Pulse: When Gravity Fails (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 1) (2 page)

2

Captain Michael Strove – Pacific Ocean off the coast of Russia

Captain Michael Strove banked and put a little more distance between his wing and the imaginary wall of air that represented Russian waters. He was well within International water, but the three Russian megs racing into his radar from the south told him that they did not fully trust his judgment. These cat and mouse games were common practice, but since the collision over the Black Sea on the other side of the continent, these games were more tense.

Michael thought he could understand their point. If a Russian fighter came fifteen miles off the coast of America, they would have an even stronger reaction. It wasn’t Michael’s place to decide whether his missions were the best decision. He was just to carry them out successfully.

The bogies were closing the distance behind him and spreading out their formation. They weren’t locking weapons yet, so that was good. When he was a kid, he and his older brother Carter had played fighter pilots. They always imagined seeing the enemy and watching the bullets ring off of metal. The reality was that dog fights occurred too far away to see each other with the naked eye usually. If it turned violent, missiles would close the distance and make the red and green dots disappear from the screen.

He supposed if they collided over the Black Sea, that was a different story.

Michael decided he had stirred enough trouble and put on speed toward the north. The Russians increased speed as he expected.

He saw the pulsing colors of the northern lights twisting in the darkness of the sky ahead. The water was shockingly blue as it curved over the horizon toward the Bering Strait.

He was on radio silence until he was back within American territory on his way back to the base in Alaska. He thought it probably didn’t matter if the enemy already had him, but they were orders and it wasn’t his place to disobey them.

He prepared to bank again, but then lights became blindingly bright before vanishing. He blinked and stared forward for a moment longer. Then the lights returned, but ran through the range of colors in a rapid pattern. It didn’t look real. They twisted into circles like they were following some current then into a flowing knot that reminded him of the infinity symbol.

The view twisted and the ocean turned from the familiar curve of the Earth from this altitude to a tunnel where the water appeared to loop around onto itself. The northern lights burned in the center. Michael got the sensation that the plane was corkscrewing and that’s what created the distortion.

When he looked down at the instruments, he realized he was flying right. Though his senses told him to pull out of the spin, his training told him to trust the instruments. The reason rich doctors and the sons of important politicians crashed their private planes was because they wanted to believe their eyes and feelings. They would get lost in storms and come out flying upside down refusing to trust that they were wrong and the instruments were right.

Captain Stove prepared to bank out over the ocean to see if the Russians would break off on open water before they intercepted. Then, the instruments winked out.

“Now I’m in trouble.” He heard his voice over the speakers in his own helmet.

They sputtered back on, but rattled through data with the same confusion he was seeing outside.
Now there is no one to trust
, he thought.

The engine tone changed and the metal screamed around him as he felt the G forces increase like he was in a hard roll. The intermittent images on the screen still told him he was flying right, but he felt the blood leaving his head and he wanted to toggle out of a spin he wasn’t actually in.

The canopy cracked and the white lines of fracture spider webbed out above him. The material was a polymer plastic and could be destroyed a dozen different ways, but cracking like glass was not one of them.

The automated female voice began rattling off a damage report. The data scrolled over the screen faster than she could nag it into his ears in her soothing tone.

Despite the force pressing down on him, he forced his head and shoulders up to look across the craft in a visual check. The smart materials of the fighter were morphing with a pressure that he had to now believe was real. On the ground, the seams across the wings were open and even leaked, but in flight, the bird was solid and flexible. As the wings bowed under the forces outside, the seams were opening again in flight.

He felt the response of the plane change. In the midst of her running damage report, Michael heard that he was losing altitude.

He was over cold water. If he ejected, which could be fatal at these speeds anyway, he would land in the frigid ocean. He could freeze to death or best case, be rescued by the Russians. He could fly in and eject over land, but after the Black Sea incident, that would create enormous problems – maybe even an international incident.

More importantly, Captain Strove’s fighter had proprietary technology. The Russians recovering his wreckage would be worse than the Pakistani army discovering the stealth helicopter after the mission against Bin Laden’s compound.

He knew he had to put the craft down in the water. It wasn’t good enough to eject and let it crash for the Russians to fish out. He had to spear it in hard enough to break it up and put the pieces on the bottom. That would give his people time to secure the site and prevent the Russians from mounting a recovery. One airman dead would be a letter home, but no international crisis.

Captain Michael Strove decided to take the craft as far out into the ocean toward U.S. waters before he crashed to make it as easy for his side and as hard for theirs as he could. It wouldn’t be far though. He was losing altitude fast and the plane was acting like it was carrying three times its weight.

