Air Force One, Part Four (1)
Michael Goulish

 

Johnny

The coldest, grayest, most dismal day of your life can be transformed by a trip of one single mile.

If you can only find the way, then you can leave all mundane things forever behind you. At the end of that short mile’s trip a new world is waiting for you: a fairyland of golden-orange sunsets gleaming off snowy mountains. In that world white spires and gently sparkling veils of mist march away in their ranks across infinite space, fading into the amber distance. In that world you can spend endless days and nights in splendor such as the dreams of gods are made of.

The problem is that if you don’t already know the way, you’ll almost certainly never find it.

You can spend your whole life looking for that magical path of one single mile. You can scour the earth. You can move from place to place, picking up stakes every year or two and settling down somewhere more promising, always thinking: Maybe this time.

Thirty years will go by. On the one hand it feels like no time at all since you were young — but on the other hand it has been an eternity of wearisome searching, and gradually fading hope.

Finally, you don’t really believe in that better world anymore. Or maybe just halfway. So you tell yourself: This place has to be good enough. I have to be able to find it from here. And maybe you really believe that — halfway. So you settle down, and build a house and you tell yourself that it’s really better this way. Now you’ll have someplace to rest, in between your searches.

Then — more time goes by. Once in a while something reminds you of the quest, and then you stop whatever you’re doing and realize, horrified: I’m not even looking for it anymore. And then maybe you go back to work, or maybe you go get drunk. In any case you soon forget again. And then — more time goes by.

Finally a day comes when you look in the mirror, and you’re an old man. You remember your ancient quest perfectly well now, and you also know perfectly well: I didn’t find it. I’ll never find it.

But the very worst part of all of this is — it really was there, the whole time. During every moment of every agonizingly long and terribly short year of your life, that perfect luminous world really was waiting for you — at the end of a trip of one single mile.

But the mile that you had to travel was straight up. 

Mick stands just behind the pilots’ seats in the big helicopter. Letting the twin rotor’s roar beat against him, he stares out the forward window at vast cloud canyons, tinted honey and salmon by the final rays of the setting sun.

Maybe it’s only when you’ve already lost everything, he imagines, that you can finally find the way, and cross that mile.

It would also be nice to think that, once having reached this new world you would become an equally new man — one who could forget everything he ever might have known about the troubled earth. In particular, it would be nice if this new man could lose the memory of how his wife stood by the tents and watched him, knowing that he was leaving her, before he turned and walked toward the waiting machines.

The floor drops from under him, and only his grip on the back of the two seats keeps Mick from rising a foot into the air. An instant later they’ve crested the wave of air and the metal floor slams back upward into the soles of his feet. He looks toward his right to see the Colonel — his white hair aglow in the last rays of the sun. Talking is too much effort to do casually, but the older man gives him a reassuring look and a hint of a smile. We’re going to do it, the look says.

Out the window to the right Mick can just see the front of one of the other helicopters. Tennen has brought five of his nine helicopters and about half of his men to secure the aircraft, leaving four choppers and the rest of his troops, still a substantial number, at the Wolverine.

As Mick watches, the other troop transport helicopter is instantly reduced to a gray shadow by the pall of a passing cloud. In the sudden gloom Mick turns to look back at where Page and his men are sitting, taking up the long bench on the aircraft’s right side.

Although there is no way for him to know that Mick is looking his way, Page chooses that moment to look up. But, Mick quickly realizes, not quite toward him. The agent is looking out the front window. Mick turns forward again just in time to see the last tatters of cloud flash past, leaving the vast cloudscape visible again, the warm colors of sunset now quickly fading to blue and gray near the feet of the cloud-mountains. But far ahead in the valley a new shape has emerged, its perfect solidity astonishing in this world of mist, air, and fire.

From this angle it looks like the black bats that wheel and dive in the air of summertime evenings around the truck stop. But this bat flies like an eagle: its wings permanently outstretched as though reaching for the rising currents of the air, banking gracefully to stay just beside the glowing cliff face.

"Radio contact! The aircraft challenges us!" the copilot shouts from his seat, his voice nevertheless only faintly audible within the helicopter’s roar.

Vision, Mick thinks. The aircraft knows they are here now because it uses passive optical sensors rather than broadcasting radar energy, which would advertise its location. It has seen them. And just as the grace of its motion among the clouds showed that it is still alive, this shows that it is still quite aware. And, no doubt, still quite deadly.

