twin-rotor job; they're not built for it.

My Hummingbird passed over the outer marker and plodded its way, fifty meters above the tarmac, to its berth, descending, hovering, roller-coasting a few meters above the ground, going up, then down.

The Haswell flight module is terrible at feeling when you pass from a hover to ground effect, when you transfer from actually flying to riding the cushion of air your rotor is pushing against the ground.

The technical term is transitional lift; whatever you call it, it's the source of a lot of accidents among beginners. If you slip out of transitional lift, fall off that cushion of air, you've got to adjust both cyclic and collective quickly and correctly, or you're going to go somewhere you didn't intend—usually down. The accidents tend—repeat:
tend—
to be minor, because ground-effect mishaps start from less than three meters up. But there's a lot of energy in fast-moving rotors; if you crash, you'd better pancake.

The Haswell kept missing the landing; I decided I'd had enough nonsense. So I clamped down on the deadman, the controls coming half-alive, then toed the bandit switch and landed it myself.

There are better modules than the Haswell, but who needs them? If you can't land a copter, fly an airframe.

I let the computer do the final check and powerdown, then put itself on standby; I was already in a half-crouch in the rear cabin, gathering my suitcases together and throwing them in the tagalong together with my trunk. I debated a moment whether or not to leave the tagalong behind and have a parcel service pick up the gear, but then I shrugged. It didn't matter; if I was going to be unpopular with the peasants for being the scion of Mark Airways, then I was.

I tried to look on the bright side. It had to be better than the hell I'd gone through at Auckland Prep. I hoped.

Clipping the follow-me onto my belt, I opened the door and stepped out onto the tarmac, the tagalong lowering itself after.

I sniffed happily. There was a trace of fuel in the air; there always is.
You
may think av-fuel stinks; to a pilot, it means he's home.

My phone chimed; I dug a hand into my flight suit and pulled it out. "Yes?"

"Emile," Papa's gentle voice said, "your mother just interrupted a staff meeting to . . . remind me that you promised to call as soon as you arrived in New Haven."

"I just got in, Papa," I said, as I walked quickly toward the registration building, the tagalong rattling behind. "And I will call you and Mama just as soon as I get settled in. Meaning no offense, Papa, I do have to get the Hummingbird tied down, the berth paid for, and myself checked in at the Academy before one o'clock."

The orders said to report by public transportation by 1:00 P.M. on September 4, 2237, and the Navy was sure to be picky about the time.

Although . . . I glanced down at my thumbnail; it was already a quarter past noon. "And I'm almost late now." Damn. If I'd been able either to bring one of the servants or to fly in the Northeast corridor at anything near the Hummingbird's top cruising speed, I wouldn't have had to rush.

"Well . . ." He paused. "I just wanted to remind you that as long as you are in New Haven . . ."

"I know. If things don't work out, there's always Yale."

Wrong, Papa.

I'd followed the family tradition as far as Auckland went, but that was where it stopped. New Haven, yes; Yale, no. Not with the Naval Academy's buildings beckoning at me in the distance.

Now, there's nothing wrong with Yale—at least you don't have to play idiot games with swords the way they pressure you to at Heidelberg—but what would they teach me to do there? Manage Mark Airways as Papa was doing and Grosspapa had done before him?

Ridiculous. Do you know how rarely the CEO of a major airways can actually get his hands on controls? Papa was lucky to get a hundred hours annually, and he'd
earned
his way onto the flight-test team for the first Hummingbirds, back in the nineties, before he'd let Grosspapa sidetrack him into management at Airways.

None of that for little Emile. No, sir. I'd go through the Academy, become a flying officer, then get myself a berth as a piloting officer on a cruiser—or maybe a destroyer; destroyers have nice thrust-to-mass ratios—then maybe first officer and finally a captaincy, once my reflexes were too far gone to actually hold live controls in my hands.

But Papa had to give it another try. "Emile. I could talk to Dean O'Donnell and have you admitted today—"

"
No
, Papa."

"Boy, you have your mother's stubbornness." I could almost hear Papa cringe at what he'd just said. Mother tyrannizes everyone else by remote control, but Papa has to sleep in the next room. "Don't tell her I said that."

"Of course not, Papa."

He sighed. "Very well. Just remember, you are a von du Mark—"

"Yes, Papa. I've got to go. I'll call you tonight. Goodbye."

"
Aufwiedersehen
, Emile."

I hung the phone back on my belt as I entered the registration building. The terminals were near the door; I stuck my left thumb in the slot of the nearest one and tapped on the keyboard with my right hand as the menu came up. I made arrangements to have the Hummingbird hangared and fueled, its engines and drive train serviced, and its avionics package tested remotely, only—when the bandit's off, it's transparent to remote testing.