Michael thought about Carter. Their father had died of a heart attack years ago. Their mother was in a nursing home and didn’t remember much most of the time. Carter would go to tell her after he got the letter, but she wouldn’t even remember him or Michael. Carter was going to carry the burden of this all alone. This would be a crisis of one.

The weight lifted off the wings and the plane rocketed upward in response to the force that Michael was still trying to fight, but was suddenly gone. The view outside popped back to normal and the plane tumbled as it soared upward.

The instruments stopped flickering, but the damage report still lilted in a woman’s soothing tones inside his helmet. Michael fought the spin and righted the plane only to find he was flying over Russian waters.

He banked hard to loop back on course. “You lied to me.”

The computer still soothingly listed everything that was broken despite his accusation.

He caught sight of the three bogies on radar. They were flying wild. One was looping hard over land, another was zig zagging out to sea, and the third vanished off of the radar not far behind Michael which meant either blown up or down.

Michael decided to see if he could crash in Alaska just for the hell of it. He wanted to get away as fast as possible in case the Russian nearest him had dropped under radar for an attack.

The G forces settled onto him again harder than before and he cursed. The instruments flashed on and off. The smart materials bowed and the controls locked.

Michael tried to fight to break it free, but he raced forward and off course.

He saw he was over land now and it had to be Russia. He cursed again and then he started to pray.

Black spots filled his vision from the edges like insects crawling over and covering the controls in front of him. He heard his own, harsh breathing in his ears through the speakers. His fingers went numb and he wasn’t sure if he was holding the controls anymore.

Before he blacked out, Michael saw the land below him become water again even though he had not changed course as the fighter undulated on the wind with its locked controls. Some part of his hazy mind knew that was important, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to make out why.

Michael whispered. “Sorry, Carter.”

3

Roman Nikitin – Taiga forest region, eastern Russia, ranger outpost 327

Roman Nikitin weaved between the trees on his way up the slope. The ground went from the spongy feel of moss, leaf bed, and high water table to the rockier surface of the hill. He saw the observation tower near the top in a break between the conifers that clung to this hill. He had to navigate by sight points as there was no proper trail even after all these months of patrolling the same area.

The loggers were almost close enough to see from the towers now. He could sometimes spot the smoke plumes from their work. Soon they would be cutting bare patches through the landscape. Half of Roman felt bad about nature being scarred for progress this deep in the wilderness. The other half of him hoped they cut down every tree in Russia as he was here on partial exile for being born into the wrong family that made enemies with the wrong family.

He reached high enough that he could see the river to the north. It was not an important river to most people and did not even appear on most maps. It was important to Roman because it marked the southern border of a military camp. If he wandered across, he would likely be shot. Part of his job as an exiled ranger was to stop explorers and loggers from accidentally crossing into the dead zone. There had never been explorers and the loggers had not yet come nearly this far.

The crackling noise echoed through the dense forest behind him. Roman turned and looked back through the trees. He was still not high enough to spot what the cause was. He had played it off to loggers being closer than he thought the first time. He decided it was just rotten trees falling the second time. But now he was running out of logical answers.

His mother had believed there were spirits in the wilderness of Russia – that the empire had earned many ghosts. She considered herself Russian, but had strong reasons to distrust the motherland. Roman’s father spent most of his life trying to keep her quiet about her concerns, spiritual or otherwise, around other people. If she were still alive, she would blame herself for Roman’s exile.

Roman pictured tigers. He had been assured a dozen times that there were no tigers in this part of Russia, but his superiors had lied to him often. The radio and electricity in the abandoned listening post that served as his ranger station and cabin did not work. They were also not easy to repair, if broken. Supplies did not come regularly and Roman was surviving by spending much of his days hunting animals for food instead of protecting them from illegal hunting.

“Tigers climb trees, but they wouldn’t be knocking them down,” Roman whispered to himself in Russian. “Unless they were very large tigers.”

He turned and continued his journey up the hill.

Roman reached the iron ladder and felt the rust grind off under his hands as he climbed. On a few of the steps, he felt the ladder waver on its connecting bolts. On a few other steps, he felt the entire tower shift with his weight and a light wind.

He reached the belly of the observation deck and pushed against the underside of the trapdoor. It was jammed shut from wear, rust, and the constant shifting of the poorly maintained tower. He pounded up on it until his wrist hurt.

