Eye in the Sky
by Jody Lynn Nye
“Detaching cargo from the ISS,” the mission commander’s voice announced over the intercom.
“Roger,” said the shuttle pilot. “Preparing to intercept.”
From her nondescript office in Nebraska, Space Force Lieutenant Nela Ferrar nodded to herself and watched multiple angles on her tri-screen array as the cylinder with the fixed wing floated out from the open bay of the International Space Station and ambled at 2001: A Space Odyssey speeds toward the camera over the capture arm of the Gryphon space shuttle. Her job was to monitor cameras from around the world and aboard hundreds of satellites circling above Earth, but her favorite leisure activity was peeking in on the space station’s mission.
She could see the small cargo lighter at three different angles. The resolution was so clear that she could read its registration numbers and even see the scratches along the white ceramic sides of the well-used container. Like the shuttle, it had wings, but where Gryphon’s was a true spaceplane, the lighter was only a glider, needing help from the shuttle or some other craft to begin its deorbit at the right time and place.
It had paced the ISS through the black shadow of the thermosphere as the blue-and-white planet spun below them, but had just crossed into daylight, giving observers the best possible view. The banter between the approaching shuttle and the ISS sounded like a couple of people who knew each other pretty well.
“Commander McKenzie, you sure you don’t want to hop in? We’ll be back on Earth within twenty-four hours!”
A hearty baritone responded with a derisive laugh. “You think I trust you to fly me anywhere? The way you drive a jeep, you shouldn’t be at the helm of a kiddie car!”
Snorts of laughter erupted in the background. Nela smiled.
As one of the staff of observers the Space Force maintained, Nela had thousands of feeder cams all over the world, but she felt a special connection with the space station. Half a dozen of her fellow guardians, officers, and civilian specialists were deployed onboard, carrying out experiments and generally training for missions off-planet, when that happy day would come. On the two screens flanking the center one, she had rotating views of the other myriad cameras, making sure that the U.S. and its allies were protected from airborne incursions.
A ping! came from her personal pad device sitting on the desk beside her keyboard.
Not now! she thought at it. She glanced at the clock in the lower corner of her screen and realized that her friends stationed in Japan must be awake and ready for her to play the next round in Lightspeed Stars, the MMORPG that had been occupying all her hours that weren’t devoted to sleep, food, or duty. There had to be a thousand Space Force members on the servers, only a percent of which she knew by IRL names. Everyone else, herself included, went by a pseudonym. She was DevilInABlueDressUniform. The game stretched dexterity and reflexes to the breaking point, as players had to follow tiny ships through scientifically unrealistic asteroid fields and keep them from crashing into heavenly bodies or each other at blinding speeds. Sometimes, though, you just had to smash up your ship for the fun of it. The effects were spectacular. In fact, the graphics had advanced to the point where she had almost come to believe in some of the game-based planets as much as she believed in Earth. Her favorite ship, Orion’s Kneecap, had battle scars from surviving dozens of close calls. She had flown with the same team of players for months now, and had only met one of them in real life, a gunnery sergeant from Canada.
She glanced back to the image of the shuttle, just in time to hear the pilot speak.
“Oops!”
“Oops?” the commander’s voice demanded. “What do you mean, ‘oops’?”
“Sir, I mean, it’s the glare—I’ll fix it!”
But anyone could see the problem. The floating cargo lighter had missed the open claw and was moving away beneath the ISS. It was decelerating, rapidly falling behind both craft. Voices shouted in Nela’s ears as the mechanical arm flailed after it.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” the commander bellowed.
“It’s . . . . . . . . . it’s venting, sir!” the pilot said. He sounded aghast, and Nela felt sympathy. As the shuttle broke away from its matching orbit, Nela switched to the feed on the craft’s nose.
Only because the ISS was in the forty-five minutes of its passage over the daylight side of the planet could she see the bright narrow plume shooting out from the nose of the lighter, pushing it ever farther away. It often took a day or more for a departing craft to return to Earth, mostly to let its orbit align with the desired landing. With the jet slowing it down, the loose lighter might descend dramatically faster.
Nela’s heart turned over. The lighter would survive reentry, and could even land on a runway if it came down over one, but with no control over the retro-thrust and its stubby little wings, it would probably fall into the sea or crash in the wilderness, and the contents would surely be lost.
“Beginning calculations,” said a new voice, a woman with a clipped accent. “Posting potential arcs of reentry.”
“Dammit!” the commander exclaimed. “You couldn’t have dropped a load of dirty underwear! It had to be this one!”
Nela immediately wondered what was in it, but knew it was none of her business. Still, if the commander was this upset, chances were that it contained either the results of experiments, defense department data, or both.
