I cleared the alarms in my heads-up display and moved them to the right corner. I could see my squad in formation behind me as I lost altitude on a rolling plunge from 8,000 meters. Chief Slade’s blip moved above my position.

  “You got a hole the size of Cappy’s head in your right wing,” he said. “You ain’t got no UDMH left.”

  “Tell me about it,” I muttered.

  “I got a problem here, Control,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I briefly described my situation. “I will need some immediate help to get out of this.”

  “I gotcha, Tiger,” Jerico said as he maneuvered alongside me, matched my roll, and slipped his left wing under my damaged right. This was something we had never practiced, but Jerico was the best flyer in SWIC, next to me, of course. He stopped my roll and stabilized my wingsuit. I could almost feel stability flowing from his wing to mine.

  “Mother, work both units as one,” I ordered. And to Jerico, “Think we can make Amargosa Valley?”

  “We ain’t goin’ nowhere but down, Boss,” Jerico said to me. “Ain’t never been to Death Valley.”

  As we flew together, I could feel his wing varying pressure against mine as surrounding air currents buffeted our ungainly marriage.

  “Rog,” I ordered, “take command and complete the mission. Set down in Amargosa Valley as planned. Jerico and I are taking a detour.”

  DEATH VALLEY SNAG

  The Gryphon-10 has a glide ratio of 14 to 1, meaning that for every meter we dropped, we moved fourteen forward. My Gryphon and Jerico’s flying together didn’t come close to that.

  “What’s our glide ratio, Mother,” I asked.

  “Five to one,” she answered.

  I glanced at my altitude gauge. It read 7,000 meters. That gave us a thirty-five klick range. My stomach dropped, and my itch returned.

  “High mountains to the east and really high mountains to the west,” I said to Jerico. “We can’t make it over the eastern range. We gotta land in Death Valley. It’s gonna be a hard landing, but you can pull up at the last moment with your rocket and come in easy. We really got no choice.”

  Jerico grunted a non-response. He was working pretty hard keeping his wing in contact with mine.

  “This is Control,” Master Chief Boldt said. “Actually, you do…have a choice, I mean. I got an Air Force C-130 Herc ten minutes out. He’s gonna set up so you can fly right into his cargo bay.”

  “Beats crash landing in Death Valley,” I said.

  “Hooyah!” Jerico muttered quietly.

  Eight minutes later, the lumbering aircraft hove into view, pulled in front of us, and matched our speed and drop rate.

  “Tiger, this is Randy Dorsey. Here’s what we’re gonna do.” In just a few seconds, he laid out the plan for us.

  “You ready to do this, Jerico?” I asked.

  “Hooyah!” he said.

  “I’m slowing, Tiger,” Dorsey said as he lowered his cargo ramp.

  We began to drift toward the open maw of the Herc. It looked pretty small from where we were.

  “Slowing more,” Dorsey said. We drifted closer—fifty meters out.

  “Ten-knot difference between us,” Dorsey said.

  Twenty-five meters…

  “Eight-knot difference…”

  Twenty meters…I checked my altitude. Only 2,000 meters. We were below the mountain peaks on either side of us.

  “Five-knot difference…”

  Five meters out…

  “Three-knot difference…”

  We were over the ramp, Mother maneuvering us by torquing my left and Jerico’s right wings. Suddenly, the big aircraft dropped three meters. One moment we were ready to set down on the ramp, the next, the Herc was falling away below us. We got separated by the turbulence from this lumbering beast, and I did a complete rollover before Jerico synched to my movement and slipped his left wing back under my right.

  “Thanks, Jerico, that feels good!”

  “Hooyah!” Jerico grunted as he fought to keep us together. Mother dropped us back and down to the Herc’s level. Fleeting images of Apryl whipped across my mind as we struggled to hold the Gryphons together.

  “Let’s give it another go, Randy,” I said, forcing my voice to remain calm like the cool fighter pilots in holovision broadcasts.

