Dark Dragons (9 page)

He rose to his feet but did not approach.  Instead, he
remained in one spot and studied their new fighters from a distance, trying to
accept the sobering fact the machines now belonged to them.  They looked
fast, even sitting motionless in the sun, but the word “fast” fell considerably
short of accentuating their unnatural speeds. 
Capable of vertical
take-off and landing
, he told himself. 
It has three different
propulsion systems, neither of which rely on an on-board fuel supply but instead
on perpetual energy tapped from an interdimensional, sub-atomic source.

The first engine was an atmospheric drive called an
anti-graviton emitter, impractical for operation in outer space because it
needed gravity to function, but could out-fly anything that Earth’s skies were
accustomed to.  It had no visible components.  The entire emitter sat
inside the large spherical chamber at the rear of the fuselage.  Only the
top and bottom of this sphere could be seen.  The atmospheric engine was
really a force field projector that used an omnidirectional anti-graviton
emitter cooled by liquid nitrogen to produce
0-degree radius
thrust-vectoring.  Gravitons were the elementary particles of gravity
which every massive body like Earth or the sun possessed.  When a graviton
met an anti-graviton, they repelled from one another in the opposite
direction.  Positive and negative.

He slowly approached his fighter. 
His
fighter.  Somehow he knew this one belonged to him.  Did a
machine-to-flesh connection exist?  He shivered again.

The AG emitter produced a maximum acceleration of 3.5 miles
per second or about MACH sixteen in just 0.17 seconds.  Point-seventeen
seconds!  Darren imagined that if someone were watching his fighter take
off from a stationary position at that speed, it would appear that his fighter
had simply vanished quicker than it took to blink an eye.  A ring of force
field projectors inside the cockpit, equaling the acceleration in the opposite
direction, negated the crushing g-forces by pushing against every molecule in
the body, not just the body’s surface like other forms of acceleration.

Sonic boom?  No such thing.  His fighter possessed
a third set of force field projectors that manipulated the air molecules, eliminating
air compression around the fighter’s skin, creating “potential flow”——smooth,
silent, loss-free . . . an aircraft designer’s wet dream.  Silent,
hypersonic flight . . . no bow shock in front of the fighter or heating of the
surface, and certainly no sonic boom existed.

He moved on to the characteristics of the second
engine.  The primary engines, the sub-lights, were a pair of bizarre
animals born from another universe of physical law.  They too had no
visible, external components like the nozzles of a rocket engine.  The
pair of magic machines that pushed the dragons across outer space lay hidden
inside the fuselage on both sides of the AG emitter chamber.  A certain
wave particle similar to a superstring millions of times smaller than an electron
existed in the quantum soup——perhaps a billion within every cubic micron of
space——that fused the heavens together and kept the chaotic gods in
check.  These particles provided an interstellar
road
in which the
quantum
wheels
of the sub-light drives could push against in whatever
direction so desired.  No on-board fuel needed.

These speed demon drives, far too fast to use for
atmospheric flight operations, could accelerate at full impulse to eighteen
thousand miles per second before a restricting governor called a
magneto-caliper put the brakes on to avoid relativistic peculiarities like time
dilation and dangerous mass increments.  Again, the anti-g cockpit fields
negated deadly centrifugal force on the pilot’s body.

Darren did a quick bit of math and realized he could reach
the moon in just two minutes.  Logically, the sub-light engines had to
produce this speed in order to exceed the escape velocity of a super gas-giant
planet or main-sequence star.

Hot rods of the gods
, he mused.

The third engine wasn’t actually an engine but a metaspace
warp generator that could produce an artificial wormhole in which to escape
from the known universe and reappear elsewhere.  The way Darren understood
it, every cubic micron of space surrounding a massive body like a planet or
star contained several fluctuating wormholes.  The warp generator dilated
these wormholes until they merged with one another to form an entry portal; the
generator then agitated the same fixed particles that the sub-light drives
pushed against to a higher frequency, preventing the wormhole from collapsing
in on itself.  The time it took to arrive at the destination depended not
only on the distance but the mass of the target object, too.  If heading
for Mars, about forty-five million miles away, it would take perhaps two
minutes.  If heading for the sun——much more massive than Mars——93 million
miles distant, perhaps two minutes as well.  Neptune, maybe ten
minutes. 
Alpha Centuari?
 Darren thought with a smile but
with a cold chill on his skin. 
A couple of days perhaps to reach the
nearest solar system to Earth’s own.