And is it really only the still-functioning computers of the aircraft that have noticed us, or is it a man? Mick wonders, and the thought chills him. Is it possible that men have survived a decade in flight aboard this craft? Is it possible that, having gained their citizenship in this borderless world — granted it by their proximity to the ultimate brilliance of the nuclear fireball — they no longer wish to descend to the cold earth? Their radios still function well enough to communicate with those who live out their slow lives on the ground below, but these people of the sky simply no longer have anything to say, except to others of their own kind.

Or are they simply doomed to stay here, as at least one of his truckers believed, by God’s judgment on them? And the ship still held aloft not by the skill of human thought but by the mechanisms of divine will — not to journey for a few more years or decades only, but sailing for all eternity through the unmarked oceans of the air.

And if that is the case, then what of those who dare, of their own free will, to climb aboard the ship of the damned?

Page has come forward out of his seat, and Mick moves aside to let him take a radio headset that the copilot holds out to him. Page puts it on quickly, pushing a hand against one earphone, then speaks a few words that are lost to human ears in the cacophony. After a few moments he removes the headset, handing it to Mick when the copilot ignores him.

"The password is accepted!" the copilot shouts again. "We have permission to approach the glidepath."

"We were ordered to approach the glidepath," Mick contradicts him, listening to one phone of the headset. The Secret Service agent’s passwords have been enough to convince the aircraft to allow them to enter the volume of airspace that the aircraft claims control over. It will not, however, permit them to actually put down on its heliport without a much higher level of authorization. Moreover, now that it has become aware of them, it will under no circumstances simply allow them to depart.

"Approach the aircraft from this altitude as far as it will allow," Tennen shouts. "Only then climb into the glidepath. Lieutenant?" he says to Mick. "Will it become suspicious if we approach too slowly?"

"Well, you’ll be the first to know if it does!" Mick yells back. Does Tennen understand what an AI is? The big aircraft isn’t a horse or a man, and the complex scripts that humans have in their heads to deal with other humans or smart animals won’t apply. If the aircraft’s higher level logic doesn’t like what its sensors detect, it certainly won’t be considerate enough to give some advance warning of its displeasure by starting to get nervous or "skittish". It’ll just blow them out of the sky.

"If you want to look it over first, just tell it that!"

"Of course," Tennen says, too quietly to be heard. Looking at him, Mick understands the words. "Inform the aircraft that we will inspect its underside for damage", Tennen shouts to the copilot, then, turning to Mick again, "and then you take his place Lieutenant. Let’s hope your strategy works!"

But the best part of Mick’s strategy is that none of the men attempting to implement it will ever know if it fails. So far the big aircraft seems to be in perfect working order. If its defensive systems are similarly intact and if it decides after all that its visitors are unfriendly — they will literally never know what hits them.

The first indication of its displeasure will arrive at the speed of light, as a laser and Electro-Magnetic Pulse volley. Coming from a platform with all the power of a small nuclear plant to draw on, and at close range, the EMP would burn out even hardened military avionics.

The laser pulse, entering through the helicopters’ large forward windows and echoing off all the metal surfaces inside would blind every man who didn’t happen to be blinking at that moment, and a second pulse would arrive two or three tenths of a second later to take care of those who did happen to miss the first.

The Gatling gun fire, arriving a few seconds later, would come almost as a courtesy.

When the copilot yields his seat, Mick takes up the headset and keyboard and begins his work. He soon loses himself in the keyboard’s small screen and the voice-responses that it gives to his commands until finally a vague sense of growing darkness ahead startles him into looking up at the windscreen. Above them, still far enough away for occasional wisps of cloud-mist to show clearly between it and the helicopter, the great aircraft nearly fills the forward view: a black, cyclopean shape hanging in the darkening sky.

He read magazine articles on it, looked at websites, and even had one briefing. Intellectually, he already knew quite well how large the aircraft was and even something about how it would look in flight. But that knowledge has done nothing to prepare him. His eyes widen. He leans forward and looks up, breathing through his mouth.

This isn’t an aircraft. This is the mightiest vessel that has every ridden the skies of Earth. It can survive any attack and remain flying — through endless wind and storm, day and night, down the decades. Yet the men in the helicopter, crowding to the forward windows, can clearly see that even this indomitable craft has not escaped harm. Even it could not remain unscathed by the fire of the gods.

The bottom of the ship, once painted to blend in with a clear blue sky, is charred black now. The three giant landing gear bays that should always be closed in flight are yawning open, some of their doors blasted away. Those that remain are frozen in place, some visibly warped by the violence of the blast that must have detonated on the runway behind it only moments after its departure.

