Nerve Center (12 page)

Not the Megafortress. With a sleek needle nose, an ultra-clean fuselage, carbon-fiber reinforced wings, and a modified tailplane assembly, the EB-52 could accelerate through a forty-five-degree climb from one thousand feet, its speed touching 423.5 knots even though it carried a simulated weapons load of 28,000 pounds of iron bombs.

“We can go faster,” Cheshire said as they climbed through seven thousand feet. She’d let him take the pilot’s seat to continue his training.

“Engines at max,” said Dog.

“Engines at maximum power,”
concurred the computer. “We should have more thrust,” complained Cheshire. “Eight thousand feet, going to ten thousand.”

The outboard J57’s rumbled noisily, as if Major Cheshire had annoyed them. Still, the airplane’s indicated airspeed slipped back toward four hundred knots. Cheshire made some adjustments on her side of the control panel, but nothing seemed to have an effect. They reached ten thousand feet; Bastian began pushing the nose down, trimming the plane for level flight.

“Air speed 380 knots,”
reported the computer.

“How can that be?” said Dog.

“Problem with Test Engine Two,” reported Cheshire, a moment before the computer flashed a warning on the status screen. The PW4074/DX engine’s oil pressure shot down, then up off the scale. The temperature went red as well.

“Shutting down Two,” reported Cheshire.

“Two, yes, shutting down Two,” said Dog. His mind hesitated for a moment, his brain momentarily caught between a dozen different thoughts. The synapses were temporarily clogged by the memory of the only time in his life that he’d lost an engine in flight and couldn’t get it relit.

Unfortunately, it was in an F-16 over the Atlantic. No amount of restarts, no amount of curses, could bring is back. He’d bailed out into a moonless night at ten thousand feet—and even with plenty of time to contemplate how cold the water would be, he’d underestimated the chill by half.

But he was in a Megafortress now.

“Trimming to compensate,” Dog said calmly, remembering the routine Bree had taught him during the simulations.

“Good,” said Cheshire. “Okay. Okay,” she sang, running through the instruments on her side.

The Megafortress wobbled slightly. Mo’s speed continued to drop steadily, but he was still in control.

“I’m going to bank around and try for Runway Two,” Bastian told Cheshire.

“Two’s no good,” said Nancy. “The Flighthawks are using it for touch-and-go’s. Three is our designated landing area.”

“Three then.” Bastian clicked his radio transmit button. “Dreamland Tower, this is Missouri. We have an emergency situation. One engine is out. Request permission to land on Runway Three.”

“Tower. We acknowledge your emergency. Stand by.”

Dog started to bank the plane. His hands were a little shaky and the artificial horizon showed he was tipping his wing a little too much.

“Temp in Engine Three going yellow, going—shit—climbing—red,” reported Cheshire.

She said something else, but Dog couldn’t process it. His stomach started fluttering to the side, as if it had somehow pulled loose inside his body.

Relax, he told himself. You can do this.

“Nine thousand feet, going to eight thousand,” said Cheshire.

“Shut down Engine Three,” said Dog.

“Through the turn first,” prompted Cheshire. “I’m on the engine, Colonel,” she explained.

Dog came out of the turn, leveling the wings while still in a gentle downward glide. Cheshire did a quick run through the indicators on the remaining engines, reporting that they were in the green. The tower came back, clearing them to land.

“Six thousand feet,” said Cheshire. “One more orbit?”

“I think so,” said Dog. But as he nudged into the bank, his left wing started to tip precipitously; the Megafortress began bucking and threatening to turn into a brick.

“Problem with the automatic trim control,” reported Cheshire. “System failure in the automated flight-control computer, section three—the backup protocol for the engine tests introduced an error. All right, hang with it. This won’t be fatal.”

She then began running through some numbers, recording the section problems that the flight computer was giving her on the screen. Under other circumstances—like maybe sitting on the ground in his office—Dog would have appreciated the technical details and the prompt identification of the problem. Now, though, all he wanted was a solution.

“We’re going to have to fly without the computer,” said Cheshire finally. “I can’t lock this out and it will be easier to just land and we can debug on the ground.”

“I figured that out,” said Dog, wrangling the big plane through the turn.

“If you want me to take it, just say the word.”

He felt his anger boiling up, even though he knew she didn’t mean it as an insult. “No, I’m okay,” he said. “Tell me if I’m doing anything wrong.”

