CHAPTER ONE
Test
If he had known that sudden, violent, fiery death was potentially on tap for the day - that is, any more than it normally is in his line of work – then it’s likely, though not definite, that the thought going through his mind at that moment would not have been:
You know, clouds are kinda funny.
They're physically there - you can see ‘em, fly through ‘em, even touch the damned things if you open a window at the right time on a plane. But still, they're kinda like ghosts in a way, sorta not there at the same time, you know? Plus, they can change shape any time they damned well want to - or actually, they change to whatever is in the mind of the guy looking at ‘em at the time, which is some wizard shit if you ask me! Two people almost never see the same thing, which is fucking weird now that I think about it because I mean, does that say that they don't have a shape of their own? What does a cloud look like if nobody looks at it at all? Is it even THERE?! Wow, that's deep! I mean, if two people look at a beer can, they're both gonna see the same thing. Sure, their descriptions may be a bit different because of how they're looking at the can, or how crappy one person's vision might be, or maybe because there's some cigar smoke in the air or some shit like that. But basically, they're gonna have similar descriptions of the can, similar enough that they know they see the same thing. It's not like one is gonna claim they see a donut with sprinkles, right? But, ask two people what they see when they look at the same damned cloud, and one might say a cat's asshole while the other says a Ferrari.
I mean, there isn’t anything like a cloud when you get right down to it, is there? Except for wizard of course. I hate those fucking guys.
This was the thought that went through the mind of Air Force Captain Alex Wakeman as the plane he was now piloting flew through a particularly dense cloud bank at 39,000 feet over the sweltering Nevada desert.
“Alex,” came the voice of Melissa Wakeman, Alex’s wife, over the radio, “what’s going on up there? You’ve been a little too quiet for the past few minutes.”
Melissa was getting worried about Alex. Not worried in the "oh my god he's going to die" kind of way that the wife of an Air Force test pilot might. No, she knew Alex more than well enough to know that at least at the moment, he wasn't in any real danger. Her worry was of an entirely different nature: the worry of a boss who was coming to the realization that her employee was slacking off.
“I was just thinking about clouds,” came the reply from Alex.
“What about them?” Melissa wondered if this might be the day her husband finally cracked and went certifiably insane. Sometimes, it seemed like he didn’t know how to take anything seriously. The curse of someone that most things came easy to, she knew.
“Oh, you know, just that they’re fluffy and look like cotton candy and I was wondering if they tasted like marshmallow and now I’m getting hungry.”.
Melissa cracked a smile and realized that Alex was perfectly fine, as she suspected. That sarcastic tone that only Alex could manage came through loud and clear.
“Well, clouds are just water in a gaseous state, so they don’t taste like much of anything.”
“You’re being a giant nerd again Melissa. We’ve talked about this. You’ve gotta get that crap under control, pronto!” Alex was a master at this kind of falsely stern reply.
Even though he was just being his usual wise-ass self, he was still kind of making a legitimate point: Melissa had a habit of thinking science jokes were funny to anyone but other scientists. She wasn't exactly the wittiest person in the first place, though she did alright in Alex's eyes at least. He always joked that her brain was so damned big and choke full of data that it had to repress the part that made someone funny, at least a bit, to make room for all the facts she had running around up there.
“Well,“ Melissa began, “I suppose they might taste like something else if a bird took a crap in one. It’d probably taste like worms or bird seed or something in that case”.
Alex smiled to himself inside the stuffy, sweaty helmet wrapped around his head.
“Hey now, that’s the spirit!” It wasn’t the best joke he had ever heard, not even the best joke he had heard that day, but it was a good try. “Can you do me a favor then and grab a pigeon, feed it a good steak and then send its ass up here? I’m starving!”
Everyone in the control room standing beside Melissa burst out into laughter, but Melissa just smirked. Even after she had made an attempt, even thought she had done a reasonably good job at it, Alex just had to show her up again by making a far better joke. She knew he didn't mean to and didn't even realize that's what he was doing, but it was a frequent enough occurrence that Melissa was painfully aware of it when he did. It was a bit of a sore spot for her that she couldn't match his wit. She knew it wasn't something that bothered Alex one bit, but it did bother her.
She supposed she shouldn't be mad at Alex, and in fact, she wasn’t. She understood that comedy was one of the ways Alex coped with the pressure around him, and it came naturally to him. Being a test pilot was no easy task on the best of days. Even though today was going smoothly, she knew that could change at the drop of a hat, as did Alex. Keeping himself and everyone around him loose through levity was something Alex did in preparation for the inevitable moment everything around him turned to shit. Not being tense, just like in a car accident, was a good thing when piloting some new aircraft that could fail catastrophically at any moment.
