Blackbird, Chapter 4

Stone asks, do extraterrestrials like tacos?

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You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

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There will be a separate newsletter this week, a deleted scene from The Orionids, and more!

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Two words buzzed in Stone’s mind for the last five hours of the flight. The intelligence report zapped to his pad had over a thousand pages. Two words among four hundred thousand were easy to overlook, and he almost did. He stumbled over them underneath a picture, as practically a footnote to the report. No question. He reread it three times. Eight letters, forming two words, a place and a color.

Code words. The analysts writing the report could have left them out. That’s what he’d have done. He wasn’t in a secure facility, hard-wired to the network, and reports were often leaked. Adding those two words to the report, controversial in Congressional circles, would create a lot of D.C. drama. Some private showing off for their internet pals would search every report with those keywords, find a connection to Blackbird, and post it on social media. Then he’d be walking up the hill to a hearing.

Senators would ask why those two words appeared in the report. What did he know, and when did he know it? He’d tell the truth, that he didn’t know. That maybe the analysts slipped.

The best-case scenario was that someone screwed up. The worst case…he shook his head. The worst case was that he’d have to look into it, and lend credibility to conspiracy theories. Those two words shouldn’t be there at all.

The aircraft lurched, and with it, his stomach. Kane, buckled a knees-length away on a bulkhead-mounted folding seat, reached for a handhold but found only exposed electrical conduit and jagged metal.

Her color drained hours ago as she halted on the rain-soaked tarmac in South Korea. “That thing’s a fucking death trap,” she said, eyeing their ride, a CV-22B Osprey.

Korea was the third leg of the flight. The first, to Okinawa, he slept and downloaded files, taking advantage of wifi access. At Okinawa, they ran bleary-eyed through sheeting rain between planes on a runway. In the air over Midway, they entered a communications blackout, the result of heightened Pacific hostilities.

They’d handed over Trisky, his Belgian Malinois, at the Kunsan Air Force Base in South Korea. Standard protocol required her to be quarantined for a week. Trisky whimpered. He felt bad, but she was in expert hands.

The entire trip, the food was barely a level above MREs. There had been turbulence too, but the worst part was the lack of caffeine. Like the modern military, he ran on coffee, and his veins were empty.

“Page eight-oh-two, bottom,” he said, tapping his fingers on his pad to the rhythm of the Osprey’s chopping rotors. The pilots could overhear him, and the comms might be recorded, so he didn’t want to say the two words aloud.

Kane tapped her headset, showing she couldn’t hear Stone over the rotor chop. The aircraft seesawed. Kane again grabbed for a nonexistent handhold.

On the tarmac in Korea, he wouldn’t have faulted her for refusing to go. The Osprey had been in numerous high-profile fatal crashes and grounded at least three times that Stone could recall. It looked like a maniacal god gave an ornery, gray hamster wings and propellers, with bulging sides like it carried a cheek full of acorns. The nacelles, the engine and prop rotor group on the wing, tilted vertically like two middle fingers to gravity, aerodynamics, and Kane’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Osprey was as safe as any human contraption defying the laws of physics. Certainly safer than the Orbital Transfer Vehicle they’d piloted to hack into spy satellites. Still, it had a reputation for chewing up passengers and spitting them out broken and burned, and Kane had personal experience with that.

She eyed the Osprey on the wet runway, and then grimaced at the silvery sky, flaring her nostrils with a deep sigh and saying, “So today we’re the nuts. Fuck it. Famous words before a bad decision, right?”

“Three minutes out and cleared to land,” the pilot said over the propeller hum in Stone’s headset. “Face force chair blazers buckle up. Fly Navy.”

Reaching through hours of mental haze, Stone vaguely remembered the pilot’s name. So far, she’d been a disembodied hand to his right, jockeying a center console stick in a scornful, crackling voice. Lieutenant McBride, maybe? It rhymed with snide. He was sure of that. Face force chair blazers was a reference to him and Kane. He enjoyed friendly banter between service branches as much as anyone, like teammates on a winning team, but Lt. Snide took it too far. Maybe it was her tone, or his lack of caffeine, but her barbs at Kane grated his skin.

Kane shot a middle finger toward the cockpit. “I’d like to see how these flying fish handle a spacewalk.” She leaned forward and put her head in her palms.

Stone put his hand on her shoulder. “First time is the hardest.”

Kane rubbed her face. “It’s not my first time, jefe. Christ, you know they call this thing the widowmaker?”

“I meant the first time since—” He decided not to argue. “Widowmaker. Why didn’t you say so, we could have invited my ex?”

That earned him a small smile. “No way I’m pulling her fat ass out of the wreckage.”

He chuckled. “We’re all but landed. Just another few minutes.”

“You’re all but divorced. Still plenty of time to disappoint. We’re five hundred feet over water.”

