Planet America (28 page)

"Do you know how to shut that thing off?" he asked. Gordon nodded to Zarex, who then leaned over and hit the control panel's deact panel. The holo-girl disappeared in a flash.

The room fell dead silent. The wind was suddenly howling outside. Rain was on its way.

"How much of this do you believe, Steve?" the President asked Gordon directly.

The CIA man replied, "By her own admission, she is a spy. It is an essential business of spies to spread lies. Believe me, I know. And it seems impossible to know where she came from, much beyond what she told us. So, she could be programmed to tell lies as easily as she could be to tell the truth. Even she wouldn't know the difference. But here's the problem: Her information is so grave, so dire, we must take even a suggestion of it seriously. Plus, it
does
fill in a lot of empty spaces in our past. And, according to our three new friends here, such shifting around of planets and stars is quite common. Everywhere else but here."

The President took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes.

"OK, Steve, I'll ask you this just one time: Do you really want me to believe such outrageous claims by a bunch of people dressed like
comic book characters
?"

Gordon did not hesitate.

"Yes sir," he said. "I do."

The President threw his glasses on the desk and ran a hand through his thinning, uncombed hair. He was extremely agitated now, for real.

"Well," he finally said. "Is there any way we can confirm any of this? Some way to check* it out? See if any of it is true?"

That's when Hunter stepped forward and spoke for the first time.

"Excuse me, sir," he said. "But I believe there is."

15

The place was called Andrews Field.

It was in a fairly isolated area just outside Washington, D.C., once a huge working farm, now abandoned. Hunter had been out here for two hours now, working on the flying machine with his electron torch. The idea he'd put forth to the President was simple: Let him leave the planet in his aircraft and investigate whether the holo-girl was telling the truth.

Weary and confused, the President agreed. His only caveat was that Hunter take off from a location that was isolated from public view. The last thing they needed now was more UFO stories in the newspapers. So Andrews Field was found and quickly cordoned off by armed CIA agents. That had been around four a.m.

It was now almost six. Hunter had watched the stars blink out above the field, and then the storm clouds started to gather. A convenient downpour would further mask his ascent, which was just minutes away. Though the woods were crawling with CIA agents, for the most part they left him alone to work. He'd reduced his cockpit back to its original proportions, before he'd taken to carrying Tomm, Zarex, and 33418 around with him. This enabled him to shave three feet off the fuselage and shorten his wingtips as well. He'd be battling winds and a lot of rain once he got aloft, "inclement weather," as Tomm had called it. The sleeker his plane's aerodynamic profile, the better. He'd also fabricated an oxygen tank and a breathing system, and, for the first time, there was a safety harness attached to his seat.

Hunter was taking these precautions because he was not intending to launch in his normal split-second fashion.

Why? Because of the "missing two seconds."

He had a theory as to why he'd caused time to stop twice that night back in Mayfield. Though it came to him after hearing the holo-girl's claims the second time around, the spark actually went back to his early days in the X-Forces. The key weapon in the Fourth Empire's vast inventory was the Time Shifter technology employed by the Kaon Bombardment ships. Once in orbit, they had the ability to literally freeze time on the battlefield below, allowing Empire troops to touch down and make quick work of their foes. During his short stint as an X-Forces officer, Hunter had heard someone mention that Time Shifters worked by encompassing their target inside a kind of bubble in which all time stopped. Be it a city or an enemy stronghold or even an entire planet. Once the enemy was vanquished, the bubble was dissolved, and time went back to normal.

The science of shifting was a closely held secret, possessed by the Fourth Empire alone. Hunter was now wondering if this technology and what the holo-spy called time bubbles were distantly related, similar somehow. Could a time bubble be an ancient form of time shifting, something left in place, rather than being dissipated once a battle was won? If so, would everything inside the bubble remain more or less frozen in time? Is that
really
what happened here on this tiny planet? According to the holo-spy, it was.

All mis led to a second question: What if a long-standing time bubble was disturbed in any way? How? By operating another time-shifting device
within
it. That's the other thing Hunter recalled someone mentioning to him. That shifting time inside time that's already been shifted was not a prudent thing to do. The person had said, "It can screw up a lot of things in a lot of different ways."

Trouble was, the propulsion unit for Hunter's flying machine was based on time-shifter technology. He didn't know how it worked exactly; no one did. But its critical components had come from a Kaon Bombardment ship he'd found crashed on Fools 6. The wreck proved to be a treasure trove of time-shifter secrets.

He knew the way his aircraft moved was partly an illusion: It only appeared to be going incredibly fast in ultradrive. In reality, it was shifting through time. But was this enough to affect a time bubble?

That's what he suspected. When he activated his flying machine those two times back in Mayfield, it might have caused a ripple across the time bubble. In those two seconds, the entire planet froze, and therein lay the problem: If the two little hops had produced such an effect here, what would have happened had he booted up to full power? What if the ripples had suddenly become a tidal wave? One that lasted an hour or two? Would he have popped the time bubble completely? Would that have thrown this planet back to where it was ages ago? What happens when an entire planet reverts back several thousand years in just a second or two? When there are suddenly rivers where no rivers had been, high ocean waves instead of beachfront property. No electricity, no power, no roads, no bridges. The potential for widespread devastation would seem very high.

So what did all this mean? Especially for the upcoming flight? Safe to say, taking off would be a little more complicated than just revving his machine up to near full volume, disappearing in a microsecond. He would have to be very careful with his velocity. He'd used just the barest fraction of his aircraft's ultradrive power during the two Mayfield flights. He couldn't even come close to those speeds again, at least until he reached orbit and presumably escaped the invisible membrane of the time bubble. This meant that for the upcoming mission he would have to take off and ascend slowly, building to a maximum speed less than that of his Mayfield trips.

