The arroyo narrowed and its walls grew higher; it had been cut—languidly, over centuries—into an alluvial fan from the uplifted mountains ahead, and there ahead the gorge through which the eroding waters flowed loomed abruptly, a gash in the red rock as acute as a gun sight.
She was still flying by hand, and she felt more confi- dent with every passing second she stayed in the air. She contemplated her ability to handle a piece of complicated machinery she could not remember ever having seen before —knowing what it was for without thinking about it, knowing the logic of it, knowing the particular layout of its controls and instruments and the capabilities of its brainy subsystems.
She reasoned that she had practiced in it. Knowing this, she reasoned that there was some weighty cause for her memory lapse.
She further reasoned that there was cause for her fear of the orange man, the fear that had made her run. She reasoned—because she remembered the entire day (why did that in itself seem strange?) from the moment she had awakened with an urgent desire to brush her teeth, and the accumulated anomalies of that day could not be ignored —that a chunk of her life had been deliberately taken from her and that she was in danger precisely because of that, and that the orange man had had something to do with her missing years and with her present danger.
Sparta—not her real name, it occurred to her, but an identity she had assumed for a sufficient yet still hidden reason—spoke to the helicopter. “Snark, this is L. N.
30851005, do you acknowledge?”
After a momentary pause the helicopter said, “I acknowledge your command.”
“Westerly heading, minimum altitude and maximum ground speed consistent with evasion protocols. On auto, please.”
“Auto confirmed.”
Flatiron walls of red Jurassic sandstone loomed and flashed by on either side of the ship. A streambed of tumbled granite boulders mounted in irregular stairsteps up the rapidly ascending gorge—dry now but for patches of snow, it would be an intermittent torrent during the storms of late summer. One moment the ship was brushing the bare pink branches of tangled willows in the streambed, the next it was flying almost straight up the mountainside, dodging leaning ponderosas and overhangs of basaltic cliff, until suddenly the gorge narrowed to a shallow ravine in a forest of pines, and the mountain flattened into meadowland dotted with stands of aspen.
Sparta had adjusted the scale of the terrain-matching projection that unscrolled in front of her and now studied it, searching the image until she found the topography she needed. “Snark, proceed to forty degrees north, one hundred and five degrees, forty minutes, twenty seconds west.”
“Forty north, one-oh-five, forty, twenty west con- firmed.” The helicopter slowed suddenly and hesitated at the edge of the aspen woods, its snout quivering as if sniffing for a trail.
A moment later the ship streaked across the open, snowy flat, toward the range of distant, much higher peaks that glistened in the sun.
“We have visual acquisition.”
On a videoplate screen in a basement room fifteen hundred miles to the east, a small group of men and women watched the helicopter racing over the ground, its sharp, highly magnified image observed from a satellite four hundred miles above it.
“Why isn’t she using evasion protocols?”
“Maybe she doesn’t know how.”
“She knows how to fly the thing.” The speaker was a man in his fifties with silver-gray hair clipped close to his scalp. He wore a dark-gray wool suit and patternless gray silk tie over a light-gray cotton shirt; it was business attire, but it might as well have been a military uniform.
The man’s outburst was an unanswerable accusation; he got no reply but a nervous shifting of feet.
A woman touched his sleeve, caught his eye, jerked her chin. They stepped into the shadows of the control room, away from the others. “What is it?” he rasped.
“If McPhee actually did restore her short-term memory using synthetic-cellular implant, she may be accessing skills she acquired before intervention,” she whispered.
She was a handsome woman, as clipped and gray and rigid as he was, her dark eyes pools of shadow in the dim room.
“You led me to believe she’d already forgotten everything she saw or did for the last three years,” he said petulantly, straining to keep his voice down.
“The permanence—that is, the degree—of retroactive amnesia due to loss of short-term memory is often unpredictable . . .”
“Why am I learning this now?” he snarled, loud enough to make heads turn.