  “Roger that, Tiger. Ready to try again. The road is a bit bumpy, so stay alert!”

  Once more, we aimed at the cargo opening, Mother keeping us to the right.

  “Back off!” Randy ordered as the Herc bounced up about a meter. Apparently, Mother saw it coming because she dropped us back and away from the ramp.

  “Okay,” Randy said, “bring her in now!”

  With some remaining forward motion and the ramp just a meter below us, we reached the forward-right edge of the ramp. My right wing and all of Jerico extended off the ramp’s right side. Jerico dropped and pulled away as my lower carapace and both wings hit the ramp. My forward motion caused my right-wing to strike the cargo hatch edge, spinning me clockwise into the hold.

  As Jerico dropped his nose, he said, “I can’t make it to Amargosa, and I ain’t gonna land in no fricken Death Valley.” He did a full 360 on his rocket, flew toward the ramp, and slid into the C-130 cargo hold, retracting his wings as he did so.

  “Nice flyin’,” Dorsey said as he closed the ramp.

  DAEDALUS SQUAD—FINALE

  Rog and the rest of the squad landed without incident in Amargosa Valley a stone’s throw from some kind of a mechanized dairy farm. We met the next day in Vegas, where we celebrated as only sailors can.

  Oh yeah, about what happened over Death Valley…You may not believe this, but we ran into a flock of migrating geese, at 8,000 meters no less. Who tracks migrating geese? Especially at 8,000 meters? They’ve been seen before at this altitude, but it’s rare. Their presence over Death Valley at our arrival was a complete fluke. They were doing 10 kph; we were doing about 200. They lost one of theirs, and we almost lost me. I guess we both were lucky.

  This time we actually managed to keep our exploit secret. The Commander-in-Chief was delighted with the proof-of-concept outcome and invited us to visit him in the Oval Office. Drinking a fine scotch with The Boss in that room was something else. We discussed several interesting things, but I can’t tell you about that.

  We proved we could do it. We’ve done it several times since. Now we’re fully ready for a combat drop. I’ll let you know when that finally happens.

  ON

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  by

  Robert G. Williscroft

  EQUATORIAL PACIFIC—SOUTHEAST OF BAKER ISLAND

  Margo stopped kicking her feet as the ominous gray shapes flashed into her peripheral view. Long, tawny hair floated past her head as her feet dropped below her slim, brightly clad body. She took a deep breath and floated slightly upward. A hint of fear crept into her mind as she turned toward three gray, sleek predators cruising just inside the limit of her vision, about twenty-five meters away.

  A gentle touch on her shoulder startled her. She turned to see Alex Regent tapping the depth reading on his dive-console with his index finger. Margo reached down and grasped her console, turning it so she could read her depth: twenty-five meters. She had drifted upward five meters since seeing the sharks.

  Margo exhaled angrily and let some air out of her breathing bag. She knew better than to lose track of her depth. Out there, her life depended on a constant awareness of exactly how deep she was. Together she and Alex sank back to thirty meters. Off to their right, the three gray shapes drifted with them. Would she ever get used to it, she thought, as she released a bit of air into her bag to stop her descent.

  “Alex,” she said.

  There was no response.

  “Alex!” She tapped the back of her console several times.

  “Alex!” Nothing but silence.

  Alex placed himself in front of Margo and looked into her facemask. With his right hand, he formed a circle with thumb and forefinger. His three other fingers extended straight up.

  Margo returned the sign indicating she was all right while nodding vigorously. Then she pointed to her ear and lifted her console, tapping the back. Alex fumbled at his ear and then tapped his console, and then shook his head.

  Great, Margo thought, EFCom is busted just when we really need it. Not busted, she corrected herself, just a submerged antenna. She pointed to the three menacing shapes off to her right. Alex turned and scanned around them. Above and just behind them the blue-painted hull of their boat bobbed in the gentle waves. About twenty meters ahead of them hung a smooth, horizontal fluorescent orange tube about one meter in diameter. To the left, it stretched into the gloom; to the right, it angled downward. The fluorescent tube was attached to a slender cable angling up to the shadow of a buoy just beneath the surface to their right. Alex turned back toward Margo, making an exaggerated shrug.

