Drone_an NTSB military technothriller by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman [Buchman, M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
Published: 2019-11-18T18:30:00+00:00

35

“I hate dentist’s chairs,” Harvey grumbled as he lay back in the control seat for the MQ-45 Casper UAV. It looked disconcertingly like one…that had mated with a well-padded Barcalounger.

Helen had never shown him a picture of her family. Did her kids look like her? Did they wear the same shy smile that shone in their intelligent eyes? Was their hair the same liquid brown of flowing dark chocolate like hers or did they take after their father with his imagined Teutonic blond good looks and too many teeth when he smiled?

“How do you feel about electric chairs?” Helen teased him as the technician strapped him to the contraption: ankles, wrists, and forehead.

“Never met one, but I’m wagering that I’d like it better than a dentist’s chair.”

“The mighty pilot afraid of a little man with a drill. My fantasy is ruined.” It wasn’t like Helen to tease him in front of others.

A simulator was not a hundred-million-dollar bird of prey and he was so mortified that he might screw up and never get to fly again. But he’d never show that, so he gave her the laugh she’d earned.

The techs ran broad Velcro bands around his thighs as well.

“Hey!”

“The actual UAV connection is far more visceral than we can achieve in the simulator. We’d rather you didn’t come back from your flight all black-and-blue.”

He looked at the thick padding all around him and wondered just what he’d be putting his body through while he was aloft.

“Take it easy at first,” she got serious, just a little too serious for him to joke that’s how they’d started out making love earlier today. “We have a standby pilot at the manual console who can recover the craft from most circumstances. If you need to, just stop trying and he’ll try to take over.”

“Try.” Harvey considered the word. He considered quoting Yoda from Star Wars, “Do or do not. There is no try.” Instead he saw that the techs were busy checking readouts just out of earshot and offered her a hungry leer. “Try is not what I just did to you in your bed. I do—a hundred percent.”

Her blush only served to confirm that he’d absolutely done a hundred percent for her.

“Tell your backup pilot to go home, I won’t be needing him.”

One of the techs returned and smeared a small patch of salve behind his right ear—a salve that he now knew would rapidly harden into a sticky glue. They pressed the pickup sensor into the glue and began running him through alignment tests.

“Up. Down. Left. Right. Level flight…” As they said each one, he pictured the accompanying sensations. Covering his eyes with soft pads, then blackout goggles, they soon moved to visual cues. As they calibrated the alignment of the patches both under and on top of his skin, the drone’s visuals began coming online.

“Brightness. Focus. Near. Far. Look up. Look left…” A bright target had been carefully aligned exactly in front of the drone sitting in the hangar, just the other side of the thin wall beyond his feet.

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