It had accepted the array—she knew it had because when she looked at her dump of the variables, they were all filled.

So what the hell was the screwup?

Shit damn fuck and shit again.

“Dreamland Command—hey, Ray,” she said, banging her mile button on. “What the hell could be locking me out?”

“The list is exhaustive,” replied the scientist.

“Yeah, but what the hell could be locking me out?”

“You’re not being locked out,” he said. “The connection gets made. The handoff just isn’t completed.”

She picked up one of the two small laptops from the floor of the plane, sitting it over the big IMBer in her lap. It was wired into the circuit and set to show the results of the coding inquiries. Data was definitely flowing back and forth; something was keeping it from feeding into the Flighthawk control system.

The security protocols of C³ maybe? The system had a whole series of protocols and traps to keep out invaders. Even though the UMB plug-ins were being recognized as “native,” it was possible that, somewhere along the way, they weren’t kicking over the right flag.

She’d put them in after C³ was up. Maybe if she started from scratch.

Right?

Maybe.

But, God, that would take forever.

Kill the Flighthawk. They wouldn’t use it anyway, right?

That would save shitloads of time.

“Jeff, I’m going to try something, but to do it, I have to knock the Flighthawks off-line. You won’t be able to launch it.”

“Do it.”

“I guess I should check with Major Alou in case, you knot, it interferes with her mission.”

“Just do it.”

She guessed he’d be angry, but she went ahead and talked to Alou anyway.

“We won’t need the Flighthawk,” Alou told her. “Go ahead.”

“We’re doing an adequate job from here,” said Rubeo when she told him what she had in mind. “We’re already over the Pacific.”

“I think this might work.”

“You still have to take the computer off-line, enter new code, then reboot it. Twenty minutes from now, you’ll still be in diagnostic mode.”

“I’ll skip the test.”

“How will you know you load right?”

“It’ll work or it won’t. If it doesn’t, what have I lost?”

She found an error in one of the vector lines before taking the system down. She fixed it, then began the lengthy-procedure.

“Want a soda?” Zen asked, pulling his helmet.

“Love one, but—”

“I got it,” he said. he undid his restraints, pulled over his wheelchair—it was custom-strapped nearby—and then maneuvered himself into it. She’d seen him do this before, but never in the air. He looked awkward, vulnerable.

Would she have the guts to do that if she’d been paralyzed?

“We got Pepsi, Pepsi, and more Pepsi. All diet. Which do you want? Asked Zen.

“Pepsi.”

“Good choice.”

Ten minute later, C³ gave her a series of beeps—at one point she’d wanted the program in “Yankee Doodle” as the “I’m up” signal, but Rubeo had insisted—and then filled the screens with its wake-up test pattern.

Two minutes later, Zen shouted so loud she didn’t need the interphone.

“I’m in. I’m there. I have a view.” He worked the keyboard in front of the joystick. “Wow. All right. This is going to work. I can select the still camera, and I have a synthesized radar. At least that’s what it says.”

She glanced over and saw his hand working the joystick. “Woo—this is good.”

“Magnification on mini-KH Eye?” asked Jennifer. She couldn’t dupe the optical feed on her screen yet—she had to get the feedback through Dreamland’s circuit—but she didn’t have a control window with the raw numbers showing whether it was focused.

Rubeo was cursing over the Dreamland circuit, using words she’d never heard from his mouth before.

“Ray?”

“I’ve lost the visual feed, the synthetic radar, everything. Damn it, we’re blind here.”

“I can see,” said Zen.

“Well, we can’t,” insisted Rubeo. “Jennifer, kill the program now.”

“Hold on,” said Colonel Bastian over the circuit. “Major Stockard, do you have control of the aircraft?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can override it here,” said Rubeo.

“Jeff, we’ll back you up, but you’re the one I want on the line.”

“Colonel, I don’t believe that’s necessary,” said Rubeo.