START AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST SECTION
Wu Liang sat in the corner of the Grind Down Café with his back to the airfield. He had the corner chair. That was his seat. That was his throne. It was uncontested. He sat there, leaning on his right elbow, with his cup half empty: the senior fighter pilot, recently promoted to commander, call sign "Monsoon." On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling window was a line of Hornets, and at the end of that line was Wu’s fighter, Alini, a ship that had bagged more bandits than any five other ships combined.
Shannon sat on Wu's left. He was partnered with the ace of Fort Wallace, the cryptic Commander Liang, who watched silently over the other pilots in his customary fashion, with those flinty oriental eyes of his. Wu had lost several wingmen during the course of his career, but his karma was strong. Shannon felt it and fed upon it.
Shannon needed one confirmed kill. Just one and his citizenship could be justified. That’s how it worked when you were the nephew of the governor. It had been easy qualifying for a pilot slot. It had been easy getting himself hooked up with a hotshot lead. All of that had been taken care of by the machine. Now he just needed that one kill. His very own kill. He would make citizen without it, of course. For him, citizenship was a lock. But with a kill, he could dismiss public speculations and rumors. They could go ahead and call him a “war hero” in press releases. A kill would clinch a bid for governor later on—maybe senator. A kill was everything.
Wu and Shannon sat in the corner of the Grind Down every duty day, just waiting to hear the tower call “Monsoon, Monsoon.” They both wanted the same thing. They wanted a combat engagement. Shannon had been there several times when Wu had wrangled with Captain Reissel over the calls he got. It was the only time Shannon could remember Wu bothering to string multiple sentences together. It was the only time Wu ever raised his voice. Shannon may have been the governor’s nephew, but Wu pulled weight at the base that not even his uncle could match. He was heavy duty Fort Wallace royalty and there were precious few who could address Captain Reissel in the tone that Wu did.
“Don’t waste my time with anything else, Al, or I’ll screw one of your Hornets down into the tarmac from ten thousand feet. Tell me…Admiral, how would that look on a quarterly review?” Yeah, all Wu wanted was the red ops. No mundane calls. Just the hot ones.
There was something about Wu. Shannon had grown up surrounded by serious men, by his father’s friends, the movers and shakers. There was a commonality amongst them—an unconflicted cynicism about the nature of the world. Yet between those men there was also an understanding of interdependence. The world would be divided up between them and they knew that they needed each other. Wu had something else, a strange detachment that he wore like armor. Whatever game he was playing, everyone else was excluded. He was playing it alone.
Wu’s table was always full. Pilots just gravitated to him, even though he rarely said more than a few words at a time. That was just fine with Shannon, who never ran out of things to say. It worked out well. The two of them held court in that corner every day they were on duty, the commander sitting there like a stone statue, and the young celebrity, Lieutenant Shannon Boyle, joking and telling stories to the group of star-struck pilots surrounding them. Shannon had a real way with them. He had that gift: the trick of the tale. Everyone could see that he was on his way to the top.
Shannon was in the middle of a story that day, the pitch and volume of his voice increasing as it did when he felt the story he was telling was becoming particularly interesting. “…because the C.O. would always tell them that the engineering workshop must remain inviolate.” Shannon dropped his voice a couple of octaves and leaned forward into his audience. “Engineering must remain inviolate,” he growled. “Engineering must remain inviolate.” Then his voice returned to normal and he lifted his eyebrows, looking around the table and nodding. “So the next day…Hazlett comes in to the C.O. and tells him that Mitchels has been threatening the purpleness in engineering—." The table broke up laughing, everyone but Wu, who had heard the story a dozen times.
Shannon was waiting for the laughter to die down so that he could finish the story, but Durant interrupted him before he could, thinking that the punchline had already been delivered. “Hey, Shannon, how’d you get your call sign? Why Badger? What's behind it?”
Durant was only an ensign, but Shannon encouraged all officers to refer to him by his first name. His father’s staff and his own handlers thought it was a mistake, but Shannon knew better. Once his service was over and he was knee-deep in an election, the navy pilots would all remember that he was one of them.
“Well,” said Shannon, looking around the table, “I’ll tell you.” He paused, as though revealing the following information were a matter of gravest confidence. He gave a vulnerable shrug. “I wanted to be Werewolf, myself, you know?” This brought a round of understanding laughs. “But the real truth is…it was picked for me. They focus-grouped a bunch of names and Badger came up highest. Men think badgers are ferocious; women think they’re cute.” He shrugged again and added, “I still like Werewolf,” taking a drink of coffee.
Shannon had never wanted to be Werewolf. Shannon never had the slightest interest what his call sign was, but he knew these guys did care about theirs. He understood people. These pilots felt like they had just witnessed a personal admission—a glimpse inside—and now every one of them felt they had a claim on him. They “knew” him. It was only seven pilots, sure. But day by day he added to that number and by the time he left the navy, every man on base would have a similar story to tell about him or would know someone who did. From that point on, with the right speech-writing, rallies at Fort Wallace would be powerful events, and there was one very important common demographic that ex-navy men and women shared: the right to vote.