“Wide turns,” she said. “Very wide turns. We’re more like an airliner than a fighter jet.”

“Yup.”

Part of him, a very, very small part of him, wanted to turn the plane over to Cheshire. A strong case could be made that it was the right thing to do—when all was said and done, he was a green pilot trying to deal with a very big problem. Even if he wasn’t in over his head, it made sense to turn the stick over to Cheshire.

But Dog was way too stubborn for that. And besides, he wasn’t in over his head—he came through another orbit much more smoothly, having worked the plane down to two thousand feet. They legged into final approach with a long, gentle glide.

“Come on, Mo,” said Cheshire, talking to the plane. “You can do it, baby.”

“Yeah, Mo,” said Dog. “Go for it, sister.”

Whether she heard them or not, the EB-52 stepped down daintily on the desert runway, her tires barely chirping.

She poked her nose up slightly, perhaps indignant to find a full escort of emergency vehicles roaring alongside her. But Bastian had no trouble controlling her, bringing her to a rest near the secondary access ramp at the middle of the field.

“Good work, Colonel,” said Cheshire. “You handled that like a pro. Maybe we
will
use you as a pilot when Pistol and Billy leave.”

ANTARES Bunker
27 January, 0755

KEVIN NODDED AT THE GUARD AS THE GATE SWUNG back from the road, the panel of chain links groaning and clicking as the metal wheels whirled. While the path was wide enough for a tractor-trailer, no vehicles were allowed past the checkpoint, not even the black SUVs used by Dreamland security.

Madrone proceeded past the gate and the three cement-reinforced metal pipes that stuck up from the roadway, walking toward the pillbox that served as the entrance to the ANTARES lab. Made of concrete, the building bore the scars from its use long ago as a target area for live-fire exercises, though it had been at least two decades since the last piece of lead had ricocheted off the thick gray exterior. The interior somehow managed to smell not only damp, but like fried chicken, perhaps because the main vents from the underground complex ran through an access shaft next to the stairway.

Madrone nearly lost his balance as he stepped down the tight spiral stairway. All of the qualifying tests for ANTARES had taken place over at Taj; coming to the lab yesterday had been a revelation—truthfully, he didn’t even know it existed. The bunker facility had actually not been used during the program’s first phase, except for some minor tests; it was only after ANTARES was officially shut down that the computers and other gear were consolidated here. Geraldo had been using it as an office and lab for a few months, but the scent of fresh paint managed to mingle with the heavier odors as Ma-drone stepped off the stairway and across the wide ramp. No human guards were posted beyond the gate, and like the rest of Dreamland, there were no signs to direct anyone; it was assumed that if you had business here, you knew where you were going.

The metal ramp led to a subterranean catacomb area with three large metal doors, none of which looked as if they had been opened in years. Madrone went to the door on the right, which was the only one that worked. It was also the only one with a magnetic card reader. He pushed his ID into the slot and the door slowly creaked upward. He took a breath, then ducked beneath it, passing into a long hallway whose raked cement walls and dull red overhead lights continued the early-bomb-shelter motif. At the end of the hallway he turned right, and was immediately blinded by light; before his eyes could adjust the door in front of him slid open, activated by a computer security system similar to the one that governed Taj’s elevator.

Now the ambiance changed dramatically. He stepped onto a plush green carpet and walked down the hallway, barely glancing at the Impressionist paintings—elaborate canvas transfer prints complete with forged brush strokes like the real thing. As he neared Lab Room 1, the adagio of a Mozart Concerto—K.313, for flute and orchestra—filtered into the hallway, and he smelled the light perfume of Earl Grey tea.

“Good morning, Kevin, come in, come in,” said Dr. Geraldo.

She was wearing a lab coat and her customary severe suit, but otherwise seemed more like a matron welcoming visitors to the family estate than a staid scientist. She ushered Kevin to a thick leather chair and went to get him some tea; somewhere along the way he’d mentioned that he preferred it to coffee.

“And a pineapple Danish,” she said, appearing with a plate and cloth napkin. “Did you sleep well?” the psychiatrist asked him.

“As a matter of fact I did,” he told her. “Best I’ve slept in weeks. Didn’t have any dreams.”

“We always have dreams,” she said gently. “You mean that you don’t remember them.”

“True.”

“How many cigarettes have you had this morning?”

