It sounded like mumbo jumbo when he tried to explain it, even to Zen. So he didn’t. Watching Jeff’s eyes start to squint into a frown when he approached, he realized he’d already gone far beyond his friend; he’d gone far beyond everyone. He wouldn’t discuss it; he couldn’t. He’d just feel it.

Today, they would air-launch two Flighthawks and simulate a combat encounter with the MiG as an aggressor. It seemed laughably routine, even boring. Madrone knew he was ready for more—four, ten, twenty U/MFs. He could fly far beyond the petty, unambitious schedule they’d laid out. He could get beyond C3s limitations. He hungered for something beyond the small scope of the robot planes’ sensors.

It made him angry to be held back. He could see the emotion coming sometimes—the edge of his brain tinged with red. He thought about Glass Mountain and Los Alamos, about the bastards who had killed his daughter, Glavin especially, who was foolish enough to still think he had him fooled, pretending to be his friend by sending Christmas cards. He remembered the bastard doctors at Livermore, and how he’d been tricked into taking Christina to see them. They’d masqueraded as doctors with a radical new treatment for her cancer, but all they’d wanted to do was kill her more quickly, steal her last moments from him.

Sometimes he got so mad he almost lost Theta. He felt himself being pushed back to the edge of the forest. The jaguar roared, snapping at him from behind the trees.

Madrone fought against it, struggling to relax, concentrating on his breathing. He’d always been good at controlling his anger, keeping secrets; it was just a matter of focusing on what he wanted.

“Two minutes to launch sequence,” said a thick voice from the side. Zen, the mission boss, monitoring the flight from Raven. “Yo—you ready, Kevin?”

It seemed like such a chore to answer. Once he was in Theta, leaving the realm of his thoughts to do anything physical, even just to talk, felt like an imposition.

“Of course,” said Madrone.

“We’re ready,” concurred Geraldo, who was sitting nearby in the 777’s control bay.

“Hawkmother?” said Zen, talking to the Boeing’s pilot. “In the green, Gameboy. Let’s do it.”

The others on the circuit agreed. Hawkmother began to nose downward, preparing for the roller-coaster maneuver that helped separate the robot planes from her wings. Kevin felt the weightlessness and the rushing wind currents as the plane approached Alpha and the release point.

Go, he thought, go.

Hawk One plunked off the wing, followed a half second later by Hawk Two. They stuttered slightly, shuddering off the turbulent vortexes from the 777’s wings. The engines ramped quickly to full power. Madrone trimmed his control surfaces, felt his indicated airspeed move above three hundred knots, pass through 350. He shot upward, altitude-aboveground-level leaping to 5,232 feet for Hawk One, 5,145 feet for Two. He pushed harder and climbed through his first marker, notching eight thousand feet.

A leisurely stroll. He’d done this before. He wanted something new, something more challenging.

Aggressor Flight checked in.

Come for me, baby.

Madrone wanted more planes, more challenges. How far could his mind really go? What if it turned inward, examined the nooks and crannies of the interface and the ANTARES computer? What rooms were there?

A video camera had been rigged in the nose of Hawk-mother to record the mission. The video was recorded onto a hard drive and could be accessed through the C3 controls, where the techies had made use of a physical bus and a series of unused interrupts to get easy control of the device. That let them run a log coordinating all of the flight records—Hawkmother’s as well as the Flighthawks’ and ANTARES—off the same time scale.

It was also a connection he could squeeze down, providing the gateway let him. His brain could slither in, like a kid slinking through a subway turnstile. Once inside, he’d have control.

C3 gave him an error message, a slight buzz of confusion poking against his temple. His wandering thoughts had confused it.

But he could see the video. It was part of him.

Pain. Great pain.

Stay in your head. Maintain discipline.

He could partition his brain. That was the trick to AN-TARES. Lock off different parts. Just as he’d locked off Christina.

The interface tried to suck everything out of you.

Kevin moved the Flighthawks into a combat spread 3,500 feet apart. He nudged Two upward slightly, offset three hundred feet higher than One’s twelve thousand AGL.

A brown-red blanket of desert lay at his feet; clear blue surrounded his head. Instruments were green.

The MiG would appear dead ahead. He would close with Two, flushing his enemy, who could only choose to dive or run past. Either way, Mack Smith and his Sharkishki would be nailed.

The tactics were basic and simple. Change the distances, which were really just a function of the engines, and the formation and procedures for engaging the enemy would be familiar to Baron von Richtofen.

Too simple a task to waste his thoughts on.

Madrone was invincible with these planes. Why had it taken so long for him to arrive at this point? He’d wasted every moment of his life until now.

“Keep your separation,” warned Zen.

“Hawk Leader,” he snapped, acknowledging the petty and tedious reminder.

Aboard Raven

8 February, 1123

ZEN FROWNED AS HE STARED AT THE MAIN MONITOR display at his station. The sitrep or God’s-eye-view projected the exercise in sharp, color-coded lines, depicting actual positions in solid against the briefed courses in dash. Everything matched, even the reds showing Mack in Sharkishki, which had just taken off en route to Area Two over the mountains.

So what the hell was bugging him?

The U/MFs had come off the wings a second too soon. Kevin had taken them from him, even though Zen had assigned himself the launch.

Maybe. Kevin had definitely come in before the planned handoff, which was supposed to be ten seconds after the launch, when the Flighthawks were well beyond the vortices. Whether he’d had control on the wing and actually initiated the release was difficult to tell, because in either case C3 handled the actual sequence.

The flight computer did nearly everything under AN-TARES, or could. That was the way the designers wanted it—the computer was more efficient.

Jeff resented that, even though C3 made it possible for him to fly as well. But he was angry about something else, even though he couldn’t precisely define it. Something about Kevin—his attitude seemed more dismissive.

Jeff realized he might be hypersensitive. Maybe Geraldo was right; maybe he was just jealous. Madrone was flying his planes, after all.

There was one other thing. The 777 had been nicknamed “Hawkmother.” It was natural, a prosaic if utilitarian name for the plane. But it also happened to be the call sign Zen had used the day of the accident that cost him his legs.

He’d thought of suggesting something different, but decided it would seem trivial or worse—superstitious.

“Dream Tower is requesting we change the scenario a bit,” said Bree, punching the interphone circuit that restricted the communications to inside the plane.

Zen acknowledged, then flipped into the control circuit to find out what was going on. A live-fire exercise was taking longer than expected, the controller explained, and they wanted to maintain a suitable margin of error. The new area for the Aggressor drill was well to the southwest, over another stretch of empty desert at the edge of the mountains.

“Yeah, okay, we can do that. Gameboy acknowledges,” said Zen. He went back on the shared line to tell Madrone and the others about the change.