Fortunately, he was piloting a new jet that Melissa had herself designed, so he wasn’t even a little worried. She was now one of, if not the leading aviation designers on the planet, with three advanced fighter designs tested over just the past seven years, an unprecedented rate of production (and successful production at that). She was a certified scientific genius on top of it: she completed a Ph.D. from MIT in high-energy physics at age 21 and a second one just two years later from Caltech in aviation design, plus Masters in astrophysics and computer science from Stanford by the time she was 25 thrown in just for good measure. She was orders of magnitude smarter than Alex was and he knew it. Hence, he had no concern about this flight. To be sure, even her designs sometimes failed. That was just part of the game. But he never worried about it when testing one of her designs. He knew the odds were in his favor regardless by a wide margin.
Still, odds, like clouds, are a funny thing…
“Alex, I’m reading an elevated level of plasma flux through the starboard drive assembly. I think we might have a gravimetric distortion forming in the power field. What do your instruments say?”
“Uh,“ stammered Alex, “they say some science crap that probably looks a lot like what you just said.”
For all of Alex’ abilities and talents, and Melissa knew better than anyone that he had many, he simply wasn’t a scientific thinker and never had been. He wasn't stupid by any stretch. He was, in fact, an above-average person in the intelligence department. The simple fact is that you don't get to be a highly-trained and combat-experienced special operator of any kind, let alone multiple types as Alex was unless you were pretty bright. He wasn't extraordinarily intelligent like Melissa was; he was no genius like she so clearly was. It's just that Alex always lacked what everyone calls "book smarts" and he most especially had a mental block when it came to science and, to a lesser degree, math. As he liked to tell Melissa: "Babe, you got all the book smarts there are while I got a decent filling of streets smarts. But hey, put us together and we're a whole, super-smart person, in the same way that me and Bill Gates put together makes a billionaire!"
Even back in high school, where they first met, Alex was more the athlete while Melissa was the lab geek. He wasn't a typical jock though, which is what allowed them to wind up becoming friends in the first place. A typical jock would never have become friends with a science nerd like Melissa in any high school in America, not unless it was part of the story of some after-school special. But Melissa had volunteered to help Alex with his chemistry lab assignments one day when she saw how much he was struggling to get the proper mixtures in his lab assignments. That, however, wasn’t the trigger for Melissa wanting to help Alex. That had come a few weeks earlier, even though to this day Melissa had never told Alex that particular story. It was something she always wanted to keep for herself for some reason even she couldn’t explain.
Melissa had witnessed Alex defend Judy Detridge from a couple of large boys, members of the wrestling team, who were making fun of her. Judy had an unfortunate skin pigmentation disorder over the right side of her face that made it look like she had a single, ridiculously large mole. It was a hideous sight, and because of this, Judy was far from a popular girl in school. Kids can be cruel to anyone that's different in any way, a fact Melissa was painfully aware of based on his own status as a "science nerd." She was ostracized for being far smarter than anyone else in school, and obviously so. She had always tried to hide her intelligence, but she could only fight the urge to keep her hand down most of the time because she knew how much the other kids hated that she always knew the answer to every answer in class. They hated how she always got 100’s on every test. She couldn’t hide her intelligence no matter what she tried. Even the times she had tried to do poorly on assignments purposely, that just made matters worse: everyone knew she was faking it.
No one was even close to Melissa in the intelligence department, including every teacher and other adults in the school. So, Melissa understood Judy’s plight unfortunately well. The hard life of those who are different in a public school was something she knew about all too well.
The huge wrestlers, five of them Melissa recalled, were being especially cruel to Judy that day, saying some extremely unkind things to her, things she wished her brain would let her forget.
You’re so disgusting you’ll never have a boyfriend!
Your mother should have aborted you when she had the chance!
There are movie monsters that I'd rather bang before I'd want to bang your ugly ass!
This sort of taunting wasn’t all that unusual for Judy, and the look of resignation on her face confirmed that. What was unusual though was what happened next: two of the boys began to push her repeatedly against the row of lockers in the hallway. Of course, just like when you see assholes driving like maniacs on the highway, and there are no cops around, there weren't any teachers around at that time either, which apparently had emboldened the boys' actions. They knew they could take it to the next level and get physical without any adult presence around. Melissa had never seen that before, and Judy's reaction seemed to confirm this was something altogether new: she began to cry uncontrollably and was yelling "Stop it! Stop it!" over and over again.