“Look on the bright side, we could be in one of those ghost cats, or whatever they’re called.”

“Ghost Bats. Autonomous fighter jets. They don’t use those for carrier delivery.”

“So that’s good—”

“The last crash happened because the pilot was landing for likes. Did you know that? They steered into a low-altitude maneuver while filming for the ‘gram.”

“Low-altitude steep-angle banks are what we do, Major Kane,” Lt. Snide said as her disembodied hand in the cockpit moved. “It was the clutch, not the pilot.” The Osprey rocked like an unstable canoe. “On final approach.”

Stone winced. He was former Major Stone, she was former Major Kane, and Lt. Snide was on a collision course.

To Kane, he said, “How far did you get in the report?”

“Skimmed. I could use some of whatever Space Force Intelligence was smoking when they wrote it.”

“Page eight-oh-two. Did you catch it?”

Kane glanced at the cockpit. “Right I saw it too. I searched, it was only mentioned in that one sentence.”

“Scratching my head.”

“When you rule out the impossible, jefe, whatever remains fills up two hundred pages of Congressional conspiracy theories. I think they had to say something about the program. Like, a non denial denial.”

The Osprey’s deep rotor chopping turned into a whine and the aircraft shook as they landed. His pad slipped off his lap, tumbling onto Kane’s boot, which saved it from cracking on the metal floor.

Kane picked it up and then sat back and stared at the ceiling, exhaling and puffing her cheeks. “Fucking hate helicopters.”

Stone raised his eyebrows.

Kane covered her mic and mouthed, doctor switched my medicine. She lowered her hand. “Not a good time to be a guinea pig.”

He nodded.

Kane stared at the ceiling and took slow, square breaths.

Hydraulics whined, and the Pacific sun peeked through the rear loading ramp. Her gray pallor matched the aircraft carrier’s deck, while her eyes, sea-blue, matched the water. Salt air brought jet fumes into the cargo bay.

Stone unclicked his restraints and stood. “Let’s go blue eyes. We made it. Next time we send my ex and her attorney on this physics abomination.” He offered her a hand.

Kane cracked a smile, then slapped his palm. She offered him his pad, but when he took it, she held on. She opened her mouth to say something, but Lt. Snide stepped from the cockpit and stood over her. Stone read her nametag, McBride.

“Y’all don’t get much airtime in the face force, do you? This is the safest aircraft in the fleet.”

Kane stood. She was a head taller than the Navy pilot. “Not the way some people drive.”

Stone stepped closer. A cramped cargo hold with jagged metal was no place for a fistfight. “Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant Snide.”

Lt. Snide puffed her chest. “McBride.”

Stone let a smile creep across his face. “My bad. We aren’t big tippers, so we’ll close our tab here.”

Lt. McBride pushed between him and Kane. After two steps, Kane said, “I have a tip for her.”

Stone put his hand up.

Lt. McBride pivoted, eyeing Kane a full measure. “Next time you two can swim.” Then she swiveled and exited the Osprey.

“Doesn’t she need to go through a checklist to shut this down?” Kane shook her head. “Clutch failures, my ass. This is amateur hour.”

Stone blew out a ragged breath, thankful that the flight deck roar prevented Lt. McBride from hearing Kane’s comment. “Back to the report. Bloke una.”

She squinted at him.

“An anagram for the project name. Like, a lob nuke.”

Kane furrowed her brow. “That’s what you’ve been spending five hours thinking about? Anagrams?”

“I’ve dissected it a hundred ways. Why is that in the report? Maybe your right. A non denial denial to cover themselves. What if your wrong?”

“Do I need to sit back down?”

“Indulge me, blue eyes.”

“Tell me your conspiracy theories walking, jefe, I need off this thing.” She waved Stone forward. “Brains before beauty.”

Stone smiled, stepping off the Osprey’s rear loading ramp into a screaming hornet’s nest of jet turbines. USS Enterprise’s crew wore color-coded jerseys—green, white, red, purple, or yellow according to their role—and marshaled aircraft, fuel, and weapons around the charged flight deck.

Kane pointed to crew in red jerseys, leaning under each wing of an F35C fighter at the far catapult. The jet blast deflector was up. Red-shirted crew pulled tags off the jet’s missiles, then backed away. “They are flying weapons hot, jefe. Combat.”

“Could be a drill.” Although as he said it, he didn’t think so. He’d been in enough drills and actual combat to notice the subtle cues, like the facial tension and the dilated pupils. In a simulator, or a drill, you knew you wouldn’t die. You might fail, but your punishment would be a lot of after-action meetings and more drills. Your lizard brain reacted to combat by secreting genuine dread. Drills were for muscle memory, to prevent soldiers’ dread from morphing into panic and paralysis.