Before Nela realized she had spoken, she heard her own voice.
“Mission Control, this is Argus Observation Post in Omaha. Lieutenant Nela Ferrar, identification number SF-3662. I can help track the lighter.”
There was a brief but perceptible pause, owing to the distance from Earth to the space station and back again.
“You?” the commander asked, with the same scornful tones of some of the male gamers she played with. She flinched a little, but steeled her spine. “Who’s your CO, Lieutenant?”
“General Stantis,” she replied. “I can patch you through to him. But, sir, let me help now while you are speaking. Send me those charts.”
She heard him mutter something about females and dexterity. Despite her concern for the payload and sympathy for the pilot, that comment raised her hackles. She had heard snipes like that all too often, but she had fine motor skills most of the men didn’t. She liked beating those players through the tight mazes all the way to the goal, and doing a mic drop on the way out. But she couldn’t do that to a superior officer.
“It couldn’t hurt, sir,” said the clipped voice. “We’re calculating dozens of potential landing zones, but anything to reduce the number of sites might be useful.”
“All right!” McKenzie said. “Let me talk to Stantis!”
“Connecting you now,” Nela said, patching the call in, though she never took her eyes from the screen. At the same time, she heard the honk from her email system. Clipped Voice had given her the whole kitchen sink. It was a live function, constantly updating. As the now-invisible lighter descended, the calculations altered, tightening the circle second by second. The target was still hundreds of miles across, though.
Her hands flew over the keyboard. On her side screens, she pulled up all of the earthbound and satellite-mounted cameras in the wake of the ISS.
A musical female voice answered the call.
“General Stantis’s office, Staff Sergeant Marelle Baker speaking.”
“Lieutenant Nela Ferrar here. Commander McKenzie on the ISS wishes to speak to the general.”
“Oh! Let me see if he is in.” After a brief but gut-wrenching pause, Baker returned.
“Holding for Commander McKenzie,” she said. Nela put the officer through, still glancing back and forth between the screens and the plotted descent of the lighter.
“Commander, good to hear from you,” General Stantis said in his hearty voice. Nela knew she ought to close the circuit, but didn’t. The voices of the two men floated back and forth between Earth and space.
“General, we’ve got a situation . . .”
There! Nela found a camera in Sri Lanka and one in southeastern India pointing up toward the heavens. They picked up a streak of sunlight moments apart. Nela entered the coordinates into the spreadsheet sent to her by Clipped Voice. Instantly, three of the trajectories vanished, and the rest updated, shrinking the target area further. She was aware of the conversation going on, catching the occasional word.
“. . . Your officer was watching the handover . . . . . . . . . failure . . . . . . . . . interference . . .”
“. . . Offer cooperation . . . . . . . . . time . . . . . . . . . competent . . . . . . . . . content . . . . . . . . . ?”
“. . . Classified! Need to know . . . . . . . . . effective . . . . . . . . . ?”
“Dammit, Commander!” Stantis’s voice came through loud and clear, dragging Nela’s attention to the connection. “Ferrar is the best at this! Don’t revert to the 1950s, man! I doubt you were even born then. You don’t have a lot of time to plan an intercept!”
A lot of grumbling followed, but in the end, McKenzie gave in. What choice did he have? The Gryphon shuttles were contractors. Maybe the pilot had made an error, maybe as a result of SANS, Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome, which caused visual impairments, or maybe just butterfingers or a malfunction, but the fact remained an accident had happened. It sounded like the lighter contained classified material, meaning they didn’t want it to land, say, in the Australian outback for anyone to pick up.
“Ferrar is assigned to this exclusively as of now,” Stantis continued. “She’s good. I will assign her to oversee the entire retrieval. This isn’t a goddamned video game like the ones I know you play. She is taking this seriously. You can count on that.”
Nela’s ears perked up. In spite of herself, she wanted to know which game.
“Yes, General,” McKenzie said glumly. “I’ll be monitoring her progress.”
“I’ll see to it that you’re patched in on everything,” the general said. “Stantis out.”
A pause while McKenzie “hung up.” “I just lied through my teeth about you, Ferrar. Don’t let me down. Pull in anyone you need on this. You’ve got a blank check. Make the Space Force proud.”
“Yes, sir!” Nela said, feeling her cheeks burn. But she pulled up her big-girl panties and buckled down. “How often do you want a report, sir?”
“Just tell me when you locate the damned thing. Stantis out.”
“Yes, sir!”
The space station had pinpointed the precise location where they had lost control of the capsule. That drew the parameters tighter yet, but the target still covered an ellipse of a few hundred kilometers. By now, she was getting input from a host of other observers, in the Space Force and the Air Force, not to mention allies from around the world.