The fastest he'd gone on that night was fifteen miles a second—with all those seconds of both trips actually reduced to about 1/lOOOth of a second, the miniscule time-frame in which his flying machine operated whenever he engaged his power systems. If he cut that number in half, and only rose to the max gradually, things should be all right. And here he was lucky. In the real world, half fifteen miles a second was about 18,000 miles an hour, or seven miles a second.

That was almost the exact velocity he needed to break free of this planet.

Dawn came, and so did the rain. Hunter was ready for takeoff.

Hunter took a deep breath from his oxygen mask—a bulky necessity for this unusual ascent—and did one last check of his flight instruments. Everything was reading green.

This was going to be different right from the start; that much was evident now. Usually, he needed just an infinitesimal amount of roll-off to get his machine off the ground. But because of the two-second problem, even the takeoff would have to be done in a more conventional manner: rolling down the long field, building up speed, and getting some lift under his wings. Flight should soon follow.

He positioned the flying machine at the far end of the field. One more deep breath, helmet visor down. He glanced to either side of him. Small groups of CIA agents were watching him from the woods. He looked at the long, grassy airstrip in front of him; two miles away was a large grove of trees. He gripped his control tighter. Did he really know how to do this?

The last modification he'd made had been to his throttle bar. He'd stretched a piece of very low-tech electrical tape across the mechanism's gear channel. This would block the throttle from moving forward more than a half inch, the speed he'd determined would be safe enough to use, until he got to orbit at least. Then he could finally let it rip.

The rain was splattering on his canopy now. One of the CIA men in the woods was sending him a hand signal. The immediate area was clear of civilians. Time to go. Hunter pulled his safety harness tight, took one last gulp of oxygen, and then edged the throttle ahead about the width of a hair.
Bam
! He was thrown back against his seat with such force his helmet strap broke. The flying machine went zooming down the field at a violent, heavy speed. Those trees two miles away were on him in an instant. Only by pure instinct did Hunter yank back on his control stick and jerk the flying machine into the air, clipping off the tops of several pines in the process.

He banked hard left to avoid even more trees; in retrospect, he should have gone right. That would have put him out over the water in just a few seconds. Instead, he found himself streaking right above a highway that was crowded with morning commuters heading into D.C. The aircraft was traveling at nearly two miles a second, much faster than he'd anticipated, but there really wasn't anything he could do about it. That was its lowest speed.

Hunter finally adjusted full right and tried once again to ease back the speed, but it was impossible. So he simply yanked his control stick again and pulled on the nose of the aircraft until he was pointing straight up.

That's when the voice inside asked a very simple question: Had he done this before?

Had he, in his distant past, strapped on a machine like this and pointed its nose skyward, ascending so lightly as if in a dream? The sensations washing through him as he shot up through the rain clouds, into the blue morning sky—they seemed so familiar. This was not like flying at two light-years a second. Moving at that speed wasn't flying at all. It was just that: moving. From here to there, through time and hence the illusion of great speed. But it was not flying.

Flying was when the atmosphere had an effect on what your aerial machine could and could not do. Flying was wind. Flying was heat. Flying was metal and cold air crashing into each other, head-on, and turning that metal sizzling hot. Flying was actually a battle against the resistance of flight. With power and skill and daring and a touch of insanity—from that mix, somehow winning the war.

Hunter felt his hand grip the control stick even tighter as he passed through thirty-thousand feet. He began breathing deeply from the oxygen mask. The high g-forces—never a factor in ultradrive—had him pinned against his seat. The sun was burning his face, around his eyes, along his cheekbones, on the bottom of his forehead. Not like the burn one got from flying too fast for too long in space. That was a glow, stuck under the skin. This was the burn of a star, close by, one that looked awfully big from this perspective. Still, its warmth felt good on his face.

Yes, Hunter had done this before. The way the electricity was rushing out of his body, through the steering control, through the control panel, out to each square millimeter of the aircraft's frame and back again, this was a feeling.
The
feeling. It was not about what was pushing him through the air but rather that he was actually doing it, seemingly against all odds. Against the law of gravity.

And that's when two words popped into his head. Just two words, but he knew right away what they meant, and suddenly he had the first real memory of what he might have been before he found himself on Fools 6 that dark night. Just two words, yet they'd managed to make an impossible leap over several thousand years from who and what he was before to now, this moment. All because this ascent into these sun-drenched, clear blue skies was something he'd done so many times before, it would have been impossible for his psyche to keep the secret down any longer.

Two words:
Fighter pilot
.

That's what I used to be....

The spell was broken right after his aircraft passed through seventy thousand feet.

He twisted the plane on its tail and looked over his shoulder. The funny little world was quickly dropping away from him.

Very soon now, his flying machine would have to become a spacecraft again. This was where it might get hairy. He removed the strip of electrical tape and eased the throttle up a notch. Again, he was slammed back against his seat. Just a touch, and he was suddenly going seventy-five hundred miles per hour.

Another touch, he was at nine thousand miles per hour.

Another, eleven thousand, then thirteen.

Hunter suddenly crossed his fingers. Another kiss of the throttle. Another deep breath. He was now going fifteen thousand miles per hour ... straight up.

His machine was shaking violently now. Yes, he knew every bolt and seam in the aircraft, and at the moment, he imagined each and every one of them was coming undone. He'd come a long way just to break apart trying to get off this tiny little world. Is that the way it would be?

He held on, fingers still crossed, aircraft still shaking. Speed at seventeen thousand five hundred.

Then came a bright flash, and everything ... just... slowed ... down.

He was in orbit.

So far, so good.

He quickly killed the throttle and drifted up to an altitude of 110 miles. Then he turned his craft over.