Starfire (33 page)

“Open fire when the shooting stops!” Ratel shouted. The toolbox was being raked with bullets, but it looked like the tools inside were absorbing the bullets. A moment later there was a momentary lull in the shooting, and Brad peeked over the toolbox, saw movement by the jet's tire, and fired. The round hit the tire, which instantly exploded, sending a concussion shock wave into the attacker's face. He screamed, clutching his face in agony. The bizjet looked like it was going to crash to the right, but the wheel hub barely kept it from completely tipping over.

Now the gunfire was shifting directions—more bullets were hitting the side of the toolbox instead of the front. “Watch your sides!” Ratel shouted. “They'll try to . . .
ahhh! Shit!
” Brad looked to see Ratel clutching his right hand, which looked as if it had been split wide open by a bullet. Blood spurted everywhere. “Take the rifle and hold them off!” Ratel shouted, clutching his injured hand, trying to stem the bleeding.

Brad tried to peek around the toolbox, but the moment he moved, the bullets began to fly, and now he could feel them getting closer and closer, like a swarm of bats buzzing past his head. He tried pointing the rifle around the toolbox and firing, but the rifle's muzzle was jumping around uncontrollably. Ratel had wrapped a rag around his right hand and was firing a pistol with his left, but the muzzle wasn't steady at all and he looked as if he was going to go unconscious at any moment. Brad heard boot steps and voices in Russian getting closer. This is it, he thought. The next shot he'd hear would be the last one ever, he was certain of it . . .

SIX

A lie never lives to be old.

—S
OPHOCLES

P
ASO
R
OBLES
, C
ALIFORNIA

Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion at the back of the hangar. The air was instantly filled with dust and debris. Voices were shouting in Russian . . . and soon the shouting was replaced by screaming, and a moment later the screams fell silent as well.

“All clear, Brad,” came an electronically synthesized voice. Brad looked up, and there behind the bizjet was a Cybernetic Infantry Device.

“Dad?” he asked.

“Are you all right?” Patrick McLanahan asked.

“Chief Ratel,” Brad said, shouting over the ringing in his ears from all the gunfire in the enclosed hangar. “He's hurt.” A moment later two men hurried over and carried Ratel out. Brad ran over to the robot. He saw where his father had burst through the doorway, taking out most of the wall around the door between the hangar and the front office. All six attackers, the four who had attacked the hangar and the two who attacked Brad on Tank Farm Road, had already been taken away.

“Are you all right, Brad?” Patrick asked.

“Yes. I can't hear very well from all the gunfire, but otherwise I'm okay.”

“Good. Let's get out of here. The Highway Patrol and sheriffs are about five minutes out.” Patrick picked up his son and carried him across a large open field to a parking spot near the south end of the runway, where the black Sherpa cargo plane was waiting, its turboprop propellers turning at idle speed. Patrick put Brad down, crawled inside through the cargo ramp in the back, and sat down on the cargo deck, and Brad climbed aboard right after him. A crewmember steered Brad onto a cargo net seat, helped him buckle in, and gave him a headset. Within moments they were airborne.

“What about Chief Ratel?” Brad asked, assuming that his father could hear him through the intercom.

“He'll be evacuated and treated,” Patrick replied.

“What will the cops do when they see that hangar? It looks like a war zone. It
was
a war zone.”

“President Martindale will handle that,” Patrick replied.

“How did you get here so fast, Dad?”

“I was in St. George when your alarm went off back in San Luis Obispo,” Patrick said. “It's less than two hours away in the Sherpa. Thank God Chief Ratel got to you in time and got you out of town.”

“St. George? Is that where we're headed now?”

“Yes, Brad,” Patrick said. The CID turned to Brad and raised an armored hand, anticipating Brad's protests. “I know you want to go back to Cal Poly, Brad,” Patrick said, “and now that you've received that grant from Sky Masters, your work is even more important. I want to see you continue your training too. So I'm going to assign Sergeant Major Wohl's team to detect and capture any more attack squads that come after you. They'll set up closer to campus so you won't have to travel all the way to the south side of the city for training. They'll take over your training until Chief Ratel is well enough to do so.”

“You mean, they'll be my bodyguards or something?”

“Although I'm sure they can handle them, Wohl's teams aren't made for personal security jobs,” Patrick said. “They train for countersurveillance and direct-action missions. But we've encountered four two-man teams of Russian hit men now. I'm not going to allow any hit squads to roam around the United States at will, especially ones that target my son. So we need to set up a plan of action. We'll interrogate the new guys, do some investigating, and figure out a plan.”

“So I'll be like a decoy, sucking in the bad guys so the sergeant major can take them out?” Brad remarked. He nodded and smiled. “That's cool, as long as I can go back to Cal Poly. I
can
go back to Cal Poly, right, Dad?”

“Against my better judgment, yes,” Patrick said. “But not tonight. Let the sergeant major and his teams interrogate the new prisoners, gather some information, and sweep the campus and the city. It'll only be a day or two. I know you do most of your studying for finals online, and your classes are basically over, so you'll be able to work at our headquarters. Before finals week comes around, you should be able to go back to campus.”

“I'll just have to figure out an excuse to tell the Starfire team,” Brad said. “The project is exploding, Dad. The university is getting money and support from all over the world.”

“I know, son,” Patrick said. “To the university's credit, they are keeping Starfire strictly a Cal Poly undergraduate project—other universities, companies, and even governments have offered to take over. Looks like you'll stay the head honcho for now. Just realize that the pressure to turn the project over to someone else as a for-profit operation will certainly build—most likely Sky Masters Aerospace, I'd wager, now that they've invested so much in it—and the university might be induced by the big bucks to let some company take it over. Just don't be offended if that happens. Universities run on money.”