The fighter’s power plant was probably the most astonishing
feature that Darren barely had enough mental capacity to understand.  At
least the three propulsion systems had some sort of far-out logic to them that
an eighteen year-old could decipher.  The power plant had a pair of
microscopic, black hole singularities contained within a revolving magnetic
field, spinning around each other millions of times per second.  Two lethal
genies were locked in a threatening knife-fight, circling one another for the
kill, and ready to unleash untold destruction upon the universe if ever let
out.  Here was a machine wrapped around a power generator which contained
an interstellar Pandora’s Box of magic.  The chills that Darren felt
across his skin reminded him that he was now in possession of technology that
scared him witless.

“They’re invisible,” came a ghostly, monotone voice.

Darren turned and saw Tony standing ten feet behind him, a
weird glint of sunlight in his eyes.  He looked like he was a million
miles away.

“I know,” Darren replied.  The fighters were not
invisible now, but he knew what Tony meant.  They did possess the
capability of invisibility, a strictly defensive and evasive feature because it
was nearly impossible for the pilot to fight while invisible.  An ECM
repulsor, which also provided an active-stealth feature, produced an energy
field which redirected visible light, infrared and ultraviolet photons back to
the opposite side and spewed them out as if they had not encountered
anything.  The drawback was that neither the pilot nor any of his
electronic sensors could see through the blackness.  Invisibility also
sucked a lot of precious energy, especially during daylight operations, which
drew power away from other systems like the engines and weapons.

Darren could smell the machinery and electronics inside the
fighter as he approached.  It certainly smelled new, looked new, but the
fighter was over three thousand years old.  He placed his fingers on the
tip of the fighter’s nose and received a static shock. 
Whoa, horse!
 
He recoiled away, anticipating something inside to react, and then placed his
hand on it again.  Smooth.  The most delicate surface he had ever
touched.

The fighter’s armor was made of carbon nanosphere sheets
woven with boron-carbide and crushed and baked by singularity forges into a
super-dense matter similar to ceramic.  Able to withstand temperatures
from absolute zero to fifteen thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the skin had an
ablative effect against angled laser blasts and could survive a high-kinetic
ballistic shot made from any material in the universe, except, of course, a
shot made from the same super-carbon material.

Darren spotted two rectangular indentations under the
cockpit windshield.  Footpads.  When he placed his right hand on the
bottom one, it began to vibrate, the fighter’s computer identifying his
bio-impulse patterns.  When it recognized him as the only pilot for this
machine, two struts popped out above his head just below the windshield. 
He grabbed them and boosted himself up.  As his weight pressed down on the
second footpad, a sensor there slid the windshield back with a whirling hum to
reveal the cockpit.

He expected to see a hundred confusing buttons and lights
with some kind of heads-up-display across the top of the dash but quickly
remembered that there would not be a solitary instrument.  No throttle, no
rudder stick, nothing.  Just a well-padded seat——

——where a black-armor, combat suit sat like a robotic
mannequin.  A conditioned response sparked new memories in his brain, and
immediately Darren understood.  The fighter didn’t require buttons, dials
or cockpit avionics; rather the suit’s helmet functioned as a relay and
processing center for the controls, the pilot’s brain the ignition key which
started the beast.  The fighter was completely thought-controlled:
weapons, navigation, propulsion and guidance, everything.

Darren uncoiled a rubber-coated cable from the main
computer’s thought-control processing terminal above the seat.  The
computer’s brain impulse-recognition device made sure the correct person was
sitting in the correct fighter or the main computer would refuse to activate
the avionics and pre-flight check.