“What’s in it?” came a curious question from a Canadian observation post in Winnipeg.
“None of my business,” Nela said, trying not to sound arrogant.
“Gawd, the brass won’t even tell you what you need to know,” the Canadian said jovially. “Sympathy, Space Force.”
“Thanks, RCAF.”
Nela consolidated the data as it flooded in. From the best calculations coming from Clipped Voice and a growing host of others putting in their two cents, it looked as though the landing zone was likely to be at the junction of North and South America.
The mark of a good officer, Nela had always had hammered into her, was to delegate responsibilities. She sent a copy of Stantis’s orders to her immediate superior, Captain Delavoir. He sent immediate approval, for which she was thankful. Within minutes, her message service was pinging with logins from other Space Force observers from around the world.
She sent a link to a meeting room on a scrambled online service, but diminished the window so she wouldn’t have to take her eyes off the trio of screens.
“What happened, Lieutenant?” Staff Sergeant Lou Furimoto asked. He was stationed at Cape Canaveral.
“An accident with the transfer of a lighter from the space station to a shuttle,” she explained. Although the moment had been recorded, blaming and shaming weren’t her intention. The pilot had to have felt bad enough. “It’s venting . . . . . . . . . on its way earthward. I need everyone not on a vital assignment to help track the lighter. Contents are classified.” She punched Clipped Voice’s content into the chat window. “Here’s the calculations on its descent. At the moment, it looks like it’s heading for Panama or Colombia.”
“Shit,” opined Lieutenant Wanda Dieter. Nela knew Wanda from Boot. She was detail-oriented as hell, but blunt in her expressions, hence her present assignment in Nome, Alaska. “ETA?”
“Sixteen hours, maybe less,” Nela said. “I’ll have to watch the logarithms. Depending on air speed, wind shear, and a hundred other variables, it could start tumbling and fall straight down into the ocean long before that. I need eyes and ideas, people!”
“USAF here, from AFB Palanquero, Ferrar,” came a deep voice. “We’re all yours.”
“Us too!” a lighter tenor put in. “This is AFB Tyndall, Panama City.”
“Gotcha!” added a hearty soprano. “Honolulu here. Just spotted the target going by overhead. Here’s video!” A file appeared in the chat. “Trajectory continuing as per your data.”
More and more stations chimed in. A reluctant acknowledgment came from the ISS. She knew the commander on board was angry, embarrassed, or both, to have to accept help from the Space Force, but that was what it was there for.
“Thanks, everyone,” Nela said, feeling honored and humbled by the cooperation she was getting. Air Force bases, ships at sea, observatories on every continent. Even an orbiting space telescope had begun a majestic turn in the skies to focus on the path the lighter was taking. Between the software and the input from every station, she ought to be able to predict the landing zone of the lighter within ten meters by two hours from impact. She sent out messages to each of the bases in the target area to ask about retrieval and negotiations with the governments of the potential target. Panama would cooperate, but Colombia or Venezuela would want some kind of beneficial exchange. That wasn’t up to Nela; she would just send the requests up the chain of command and let them negotiate. They had a little time. Her job was just to find the lighter and make sure it got picked up. So far, she had faith in the technology, and the spirit of cooperation between corps.
But nothing good lasts forever. An insistent ping came from her personal phone. She didn’t recognize the number, nor the numerous ones that followed, each leaving messages. Nela saw previews, most of them beginning with the word urgent!
Then, an intranet call came in.
“Ferrar,” she said, sparing only a glimpse at the screen.
“Lieutenant, this is Lieutenant Briggs St. John,” a brisk male voice with a New England accent announced. “Turn on your camera, please.”
“I’m in the middle of a very important assignment and need to stay focused on my visuals,” Nela replied. She didn’t move a finger toward the touchscreen. People were so used to face-to-face meetings on computer these days, when a phone call would do almost all of the time. “How may I assist you?”
“I’m the public affairs officer for the space station. Have you transmitted any information to news media about this incident?”
“No, of course not,” Nela said, stifling an inward groan. PAOs were a necessary evil, but she had had run-ins with them before that convinced her that the “evil” could be a more prominent characteristic than “necessary.” “I have only communicated with military bases and astronomical observatories, as per my instructions from my commanding officer.”
“Well, somehow”—St. John made it sound accusatory—“the media has gotten a hold of the news about the lighter. I’m being slammed with queries about its contents and mission. What have you told them?”