Someone cleared his throat behind me.

"I'll be done in a minute," I said, "just finishing—"

He cleared his throat again.

"—or you could just use another terminal."

He tapped me on the shoulder.

Now I was starting to get angry. "Do that again, and you'll eat that finger." I asked the machine to repeat the price list for various tiedown and hangaring services. If he was going to be annoying, I'd take more time.

"If you are Cadet Candidate Emile von du Mark,
Mister,
you have exactly three seconds to turn around and come to attention, or you will be
former
Cadet Candidate Emile von du Mark."

I pulled my thumb from the slot and turned around.

"You call that attention?" he asked. Rhetorically, I assumed. He was a tall, raw-boned man in his early twenties, dressed in Academy White informals, his cap firmly on his head. I couldn't—then—read the short row of cadet ribbons over his heart, but I did see the two broken silver stripes on each sleeve.

Goddam.
He was a cadet lieutenant—not just a j.g. The ident bar on the right side of his uniform blouse said
BRUBAKER.
I pulled my shoulders back.

"Never mind." Smiling sadly, he shook his head slowly. "Slouch. It comes much more naturally to you. I am Cadet Lieutenant Ernest Brubaker."

"Pleased to—"

"You don't speak out when you're slouching at attention. Are you Cadet Candidate Emile von du Mark?"

"Yes, I—"

"First lesson. Cadet Candidate Emile von du Mark. When you speak to an upperclassman, the first word out of your mouth will be 'sir.' The last word out of your mouth will be 'sir.' Both the words are the same; I hope they won't strain your puerile little memory." He looked at me, a corner of his mouth twisted up.

"Sir. Yes—"

"Second lesson, Cadet Candidate von du Mark. Except when answering a question, you do not address an upper-classman without asking permission."

Pray tell, how do I ask permission to talk to you? Would you like me to stick a love note in your shorts?

I thought it, but I didn't say that—this fellow had me fully intimidated.

"Very good. You have your orders with you?"

"Y-sir. Yes, sir." I don't know what it was, but this Brubaker person actually had me stuttering as I reached for my hip pocket.

"I didn't ask to see them," he said.

As I let my hand drop to my side, he sneered again. "They read in part, and I quote, '. . . inasmuch as you have accepted Cadet Candidate status, you are required to report, utilizing public transportation, to the Thousand Worlds Naval Academy at New Haven NAF on 4 September 2247.' Correct?"

"Yes."

He pretended not to hear me.

"Sir. Yes, sir."

"Very well. Now, for your information, Mister von du Mark, the Whale that just landed is the last regularly scheduled public carrier due into New Haven before the reporting deadline, and of all the six hundred-odd cadet candidates, all but one had either previously reported or were on that shuttle.

"Further—and again for your information—there are thirty-four cadet candidates sitting aboard a non-air-conditioned bus that is
supposed
to carry them immediately to the Academy, and I suspect that these, your future classmates, are none too pleased with you for blithely choosing to disobey the orders that said you were to report by public, and not private, transportation, and—yes, what is it?"

"Sir. The Hummingbird, sir, that I came in on, sir?"

"You didn't ask permission. But never mind—speak up, Cadet Candidate, speak up."

"Sir, it's owned and operated by the Public Transport division of the company that owns the Whale, sir. I believe that means that it is public transportation, sir."

"Huh?"

"Sir, my . . . father is von du Mark of Mark Airways, sir."

"Nicely put." Brubaker's smile grew broader; I had the feeling that he already knew that.

"Very,
very
good, Cadet Candidate von du Mark. Let me give you some more information. There are two things in the universe that I absolutely despise: rich boys, and barracks lawyers. Despite that, despite the fact that you are both of the things that I most despise, you might notice that I'm smiling. Have you noticed that, Cadet Candidate von du Mark?"

"Sir. Yes, sir."

"Doesn't it impress you as strange that I'd be smiling, given the situation?"

"Sir. Yes, sir."

"Oh? You think I'm strange, do you? Never mind, Mister, we can discuss your lack of respect for an upper-classman later. The reason that I'm smiling, Mark, is that it is going to be my great personal pleasure to run your rich barracks lawyer's ass out of the Academy. Now, about that landing of yours—did you override the autopilot?"

As I opened my mouth to deny the accusation, he raised a warning finger. "Say whatever you want now, Cadet Candidate von du Mark. Right now, you're a cadet candidate—but if you pass your physical and take the oath, you will be a cadet—of sorts—and cadets don't lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate others who do. Understood?"

"Sir. Yes, sir."

"Now, was that a legal landing?"

I didn't say anything. He probably couldn't kick me out for it, but he might try.