Thought-control——actual symbiosis with a machine. 
In
your face interface.
 The idea was not too farfetched.  Darren
had a distant paraplegic relative who got around in a special wheelchair that
responded to simple brain-impulse commands.  Quite a remarkable machine
but nothing like this futuristic engine of destruction, without a doubt the
most user-friendly piece of machinery he had ever seen.  A
thought-controlled weapons system was a volatile package, and it would seem
that just one unintentional bad thought could wipe out an entire city block or
blast the pilot’s wingman out of the sky.  However, Darren knew the ship
last night had given him an electronically assisted push up the evolutionary
ladder.  Unused areas of the brain not meant to be used for a million years
had been accessed.  As a result, he had been conditioned to think and
react in a faster, transcendental state, a kind of “cockpit Zen” that allowed
him to maintain mental harmony with an accelerated system.  Inadvertent
thoughts were nonexistent.

When the helmet’s internal circuits were activated, the
glass visor——no it was not glass, he reminded himself, but something
else——became a transparent monitor from the inside.  The visor displayed
status info, infrared night-vision, air-to-air and ground targeting, damage reports,
altitude, speed, global and space positioning.

I am En’rev’k Y’rid Zet,
Darren thought with a smile.
‘He Who Greets With Fire.’

He looked around the cockpit again to see if he had missed
anything.  The seat was shaped more like a recliner, so when the pilot sat
down, it automatically clamped him in with a restraining brace.  The
cockpit was shock-proof, mounted on springs to safeguard the pilot from the
concussion of close-proximity explosions.

When Darren climbed down, the windshield automatically slid
shut, and he walked under the port wing.  The fighter of course did not
use lift or angle of attack as a force to achieve flight, but rather the faux
wings were used to store an impressive selection of exotic missiles and rockets
since the propulsion and generator systems took up nearly eighty percent of the
internal fuselage.

“We’re supposed to fly those?”

Nate was standing on the spot where he had fallen last
night.

“Yes,” Darren replied.  He turned back to face his
fighter.  “They’re called Dragonstars.”  He had pulled that from his
new memory: named for the giant, acid-spitting, apex predator that once
terrorized the skies of Xrelmara some 3 million years ago and had forever
burned their legacy into the myths of a long-forgotten history.

Jorge had woke too, still sitting on the ground behind Nate
who began to chuckle nervously like he always did when confronted with
something beyond his control.  Heartless laughter . . . Earth faced alien
invasion, and they were chosen to stop it.

Random heroes.

But why did the ship select them?  Maybe it had been
heading for the United Nations building or the White House south lawn. 
Certainly not here.  Why not land in the middle of Camp Pendleton to
brainwash a squad of Marines with the scary light show and brain scans? 
Or some fighter pilots in the Air Force?  Darren answered his own
questions when he remembered the crippling, high-ballistic strike.

“Hey.”  He spun around.  “What happened to that
big ship?”

Saturday, May 15

In a sun-parched area north of Ridgecrest, California, lay a
rattlesnake-infested region of military land 4,500 square kilometers across
known as the Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake.  Here, the U.S.
military designed and tested missiles, artillery and other amazing weapons away
from the curious eyes of citizens those systems were made to protect.  The
Sidewinder air-to-air missile which American fighters have used since the
1950’s was created at China Lake.  The AGM-88 High Speed Anti-Radiation
Missile and the AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missile were tested here in the
1970’s as well.  Almost every missile born during the witchy years of the
Cold War originated at the China Lake proving grounds, and it was here where
Colonel Martin Towsley had received requisition and clearance to build his
fortress.

He stood in the hot afternoon sun outside the tunnel and
watched four MH-53J Pave Low helicopters take off from the heliport near the
9,200 foot runway a mile away.  His organization was on the move. 
“Icarus Hammer” had been ordered, and all APIS personnel were being airlifted
to the Southern California Logistics Airport at George Air Force Base ninety
miles northeast of L.A.  However, Towsley had to stay behind for the
moment and would not be joining the A-teams until later . . . because Air Force
One would be arriving shortly.