“I won't be offended.”

“Good.” The CID turned its massive armored head toward Brad. “I'm proud of you, son,” Patrick said. “I've seen it in hundreds of e-mails from all over the world: people are impressed with your leadership in driving this project forward, building a first-class team, and gathering technical support. No one can believe you're a first-year undergrad.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Brad said. “I hope I can achieve even a little bit of the success you've had in the Air Force.”

“I think your path will be totally different than mine,” Patrick said. He turned back, facing the rear of the aircraft. “I always wished I had leadership skills like yours. My life might have been so much different if I had your skills and learned how to use them. You obviously learned them from someone other than your dad, or maybe from Civil Air Patrol.”

“But you were . . . I mean,
are
a three-star general, Dad.”

“Yes, but my promotions came about because of the things I did, not because of my leadership skills,” Patrick said, the pensiveness in his voice still obvious despite the CID's electronic voice synthesis. “I had a couple command positions over the years, but I never actually acted as a real commander—I acted like I always did: an operator, an aviator, a crewdog, not a leader. I saw a job that needed to get done, and I went out and did it. As a field-grade or general officer, I was supposed to build a team that would do the job, not go off and do it myself. I never really understood what it meant to lead.”

“I think getting the job done is the most important thing too, Dad,” Brad said. “I'm an aerospace engineering student, but I can barely make sense of most of the science I'm expected to learn. I muddle my way through it by finding someone to explain it to me. But all I really want to do is fly. I know I have to get the degree so I can attend test-pilot school and fly the hot jets, but I don't care about the degree. I just want to fly.”

“Well, it's working for you, son,” Patrick said. “Keep fixated on the goal. You'll make it.”

The Sherpa landed about two hours later at General Dick Stout Field, fourteen miles northeast of the city of St. George in southern Utah. The airport had been greatly expanded over the past few years as the population of St. George grew, and although Stout Field was still a nontowered airport, the west side of it had blossomed as an industrial and commercial air hub. The black Sherpa taxied to a very large hangar on the south side of the industrial side of the airport, and was towed inside the hangar before anyone was allowed to disembark. The massive hangar contained a Challenger-5 business jet, a Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle with weapons pylons under the wings, and a smaller version of the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, all painted black, of course.

Patrick led his son to an adjacent building. Brad immediately noticed that the ceiling was higher and all of the doors and corridors were wider and taller than normal, all obviously constructed to accommodate the Cybernetic Infantry Device that was walking through them. Brad heard a lock automatically click open as they approached a door, and they entered a room in the center of the building. “This is home,” Patrick said. It was nothing more than a bare windowless room, with just a table with some of the nutrient canisters sitting on it, a spot where Patrick plugged himself in for recharging . . .

. . . and, in the far corner, another new-model Cybernetic Infantry Device robot. “I see I'm getting a replacement,” Patrick said woodenly. “It usually takes another day or so for us to run a full set of diagnostics on the new CID before they do the transfer.”

“Then I'll be able to see you, Dad.”

“Son, if you're sure that's what you want to do, then I'll allow it,” Patrick said. “But it's not pretty.”

Brad looked around the room. “Sheesh, they don't even let you have pictures on the walls?”

“I can get all the pictures I want, anytime I want, played right inside my consciousness,” Patrick said. “I don't need them on the wall.” He replaced the nutrient canisters in his chassis with the new ones on the table, then stood in a specified spot in the center of the room, and power, data, hygienic, nutrient, and diagnostic cables automatically descended from the ceiling and plugged themselves into the proper places on the CID. Patrick froze in place, standing straight up, looking very much like the unmanned robot in the corner. “The sergeant major will be by in a few hours to get briefed and talk to you about what happened, and then he'll take you to a hotel,” he said. “He'll bring you back in the morning, and we'll set you up so you can do some studying.”

Brad thought about what he was going to say for a moment in silence; then: “Dad, you told me that you're still you inside that robot.”

“Yes.”

“Well, the ‘you' I remember had awards, plaques, and pictures on the walls,” Brad said. “Even in the little double-wide trailer back in Battle Mountain, you had your old flight helmets, display cases with memorabilia, airplane models, and random bits of stuff that I never even knew what they were, but they obviously meant a great deal to you. Why don't you have any of that here?”

The robot remained motionless and silent for several long moments; then: “I guess I never really thought about it, Brad,” Patrick said finally. “At first I thought it was because I didn't want anyone to know it was me inside here, but now all of the people with whom I interact in this building know that it's me, so that really doesn't apply anymore.”

“Well, the robot wouldn't have stuff on the walls,” Brad said, “but my dad would.” Patrick said nothing. “Maybe when everything calms down and gets back to normal—or the closest it will ever come to normal—I can fly out here and set up some stuff. Make it more like your room, rather than a storeroom.”

“I'd like that, son,” Patrick said. “I'd like that.”

O
FFICE
OF
THE
P
RESIDENT

F
OURTEENTH
B
UILDING
,
THE
K
REMLIN

M
OSCOW

S
EVERAL
DAYS
LATER

“Definitely signs of increased activity on the American military space station,” Minister of State Security Viktor Kazyanov said over the video teleconference link from his intelligence center to the president's office. He was showing before-and-after photographs of Armstrong Space Station. “There has been one heavy-lift rocket launch that delivered these long structures, along with many smaller pressurized and unpressurized containers. We do not know for certain yet what is in the pressurized containers, but these other unpressurized items resemble the batteries already mounted on the truss, so we assume they too are batteries.”

“I want no more assumptions from you, Kazyanov,” Russian president Gennadiy Gryzlov said, stabbing at the image of Kazyanov on a computer monitor with his cigar. “Find me the information. Do your damned job.”