It was somehow right that they should conquer this world of magic. It was
the natural order of things, meant to be. As he shaped and formed, Craig
realized in the back of his mind he hadn’t always felt that way. But that
was immaterial, like a long-ago dream. This was fated and he would bend
all his talents to seizing this other world.
Something told him that those talents were now considerable.
A push, a twist, a sudden shimmering coalescence and their magic castle
was done! Craig breathed a sigh and admired their creation.
The walls soared straight up out of the sides of the peak. Towers and
turrets sprouted everywhere, flags flew from the staffs and whipped in the
incessant wind. It was magnificent!
At least it was magnificent for a first effort. He had to admit that the
walls leaned askew in a couple of places and that some of the towers
slumped as if half-melted. Some of the windows were funny shapes too. And
somehow it wasn’t as big as he had imagined it would be.
“Needs a lot of work,” Mikey said.
“It’s pretty good for a first effort.”
Mikey shrugged. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of this wind.”
Together they strode over the canting drawbridge and through the lopsided
gate of their redoubt.
Craig looked at his handiwork sitting in the flagged stone courtyard and
suppressed a pang of disappointment. It was smaller than he had thought it
would be, maybe ten feet from wingtip to wingtip. The color was a nice
battleship gray, just like a real F-15, and the twin tails stood proudly
above the jet exhausts, but somehow it didn’t look just right. It looked
kind of like an F-15 Eagle, or maybe a Russian Foxhound or Flanker
interceptor, or maybe even a Navy Tomcat. He tried to remember just
exactly what an F-15 looked like and found he couldn’t separate the images
of twin-engine, twin-tail interceptors in his mind.
Well, all right, it would have to do. They needed air defense, didn’t
they? This might not be exactly right, but it could fly and it could
fight. That was good enough.
Anyway, there was some good stuff. The conformal fuel tanks along the
sides of the fuselage under the wings were right. And the missiles and
drop tanks hanging from the pylons beneath the wings and body looked
right. Who cared if it wasn’t perfect? It was wicked and it was all his.
“Hey Mikey,” he yelled, “look what I’ve got.”
“Yeah?” Mikey came out of the main keep, wiping his hands on a rag.
“There,” Craig gestured proudly. “It’s a robot F-15.”
Mikey walked over to the plane. “Bullshit.”
“Huh?”
“Bullshit. Look, you’ve got a missile under the left wing and a drop tank
under the right.”
“So?”
“So what happens if you drop the tank or fire the missile? You’ve got an
unbalanced load on the plane. And anyway, that missile isn’t off an F-15.
It looks Russian or something. And you’ve got the center drop tank painted
with a red nose, like a bomb.”
“So who the hell cares? It will fly and it can fight. All right? That’s
what’s important, isn’t it?”
“Who’s it going to fight?” Mikey demanded. “We’re the only people in this
world. You think the Russians are going to come swarming in here or
something?”
“We’re here to fight someone,” Craig said stubbornly. “They told us so.”
“Oh yeah,” Mikey agreed. “We’re gonna have to fight all right. But shit
like this,” he gestured at the plane, “isn’t going to be what decides that
battle.”
“Oh yeah? Well, what will decide that fucking battle, hotshot?”
Mikey got that sneering smile Craig had come to hate. “Something a lot
more powerful than any robot airplane. You’ll see when the time comes.”
Well, fuck you very much! Craig thought as Mikey disappeared back into
their lumpy castle. He picked up a loose stone and threw it against the
castle wall with all his strength.
He needed a better way to do this. He’d created the F-15 just by imagining
it, but the problem with that was that you had to imagine all the details