If, a decade ago, that terrible weapon had found its mark just a few seconds sooner, then even this great vessel must surely have been consumed. If the blast had come a few seconds later, the ship might have escaped essentially unharmed. Instead, two of the great landing gear have been sheered off. The forward one was cut cleanly, but of the heavier aft starboard gear large twisted struts still remain, protruding from the undercarriage. The aft port gear remains nearly intact, but is badly bent, with all traces of the rubber tires burned away. The bomb, exploding with the fury of the sun, may have failed to clip the great airship’s wings — but the weapon succeeded perfectly in amputating its legs. Any attempt to come down now, on land or water, will destroy it.

Now the great ship is indeed a citizen only of the regions of the air. For all these years it has remained aloft because — in the incandescence of one moment — it lost the earth forever.

Mick realizes that both Page and Tennen are standing behind him now, staring up toward the ruined undersurface of the ship just as he is.

"Sir," the pilot addresses Tennen, shouting above the noise of their helicopter — a raucous, fluttering toy chasing majesty, "a new transmission: the aircraft orders us into glidepath entry position, to hold at three hundred yards."

Tennen nods assent at the man, and at the moment that the helicopter begins to climb Mick presses enter on his keypad.

The helicopter rises slowly above the ship without changing the distance between them. Even as they pass through the ship’s altitude and see it edge-on, it still seems large. At it thickest point, just forward of the centerline, the vessel’s fuselage is just over fifty feet thick. It has three stories of shielded compartments stacked atop one double-height level that houses the power plant as well as utility and machinery bays.

As the top surface of the ship becomes visible signs of damage become fewer and less obvious. The topside has always been charcoal colored and the fading light makes details difficult to discern. Even in the best light the great delta wing’s subtle curves would leave little detail for the eye to fix upon outside of the landing area.

It is a triangle ninety yards wide at its back, which is nearly flush with the vessel’s aft edge, and it echoes the ship’s overall shape. No more than a third as wide as the whole vessel, it nevertheless encloses more usable landing area than half a football field. At its leading edge, the area is sunken three stories below the general surface to provide shelter from the wind of the aircraft’s flight. It was meant to allow the ship to take on supplies and personnel while still in flight, in exactly the way that Tennen means to use it now.

The pilot puts one hand to an earphone as suddenly as if it had stung him, and then turns to look directly at Mick who continues to look straight ahead.

"What are you doing?" the pilot shouts angrily, then turns further in his seat to shout at Tennen. "He is broadcasting to the ground!"

"What are you doing?" Tennen shouts in his turn at Mick. "You must not broadcast!" At a quick gesture from him, one of his men immediately produces a firearm. Mick instantly raises his hands away from the keyboard.

Page remains, standing as still as a statue, braced with his left hand against the back of the pilot’s seat — his right hand hanging loosely at his side.

"It’s on a military frequency pattern and it’s encrypted!" Mick shouts quickly, still looking straight ahead out of fear to make any unexpected motion, however slight. "Nobody’s going to hear it. They would have to know its coming, know the frequency, and have the decryption key. That will not happen!"

"Who are you communicating with?" Tennen demands.

"A friend!" Mick retorts. "He’s running my extra hardware down there! How did you expect me to crack the airplane’s security? With this damn laptop?"

Tennen frowns down at Mick, considering.

"Then beamcast to him," the older man shouts. "There is still too much chance of detection in a broadcast. Our enemies are more clever than you may think!"

"Beamcast straight at him so you can send your men to say hello? My buddy would not like that very much! He’s real shy about telling people where he lives. And he sure doesn’t like uninvited guests!"

"The aircraft demands our mission authorization!" The pilot shouts, and then continues immediately: "Laser ranging ping! The aircraft is preparing weapons systems!"

Tennen’s face hardens as he stares down at Mick. The innkeeper can feels his anger like a radiant physical force.

"The aircraft will fire on us!" Page shouts.

And even as he speaks, the ship’s two Gatling guns deploy, snapping instantly out into position from their recessed bays near the sides of the landing area. They look small, at this distance.

Tennen looks at Mick for several second more, then slowly blinks.

"Very well," he says, "But put him on the speakers. I want to hear your friend’s voice!"

Mick stares back at him, then types several commands at the keyboard.

"Hey big John," he says into the microphone, certain that the Colonel is within seconds of seeing through his ruse. The speakers force his amplified voice through the helicopter cabin. "Hey big John, the Man up here wants to hear your voice, buddy."

His slow speech hides desperate thought. When Johnny’s voice comes over the speakers, it will be obviously artificial. Johnny, after all, is artificial. JNY-013 "Johnny" is a Bolo: a 150 ton battle tank animated by what is almost certainly the most powerful artificial intelligence still in existence on the planet. Not long after the big tank’s arrival at the truck stop two years ago, after correcting some severe cognitive problems brought on by Johnny’s role in the Last War, Mick sent him to secretly guard his daughter by patrolling the whole northwestern corner of Michigan.