Why they had begun getting physical Melissa never knew, nor did Alex, but while one of them, namely Melissa, stood by watching, frozen in horror, the other reacted quickly and decisively. Alex rushed to Judy’s aid and took on all four boys by himself. He managed it with seeming ease too: the first boy, the one closest to Judy, he grabbed from behind, wrapping his arm around the boys’ neck and forced him to the ground violently, knocking him instantly unconscious. The second boy who had also been pushing her barely had time to realize what was happening before Alex kicked him hard in the side of the kneecap, dropping him to the other knee in agonizing pain. Then, Alex completed the task by driving his knuckles into the boys’ temple, knocking him out cold.
The other two boys quickly took action, attempting to double-team Alex. One grabbed his right arm and began trying to contort it into an unnatural position while the other executed a well-practiced wrestling move to get behind Alex and wrap his arms around his waist to try and control him. They struggled for what seemed like an eternity, Alex trying all the while to extricate himself from their grasp, but unable to. Finally, he did an unexpected thing, judging by the reaction of the two boys: Alex simply let his legs collapse under him, his body crashing to the ground, landing on his ass. The boy holding him from behind, unable to react fast enough, kept his grip, which meant he followed Alex down to the floor. Melissa hadn't noticed, but right before this move, Alex had shifted his weight so that his head was just below the boy's chin. The sudden impact of Alex into the ground drove his skull up into the wrestler's chin. The blood from the split skin on his chin began bleeding immediately. Alex, without hesitation, drove his now free arm that the other boy had released thanks to Alex’s momentum, into the remaining boy’s genitals.
The fifth boy, who had been barely involved in the whole situation, stood there in stunned silence, mouth agape. This boy had lobbed a few taunts at Judy, but more conventional and mundane ones, nothing as mean and nasty as the other four, and he showed no signs of getting physical with Judy. Melissa suspected he wouldn't have.
Still, he was there, and he was involved, even if to a lesser degree than the others, so Alex would have none of his escaping justice. They had shown no mercy to Judy, and Alex wasn’t about to do any different, to any of them.
Alex got himself to a standing position again quicker than Melissa would have thought possible. He advanced towards the boy, grabbing a thick textbook out of Judy’s half-open locker as he did. The book slammed across the face of the boy faster than anyone could see. They did, however, see two teeth and a lot of blood fly out and splatter against the lockers.
At that point, without even breathing unusually heavy, Alex turned to face Judy. His expression changed instantly from the violent persona he had been wearing on his face during the fight (if such a quick and one-sided contest could even be called that) to a soft, almost soothing, paternal look. He helped Judy to her feet without saying a word and used his shirt to wipe off the blood that had begun dripping from the cut on the side of her head where it had impacted the edge of her locker door. He calmly walked her down to the nurse’ office, and needless to say, every other student in the hallway got out of their way in a hurry.
Alex, of course, got into a ton of trouble for this. He was suspended from school for three weeks, which was a much lighter a sentence than he otherwise would have gotten except for the fact that many of the students who witnessed the event confirmed that Alex was defending Judy. This was fortunately in the days before every little confrontation in school was a matter for the federal government to deal with, but it still was in no way a minor thing. Alex had taken his punishment without the slightest argument. Three weeks wasn’t that long, but it did have the unfortunate effect of causing him to fall behind on a lot of school work. It was near the end of the school year and although Alex had managed to get passing grades on most of the finals for all his classes, but not all. But, he was struggling with chemistry and was almost sure to fail that final exam and, coupled with his other final grades, would have to repeat the entire school year as a result.
Melissa knew it was her turn to be a hero in the only way she knew she could be.
After witnessing what Alex had done for Judy, she knew Alex was a good person, someone she wanted to be friends with. She also knew that she hadn’t done anything to help Judy, and she felt guilt over her inaction, though she knew there wasn’t anything she could have done. Alex represented a chance at redemption for Melissa. It wasn’t within his power to help Judy that day, but it was within her power to help Alex pass chemistry, and that’s exactly what she did.
From that point on, Alex and Melissa had been close friends. Melissa respected the man Alex had become now, who she knew he would become after that day in school, and Alex, although he'd never admitted it to Melissa, respected the unmatched intelligence that Melissa possessed.
That intelligence was exactly what was needed based on the readings they were both seeing now.