  Margo reached for her dive-console again and pressed a button located prominently on its face. The three sharks turned and commenced a meandering movement toward the two divers. Their front fins extended stiffly downward at about forty-five degrees. Their backs arched slightly, and their blunt snouts moved back and forth as they approached.

  Margo felt her hair stand up on the nape of her neck. She turned to Alex and motioned him to her side. Alex withdrew a telescoped baton from its holder at his waist and extended it to its full one-and-a-half-meter length. He checked the safety lever near its handle, and with his thumb he flicked the lever so it pointed forward. As the sharks drew nearer, he held the stick out in front of him, pointed in their direction. Margo glanced around them again and pushed her console button once more. Alex waved the stick about slowly and then steadied up on the nearest of the three menacing monsters.

  Suddenly, with blurring speed, the nearest shark attacked. Alex struck out with his stick, the jolt of its impact rocking him backward. A sharp crack was followed by a hissing sound as carbon dioxide rushed into the shark’s body. In the same moment, flashes of silvery-black streaked from several directions. One of the remaining sharks was struck broadside by a dolphin’s blunt nose. In a flash, it disappeared.

  The animal Alex had injected rolled on its side and began a crazed, uncontrolled spiral toward the surface thirty meters above them. On its way up, it was hit several times by charging dolphins. It expired of massive embolisms before reaching fifteen meters. In the melee, the third shark vanished.

  Margo reached out for Alex, grabbed a handful of breathing bag, and pulled him close to her. She placed the flat of her full-facemask against his and looked deeply into his eyes, as close to a kiss as she could come under the circumstances. Even down here, they were deep blue. Several bubbles escaped from the positive pressure maintained inside their masks and shimmered their way toward the surface, expanding rapidly as they rose.

  Like an old-time scuba diver, Margo thought, watching the rising silvery spheres. Instinctively she checked the volume in her breathing bag and glanced at the gauge on her tiny, ultra-high-pressure air flask. She found she was holding her breath, and as she felt the need to breathe, a gentle pressure developed against her back. She pulled back and turned to confront a two-and-a-half-meter-long dolphin nudging her from behind.

  It was one of four that had responded to her sonic signal—George, her favorite. The other three dolphins crowded in around the neoprene and nylon suited divers, jostling each other for attention. Margo rubbed the head dome of each and indicated to Alex that he should do the same. Then the two of them turned their attention back to the tube suspended in front of them.

  Alex swam to the angled portion and began to search along the tube’s length, descending slowly. Margo dropped her arm from George’s neck and kicked in Alex’s direction, keeping him in sight, but staying between him and the surface. The four cetaceans arrowed toward the surface and grabbed a gulp of air, then settled back down, playfully cycling between Alex and Margo, gently jostling them. About thirty minutes later, Alex motioned Margo to join him. She released a bubble of air from her bag and dropped down beside him. Her console showed a depth of fifty meters. Alex pointed to a five-centimeter rip in the bottom curve of the tube’s fluorescent covering.

  Margo reached into a deep pocket located on the left leg of her suit and withdrew a role of patching tape. Alex stretched the edges of the tear, and Margo applied a strip of self-sealing tape along the opening. Then she located a small pneumatic valve on the top of the tube and attached a hose from her spare air tank. On a signal from Alex, she released air into the tube, forcing water out through a one-way valve on the underside. She stopped when bubbles escaped from the lower valve.

  As the tube rose slowly, Margo held on, keeping track of their progress on her console. They stopped rising when the gauge read thirty meters. Margo felt the tube—it was taut and solid. She tapped the back of her console, listening for the faint rush of sound in her ears. Nothing. She pointed to the back of her console and then her ear, and shook her head. Alex offered another of his exaggerated underwater shrugs and grinned, although the only part of the grin she could see was his crinkled eyes. She grinned back and pointed toward the suspension buoy and their boat, making an angled upward sign with her free hand. Alex nodded, checked his console, and they both headed back, slowly rising as they swam.