“Nothing,” Nela said. She kept her voice level. The call was probably being recorded. PAOs liked to cover their own asses. “I don’t know what’s in the lighter, and it has no bearing on my assignment. I don’t have to have released any information. We’re not the only people out there with eyes on the sky, you know. Nothing that happens in space is a secret! Once you launch something, anyone with a telescope can see it. And they’re everywhere. NASA has its own feed, and that’s public access. I bet a hundred thousand people saw the drop! And they might even have a better idea where the lighter is than we do,” she added, with a touch of malice.
“That is outrageous!” St. John said, as if it was her fault. “We need to make this look good for the space station. And the Space Force,” he added, making certain that she knew it was a very minor afterthought.
“Sounds like your job, sir,” Nela said. She didn’t have time to worry about his ego. “Unless you need something specific from me, I need to focus on my mission. May I suggest you get in touch with General Stantis? He’s the one who assigned me to observe the descent.”
St. John growled low under his breath. “Make sure you clear any release of information through my office. I’m texting you my office number.”
“Of course, sir,” Nela said. “Ferrar out.” She hit the disconnect. Her heart raced. She hadn’t been this nervous when she volunteered to trace the lighter, but being held responsible for a potential breach of information security? That frightened her. When the retrieval seemed like a big video game, it felt almost fun. With bureaucracy intruding, she was yanked back into the real world. Her gamer buddies would call it a minor boss battle. Did she “win” in her conversation with the PAO?
No, the only win that mattered was getting the lighter back safely. Nela reached for her coffee carafe and thumbed back the seal. The contents were cold, but a jolt of caffeine gave her a momentary feeling of confidence.
She checked her charts. Its downward spiral meant that, by now, the lighter had circled the Earth and was nearly back at the same point where it had dropped away. Tracking cameras all around the globe gave her momentary views of the little cylinder. She felt sorry for it, and sorrier still for the shuttle pilot.
Calculations on the live spreadsheet from Clipped Voice, whom she now knew was Technical Sergeant Caroll Bissette in Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, updated to the point that Nela believed with some certainty that southern Colombia or northern Venezuela would be the lighter’s landing site. The moment she knew it, the rest of the world did too. Space enthusiasts with telescopes and computers were sharing information back and forth all over the internet, and more than one of Nela’s correspondents passed along some insanely clear pictures of the lighter as it passed within range. She added that data to her simulation. Yep, Colombia. She passed that information up to Delavoir, asking politely for updates on cooperation with the governments in Bogota or Caracas.
“Going AFK for five,” she told the group chat. “Bio break.”
“Go for me, too, will ya?” Honolulu asked. “My relief is late, and I gotta go down two floors to the can.”
“I’ll do my best,” Nela said with a chuckle.
When she stood up, her rear was numb, and her legs almost collapsed underneath her. The digital clocks on the wall and in the corner of her many screens told her that more than five hours had passed since the botched handoff. She stretched, trying to work feeling back into her lower body.
But where was her relief? Reese was normally prompt, even early.
When she tried to leave the monitoring center, she discovered a roadblock: two large MPs wearing solemn expressions.
“Do you know where Lieutenant Reese is?” she asked them.
“This area is restricted until the current mission is resolved, ma’am,” the first one said.
“Seriously? I’m supposed to sit out twenty hours on my own?”
“It’s important, ma’am,” the other added.
“I know that! Can someone at least bring me fresh coffee?”
The two exchanged glances. “I think that can be arranged,” the first one said, although he sounded uncertain.
She shook her head and headed for the bathrooms, a line of four individual doors across the hall marked for all genders.
“Where are you going, ma’am?” one of them asked, stepping into her path.
“The can,” she said, and pointed. They were less than four meters away.
“One of us will have to accompany you, ma’am,” the first guard said, with an apologetic glance. “Please leave all technology here.”
She rolled her eyes, but strode across the hallway. The guard glanced inside before letting her enter. It was a one-holer, so there was no way to pass anything under the stall to someone else.
The sentries would have been better off checking her technology. When she returned to her desk—and, thankfully, a fresh cup of coffee beside her central monitor—dozens of messages, pings, and other queries had flooded in on the chat. Her phone started dancing across the desk, buzzing with irritation.
Bissette had updated the stats. The wobble Nela had feared was increasing with every sweep the lighter made around the planet. It caused the stubby craft to descend even faster. Heart beating like a castanet, Nela scanned all of the new information. Had it changed trajectory too?
Her phone lit up again. Another call from Briggs St. John.
Before she could speak, he snapped at her. “I’ve got word that the Russians are communicating with rebels in Venezuela and Colombia, offering them bribes to take the lighter when it lands. The drug lords will cooperate with them. Can you guarantee that U.S.-friendly forces will retrieve it ahead of them?”
Nela, her eyes fixed on her rapidly updating map, clenched her stomach muscles to avoid shouting at him. She felt her nose getting hot.