“Oh my God Alex, I think the field is going to collapse!” exclaimed Melissa, yelling into the radio headset that was two clicks too tight on her head. “Alex, if that happens without going through a proper shutdown sequence the plasma will condense and could reach a high enough density to ignite and rain gamma radiation over hundreds of miles of desert, killing anything it comes in contact with!”
Alex shot back without missing a beat
“Including me, right? And that’s a bad thing, right Melissa?”
“A bad thing?! No, it’s not a bad thing, not if you enjoy plummeting 36,000 feet and crashing into the desert at 300 miles per hour and rendering a large portion of Nevada uninhabitable for a few decades!”
Alex couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing. Melissa heard the laughter, and before she could bring herself to yell at him, he collected himself enough to reply.
“Now see Melissa, was that so hard? With your brains, you should be that funny all the damned time!”
"I wasn't trying to be funny Alex; this is serious! I don't want to see you die up there in an experimental plane I invented!"
“Ok, well then, let’s make sure this thing doesn’t crash, shall we?”
The calmness in his voice, still to this day after all these years together, amazed Melissa. Calm in the face of almost certain death was one of Alex’ key strengths. Little ever shook his calm. His years of Navy SEAL and Army Ranger training and combat experience had given him that, although Melissa had always said all that experience did was enhance what was already there.
It’s rare for people to be allowed to cross-join branches of the military, most especially when they serve in elite units like SEALs and Ranger units. Alex was a special case, though. He joined the Army shortly after high school, after a few odd jobs and a short but ultimately fruitless stint in college. He couldn’t keep his grades up, again struggling with math and science, which caused him to lose the scholarship he had managed to get due to his abilities in baseball. He had been just good enough to earn the scholarship, but not so good that the school could overlook his grades.
After dropping out, Alex decided to join the Army since his father had been in the Army. It wasn’t much of a reason, but as he always explained to Melissa: “It just seemed like a good idea at the time, and besides, I didn’t have much else going on, did I?” Alex had done well in the Army and eventually decided to join the Rangers. He excelled in this advanced training and had gained some field experience in a few operations around the world that, as he liked to tell Melissa, he still couldn’t talk about without having to kill her.
After about two years with the Rangers, Alex decided that the challenge wasn't there any longer. Physical activities had always come as easily to him, just like science did to Melissa. And, since he was coming up to the end of his enlistment anyway, he decided to speak to his commander about getting into the Navy so he could join the SEALs. His commander just happened to have a brother high up in the Navy chain of command. Given that Alex had saved his commander's ass more than once during operations, he was able to use this connection to get Alex enlisted in the Navy, even against the usual rules that say that members of other branches, or even former members, can't join a new branch.
Alex began his SEAL training immediately, able to skip more basic training thanks to his Ranger status, and found it to be more challenging. But, as was usual for Alex when it came to such challenges, he did well without too much effort. In fact, he frequently told Melissa that SEAL training isn't nearly as hard as some people make it out to be. The physical part wasn't so bad as long as you are in good shape, and so long as you enter into it with the right mental worldview and a certain mental toughness, you won't have too bad a time with it.
During his time in the Navy, Alex had discovered something he never expected: a love of aviation. Melissa suspected it was in large part due to a subconscious need Alex had to always push boundaries, to find the next big challenge. The Army and the Rangers hadn’t been much of a challenge for him, even the Navy and the SEALs weren’t significantly more challenging, and Alex was getting bored. It was a strange thing, to be bored when your life was on the line, but Melissa suspected that’s what it was.
So, when it was time to re-enlist with the Navy, Alex again managed to pull some strings thanks to his combat record and managed to get himself into the Air Force. It wasn’t long before he managed to work his way up the ranks and was flying in no time. Not just flying: in typical Alex fashion, he excelled at it. More importantly, he loved it, enough that he for the first time re-enlisted in the same branch and continued flying. Eventually, an opportunity arose to be a test pilot and Alex had his next challenge to put his mental toughness up against.
That, mental toughness, was something that Melissa new Alex possessed in spades, and this crisis was just another chance for him to prove it. This time, however, he would do so in a way that wasn’t typical for Alex: with his mind, instead of his body.
"I realize I'm not the science geek here Melissa, but this gravity drive thing you've got me riding interacts with the Earth's gravitational field, right? Basically sort of like a surfer riding a wave?"
Melissa crinkled her nose at the notion of her most advanced technological creation yet being minimized to a crude analogy. Unfortunately for her, it was an analogy she grudgingly had to admit was accurate enough, especially coming from her less than her scientifically-inclined husband.
