“Some,” she says. “Scattered readout. Some blips are probably horses and cattle. Might be some humans in here, though. At least, something roughly the same mass as humans, and something in their vicinity that’s probably a machine heat source.”
Which at least, Manny reflects wryly, leaves out rabbits. Deer, bears and elk are still possibilities, even if they are unlikely to be driving a tractor. Locating survivors is a secondary objective of the mission. At best, they can be recruited into support positions, freeing more trained military for fighting the droids. At worst, it may be possible to warn them of the advancing enemy. He pulls the plane around in a graceful loop to make a pass over the coordinates Massaccio punches into his readout, activating the zoom on the powerful camera riding among the Sidewinder and Phoenix missiles nestled underneath the Tomcat’s wings.
“What’s the radar look like back there?”
“Negative. No company at all within range.”
Not that he expects any. According to Kirsten, no androids have ever been programmed as either pilots or navigators, one of the few precautions the Pentagon had agreed to in its enthusiasm for soldiers that would never come home as political liabilities in body bags.
Wounded Knee passes beneath them, the empty black lanes of Highways 18 and 20, the blue ribbon of the Niobrara. They are over Nebraska, the rolling hills of the western rural counties stretching empty to the horizon. The shapes of farms and ranches remain clear despite their abandonment, the pale lines of fences marching across the land, the rectangular fields defined by windbreaks and the hatched checkerboard created by the last harrowing after harvest. Silent blips appear on his topo screen as Massaccio punches her readouts forward, but there is nothing of note. Scattered readings that may be human appear sporadically, along with occasional clusters that are probably surviving farm animals, or, more likely, deer. Manny knows he does not have the mystic streak that runs through his uncle’s family—and he is happy not to have it, thank you very much—but even he can see the future in the air that shimmers over the bare earth. Even now, even a mile up and years in their past, he can almost see the dust cloud raised by the myriad hoofs thundering across the prairie as the buffalo return, and with them the wolf and the bear, the puma and the river otter. As it was in the beginning, in the time of the People’s coming forth onto the broad shelf of Ina Maka’s breast, so it will be again.
“Rivers, you there?”
The squawk comes through his earphones, jarring him out of the interstices of time-not- yet. “What is it?”
“Something about twenty miles off to the south—moving toward us, not very fast.”
Without even thinking, Manny hits the switches to arm the missiles under the Cat’s wings. “Civilian aircraft? Chopper?”
“Can’t tell.”
“Let’s check it out.” He pulls on the stick again, laying the craft over onto her side in a wide turn. The blip comes up on his screen, and he frowns at it.. Massaccio is right; whatever it is, is slow. Damned slow. To slow to stay in the air almost, unless it’s a helicopter. Low, too. Only a thousand feet up or so. He kicks Cat’s nose up, getting a bit more height. Just in case.
A few miles to the north of the Platte, movement appears on the horizon, a sweeping, undulating mass riding the wind that scuds over the Kansas flatlands to the south. It is at least a mile wide, perhaps twice or three times as long. Manny feels his muscles go slack, losing their unconscious tension, and he slaps the missile controls a second time, deactivating the preliminary launch sequence. As they pass overhead, he can make out the beating of thousands of wings, hundreds of thousands, as a kettle of hawks makes its way north toward their nesting grounds in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
“What the hell are those things?” Massaccio demands. “There must be a million of them!”
“You a city girl, Massaccio? Those were hawks, probably broadwings. Koda could tell you for sure, but I don’t think anything else travels in kettles that large.”
And it comes to him that it is beginning already, the return of the winged ones and the four foots. Without humans to shoot them for sport, without humans to poison their prey, unprecedented numbers of the hawks have survived to make the spring flight north from their wintering in Central and South America. Which means that there, too, the humans must lie dead in the millions.
With the sun at their tail, Manny guides the Cat along the course of the Platte. Once or twice they pick up a blip that may be a watercraft. Or maybe rafts of debris, floating down toward the Missouri with the thaw. As they pass Kearney, just west of the spot where the river splits and flows in parallel streams for fifty miles or so, the infrared picks up multiple heat sources, all of them mechanical.
“Droids on the move?” Massaccio’s voice comes over the com. “I don’t see any readout that looks like anything but a vehicle. And I’m getting hits on the metalhead scanner.”
Not good. “Let’s get some height here. I’m gonna take her from here on compass. We’ll make a pass straight over Omaha and hope they don’t put up any surface-to-air.”
Up and level again, Manny opens the throttle and lets the Cat scream across the sky, afterburners blazing. The readout passes across his screen so fast he cannot process it, only hope that the sensors record everything the telemetry picks up. “Incoming!” Massaccio yells, and he has it on his radar almost simultaneously, a long, slim shape streaking toward them from the ground. Manny hauls the plane into an evasive corkscrew and fires a Sidewinder at the rising missile, noting with satisfaction the blossom on the LED screen as it makes its kill. So much for hoping to go unnoticed; one of the trucks has radioed the Base. A second surface-to-air missile bores at them on the heels of the thought; a second Sidewinder leaves its nest and scores a second kill. Yet a third goes wide, missing them and inexplicably detonating in a cloud of white smoke a thousand feet above them.
Or maybe not inexplicably. Maybe the droids haven’t modified their weapons’ guidance systems and their GPS is fritzing out.
One for our side. Aloud he says, “You got what we need back there?”
“Got.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go home.”
Their course takes them north along Interstate 29, checking still for movement along the highway. They are over Sioux Falls and about to swing west along 90 for home when the plane falls out of the sun, coming straight toward them on an intercept course, visual contact almost as soon as it shows up on the screen. “Unidentified!” Massaccio yells in the same instant that Manny comes to the same conclusion for himself and dives just as a missile separates from the F-15 and comes snaking toward them, its contrail white in the clear air. One of their own Sidewinders takes it, and Manny looses a Phoenix at the unknown fighter as they pull up and away, looping back to evade the enemy’s guns as it fires and corkscrews away. “Massaccio! You get any signal at all off that fucker?”
“Negative. No markings that I can see, either. You wanna try talking to him?”
“Not after that introduction. You still got him?”
“Here we go again. He’s turning.”
Manny hauls back on the stick and puts the Cat’s nose straight up into a vertical climb, then pushes it down again, diving on the other plane. The sun glitters off its unmarked silver fuselage, off the canopy behind which a helmeted shape is visible for the fraction of a second it takes to sweep past, kicking out another pair of Phoenixes at close range.
The Eagle spirals down in evasive action, swinging away to the south. “No joy,” Massaccio reports. “He’s not hit.”
Manny comes to a decision. “Screw this. We can’t afford the risk. We’ll just have to outrun him.”