“Sir, with all due respect, I can’t guarantee anything! I’m not there! I can only estimate the lighter’s trajectory, and that changes with every minute.”
“Well, what do they know that we don’t know?”
“Nothing,” Nela said, her patience at an end. “I bet if you get off the line and go Google it, you’ll see the same video I did five hours ago. In fact, it’s almost certainly the lead story on the evening news everywhere. I respectfully request that you get in touch with General Stantis and tell him to order me to fly into the South American jungle with a catcher’s mitt and catch the thing just before it hits ground to make sure no Russian agent intercepts it instead. Please excuse me, I have to concentrate.”
She cut the connection. She would almost certainly get flak for her comment, but she didn’t care. A sip of coffee, much tastier than she usually got from the junior officers’ mess, suggested that despite the PAO holding her personally responsible for his increasingly bad day, someone out there appreciated her.
Hour after hour, she rotated between the updating charts and the tiny flash of light streaking across the screen over oceans, mountains, and plains. True to his word, General Stantis had left authority to her. The responsibility felt overwhelming, but she was touched by the number of people who reached out to offer their support. Fresh cups of coffee and even a lunch tray were delivered to her desk by people outside her field of view. Hands moving into her periphery and out again, without disturbing her, were all she saw. She promised herself she wouldn’t let them or the Space Force down.
Closer and closer to the Earth the small lighter came. From the original altitude of four hundred kilometers, it had spiraled down to under a hundred. When it hit the stratosphere, its path would be impacted by weather, and by the time it descended into the troposphere, chances are she could lose sight of it among clouds. But she had input from dozens, if not hundreds, of amateur skywatchers alongside the official observers. Someone had shared one of her accounts, so she received scrolling messages from well-wishers, but among them were trolls, and even threats.
“Your government is bringing alien spores to Earth to wipe us all out!” one “anonymous” message ranted. “If it lands, you and all of your co-conspirators are going to die!”
Nela just passed all the weirdo transmissions up to the PAO and Captain Delavoir. She had to keep monitoring. She ran a diagnostic to make sure she hadn’t actually been hacked. The computer burbled for a minute, then spat out its findings: nothing. She heaved a sigh of relief. No amateurs, then. She couldn’t keep out the pros, so she must not let that prey on her mind.
As zero hour came closer, her nerves began screaming at her. What if she lost sight of the device? What happened if, after all her attention, it still fell into the wrong hands? She was dying to boot up Lightspeed Stars and get a little relief by blowing up enemy spacecraft. She had to blink almost constantly, as her eyes burned from focusing on the screens so intently. She no longer felt her body beneath the waist. All that coffee must have been pooling in her bladder. When she eventually got up, gravity would tell her what a fool she had been. She popped vitamins B-12 and C to stay alert. It wouldn’t be her first all-nighter, but it was the tensest one on record since her philosophy final.
“How are you holding up?” Bissette asked. Even her precise diction wavered from its earlier perfection.
“I’ll get there,” Nela said.
How was she supposed to make certain that the lighter was secure once it landed? The tightening landing zone looked to be square in the middle of the Colombian jungle. The PAO was right about invading drug-lord territory. The U.S. would not negotiate with terrorists, and the cartels fell right into that zone. Still, the Russians were playing with fire, thinking that a deal with the cocaine barons would go completely their way. The drug lords were just as likely to take the lighter hostage and play both sides for a substantial ransom.
So, how were the Russians planning to make sure they got the cargo? Surely they didn’t actually have boots on the ground. Or not many.
Technology. The only real answer, and the place where she felt sure she had the advantage. She leaned into her microphone.
“AFB Palanquero?”
“Roger,” a hearty tenor voice said, after an audible throat clearing.
“This is Argus Observation Post. Looks like ground zero is going to be right in your neck of the woods,” Nela said. She zoomed in from an orbiting camera, one capable of more than ten thousand times magnification. Night with a narrowing half-moon painted that sliver of terrain with pale blue. She scanned over jungles, cliffs, and heavy undergrowth, striped with narrow, glinting rivers, bordering square patches of gray farmland that in an hour or less would burst in a thousand shades of brilliant green. “What kind of air cover can you give my package coming in?”
Palanquero sounded as though he sat straight up in his chair. “Well, shit, Argus, if you give the order, I can arrange to blow hell out of miles of jungle until we can see the landing crater.”
Just for a minute, she loved the idea just for the visuals, but firmly tamped it down. Real human beings and their animals lived there, not to mention some endangered wildlife. And she could just imagine what General Stantis and Commander McKenzie would say. She shook her head.
“No way. It’ll ruin too many people’s day. How fast can your forward observation drones move?”