“. . . except that, as ever, we can be completely confi- dent that she will never remember anything that occurred after the intervention.” The gray woman paused. “Until the reintervention. Before today, that is.”
The two of them fell silent, and for a moment no one in the dark room spoke. They all studied the helicopter, which was fleeing its own shadow over snowy hummocks, over frozen ponds, among pines and aspens, down steep defiles, a darting dragonfly with its twin interlocking ro- tors fluttering like membranous wings in the crosshairs of the tracking satellite, but with a more evident purpose to its flight.
The image stuttered momentarily, then steadied at a slightly different angle, as a new satellite took over the tracking task.
“Mr. Laird,” said the tracking operator, “I don’t know if this is significant. . . .”
“Let’s have it,” said the gray man.
“The target has been gradually turning counterclockwise for the past two minutes. It is now on a southeasterly heading.”
“She’s lost,” someone—an enthusiastic aide—volunteered.
“She’s flying blind and she doesn’t know which way she’s going.”
The gray man ignored him. “Give me the whole sector.”
The image on the screen immediately widened to show the Great Plains surging like a frozen ocean against the Front Range, the cities beached there like flotsam: Cheyenne, Denver, Colorado Springs, fused by their suburbs into a single threadlike agglomeration. The helicopter was microscopic, invisible at this scale, although its position was still clearly marked by the centered crosshairs.
“The target appears to be holding steady on course,”
said the operator.
“Dammit, she’s heading straight for Space Command,”
said the gray man. He stared bitterly at the gray woman.
“Seeking sanctuary?” she said mildly.
“We’ve got to shoot it down,” blurted the same enthusiastic aide, whose enthusiasm had been converted to panic.
“With what?” the gray man inquired. “The only armed vehicle we own within five hundred miles of her position is the one she’s flying.” He turned to the woman, hissing the words but hardly bothering to keep them inaudible.
“If only I’d never listened to your clever explanations . . .”
He bit off the sentence, snapping his teeth in his fury, and bent over the console. “She’s not using evasion protocols.
What’s the chance of jamming her?”
“We can’t jam the target’s navigation and control circuits, sir. They’re shielded against everything.”
“Outgoing transmissions?”
“We’d have a good chance there.”
“Do it right away.”
“Sir, that’s not exactly a surgically precise operation.
Air Defense Command will pop a gasket.”
“Do it now. I’ll take care of ADC.” He turned to an aide. “A blackline to Commander in Chief, NORAD. Let me see the profile before you put it through.”
The aide handed him a phonelink. “CINCNORAD is a General Lime, sir. His profile’s coming on screen B.”
The gray man spoke into the phonelink and waited, quickly reading the general’s psychological profile off the little flatscreen, planning his spiel as he shifted his attention to the big screen.
The spy satellite’s crosshairs moved inexorably toward Air Force Space Command headquarters east of Colorado Springs. A curt voice came on the line, and the gray man quickly replied. “General, Bill Laird here”—his voice was warm, confiding, deferential—”I’m very sorry to disturb you, but I have a serious problem and I’m afraid I’ve let it get out of hand—so much so, in fact, I confess it’s become your problem too. Which will explain the EM interference your people are experiencing on combat channels . . .”
* * *
The phone conversation drew heavily upon the director’s resources of amiability and persuasion. It was not the last call he had to make; General Lime refused to commit to action without confirmation from Laird’s superior.
More earnest lies went through the aether, and when the director finally put the phone down he was trembling behind his tight smile. He yanked at the gray woman’s sleeve and propelled her back into the shadows. “This program is about to be ended, thanks to you,” he said angrily.
“And we will have lost years of work. Do you think I can hold my post after this debacle? We’ll be lucky to escape prosecution.”
“I certainly doubt that the president would . . .”
“You! Keep her alive, you said.”
“She was magnificent, William. In the early stages. She was a natural adept.”