USS Enterprise’s crew wore all different color jerseys, but the same fear behind their goggles. All asking the same questions. Who wasn’t coming home? Did I tell my partner I loved them? Why did I miss my kid’s birthday party? The crews’ bodies executed their duties the way they’d been trained. An outsider might see machine-like clockwork. But their minds promised themselves that if they survived, they would never miss another of their kid’s birthday parties.

At the catapult, a horde of thumbs went up. The F35C’s wing and rudder flaps cycled. An officer in a yellow vest, the shooter, kneeled on the deck, pointing forward, and then the fighter jet roared and catapulted off the flight deck. The blast deflector lowered. The crew then shepherded an unmanned aerial vehicle to the catapult.

Kane hung on the Osprey’s metal threshold, watching another F35C volley from catapult two and bank right to follow the first.

Stone surveyed the flight deck. All four catapults were launching planes. At the horizon, leaden smoke soared from a battleship. One missile, then two, then three rocketed and then pivoted for the horizon.

A white-shirted petty officer gestured for them to move, pointing beyond a swarm of greenshirts and purpleshirts hustling to fuel and launch aircraft, towards an Ensign in gray digital camouflage who stood at the edge of the carrier’s island waiting to guide them.

Kane edged through the stinging odor of jet fuel and tail exhaust, finding a space between the island’s gray wall, a two-story white crane, and a pair of redshirts bent over a dolly with rocket munitions.

The Ensign greeted them with a salute and then a handshake. “Major Kane. Major Stone. Welcome aboard USS Enterprise. Let’s get you below deck.” The Ensign’s nametag read Frick.

“Not Major Stone or Major Kane. Alex and I are retired.”

The Ensign swiveled towards stairs at the flight deck’s edge. “My orders are to keep you two invisible. Space Force Intelligence contractors will invite unnecessary—”

Engine roar cut off Frick’s words, although Stone could fill in the blank. Frick emphasized contractors as if spitting sour milk from his mouth. Contractors were suspicious, beneath privates, and not fit to scrub the toilets. They brought news of salaries in the outside world and were bad for retention NCO’s spreadsheets and fiscal year statistics.

Kane smiled, saying, “Invisible is our favorite color, Ensign Frick.”

Stone blocked Kane as Ensign Frick ducked through a gray hatch at the bottom of the stairs.

Kane sighed.

“Kona Blue.”

“I am familiar with the rumors of the project, jefe. It doesn’t exist.”

“It’s in the report. Page eight-oh-two.”

“So is Mothman and the Loch Ness Monster.”

“Not literally. Kona Blue was never about reverse engineering alien technology or exploiting extraterrestrial biologics. We are always reverse engineering enemy technology. And friendly technology too. It’s an umbrella project for any time we reverse engineer technology.”

“And you know this, because?”

Stone looked off at the blue water stretching to a clear blue cloudless sky at the horizon. Two words in the report stained his vision and clouded his mind. Once he saw them, he couldn’t unsee them.

“You don’t know this. You clicked some dumb internet video.”

“Its a theory.”

“Well, there are three big problems with your theory.” Kane counted off her fingers. “One, Kona Blue never existed. Two, aliens don’t exist. We’ve been to space a half dozen times and not once did E.T. contact us.”

“Aliens is a metaphor. And that was two problems, not three.”

“Three, you can’t reverse engineer something you don’t have. We don’t have it. We don’t even know who makes it, or where.”

“Maybe we did. And lost it. Maybe we have it, and are covering it up.“

Kane shook her head. “If we had it, why did I just risk my sanity in that giant flying hamster?”

The South China Sea was the most amazing color blue, the same as Kane’s eyes, but staring into it gave Stone no answers. He shook his head.

“Fine. I’ll tell you what. How many tacos you owe me, jefe?”

He had no idea. He had lost so many taco-bets to her intuition. “A few dozen?”

“Fifty-five.”

He exhaled. The number felt like relief. He was sure it was more. “I trust you. Your point?”

“Fifty-five tacos to your one, we don’t have it.”

“To be clear, if I win, and we have Blackbird, my debt is canceled. If you win, I owe you a taco?”

“Another taco. Fifty-six. Are you feeling lucky, punk?” She smirked.

“Deal. Wanna shake on it?”

“I know where your hand has been since you separated from that bitch.”

Ensign Frick poked his head from the hatch. “Major Kane? Major Stone? Everything all right?”

Kane slapped him on the chest and pointed at him, using her you better pay me this time expression. To Frick, she said, “We were discussing options. We haven’t eaten, haven’t slept, and haven’t had hot coffee.”

“Admiral McKay says we have the best coffee in the Pacific. As far as food—”

“Tacos? You serve tacos?”

Frick furrowed his brow. “I think so, Major Kane.”

“Good. My partner here is hungry.” Kane pumped her eyebrows and slapped him in the chest again. “He’ll need tacos. A lot of tacos.”

Blackbird, Chapter 5