“Not fast enough to track incoming from outer space, unfortunately. But we have got lots of them, and the Spec Force ops on base have the best toys. Want me to patch in the commander?”
Nela smiled at the moving map on her central screen.
“Please do, Palanquero. I’ll wait.”
After a while, a woman’s voice joined them. “Captain Edelman, Argus. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
The crispness of her tones made Nela sit up straighter herself. “Space Force, ma’am.” She gave a quick briefing on the descending cargo lighter, at that moment transiting over Saudi Arabia, and explained her idea.
“You want to line the forests from the coast to the interior with drones?” Edelman asked, her tone harsh with sarcasm.
“We shouldn’t have to, ma’am.” Nela pulled up the calculations. “I can give you a corridor about fifty meters wide . . .”
At that moment, the chart started flipping on her. The numbers tumbled over one another, and the map went wild. What was happening?
“Hold on, Argus,” Bissette snapped out. “Unclear what’s causing this, maybe something to do with that tropical storm in the Pacific? But the target is losing altitude rapidly. We’re going to lose a revolution.”
Nela watched the video in dismay. She pulled up as many relays as she could on the lighter’s track. The little craft seemed to be tossed up in the air, then dragged down, like a fish being played with by a seal.
Nela gasped, staring at the screen. She pulled feed after feed, trying to catch up with the errant lighter. At last, she caught sight of it east of India, at a dismayingly low altitude. “Captain, hold the line a minute.”
“With you, Argus.”
“Calculating,” Bissette said, her precise voice calm. “Changing ETA. I now estimate only one full orbit before landing. On the other hand, it narrows the landing path.”
“Got you,” Nela said, following the new calculations. “Captain, it’s going to come in south of you, near AFB Apy-yay?”
“Apiay,” Edelman corrected her pronunciation. “I can arrange for cooperation. How long have we got?”
“One hour fifteen minutes, as near as I can estimate.” She sent the revised flight path to Edelman.
“I’ll have them scramble all the drones we can send out and notify my opposite number at the Colombian bases, and get some helicopters in the air above your potential landing site. I’ll get back to you ASAP. Edelman out.”
The channel closed. Nela hung over the scope, willing the little craft not to hit any more surprises.
Between the long night and the adrenaline, she could feel her brain trying to shut down behind her eyes. Touch-typing, she sent out information to Captain Delavoir, Lieutenant St. John, and to the rest of her chain of command updating them, devil take all her typographical errors. St. John must have had as much coffee as she had, and immediately began blowing up her phone. She ignored his calls. Worried every moment she might miss something, she took a hasty bathroom break, vowing it would be the last until all this was over. The hallway outside her office was dark, and two new guards had taken over from the first two. They eyed her warily, but didn’t dare to ask how things were going.
With every wobble on the scope, Nela grew more concerned about the lighter’s flight path. Edelman copied her in on the communiques between her and the flights at both Air Force bases. The lighter had started its last circuit of planet Earth. Dawn had broken in full over Nebraska and South America, and she waited for the cargo lighter to burst out of the night terminator to the western Pacific Ocean.
“Scrambling fully charged drones to the new location,” Edelman said. “Six on the coast, twenty arrayed at key points within your target location. They can be adjusted at a moment’s notice. Just FYI, unmarked craft are also in the area, estimated twenty UFOs. Advise?”
“Are any of our drones armed?” Nela sent back. It was a flippant reply, but Edelman took it seriously.
“Three.”
“Can I get linked to the forward cameras on a drone?” she asked eagerly. “At least one of them? I want to follow the lighter in.”
“I can do better than that,” Edelman said. “Can you fly a drone?”
“Can I?” Hell, yes! she thought. All her weariness and aches melted away. “I’m flight qualified on remotes as well as cargo aircraft. I also play Lightspeed Stars. Level eighty-seven.”
Edelman’s voice rose in delight. “No kidding? Me too! I’ll have to join your server when all this is over. Let me get my operations center to hook you up.”
Nela waited impatiently for the feed to open. The lighter emerged from the night terminator and into the rising sun over the ocean. It was moving fast. When it hit, it was going to bury itself deep. Considering the depths of the forest, she had to home in on the lighter and keep it in her sights as best she could. The fastest drone she knew of could go approximately 225 miles per hour. The lighter was coming in at about the same speed. If she could pace it, she could stay with it to impact and, she hoped, stay with it until an American crew could retrieve it.
She linked to all of the other Space Force observers worldwide.
“I’ve got to focus on this craft,” she explained. “I’m turning all of my usual scan programs over to you until further notice.”
