Crow's Gambit, page 12
part #1 of Sylphan Revelations Series
She left him to his investigations and looked over the rest of the craft. She ran her hand slowly over the nose and back down the fuselage to the swept wing. The back third was still covered by a large tarp. Obviously, the twin tail fins had not been reattached. She took the edge of the tarp and pulled it back part way. Most of the rear was missing the outer covering. Only two of the main engines were currently installed.
A gap showed where the other engine fit. Fuel lines and sensor connections hung loose waiting to be connected. She had worked with small jet engines and was familiar with the operation of large gas turbine generators. The engine arrangement here wasn’t like anything she had ever seen.
Borrowing Wang’s flashlight, she ducked under the protective sheet and slid under the guts of the XS-9 on a rolling creeper cart. She laid on her back, tracing lines and wires by running her hands over them to figure out where they came from and where they went.
There were two small rectangular ducts at the bottom which split off a larger one coming from the front of the aircraft. Each duct was in the process of being connected to the two engine’s compressors. It had to be some sort of ram scoop.
She knew the older X-37s had gotten their initial boost into orbit by riding on a rocket. Darrow said the XS-9, however, was designed to take off like a plane. Would an aircraft this size be able to carry enough fuel and oxidizer to get into orbit? Even the old space shuttle had to ride into space on the back of a giant fuel tank. If this plane used an air-breathing engine, it wouldn’t need so much oxidizer stored on board.
Jet engines were also axial in nature. All the components were in one line with air flowing through them. The missing middle engine had to be something else. There was a place for something like a combustion chamber and an exhaust but no compressor inlet and no clear rotating components.
This was more like a traditional rocket engine. There was something wrong though and she couldn’t put her finger on it. She stared at the partial assembly from several angles trying to puzzle it out.
Without warning someone grabbed her leg and she was dragged from underneath the fuselage. A large hand grabbed her shirt, yanking her to her feet. The sudden blinding from the overhead lights cleared and she saw a burly, unshaven man holding her. He was wearing a security guard’s uniform.
A second guard appeared from around the corner. He dragged Wang in front of him, one arm holding Wang. In his other hand, he held Wang’s tablet. The boy’s eyes were large and scared.
“Move away from the aircraft.” The assistant stepped up next to them. “I’m afraid Dr. Howard has instructed me to have you removed from the building.”
“Did Dr. Howard tell you to assault us, too? We were told we’d have full access to the XS-9.” Her eyes darted around the area while she talked. To her side she noted a large metal socket wrench laying on the tool cabinet.
“Regardless, you are leaving.” The assistant nodded to the guard holding her.
He pulled out what looked like an electroshock handgun. It buzzed as it was primed, and she recoiled involuntarily.
Then she heard a soft metallic click. They had focused on her solely, and hadn’t noticed Gloria quietly come up behind them. She stood on the side of the assistant with what looked like a serious projectile handgun pointed at his temple. For a moment everyone froze where they were. The assistant shrank back from Gloria. Wang still looked terrified.
“You,” Gloria nodded at the man holding Wang. “Remove your arm, slowly.”
The man let go of Wang and raised his arm. Then he lunged at Gloria.
She twisted sideways to put the assistant between her and the charging guard.
The man grabbed the assistant by the shoulders and shoved him out of the way. Turning back, he ran right into Gloria’s fist as she released a hard hook. He stumbled backward and fell to the ground.
Taking advantage of the other guard’s distraction, Cassie reached over and grabbed the socket wrench. Swinging it like a baseball bat she connected with the side of the man’s face. His head snapped back as he crashed into the equipment behind them. His weapon clattered to the floor where she quickly grabbed it.
“Cassie take Wang to the car!” Gloria moved her body between them and the two guards, aiming her gun at them.
The assistant had already run out a back door.
She took Wang by the hand and ran toward the exit. When they were outside, they both jumped in the back of the sedan.
A few seconds later, Gloria appeared. When she reached the driver’s side of the car, she returned the gun to a holster under her coat. In moments they were speeding out of the facility grounds.
Her heart was racing as she tried to take deep breaths. No one said anything for several minutes. Once they reached the interstate with other cars around them everyone collectively relaxed.
Gloria kept glancing in the side and rearview mirrors, however.
Eventually Cassie couldn’t stand the silence. “Okay, what the fuck just happened? I thought we were working with the Smithsonian staff on the restoration. Why did they decide become assholes? Were they actually going to hurt us because we touched their half-finished plane?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried to contact Mr. Darrow but he’s in a meeting and can’t be disturbed. Neil isn’t answering either. I think it’s best if I take you both back to Crow Research.”
“And what? Pretend this never happened?” She realized her pulse was still running fast. It took a conscious effort to relax her muscles and let her fists unclench.
“No. After I drop you off, I will be returning to Washington to have a discussion with Dr. Howard.”
Cassie realized her hand still gripped the weapon the guard had dropped. The charge setting was on maximum. That definitely would not have felt good. Could it have killed me?
She studied it silently. Slowly she started to grind her teeth. “I think I’d like to go with you for that discussion.”