  Margo saw Alex check his console from time to time, making certain they kept below the ever-changing ceiling limit it calculated for him. Since she had remained shallower than Alex for most of the dive, she knew she would be safe following his lead. She looked around at the four dolphins. Her earlier fright was gone, and she simply enjoyed George’s protective nearness and the playful bumps and nudges from the others.

  On the surface finally, Alex dropped his facemask down around his neck, fully inflated his bag and grinned at Margo. “Close call down there!”

  Margo shoved her facemask down and patted the glistening snout that appeared in front of her. “Thanks, George. I love you too.”

  The dolphin mewed a pleased response, lifted his body out of the water and backed away, chattering as he went. The other three animals circled at and below the surface, keeping watch over their human charges.

  “What happened to the EFCom?” Margo asked. “I expected it to come back online as soon as the antenna surfaced.”

  “Broken antenna wire, I imagine,” Alex answered.

  “Storm damage, I’m sure,” said Margo, as they turned and headed toward the waiting vessel.

  “Probably,” agreed Alex. “But that wasn’t a burst seam,” he added.

  “Yeah, maybe the sinking tube snapped the wire.”

  Actually, tube flotation chambers flooded on a regular basis. They had patched a full ten percent of them since the project started. But it was a bit unusual to find a rip on the tube bottom, and the Electrostatic Field Communication (“EFCom”) transceivers on the buoys almost always survived.

  The EFCom buoy nearest the tear had ceased transmitting, and the buoys on either side of the tear had signaled their departure from datum a day earlier. Alex had opted to employ an electrostatic field communication system, because of its clear underwater signal transmission capability that was independent of acoustic conditions, since it didn’t rely on sound transmission through the water. Every buoy, each skimmer and floater, and every diver was outfitted with one of the small EFCom transceivers. Alex had inspected the non-transmitting buoy personally during an overflight from Jarvis Island. There was nothing visible on the two kilometers of surface between the buoys; they were closer together, but not so that it was visible to the eye. Nevertheless, the remaining 1,828-odd buoy-suspended kilometers of tube were stressing from the downward pull of the waterlogged section. The buoy near the tear was several meters underwater.

  Suspended inside the flotation tube were two virtually impervious, lightweight, hose-like tubes, each about six centimeters in diameter, called vacuum sheaths. Two shallow channels jutted out from the bottom of each vacuum sheath, filled with electronically-controlled suspending magnets. Magnetically suspended inside each vacuum sheath was a five-centimeter tube of segmented soft iron officially called the rotor, but more popularly known as the ribbon, so named from the earliest conceptions back in the 1980s of the Launch Loop inventor, Keith Lofstrom. Alex was eager to check continuity readings to make certain the vacuum sheaths had not breached. They were not yet evacuated, but seawater entry at this stage would seriously delay the entire project. If the EFCom had not crapped out, the tests would already be underway.

  Alex glanced ahead at Margo Jackson, cavorting with her four dolphins as they made their leisurely way back to the waiting boat. His field engineer in charge of underwater construction was a remarkable female. Nearly as tall as his own 183 centimeters, her model’s slender figure, encased in electric-blue nylon-covered neoprene, seemed to lack feminine curves. He knew differently, of course, having joined her bikini-clad person from time to time for morning swims since the project began over two years ago.

  The project—Alex had lived with it for three years before actual construction began. Longer, actually, if you considered dreams—since before the incredible, worldwide bi-millennial celebration when he still was a young boy.

  There was the nearly simultaneous publication in America and England of practically identical ideas in 1985. Paul Birch published an article in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, while in America Keith Lofstrom published his article in a supplement to The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, he recalled. Nobody could agree on the names: Skyrail, Launch Loop, Beanstalk. There were others, but the idea is what counted, the sky-shaking idea that you don’t need rockets to get into space.

 

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