There are no identifying patches, no name tag on his flight suit, and the material looks suspiciously woven with sensors. His fitness-tracker-type bracelet and tinted glasses are remarkably similar to my CUFF and PEEPS.
“No stick time for you today,” he picks on me just like he’s always done over the phone, only I never knew he might be flirting. “You get to be chauffeured.”
“It makes me sick,” as I do a walk around, feeling one of the worst cases of aircraft envy I’ve suffered in a while, and I ask if he’s the pilot in command.
“Who other?”
“Then you’d better hope you do a good job because I’m watching,” I point at my eyes and his, the way Carme does when she’s being aggressive, and the gesture sets off the Suburban’s car alarm, the engine gunning.
The awful honking and roaring stop as quickly as they started, and Dick has a bemused smile as we climb into the cabin of the helicopter, sitting down in the forward-facing seats.
“That’s happened twice now,” I let him know. “I cause a misfire, setting off the car alarm, the accelerator gunning and sticking.”
“Our bad,” he admits. “Pointing at your eyes sent the wrong message to ART. He confused the gesture with a different one I don’t need to bore you with,” translated, he’s not going to tell me. “Suffice it to say what you witnessed is a misinterpreted gesture that causes misfires. A programming error that needs to be sorted out.”
We begin fastening our 5-point harnesses, and it frosts my cupcake. I want to be up front flying right seat, not sitting back here like I’m in a taxicab, talking. I don’t care who it’s with.
“The intercom will be set to crew only,” Dick informs me as Conn and his copilot begin going through their preflight checklist. “I’ll give you the upshot of what’s about to happen, Calli. And I don’t want you to get upset.”
“Why would I?” I feel the blood drain from my face, always dreading that he’s about to deliver terrible news, because he has before.
These days I worry most that it will be about Carme. I’ve always known that if something happens to her, Dick would be the one who tells me. Somehow, he’d get word first, before her own family because of who he is. I ask him if she’s okay as I hear the sound of the Agusta’s battery turning on, my built-in spectrum analyzer picking up electronic signals like mad.
“She left before Fran or anybody else showed up, didn’t say where she was going and I’ve not had any contact with her since she left,” I explain.
Carme also didn’t mention if and when I might see her again, and I hope I’ll get used to living like this. Here today. Or maybe not. Showing up when least expected just in time to shoot someone and hide the evidence.
“You don’t need to concern yourself about her,” Dick says as the first engine fires up, the blades turning, and we put on our headsets. “You need to worry about yourself,” his voice over the intercom now, and I turn down the volume, my hearing more sensitive than it used to be.
“What is it I might get upset about?” I push the foam-covered microphone boom closer until it’s touching my bottom lip as the second engine fires up, both of them in flight idle.
“It was never my intention to throw you into the fray this soon. Much sooner than ever intended,” Dick’s voice in my headset. “I wouldn’t blame you for being angry and feeling put upon,” as the blades spin faster.
We can’t hear the chatter between the pilots or their calls to the tower, and Dick assures me they’re not listening to us either. It seems an irony that he would expect me to believe that considering who we’re talking about. The CIA and Secret Service. The commander of Space Force and a NASA cyber investigator. I don’t know why any of us would trust anybody, least of all each other.
“What things are you talking about?” I insist. “Beyond what I learned at Dodd Hall.”
The helicopter is getting light on its wheeled landing gear, and I feel us lifting off, nosing forward to gain speed.
“I realize you were preoccupied at the Gantry yesterday afternoon,” he changes the subject as he does so artfully, referencing my foot pursuit with Lex while the test model was splashing down. “What did you think of the MOBE?”
“I guess it’s like patenting an invention, then seeing it in a store, and nobody told you,” I reply, the NASA Langley campus below dark, empty and slushy with melting snow.
The Gantry hulks blackly against the horizon, the first morning light touching vacuum spheres that look like ghostly planets from up here.
00:00:00:00:0
FLYING OVER Smith Lake, we cross I-95 at an altitude of 365.8 meters (1,200 feet), ART lets me know. He’s thoughtful enough to give me constant flight updates on our speed, heading, aircraft in the area, nearby cell towers and other obstructions.
After hearing me complain to Dick about how badly I wanted to be at the controls instead of a passenger, ART gave me my own heads-up display in my PEEPS and SPIES. I’m able to monitor the same maps the pilots have in the cockpit. I almost believe my artificial friend feels a little bad for me.
By now it’s obvious where we’re headed but I’m not sure why or what’s expected of me. For the past 40 minutes, Dick and I have been discussing the extensive research I conducted on the MOBE, although it wasn’t called that then. Helping with the design of such a vehicle was one of my first tasks when I began working at NASA Langley.
I remember driving myself crazy imagining every far-flung potential and worst-case scenario. It was on me to anticipate conditions and failures that could cause catastrophic problems, if the heat shielding got damaged, for example. Or a thruster malfunctioned, causing the spacecraft to go into a spin, running out of fuel and spiraling down into the Earth’s atmosphere. In other words, toast.
Less than 10 minutes out from our destination, and Quantico is directly under us now. Usually one doesn’t fly over the Marine Corps base, and is polite enough to give the FBI National Academy a wide berth. But our pilot in command navigates through restricted, sensitive airspace as if he answers to no one, gracefully banking east toward the Potomac, the sun low over the river as we begin to follow it.
When the visibility is as good as it is right now, I’m reminded that the past is always present, and at times I get the uncanny feeling that nothing begins or ends, everything happening at once. In creeks and shallow water along the shoreline are the coffin-shaped charred hulls of Civil War fleets set ablaze more than a century and a half ago.