Gloria’s eyes flicked back to her in the mirror. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“If something is going on wouldn’t it be better to get there quicker and catch the doctor by surprise? And the Smithsonian is public. It’s not like anyone would try something there, right? And...”
Gloria raised her hand. “Stop. Let me think.”
Wang had been sitting silently throughout the conversation. In fact, he hadn’t said a thing since they’d jumped into the car. His eyes, and mind, seemed to be focused somewhere else.
“Wang?” His face turned toward Cassie slowly. “Wouldn’t you feel safer with Gloria right now than back home?” For several seconds he just stared at her.
“Yes,” he finally said in a faint voice.
“Well there you have it.” Cassie leaned back with her arms crossed. “That’s two to one. We have an appointment with Dr. Howard. I say we keep it.”
And I intend to get some answers.
Chapter 19
IN LESS THAN AN HOUR they were pulling into a reserved guest spot behind the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. To get there they had to drive past a throng of protestors.
Cassie couldn’t tell what they were chanting, but several of them were holding up signs with what reminded her of some old Celtic crosses she had seen. It looked like a cross with a circle in the center. No, not a circle. A sphere. It was familiar but she couldn’t remember what group it belonged to. Nervously she scanned the protestors and their signs for a circle with a hexagram inside it, the symbol for the Millenialists. She breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t spot any.
“Who are the protestors?” she asked Gloria.
“They come from different groups. There are always some out here trying to get the museum closed. They view it as a public danger. Most of them are harmless.”
“What’s that they’re chanting? Hey-hey, ho-ho?”
“These planes have got to go,” Gloria finished.
How clever.
She noticed Gloria removed her handgun and locked it in a gun case under the front seat. Darrow’s influence must not extend to a museum on the National Mall. She looked at the electroshock weapon she had taken, shoved it into her backpack, and put the backpack on the floor. It wouldn’t do her much good inside anyway.
Wang was still sitting quietly beside her staring at the floor. When Gloria got out of the car and opened his door he continued to sit there and didn’t move. Cassie glanced at Gloria and then Wang.
“Hey Wang, you coming?”
He sat unmoving. “People have tried to hurt me before. When my parents died,” his eyes darted to scan the protesters.
From their earlier discussion, Cassie knew Wang’s parents were dead but not how. He also hadn’t revealed what happened with the Roberts. Everything at the restoration facility had obviously dug up some buried memories and emotions. Someone would need to talk to him about it.
She looked up at Gloria with pleading eyes.
Gloria raised her eyebrows with an expression that said, coming here was your idea. She shrugged and jerked her head toward Wang. Counseling a teen boy about trauma didn’t seem to fall under her job description.
Fine.
“Why don’t you give us a couple minutes?” Gloria quietly assessed her, then nodded and shut the door.
“How are you doing, Wang?” Stupid question. Cassie scanned her memory for what people had said when her parents died. Finally, she settled on, “So, do you want to talk about it?”
He looked up at her now. “Those men were going to hurt us, weren’t they?”
“Maybe. Gloria wouldn’t have let that happen though.” Silently, she wondered what would have happened if Gloria hadn’t appeared. She had some questions for Dr. Howard.
She settled on a direct approach with Wang. “How did your parents die Wang? Were you there?”
He was quiet for a moment. “It happened when we were leaving China. Sometimes I think I remember it. I was only two though.” He shook his head in confusion. “But then I think I must be imagining it. You can’t really remember things from that age, can you?”
Flashes of her parents went through her mind. A picnic in some park. Riding a painted horse on a merry-go-round. Her mom helping her wash mud off her hands in the bathroom. The memories were abstract and fuzzy at the edges. She knew each had a nugget of truth at its core, but she couldn’t tell how much of the detail she had superimposed after the fact.
“You know, I understand how you feel.” He looked at her a little suspiciously, as if she were trying to trick him somehow. “I was only four when my parents died.”
His turned toward her slightly and his gaze shifted to her face. “Did they get ... you know, zapped? On Net-Day?”
“No, actually they didn’t. They died a couple days before, after the Sylph appeared, but before the Net-Day attack.” Now that she was committed, Cassie took a deep breath. Years had passed since she had talked about this. Since before Grandpa died. “They had taken new jobs in California and we were getting ready to move. I was staying with Grandpa in Minnesota while they were house hunting out west. Then the Sylph showed up.” She found herself swallowing against an unconscious tightening of her throat.
“Everyone was kind of panicking. I was too young to understand everything going on. Grandpa still took me to the park and pushed me on the swings, trying to pretend things were normal, but I could tell something was wrong. Or at least, that’s the way I remember it now. My parents tried to get home to us, but the airlines were already a mess because of the growing panic, not to mention the loss of some of the communications satellites.”
“So, what did they do?” Wang asked with curiosity.
Cassie smiled to herself. It seemed funny to talk about them like she knew them, but the truth was she barely remembered them. Most of what she knew came from stories her Grandpa had told her, a few old pictures, and some videos of when they were dating.