The real truth about his call sign? Shannon’s guys had floated a number of ideas for call signs long before he enlisted. There had been Badger, Mantis, Stalker, and about a dozen other names up for consideration, all of them based on the mascots and emblems of defense contractors and armament manufacturers. They had picked his call sign based on the corp that was willing to make the largest contribution to the Shannon Boyle campaign fund. It had been no more complicated or meaningful than that.
The voice of tower control came echoing over the intercom, a female voice carrying through the building with characteristic monotonous disinterest. “Monsoon, Monsoon, red op in grid five. Monsoon, Monsoon, scramble to grid five.” The flat, emotionless delivery was a strange contrast to the strong implication of the message . Shannon's heart leapt. He grabbed his jacket and headed through the door after Wu at a run.
As Shannon followed Wu out the door, Durant nudged the pilot next to him. “Hey, how is it they always get the red ops?”
Out on the blacktop, sirens sounded across the base. Lines of landing beacons shone icy white under the overcast sky. Shannon was following Wu down the row of Hornets to their ships. The old man really moved. Truth be told, it was difficult to keep up with him. Shannon could hear the exchange with the tower through his implants.
“Monsoon, you are cleared on runway eighteen lima. Badger, eighteen romeo.”
“Eighteen lima,” said Wu.
Shannon acknowledged, “Eighteen right,” as he began to climb the ladder extending down from the cockpit of his ship.
—— —— ——
Commander Wu settled down into his seat and began the abbreviated combat preflight procedure even before the canopy sealed and he felt the cockpit pressurize. He could run the system checks in his sleep at this point and began to taxi out as he went through the sequence. Text popped into the corner of his retinal display as he spurred the air brakes and nudged the aft fin rudders.
[Shannon: HELL YEAH!!].
Wu grimaced. His wingman let enthusiasm control him, but Shannon was no warrior. To him this was nothing more than a game, as it was for so many. To Wu it was sacred, but all too soon it would be ending. The Commander was moving him upstairs soon, out of the cockpit and into a desk. That was the plan. Wu was thirty-five. Too old now to ride the wind in the service of the American Empire, and so the reign of Monsoon was coming to a close. There would be no more blood.
Wu pulled the amulet from beneath his shirt and held it up into the light of day. The worn and beaten silver burned clean. A hidden intensity filled his voice and shone in his eyes as he recited the ancient prayer in Akkadian. “Zu, descend upon me from the south. Zu, from the land of the dead, emerge. Pa-Zu, raise me upon the winds. Rider of Storms, guide me.”
The two fighters rolled to a stop, in position for takeoff. Then came the clearance from the tower. “Buster, buster, vector one seven one point two. Monsoon and Badger, you are clear ear to ear.” “Buster” was the tower’s instruction to respond at full basic thrust. “Burner” would have indicated afterburners, but this was almost never advised because of fuel-range considerations.
“Proceeding one seven one two,” said Wu. He throttled up and the Gs pushed him back into the seat, engine roaring, the Hornet rapidly picking up speed down the strip. He felt that thrilling instant of lift-off and then the blacktop was falling away behind and they were climbing. Wu could see Shannon closing in off his right wing.
There was a heavy cloud ceiling, but it was high enough that the fort’s entire flight pattern could be seen shifting and disintegrating. The tower “hung” incomers in standard response to a red op and then diverted them to secondary destinations while the op was underway. The tower needed the pattern empty and the field clear so that they could launch backup as the situation demanded without having to worry about normal traffic until the base returned to condition white.
“Monsoon, climb to twenty-one hundred and maintain hard deck of one zero.”
The hard deck was the operational minimum altitude. One thousand meters (or “ten”) was pretty standard. Local ordinances normally restricted traffic to below five hundred meters but you never could tell when some hotrod or impatient hauler would pop up into restricted space, so a thousand meters was considered the beginning of military jurisdiction in most population centers.
Wu already had a fix on the bogey at twenty-five klicks out. The signature was clean. It appeared to be one stationary ship hovering less than two hundred meters off the ground above the university campus. Coming over the ridge at the edge of the fort, the terrain exploded into green, billowing copses of chestnut and macadamia mushrooming from the hills. It made identifying ground targets and low-hanging craft more difficult than out on the salt flats that surrounded the base.
They skimmed through the pass, more or less following the ground lanes that ran below in long, straight segments jointed by occasional jinks and twitches. They were approaching the target and Wu prepared himself for combat. He whispered under his breath in the alien poetry. “Zu, guide my wings upon the wind. Zu, guide my ship among the stars. Guide my talons and accept the blood of my prey.”
Wu felt the demon's approach. He felt its presence as it entered the cockpit. He felt it take him. His senses sharpened. His hair stood on end. He was one with the wind.
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