The crew chief called up. “Rail clear?”
Garry gave him a thumbs-up.
The canopy came down, a clear polycarbonate bubble that slid down over him and locked into place, smooth as something out of Flash Gordon. He activated the seals to pressurize the cockpit, and set the climate controls to a little cooler than the flat desert air outside. He was in his own world, already cut off from the ground, the cockpit so tight and cramped around him it was as if he had donned the bird like some immense Batman suit.
He strapped on his knee clipboards, and set his switches to their start positions.
He called the crew chief. “Fore and aft clear, fire guard posted, chocks in place?”
Roger that, Garry. Ready for run-up.
He turned on his electrical power, and hit the jet fuel starter, the small engine that would turn over the main motor, the GE-100. He advanced the throttle from off to idle; the engine surged with a throaty roar.
When he was ready to taxi, the fire guard removed the chocks from his landing gear. The crew chief directed him forward, waving his hands back behind his head.
Garry pushed the throttle past idle, and led Jake out towards the runway, steering with his rudder pedals. The end-of-runway crew gave them a final systems check, and the weapons crew pulled the safeties on the bombs. He kept his hands in the air, where the crew could see them, just so the crew knew he wasn’t about to flatten them with a careless touch of a flight control.
They were cleared for takeoff, and he taxied onto the runway. He pushed the throttle to ninety per cent power. He ran one last check, cycling the flight controls. All was in order.
He took his feet off the brakes and pushed the throttle to military power.
The engine rose in pitch to a scream. He turned on his afterburner, injecting neat fuel into the hot exhaust stream, generating huge thrust.
The plane kicked him in the back, and the runway was ripped out from under him.
At three thousand feet he reached his takeoff speed, two hundred miles an hour. He touched his stick back, stroking the fly-by-wire, the plane’s nervous system.
The plane just leapt into the air, and he followed the flight-path marker on the head-up display into the sky.
Below him, the Earth closed over on itself, turning into a dome littered by the blocky buildings of the base — airplanes sitting in the washed-out sun like kids” toys — and he could see the desert beyond, etched by roads, scarred by the smooth sheen of the dry lakes.
Monica saw the takeoff from the ops building.
It was a burn and a roar, as Garry bore down the runway at full thrust. His engine nozzle opened with eerie mechanical grace, and a sheet of flame shot out. There was a rumbling, and the air seemed to shake, or perhaps it was the very ground.
Then he was in the air, and receding quickly, the flame becoming little more than a red dot. She watched until she had lost him, in the blur of the volcanic sky.
Then she went indoors, wondering how much more of this marrow-sucking heat she could withstand.
The doctors said she had a full house of mets now: secondary sites, lungs, and liver… She knew what to expect. The pressure in her skull was giving her the headaches. She might get speech or movement disorders, or epilepsy. Maybe even dementia, if she lasted so long. But the liver or lung stuff would probably collapse on her first.
The only good thing about her illness, she was finding, was that it took her mind off her worry about her son, the fighter pilot.
Aviate, navigate, communicate.
Jake checked his relative position by radar. Two is tied. Two is visual.
Garry craned his neck; he could see Jake’s bird in the muddy sky. “Clear to rejoin.”
The wing man came skimming in, sliding through the air until he was in fingertip formation, within five feet or so of Garry’s wing tip, every detail of his bird visible sharp and clear. They ran an eyeball leak and panel check of each other’s planes, and then they slid apart to a standard formation, tactical line abreast, a mile and a half apart.
Garry was sitting at the front of his plane, cushioned by ear plugs and ear cuff pads, surrounded by a crystal clear bubble of plastic. He was in a cocoon of sunlight and sound, everything at his fingertips and under his control, at home.
Garry turned the formation to the north-east, towards Arizona.
They flew over Las Vegas. The city was a splash of glass and concrete in the middle of a crumpled, arid landscape. He could see the pyramid of Luxor shining in the washed-out sun, utterly unreal. And then over Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam, and across the Shivwits Plateau… And now, here was his first, thrilling glimpse of the Grand Canyon.
Here at its western end the Canyon was a knife-gouge in the Colorado plateau. He was flying east now, into the low sun, and he could see how the light picked out sedimentary strata. In the deepest section of the Canyon he could see the Colorado River itself, a stripe of silver-blue painted over the land. There was a greenish stubble over the plateau and the upper slopes of the Canyon, the asparagus green a strong contrast to the crisp red of the old rocks exposed beneath. The stubble was a covering of trees, he knew, junipers in a sea of sage, diminished to specks by the scale of the Canyon.
He dipped low, and imagined the sound of his passing washing over the empty land. But a soft warning from Jake made him lift his nose, and gain a little more altitude. A smudge of volcanic shit, ash and dust, covered the ground here, emanating from the cracks that had opened up in million-year-old vents. Best to keep his engine intakes clear of that.
He looked into the Inner Gorge, the oldest rocks. He could see where the Moonseed was eating into them, silvery patches like scars amid the volcanism.
They headed further east. He passed Lava Falls, where rapids turned the river white, and he was flying over the Havasupai Reservation, the home of the People of Blue Green Water, who had lived here for a thousand years. But today, of course, the People had been evacuated. Despite the peril they had stuck to their traditions; they had insisted on walking out, all the way to Tusayan.
They flew on over the tourist areas around Tusayan. He could make out the tiny, scattered towns and lodges, the dusty trails along the South Rim, the fine black lines of the metalled roads. And then he followed the Colorado to the north, skirting the Navajo Reservation, soaring over Marble Canyon, until he reached Lake Powell itself.
Lake Powell was flat, like some kind of engine oil spilled into the valley, its Mediterranean blue a striking contrast with the sunlit red and ochre of the high desert. He could see at a glance the lake wasn’t natural. Its shoreline was sharply ragged, like a fractal pattern: no time for erosion to smooth away the edges here.
Maybe some day — if the kooks, like Alfred Synge, that his mother used to bring home had been right — Mars would look like this. Terraformed, by American hands and energy and ingenuity, blue against the red dust. He grinned. Even if all we do with the world we build is put up plastic pyramids.
Anyhow, today the Moonseed was soon going to find out just what Americans were capable of. For better or worse, for them all.
He turned away from the sun, with Jake on his tail. He scooted low over Lake Powell.
And there, at last, was Glen Canyon Dam. The target.
Garry was going in first. “Target in sight. Ten seconds to the drop.”
Copy, Garry. Your pickle is hot.
“Master Arm on…”
The LANTIRN targeting pod, fixed to the forward fuselage of the airplane, fired a short laser burst at the dam, to establish the range to target. A grainy image on his head-up display, generated by the pod, told him what was going on.