Roman spouted out every Russian curse he knew twice plus a few Yiddish ones he had heard from his mother at night when she argued with his father. Roman twisted around on the ladder so that his boot was above him against the hatch. The entire ladder rocked hard to one side with the off balance stance. He fully expected to have the rungs snap under him and he would fall bodily into the jaws of a giant tiger sneaking through the trees below.

He bent his knee and kicked once, then twice. The door gave slightly. He drew back and kicked again feeling pain lace up through his joints. “Why do I go on with these empty comings and goings? I kick against the goads like a stupid donkey.”

He kicked again and the hatch burst open with a crash.

Roman righted himself and climbed up onto the deck. Safety regulations called for closing the hatch back, but Roman pictured himself dying of starvation trapped above the Russian wilderness. He determined to just not stumble through the opening and fall to his death.

He spoke a phrase in English he had learned from TV shows on the Internet before he was assigned a post with no electricity. “Note to self.”

Roman raised the binoculars to scan over the top of the forest looking for lost hunters, loggers, or evidence of giant tigers. He saw none.

The sound of another crack and crash rolled up past his ears in the tower. He leaned his elbows on the wood shelf of the open observation bay and scanned again.

He still didn’t see it, but kept his eyes to the lenses and the glasses aimed out toward the west below him. He mumbled in English. “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright …”

Roman knew the story of the meteorite striking in the middle of Siberia and flattening miles of forest in an instant. It had happened in the early part of the twentieth century, but like most stories in Russia, it was told as if it happened yesterday. The impact had been so great that it was like an atomic blast before the Americans ever invented and dropped the first bomb. Like most stories it Russia, some told it as something beyond natural – the invasion of some dark force from beyond this world.

Roman was farther south and east than the tundra of Siberia in the temperate forests of the Taiga. Also, if an atomic sized meteorite strike happened, he would not have time to wonder what it was. But maybe a shower of smaller rocks could strike. They might cause a fire that he had no chance of outrunning or one might punch right through his skull.
No one would even notice I was gone
, he thought.

“Taiga, Taiga, burning bright … Note to self: Do not get killed by falling space rock.”

He saw the tree go down and then the sound hit his ear a fraction of a second later. He looked for motion or a cause from the ground, but saw none. An entire row of trees went down like a band across the forest.

For the split second between the sight and the sound reaching him, Roman thought of loggers clear cutting, but that wasn’t right. The new clear space was also clear of people and machines. The drop had been instant like a great, invisible weight had fallen onto the forest all at once.

In the midst of the larger, felled timber, Roman saw smaller pines bent down along their flexible trunks. He thought they might be pinned under the larger trees, but some were standing alone near clearings. It was as if the smaller trees were bowing in respect to some unseen force.

Roman cursed in Russian and said, “I should have listened to your crazed rantings about spirits more closely, Mother.”

More individual trees crumbled around the edges of the band of destruction. Roman looked for a fissure or sink hole where the forest floor might be breaking over a magma pocket of some ancient, forgotten volcano, but there was nothing. The ground was whole.

Motion to the south drew his attention and he panned the binoculars. Another band of trees collapsed in the wake of the phenomenon. It was further from him and Roman could not see the exposed floor from his vantage this time. He could see the band was thinner this time, but miles longer.

He watched with his jaw open as thinner trees bowed slowly down from their tops.

“Show due respect to our invisible tiger master.”

Roman heard a screaming roar build around him. He looked around for the source and then lowered the glasses.

The fighter raced over the top of the tower close enough to shake the entire structure. Roman thought he was going to be flung right out the opening. A mist of gooey film lighted on his skin and smelled like spilled kerosene. As he watched the fighter drift down toward the forest, Roman touched the sticky paste over his arms. “Jet fuel?”

The fighter hit the trees and clipped through the ones that were still standing before gliding into the space of the open band like it were a prepared landing strip. “Was this a military operation?”

He brought the lenses back up which were partially obscured by the film of spilt fuel from the air. Roman cursed in English. “That’s not a Russian craft.”

As he watched the plane hit the ground in a tumble over the fallen timber, Roman saw the smaller trees rise from their bow like they were raising their heads to watch the crashing enemy plane.

More crackles and falling trees traveled up the hill below him. Roman took his view off the plane and followed the path of falling trees approaching him. “Is that you, Tiger?”

Roman felt his legs grow heavy and he felt dizzy. The binoculars increased in weight until he finally let go of them and they pulled on the strap along the back of his neck.

The hatch slammed closed behind him and then ripped loose tumbling down the ladder. He heard the scream of metal on metal and Roman dropped to his knees. “What is happening?”

The tower collapsed around him and Roman was plunged into painful darkness.