“Envy, envy,” said Tyndall. “It’s gonna be a wild ride. I’d love to piggyback on you.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Nela said. “But maybe the video can be declassified later.”
To a chorus of disappointment, she clicked off and went back to Palanquero.
“Where’s the package now?” the captain asked. Nela shared her screens.
“Less than a hundred kilometers off the coast of South America.” With satisfaction, she added, “It’s right in the zone, ma’am. Latitude 34.0216.”
“Drones deploying, Argus. “Lieutenant Souter, you with us?”
“Yes, ma’am!” a very deep voice with a Texas accent jumped in. “Patching you into the visuals, Argus.”
On her side screens, Nela suddenly had visuals of a swath of green and dark-brown treetops. They were going fast, but not too fast to follow. She picked the left-hand drone and moved the video into her center screen. The cargo lighter and the calculations still occupied the right-hand screen.
“You want to take over now?” Texas asked.
“Give me a chance to try out the controls,” Nela said.
“It’s easy. They’re all based on console first-person shooters these days,” Texas added, humor in his voice. “Plus a couple of special commands.” He explained those, and Nela typed a note to pin to the right side of her screen. She made the drone rise and fall, then flew an Immelmann, narrowly missing a tall branch sticking out of the forest crown. “You’re now designated Drone One. Welcome to the flight.”
“I’ve got helicopters in the area,” Edelman said. “Once we pinpoint the landing zone, four MH-6 birds are ready to drop in.”
“Heads up!” AFB Apiay barked. “Eight—no, nine uglies just popped up on my readout.” He shared the view, obviously onboard another drone. Nela stared. The small flyers were almost invisible against the thick forest, but she could see four rotors whirling at the corners of a central base. Their sleek design and camouflage paint job suggested Russian military drones.
“Where are they from us?” Nela asked.
“Ten klicks,” Apiay said. The display showed a terrain map with the U.S. flight picked out in blue, and the Russians in black. “Closing fast. Wow! They can move.” Hot red light erupted from the body of the lead craft. “Oh, shit! They’re armed.”
“So are we,” Texas said, his voice level.
Nela kept an eye on the lighter. Not only did she have satellite views, but coastal cameras were tracking the incoming vessel. The lighter had burnt streaks along its side, probably from reentry through the atmosphere, but looked intact. You’ll be mine in a minute, she thought at it.
The lighter streaked over the shoreline, over the towns on the coast, and into the interior. It was so low that Nela feared it would hit telecommunication towers on the way. Luckily, it missed everything, and plunged through the line of trees.
“Lost you,” announced the observer reporting from the GOES-West satellite. “Switching to infrared.”
“On visual!” a woman’s voice crowed. “Drone Four falling in behind.”
Suddenly, Nela caught a glimpse of white hurtling through the trees. The lighter appeared and disappeared, as it played havoc with the local greenery. She imagined monkeys and parrots screaming at it as they scrambled to safety.
She spun the drone and revved the electric motors up to full. She felt fond of it, as though she was seeing an old friend. The last time she had seen the lighter this close was off the monitors on the nose of the Gryphon shuttle. She let it hurtle past her, and thrust the controls to full to stay on its tail. The craft was large enough to mow down trees. Nela had to pull back in order not to have any of the falling timber hit her rotors.
“Incoming!” Drone Four announced.
It felt like a live-action game of Lightspeed Stars. On the infrared scope provided by GOES-West, she saw the bogeys homing in on them from the north. A few blue streaks peeled off to engage them and try to keep them from following the cargo lighter. They circled one another like dogfighters.
By now, the lighter would be hunting for a landing strip to steer for, but it just wasn’t going to find one. The farther they flew, the jungle became thicker and thicker. Nela had to do some neat Han Solo moves to stay behind the lighter, turning the drone on its side to slide between tree trunks. A cluster of lianas, set free by the cargo craft’s destruction, slithered down in front of her. She spun a hundred eighty degrees to avoid it, then switched back, throttling up to get back on the lighter’s tail. At least one of her companions and a Russian fell prey to the vines.
Nela felt sweat running down her back. With the exhilaration of the chase, she forgot all about her full bladder, the numbness of her legs, and her exhaustion from sitting up for over eighteen hours. A suspension bridge rose out of nowhere. The lighter, thankfully, was too low to crash into any of the supports, and too high to drop into the river, but it wouldn’t be long now. Its momentum had slowed drastically because of the impacts with branches in the canopy. Her computer estimated the time of impact to under three minutes, maybe less. She started a countdown on her left screen.
“Two on your tail,” Texas said. “Comin’ up fast.”
She gave the infrared map the briefest glance. Now that she knew the trajectory of the lighter, she didn’t have to stay precisely on its tail.