"Yes, that's essentially right."
“And the stronger the field, the stronger the interaction, right?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right!” Melissa was becoming more agitated with each moment. She didn't see the point in this science lesson right now when, by her reckoning, Alex was about three minutes from certain death.
“Well, could this plasma flux we’re seeing be because the interaction is stronger than you expected?”
“Yes, that’s pretty obvious Alex!”
“Ok, so how do we weaken the interaction?”
"You'd have to shut down the drive assemblies slowly, ramp down the power. That's the standard shutdown procedure. But you can't do that mid-flight – you may not be great with the science Alex, but you know as well as I that flying without an engine isn't a very good idea".
A short pause was heard by all in the now extremely tense control room. The laughter from just a few minutes ago was now replaced by deathly silence.
And then, Alex broke the silence.
“Well, so we need to gradually shut them down, which we can’t do in the air or else I’ll find myself no longer in the air before long. So, then, can we reduce the effect of Earth’s gravity instead?”
It was a silly suggestion, and Melissa began to say so with a tone that said no matter how much I love you, you’re a moron.
“No, that’s impossible. You’re talking about changing the laws of physics and you just can’t…”
Then, as sudden as a heart attack, three things dawned on her almost simultaneously. First was the realization that she was about to sound an awful lot like Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott from Star Trek. You cannae change the laws of physics, Captain! Even Alex’s rank matched up with the expression! This thought lead to her second realization, which was that she would be cracking hysterically up right now if this was any other situation. But somehow, that just didn’t seem like the right thing to her to be doing right now in light of the third realization, which was that Alex had inexplicably beaten her to the only logical course of action! Maybe all her talk about science all these years, despite the glazed-over look in his eyes every time, had stuck with him a little bit!
Either that or he just got lucky. Either way…
"Alex, shit, yeah, you got it! If you can gain enough altitude, take that thing right to the edge of space, the drive assemblies will gradually lose power on their own as you climb out of Earth's gravity well and they have a weaker and weaker field to interact with and they'll eventually shut down. The plasma will naturally cool along the way and disperse like during a normal shutdown. The final step of the shutdown is an automatic purge of the plasma. But, by that point, the toxicity will be significantly reduced, and the higher layers of the atmosphere will disperse any remaining radiation over wide enough an area that they shouldn't do any harm to anything. It'll be a practically unnoticeable increase to the natural background radiation of the upper atmosphere. That's brilliant!"
But then, Melissa followed the train of thought a little further and saw the problem
“But Alex, you’re going to then be in a dead plane at around 327,000 feet, and that’s assuming the drive assemblies even last long enough to get you that far. You’ll likely lose consciousness on the way too. It’s a suicide run!”
“Actually,“ began Alex, “I’ve got a plan. I’ll put this thing on autopilot for the ride up. Once the drive assemblies shut down and vent and I begin to descend, it’s going to be your job to revive me.”
Melissa was dumbfounded now... dumbfounded and agitated. Her reply was harder than she intended.
“And how in the fuck am I supposed to do that from down here?”
“Easy! You'll have to rig a remote program to pop the cockpit canopy off, just like during an ejection, but obviously without the… you know… ejection part."
Melissa couldn’t believe what Alex was suggesting, and that he even managed to sneak in a small wise-ass comment in too.
“Set it to go off around 50,000 feet. That should give me time to get the plane under control at least enough to do a glide path landing with it”.
"Alex, that's fucking insane! First, I'm not at all sure you'll survive either the ride up or the rapid descent after you black out. Second, I don't know if I can get such a program written and uploaded to your onboard computer in time. Third, there's no guarantee popping the canopy will revive you, in fact, it seems more likely to kill you. Fourth, a glide path landing in that thing isn't even theoretically possible under the best of conditions, which this obviously isn't."
"Melissa," began Alex, much more calmly then he had a right to be, "there's no better option, and you know it. We don't have much time here, and this isn't up for debate. I've already started climbing and frankly, I'm starting to not feel so good. So, you'd better get those fingers going and get that program done, or the next time you see me, I'll just be some juice and chunky bits in a jar."
Melissa wanted to say something else, wanted to say something that would dissuade the love of her life from this course of action. She was ready to shout out to him to just eject and let the damage be done to the environment. A huge chunk of uninhabitable land and thousands upon thousands of dead people on the ground seemed like an entirely fair trade for the life of her husband. But, she also knew that Alex would never stand