“My parents were both pilots. It was their hobby. They loved to fly. So naturally when they couldn’t get a flight home, they took the next quickest way. They rented a small twin propeller plane and planned to fly home themselves.”
His expression changed to a questioning one.
“Remember this happened before the Sylph started to take out planes. Before we sent up the missiles. My parents weren’t killed by aliens from space. They died due to simple mechanical failure. Somewhere just past the Sierra Nevada’s, they sent out a mayday call. Engine failure. Something to do with the fuel. Radar tracking showed the plane crash soon after that.”
“Did they find them?”
“No, the authorities never found the bodies. Everything was chaos by then. The Sylph started taking out the low orbit satellites ending any way to find the crash site using the emergency beacon or satellite imagery. Their plane went down in a remote region. After Net-Day there weren’t any planes and there wasn’t an easy way to reach the crash site. Besides everyone was busy with more pressing emergencies.”
“You mean they never found the crash?”
She looked at him and smiled sadly. “No, someone found it, eventually. About two years after Net-Day, there were these survivalists hiding out in the desert. When their food ran out, they came back to civilization. They reported finding the wreckage of a plane matching the one my parents were flying. When I was a little older, my Grandpa left me with some friends while he drove down and hired a guide to help him find the site. He confirmed it was their plane.”
“And their bodies?”
“Between the weather and the wildlife, there wasn’t much left. My Grandpa buried what he found there and built a stone cairn over their graves. He showed me pictures, but I’ve never been there to see it myself.”
They sat there silently for a minute.
“You lived with your grandfather, he raised you then?”
“Yes. We were all each other had. I loved him.” While she didn’t have many memories of her parents, she had tons of her Grandpa. She blinked a tear away and swallowed several times before continuing. “He died about two years ago. A congenital heart defect no one knew about. It was sudden.”
“I don’t have any family left either.” Wang laid his hand gently on hers. The effort it must have taken for this shy teenager to do that made fresh tears spring to her eyes.
As touching as the moment was, they were still sitting in the car. She realized she hadn’t done anything to lessen Wang’s anxiety. She reviewed what he told her.
He was only two when his parents died, so roughly five years after Net-Day. Of course. The New Dawn protests in China. The temporary collapse of the world economy had hit China especially hard. Food and power shortages had ravaged the region. Wang’s parents must have been trying to get out of the country during the resulting protests and riots.
Cassie glanced outside. It wasn’t just the men at the restoration facility that had upset Wang. It was the combination of that with the protesters. The whole situation must seem too familiar.
“Tell you what, instead of going in the staff entrance how about we go in the front through the museum?”
That would take them in the opposite direction of the protestors. Confronting Dr. Howard would just have to wait a few minutes. “What do you say we go look at some old planes on the way?”
He nodded slowly. “But maybe this time we shouldn’t touch anything.”
“Agreed.” Cassie replied smiling.
Chapter 20
THEY GOT OUT OF THE car and found Gloria waiting patiently. She was nodding as if she was talking to someone, but her lips weren’t moving. After a moment Cassie realized Gloria must have a communications implant. Only she was much better at using it than the agent in Milwaukee.
They walked around the block where Gloria led them through the main tourist entrance. The Air and Space Museum had been a popular tourist destination before Net-Day. Now it had a feeling of being run down and uncared for.
She could tell some displays and posters hadn’t been updated in years. The number of visitors was underwhelming. A few tour guides led small groups of older tourists around. Most looked to be from the “Pre” generation—those born twenty or more years before Net-Day. The ones who still remembered a society before the Sylph.
Nonetheless, Wang found the exhibits fascinating. His interest bleeding over into Cassie. For her part, she was surprised to find the Gemini and Apollo space capsules so moving. Small metal structures astronauts had crawled and crammed their way into so they could be hurled into space. The ablative heat shields showed the scars of reentry, where the intense heat burned away parts of the material.
What did it take for someone to not only be willing to volunteer for such a thing, but to actively compete to be one of the people on that ride? Was it bravery or foolhardiness? Or an overwhelming drive to accomplish something that had never been done. To go beyond. To take a tiny step off the planet and into the larger universe.
In the grand scheme of the universe, human lifespans weren’t long. How would history have unfolded if the Sylph had arrived before man had flight? Net-Day would never have occurred. Society and technology would have taken a divergent path. How long would it have taken humans to realize they were in a cage?
On the second floor, they paused to look at one of the hanging exhibits, the X-15. Now that was a rocket plane. Not a drone like the XS-9, but a piloted aircraft. Designed as an experimental plane in the 1950’s, the X-15 reached speeds over Mach 6, or 4,500 miles per hour. The warning on its tail: “Beware Blast,” made Cassie chuckle.
The X-15 never flew as high as the later space shuttle, still at fifty miles high many of its pilots still qualified as black sky astronauts. It was funny to think of it that way. Fifty miles on land was just a quick drive of less than an hour which commuters did all the time. Change the direction ninety degrees and it became incredibly hard and earned you the title of astronaut. Fifty miles. Mankind lived in an amazingly thin layer of air wrapped around the planet.