Kevin laughed—not at her stern-grandmother scowl, but at the realization that he hadn’t had any. He hadn’t even thought of it.

“I think your pills are a cure for nicotine fits,” he suggested.

“If so, you and I will share a fortune,” she said kindly. Geraldo glanced toward his thumbs, which Kevin belatedly pulled into his fists; that was one habit he hadn’t yet broken. “You’ve gained weight. Very good. You did your exercises?”

“Yes, ma’am. Full hour.”

“Let me look at your spider,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to examine the side of his skull above his ear. It was a bit of a joke—the integrated circuit placed there to facilitate the ANTARES connection looked like a flattened spider. “Itchy?”

“Not today,” said Kevin.

“Yes, I think it’s fine. I think it was only the irritation from the shaving bothering you.”

He sipped his tea. Inside the next room, Geraldo’s two assistants were making last-minute adjustments to the equipment. One of them made a joke that somehow involved the word “monkey,” and the other laughed.

Monkey. That’s what he was.

Madrone concentrated on the Danish as Geraldo reviewed the results of yesterday’s session. She gave brain wave and serotonin levels, which he knew wouldn’t be encouraging—they had failed to make a link.

The thing was, he didn’t quite know what making a link really meant. Geraldo said it would be like shaking hands with the computer, except that it would seem imaginary. He’d feel it more than think it.

Neither description cleared up his confusion. Zen, who had gone through ANTARES before his crash, described it as a smack on the head with an anvil, followed by the warm buzz of a beer when you’d spent the day working outside in the sun.

That didn’t help either. Not only had he never been hit by an anvil, Madrone rarely drank, and frankly didn’t like the loss of control that came with being buzzed, let alone drunk.

Geraldo bent down in front of him, so close he could smell the tea on her breath. “You’re worried this morning.”

“A little nervous.” He felt his thumb twitch.

“You’ll be fine,” she told him. “The link will come. It takes time. Everyone is different. There are different pathways. Trust me.”

Shorn of its classified and complicated science, descriptions of the ANTARES system tended to sound either like Eastern religion or sci-fi fantasies. The bottom line was an age-old dream—ANTARES allowed a subject’s brain to control mechanical devices. It was hardly magic, however. The subject could not simply think an item into existence, nor could he—for some reason not totally understood, no woman had ever been an effective ANTARES subject—move items by simply thinking of them. Thought impulses, which corresponded to minute chemical changes in synapses in different sections of the brain, controlled a series of sensitive ultralow-voltage electrical switches in the ANTARES interface unit, which in turn controlled the external object—in this case a gateway to a special version of C3, the Flighthawk control computer.

But before Madrone could interface with C3, he had to reach Theta-alpha, the scientists’ shorthand for a mental state where he could produce and control the impulses of the hippocampus in his brain. The production of the waves were measured on an electroencephalograph. All humans, in fact all carnivorous animals, produced such waves. But few people could actually control them, let alone use them to project thoughts as instructions. Successful ANTARES subjects could do just that, using the brain waves as extensions of their thoughts, in effect talking to a computer without bothering to use their mouths.

In Theta-alpha, the brain began utilizing resources that it normally didn’t tap. Or as an ANTARES researcher explained it on the introductory video: “Areas of the brain that normally go unused are suddenly put into service to control autonomous functions. The average person uses only thirty percent of his available brain capacity, but under Theta-alpha, the other seventy percent is suddenly put on line.”

That seventy percent would be augmented by the computers it was interfaced with. When he mastered Theta and ANTARES, Kevin would tap into their memories and, to some extent, computational abilities.

ANTARES had physical components. A special diet, drugs, and feedback manipulated serotonin and other chemical levels in the subject’s brain. A chip implant in the skull supplied and regulated the vital connection to the ANTARES input and output system: this was physically taped to a receptor or, alternatively, overlain by a copper connection band in the ANTARES control helmet. ANTARES subjects had to either sit in a special chair or wear a flight suit that contained a sensor that ran parallel to their spine, allowing the ANTARES monitoring units to record peripheral nervous-system impulses. But the most important component was the subject’s mind, and his will to extend beyond himself. Kevin had to think himself beyond the interface into the object itself. As Geraldo was fond of saying, he had to discover a way to think in harmony with the machine. He needed to invent a new language with its own feelings, metaphors, and even thoughts.