He has been in occasional radio contact with the Bolo since then, using agile-frequency equipment that Johnny carried with him, supplemented by one-time-pad encryption. Even so, Mick has never felt free to speak too frequently. But at the moment Mick remembers the sound of Johnny’s voice only too vividly. He actually sounds like he’s a tank.

OK. My friend is using one of those voice-distorting gadgets so that — what? So nobody will recognize his voice? On a military-grade encrypted radio?

Looking down toward the great ship’s expanse to disguise his panic, Mick can only see the Phalanx-II Gatling guns. Each of their magazines is a drum twice the height of a man, its lighter gray easily visible against the surrounding decking. During high-speed firing the barrel clusters rotate at five hundred revolutions per minute, allowing the system to fire nine thousand rounds in sixty seconds. It’s normally a shipboard weapon. You’d never be able to use something that big in the nose of any kind of fighter or close air support plane: even if you could carry enough ammunition to make it worthwhile, the thrust of the weapon’s firing would stall out the aircraft instantly.

The stream of rounds from those guns would punch thumb-sized holes through armor thicker than any airplane would ever carry. They would shred the unarmored bodies of the helicopters like wet paper, at first devoting no more than a quarter-second burst to each target. The two weapons, capable of traversing three hundred degrees of arc per second, would destroy all five helicopters and still have time to target the larger remaining pieces before they fell out of sight astern.

They call this type of weapon system "terminal defense". Emphasis on the "terminal".

"Hey Mick, is that you buddy?" the radio blares. "Tell your pals I’m ready to run your little program here — or we just can sit around and chat for a while first, if they think that’s a good idea."

Mick looks down at the radio console with his mouth a little more open than he would like it to be. The voice is definitely not Johnny’s. It could belong to any number of the truckers Mick has known — then he understands. It’s Red’s voice: the trucker who first pulled Johnny’s tarped bulk into the Wolverine’s parking lot, only to be gunned down by a man who wanted to sell knowledge of the big tank to the Gangs.

Johnny must have spent weeks or months on the road with Red before reaching the truck stop that he had determined to be the home of a former Bolo researcher. Mick has never spoken to Johnny about that time, fearing to reactivate memories of the cognitive problems that Johnny was stuck in at the time. Now Mick realizes that, with no more than a few seconds’ warning, Johnny has understood the danger of using his normal voice in a context where others are listening, found a solution to the problem, and synthesized a speech from his memories of the voice of a trucker long dead.

"No, uh — " Mick twists in his seat to look up at Tennen. After one final moment of hesitation, the Colonel nods. "OK, do it now buddy," Mick says quickly into the microphone. "Run the program now!"

As if there were, or could be, a "program". Mick winces a little, mentally, at the deception — but doesn’t seriously worry that the Colonel will detect it.

It’s very easy to see that the Colonel is nothing like a fool. He is a powerful man, and one who commands the allegiance of his troops instantly and utterly. It is also apparent that he has had long experience in actual combat as well as in the equally complex task of managing troops during peacetime. But, like most managers — he doesn’t know shit about software.

The only program involved is Mick’s suggestion last night on the radio to Johnny that he will need to break Air Force One’s security quickly, once the time comes, and an outline of what little the Colonel had mentioned about the problems that would be involved. If the Colonel wants to believe that Mick, possibly with the help of his mysterious "buddy", wrote a program in a single night that can crack the best military security that the United States was able, at the very height of its power, to produce — that’s just fine.

"OK, buddy, you got it!" Johnny’s assumed voice replies immediately.

"OK, let’s quit talking and do it, big J!" Mick says.

"Well, it’s done, buddy. That’s what I’m sayin’! That big airplane ain’t still being mean to you, is it?"

"But did you—" Mick stops talking when he sees that, down below at the edges of the great aircraft’s landing area, the white drums of the Phalanx magazines are withdrawing again into their armored recesses.

"Did it work OK?" Johnny asks again in Red’s voice.

"The aircraft grants permission to dock for five helicopters!" the pilot shouts, turning toward Tennen.

Mick continues to stare at the radio, then he blinks and tries to look like he knew perfectly well that it would work. OK, so Johnny, with twelve or thirteen hours’ preparation, can, in fact, break through maximum military security in something under one second. All those dead taxpayers ought to get something for the cost of a thousand processors, each operating at a top speed of two hundred gigahertz.

Mick looks back at Tennen only to find that he is also impressed. Perhaps dangerously so.

 

 

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Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"