The correspondences were all there, a perfect set of fingerprints showing that C3 and the Flighthawks had worked flawlessly, at least until the point when Raven lost its link with Hawkmother over the Sierra Nevadas.
But the diagnostic program that she’d run to check for the correspondences had discovered a large number of anomalies in the allocations. Sparse at first, they’d increased dramatically by the time contact was lost.
They were short too, and didn’t correspond to actual or virtual addresses in the memory or processing units. But they were definitely there — as her yellow marker attested. Jennifer climbed onto the table, bending low to mark them. She was about three quarters of the way through when the door to the lab slid open.
“Hey, Jen,” said Zen, rolling in.
“Hi,” she said, continuing to mark the sheets.
“What are you doing on the table?”
“Cramming for the test,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Just a joke.” She lifted her knees carefully and slid off the table.
“Some view,” said Zen.
“If I’d have known you were coming I would have worn a miniskirt,” she said.
“Seriously, what are you doing?”
“Something strange happened with the Flighthawk control computer,” she said, explaining about the allocations.
“Maybe it’s just a transmission problem.”
“No way. We’ve done this a million times without anything like this showing up.”
“Not with ANTARES.”
“True.”
“This related to the crash?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
Jennifer tugged a strand of hair back behind her ear. “I don’t see how. You have no idea what happened?”
“Kulpin thought the flight computer on the Boeing whacked out and somehow took over.”
“Hmmmph.”
“Possible?”
What if the gibberish were code from the Boeing’s computer pilot?
“Well?” asked Jeff.
“I uh, well, probably not,” she said. “We’ve never had that kind of problem with the autopilot before. It’s basically a subset of the systems we’ve used in the Megafortress.”
How could the Boeing’s command computer leak across into C3?
Through the interrupts they used for the video, and to coordinate the flight information. But the gateway and thus ANTARES were in the way.
Impossible.
Impossible?
“Jen?”
“I just thought of an odd theory,” she said, explaining it to him. Zen’s eyes began to glaze after the first sentence, so she cut it short. “I’ll have to review a few sessions to see if I’m on the right track. I’m not sure I’m right, but it might be a start.”
“Do you have anything that can help us now? For the search’?”
“Sorry.”
Jeff started to roll away.
“Jeff, if you can get the hard drives back, we’d have a much better chance to figure out what happened.”
“Figuring out what happened isn’t my priority at the moment,” he said. “I want to find Dalton and Madrone.”
“So do I.”
Chapter 49
Sergeant Perse “Powder” Talcom leaned against the door window of the Pave Low as the big helicopter struggled against the wind. The cloud hanging on the mountainside seemed like a massive bear, trying to protect her young.
“Fierce fuckin’ rain,” he groused to Sergeant Lee “Nurse” Liu, who was standing behind him. “I can’t fuckin’ see fuckin’ shit.”
“Sleet,” corrected Liu. “Some of it’s even snow.”
“Whatever.”
“Use Captain Freah’s visor.”
“Helmet’s too damn heavy.”
“Then I will.”
Powder gave his companion a scowl, then braced himself to fit the smart helmet and its high-tech visor over his head. Freah’s suggestion that they take the new device had seemed like a great idea — until Powder put it on in the transport out to Nellis. The helmet had been formed for the captain’s head. It scraped the hell out of Powder’s ears going on, but floated around freely like a bucket atop a water pump once on.
No wonder officers thought differently than normal human beings; their heads were shaped weird.
Normally, a Pave Low would ride with two officers — pilot and copilot — along with a pair of flight engineers and two crew members manning the guns. This craft, Charlie 7, had been flying nearly nonstop since before the crash, and was now on its third crew. Besides the pilots and the Dreamland volunteers as SAR personnel, it carried only one flight engineer, a staff sergeant named Brautman who had drunk at least four liter bottles of Coke since the Dreamland volunteers had come aboard forty-five minutes ago. He definitely had a caffeine buzz — his chin bobbed up and down constantly and his arms buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. Brautman kept getting up and down, pacing back and forth between the rear of the flight deck and the rest of the cabin, so jittery Powder felt like laying him out with a shot to the jaw.
“There, right there,” said Liu, pointing to the ravine.
Powder flicked the visor into infrared mode. A brownish blob appeared at the lower left of the screen; the weather cut down greatly on the available detail, but there was definitely something warm down there.
“Get us the fuck down there,” Powder yelled to Brautman, who relayed the request to the pilot without the expletive.
“Too windy,” was the reply.
“Fuck that.” Sergeant Talcom took off the helmet, and then nearly lost it as turbulence rocked the helo. Liu grabbed the helmet and Powder tottered forward, grabbing at the bulkhead like a drunken sailor.
“You gotta get us fuckin’ down!” he yelled at the two men on the flight deck.
As a general rule, Air Force SAR helicopter pilots, and Pave Low jocks in particular, had boulder-sized balls. With the possible exception of their mamas, they weren’t scared of anything. This particular pilot had flown deep into Iraq during the Gulf War, and had a scar on his leg to prove he had done so under fire. But he shook his head.
“The storm is too much, night’s coming on, and that’s not a man down there,” he told Powder.
“How the fuck do you know?” demanded the sergeant.
“Because we’ve been looking at that spot for five minutes on the infrared.” answered the copilot, pointing to the Pave Low’s screen. A strong gust of wind caught the helicopter, and he snapped his head back to the front as the pilot steadied the craft. “The scope is clear,” he added. “No one’s there.”
“He’s on ours!” answered Powder. He jerked his thumb back toward Liu. “Or something is! I’m fuckin’ tellin’ yaour gear spotted something.”
“Look, Sergeant, you do your job, we’ll do ours,” said the copilot. “And watch your language when you’re talking to an officer.”
“Hey, fuck that,” grumbled Powder.
Liu squeezed next to him, the helmet on his head. The Whiplash crew members’ discrete-burst com sets didn’t interface with the Pave Low’s interphone, so he hadn’t heard the discussion.
“I see something,” he shouted to the others over the whine of the engines.
“We know,” said Powder.
“Not a person,” answered the copilot.
“I know,” said Liu. “But I have a theory.”
“What?” said Brautman.