Almost as if she could feel the fingers on the trigger, she dropped the drone two meters, and saw a red tracer zing over her head. She laughed out loud. Although she had never been a combat pilot, she’d dodged plenty of similar attacks on her six in the online game. Watching the map for breaks in the terrain, she planned out a series of maneuvers, hoping to avoid strikes. The two Russians came up to meet her. Red tracers pinged past her, above and below. They were bracketing her for the kill.
She narrowed her eyes gleefully. Hadn’t she spent too many wasted hours honing her skills for just this kind of encounter? Hundreds of old movies, newsreels from the 1940s on forward, and battle after battle against competitive players worldwide. Maybe one or both of the drone pilots facing her had been in the game as well?
“What are my armaments?” she asked Texas.
“You got two missiles, one under each arm,” he replied. “Control-D and Control-K launch. They’ll throw you into a wobble.”
“Got it,” Nela said, her fingers running over the controls, her eyes intent on the screen.
The seconds counted down rapidly. She needed to be there when the lighter landed, so she took off for the treetops. The Russians followed, still firing. She kept shifting, keeping her movements irregular.
Only the falling trees and birds exploding out of the undergrowth heralded the path of the lighter. The faint infrared trace from residual reentry heat was fading quickly. She angled the drone down into the path of destruction. The Russians followed her.
Almost as soon as she dropped into the canopy, she spun the forward left rotor and zipped off through a gap in the trees. The Russians hesitated for a moment, then followed. Nela led them on a merry chase under branches and through nearly imperceptible gaps in the undergrowth. She was all too aware of the countdown going on in the corner of her screen.
The scenery took a major wobble, and her right rear rotor refused to respond to her controls. They’d hit her!
No more time to lose. Nela took several more abrupt turns and angled upward. Her speed had dropped to two thirds of maximum as the battery kept trying to feed the damaged rotor. The two enemy craft closed in, figuring she would retreat. She broke through the canopy.
No.
Instead, she spun on her three remaining wings, homed in, and hit both missile controls. She was so close the Russians had no time to react. She hit one dead-on. It burst apart in a shower of parts. The other craft took a hit on its two right rotors and sagged lopsided into the canopy. She never saw it again.
Nela angled her drone toward the destruction the lighter was wreaking. The dogfight had taken less than a minute. The lighter was still on the move.
Only fifteen seconds to impact. Ten. She was just in time to spot the lighter through the trees before it disappeared in an explosion of greenery.
“Touchdown!” she cried. She reeled off her location, though it was already on the screen for anyone to read. “Homing in for retrieval.” She circled around the site of the impact. No way to see the craft. It had dug itself a trench, then buried itself deep in the jungle floor.
Within moments, three other drones met her circling above the site.
“Helicopter on the way to your location,” Edelman said. “Thank you, Argus. Nice work.”
“Thanks.” She settled the damaged drone on the ground. Its work was done.
“That was some fancy flying,” Texas added. One of the American drones dipped its rotors as if in salute. “I caught some of that on my cameras! You want to come work with us? I could use someone with your reflexes.”
“No, thanks,” she said with a laugh. “I’m holding out for a Moon base assignment.”
“Well, they’d be lucky to have you.”
Another voice broke into the circuit. “I know that flying style!” a man exclaimed. “Dammit, are you DevilInABlueDressUniform? I’m NoParachute! We were in a tournament together two months ago. Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
It took her a minute to recognize the voice, and she gawked in flat-out astonishment. Not eighteen hours ago, it had been shouting at her. “. . . Commander McKenzie?”
“Call me Mike,” McKenzie said. “Sorry about earlier. You can guess how we were feeling. But the Space Force really helped us out. I appreciate your vigilance. And your fancy flying.”
“Happy to help,” Nela said. She suddenly became aware how much her body ached from holding one position for so long. She let her arms drop and shook them. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“That was above and beyond,” McKenzie said. “I’ve got a call in to Stantis to thank him for interservice assistance. And I’ll see you in the next tournament. It’s in two weeks, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” Nela grinned, as she watched the helicopters land in the jungle and Air Force personnel in camo jump out and race toward her cameras. “I’ll beat you then too.”
***
Jody Lynn Nye is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction books and short stories, many of them with a humorous bent. She’s published more than 170 short stories and over 50 books, including her epic fantasy series, The Dreamland, contemporary humorous fantasies, medical science fiction novels, and more.
Before breaking away from gainful employment to write full time, Jody worked as a file clerk, photographer, accounting assistant and costume maker, and oh, as part of the engineering team that built a TV station, acted as technical director during live sports broadcasts, and worked to produce in-house spots and public service announcements.
More at jodynye.com